Time for a New Paradigm — The Reunification of Science and Religion (Long version)

This is an edited transcript of a talk I gave on June 9th 2019 at the Leeds Theosophical Society in England (there is also a shorter word-for-word version). It gives references and sources which were not mentioned in the actual talk, contains some quotes and extra material omitted for time considerations, and some explanatory material not thought necessary for the audience there.

To avoid any misunderstanding, let me make it clear that, although I am a member of the Society, this does not impose any belief-system upon me; all that is required is an acceptance of its three founding principles:

1. To form a nucleus of the Universal Brotherhood of Humanity without distinction of race, creed, sex, caste or colour.
2. To encourage the study of Comparative Religion, Philosophy and Science.
3. To investigate unexplained laws of Nature and the powers latent in man.

I am very interested in Theosophical teachings and texts (Helena Blavatsky and others), as I am in all spiritual thinking, but do not necessarily endorse them in their entirety.

=======================================

The search for the new paradigm in my title, without any reference to Theosophy, is highly desirable, but I will be suggesting that this means a return to what is called the Ancient Wisdom, or Perennial Philosophy, of which Theosophy is an outstanding representative. I’ll be quoting three important source books:

• Ancient Wisdom and Modern Science¹, edited by Stanislav Grof, a highly significant new-paradigm thinker, especially his opening chapter.
• Creating the Soul Body: the Sacred Science of Immortality², by Robert Cox. Nowhere does he mention Theosophy or Madame Blavatsky, (the co-founder of the Society) but he might as well be a Theosophist, since he draws on Vedic, Egyptian, Kabbalistic, and Hermetic traditions.
• Tim Wyatt’s book, Cycles of Eternity: an Overview of the Ageless Wisdom³. (Tim was the co-organiser of the conference, present at the time.)

So, when in what follows I say ‘Grof’, ‘Cox’, or ‘Tim’, I am referring to these books. I’ll also occasionally refer to the thoughts of Theosophist Edi Bilimoria, based on his book The Snake and the Rope⁴.

This is Cox’s opening statement: “This book is devoted to a re-evaluation of ancient systems of religious-mythological thought and their relevance to our modern systems of scientific thought. Throughout this book runs this theme: The ancients were much more intelligent than we have supposed them to be. In particular, the chapters that follow propose that many ancient cultures once shared a genuine spiritual science, a science of consciousness, which in certain ways rivals and even surpasses the most advanced physical theories of today”.

The terms paradigm and paradigm shift acquired public prominence through the work of philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn. His book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions⁵ described the process of how the world moves from one paradigm to another. I’ll summarise his argument.

A certain scientific or philosophical worldview becomes established, and continues for some time because nothing is perceived to contradict it. Then some anomalies begin to appear, which cannot be explained. If this continues, then a crisis emerges for the old way of thinking, and new speculative theories begin to be developed, until a vision for a new paradigm emerges. However, there is no simple transition from one worldview to the next, for those who are attached to the old paradigm defend it vigorously, and argue strongly against the new ideas. The two paradigms therefore co-exist. At some point, however, a critical point is reached when the old paradigm is no longer credible, and is swept away by a revolution. The new paradigm then becomes the accepted world-view.

The current situation in science fits neatly with Kuhn’s analysis. The old paradigm is that of materialism, and its key features are:

• The universe is a highly complex mechanism, made up only of passive, unconscious matter, assembled by blind forces with no creative intelligence into separate objects.
• Organic matter and living organisms emerged by accident through random chemical reactions.
• Higher life forms emerged through a process of Darwinian evolution, natural selection acting on random genetic mutations without the participation of an intelligent principle. Human beings are therefore highly developed animals.
• Consciousness, and creative intelligence emerged as a product of highly developed and organised matter, the central nervous system or brain. Grof is worth quoting at this point: “At a certain point of its development — not clearly identified by mechanistic science — matter, previously blind and inert, suddenly became aware of itself. Although the mechanism involved in this miraculous event entirely escapes even the crudest attempts at speculation, it is taken for granted and represents a fundamental postulate of the materialistic and mechanistic world-view” (p7).
• Organisms and objects are separate entities.

The key features of the Ancient Wisdom, and therefore of the new paradigm to which we are heading, are:

• The universe is considered to be a living organism — life did not emerge from non-life, everything is alive.
• Consciousness, not matter, is the primary source of existence.
• There is a hierarchy of realities above the material world — some of them experienced, others hidden under ordinary circumstances and directly observable only in certain special states of consciousness.
• Evolution is creative and purposeful.
• Everything is interconnected.
• Humans are commensurate with the entire universe and ultimately divine.

Grof asks whether Western science and perennial wisdom could be “reconciled in a way that would combine their advantages and avoid their drawbacks. Since it is not possible to change the ancient and perennial, any attempt must involve changes in the philosophy of Western science” . But, he wonders, can the basic assumptions of science change? Don’t its triumphs constitute proof of its philosophical assumptions? (p4)

He also says that in the old paradigm “there is no place for mysticism and religion. Spirituality is seen as a sign of primitive superstition, intellectual and emotional immaturity” (p9). The old paradigm, once a powerful tool, has become a strait-jacket, seriously impeding further progress. It has also created a very negative image of human beings.

As I see it, the current situation is that we have reached the point in Kuhn’s process where the two paradigms co-exist. The old paradigm of materialism is no longer credible, yet is still vigorously defended by its advocates. At the same time a generation of new-paradigm thinkers has emerged, and it is hopefully only a matter of time before their ideas become the new world-view. The important thing to note is that new-paradigm thinking is a return to the Ancient Wisdom, even if its language sounds new.

