About one hundred years ago, the father of quantum mechanics, Max Planck, made an amazing discovery. As he said in 1931, “I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness! Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.” In fact, Dr. Planck had found that there is indeed a base creative force. But the university departments and the peer-reviewed journals were already having trouble dealing with quantum physics! And rather than allowing the open-minded scientific investigation of this new base creative force idea. So, why don’t scientists believe in the afterlife?
The scientific gatekeepers of the day chose instead to invent the scientific dogma of atheistic materialism, and they began to limit mainstream science to the study of matter and material energy. Mainstream science thereby became a field where entirely free inquiry was no longer allowed. It became instead an atheistic materialist belief-system. In effect, science became a religion.
Atheistic Materialism: Exploring Why Scientists Don’t Believe in the Afterlife
Atheistic materialism considers people to be just material automatons. Materialist scientists are sure that there is no spiritual component to people at all, and nothing in us can survive our deaths. But it is even worse than that, since one of the tenets of this weird new scientific religion holds that people do not even have free will. For the past century, scientists have studied our brains, since where else can our awareness come from? The idea that matter must generate consciousness is a peculiar notion, but atheistic materialist scientists remain undaunted by the fact that all their work in this field has yielded so little information about how the meat in your head creates who you are. One thought is that the process must be “quantum.”
And in the 1980s, a researcher named Benjamin Libet showed that preparations to move a material finger begin 350 milliseconds before we decide to move that finger. This seemed to prove that human beings have no free will, although there are some scientists who are less confident about that.
Atheistic Materialism and Scientific Views
Atheist Sam Harris took Libet’s position in his book entitled Free Will, which was published in 2012. In an article about Harris’s book, Harris explains that “The phrase ‘free will’ simply describes what it feels like to identify with certain mental states as they arise in consciousness (he is talking here about the “consciousness” that he imagines must actually somehow “arise” inside the human brain) — and our ‘freedom’ constitutes nothing more than this illusory feeling of control.”
Society’s Response and Concerns
At this point, most of the scientific community seems to share Harris’s misconception. We are being urged now to accept this theory, but to believe in free will anyway. Because scientists worry that if humanity’s prevailing view becomes the idea that people are not responsible for our actions, civilization soon will fall apart.
But of course, this whole idea is simply wrong. Of course you and I have free will!
Why don’t scientists believe in the afterlife? Consciousness and Materialism
when the scientific community decided that your consciousness must be produced by your brain, they made it impossible for anything in this vein ever to make any sort of sense. Your mind exists in eternal Consciousness, together with every other mind. And your material body, with its meat-brain inside it, is a mere automaton. So when your mind decides to move a finger, it then signals first your finger and then your brain that it has decided to move that finger, and you get Benjamin Libet’s peculiar experimental result. Problem solved. His odd experimental result, like so many other scientific puzzles, is simply the result of the purely erroneous scientific dogma of materialism. And modern science is going to continue to be flat wrong about the afterlife and about so many other very important things until it abandons every dogma and turns itself back into the simple open-minded pursuit of the truth!