The ancient Egyptians seemed to be remarkably prophetic about this issue. They predicted that their wisdom would be lost. The Hermetica says: “O Egypt, of thy religion nothing will remain but an empty tale, which thine own children in time to come will not believe… And in that day, men will be weary of life, and they will cease to think the universe worthy of reverent wonder and of worship… No one will raise his eyes to heaven; the pious will be deemed insane, and the impious wise… As for the soul, and the belief that it is immortal by nature, or may hope to attain to immortality, as I have taught you — all this they will mock at, and will even persuade themselves that it is false”⁶.

Does this remind you of anything recent? Here is the description of the human situation according to two prominent scientists, and one philosopher from the 20th century:

• Nobel Laureate Bertrand Russell, having summarised old paradigm thinking, concludes: “All these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built”.
• Stephen Hawking: “The human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet…”
• Richard Dawkins: “The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference”.

And these figures, and others like them, are revered, highly respected and influential in the modern world.

The Egyptians also said that their Ancient Wisdom, having been lost, would be refound. So what needs to happen? One of the important adages of the Society is: there is no religion higher than truth. Thus truth is the highest form of religion. We are seeking scientific, religious and historical truth.

In which case, we have to ask, who is not telling the truth, whether consciously or otherwise? Christianity in its various forms, at least in the exoteric forms for public consumption, has a lot to answer for, but the main culprits are materialist, atheist scientists. As Grof says, it is that philosophy which has to change. I think that Madame Blavatsky said somewhere that science should be without preconceptions and beliefs. We have to free proper science from the philosophical baggage that has become attached to it. The same thing applies to religion. Tim says that his book is “offered at a time when there is an increasing interest in human consciousness and psycho-spiritual development without the prejudice and preconceptions of sceptical science or worn-out religion”.

Here is a whirlwind history of the issue. The argument between spirituality and materialism seemed to begin in ancient Greece. Before that, as far as I can tell, every society was religious or spiritual, archaeologists saying that an awareness of a sacred presence in the world extended deep into paleolithic times. Leucippus, Democritus, Epicurus, and following in their footsteps the Roman Lucretius all argued for materialism, while the now two most famous names who represented the spiritual perspective were Pythagoras and Plato.

Then came Aristotle, who was a student of Plato but went off in a different direction. He was definitely not a materialist in the modern sense, but he reacted against Plato’s transcendentalism, and focused his attention on the material world. So nothing of what I’m about to say should be interpreted as a criticism of Aristotle’s thinking; I’m just trying to indicate a trend, a direction of travel away from Plato.

Some of the early Christian Fathers were Platonists, most notably Origen. After that early period, however, the Catholic Church, often under the supervision of the Roman Emperors, progressively distanced itself from spiritual ideas, and removed them from the teachings. There was also a ruthless suppression of Ageless Wisdom ideas.

Some significant moments were:

• the Council of Nicea in 325, when Emperor Constantine took control of the Church for his political ends.
• the Anathema Against Origen of 553, when the doctrine of the pre-existence of the soul, and by implication reincarnation, was condemned as heresy. Extraordinarily, this was instigated by the Emperor Justinian against the will of the Pope.
• the Council of 869, when belief in spirit was condemned.

Despite this, Platonism was still the accepted doctrine of the Catholic Church about 1000 C.E. During the 12th and 13th centuries, however, Aristotle’s philosophy was rediscovered, and later became church dogma. The formal expression of this was Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae, which attempted to reconcile Christianity with Aristotelian thinking, thus a decisive break with Platonism.

Later debates were more theological than scientific, but the ideas of Aquinas were officially adopted at the Council of Trent in the mid 16th century, and in 1879 Pope Leo XIII declared Aquinas’s theology to be eternally valid. He said that “Aquinas contended against the errors of the Greeks (who was he thinking of there?), of heretics and rationalists”.

So, in the Catholic Church, we see a general trend away from a Platonic perspective. As an aside, it is said that during the Feast of St. Nicholas in 1273, Aquinas had a mystical vision that made all his writing seem unimportant to him. He was urged to continue, but replied, “I can do no more. Such secrets have been revealed to me that all I have written now appears to be of little value”. It would be interesting to know what those secrets were. Something to do with the Ancient Wisdom, perhaps?

It is hard to know if there was a causal connection, but there followed soon after Aquinas a reaction in the form of the Italian Renaissance, an outpouring of spirituality, with its revival of Platonic, Pythagorean, and Hermetic ideas.

The next significant movement was the so-called Enlightenment, which is still with us. It undoubtedly had some good points. As Grof says: “Initially each new paradigm has a positive and progressive role”. However, as he also said, it has become a strait-jacket.

The old paradigm had gone as far as it could go. At that point, just as Thomas Kuhn might have predicted, the new paradigm was born with the arrival of quantum physics. Theosophist Edi Bilimoria calls quantum mechanics the crown jewel of physics, because it brings science close to the borderland of occult science. Grof says that modern physics has questioned and transcended every postulate of the old paradigm. Reality is entirely different from the old model.

As soon as the early quantum physicists made this breakthrough, they took a decidedly Platonic turn. Werner Heisenberg said: “Modern physics has definitely decided for Plato. The smallest units of matter are not physical objects… They are forms, structures, or — in Plato’s sense — Ideas”⁷. The most eye-catching quote comes from Sir James Jeans: “The universe is looking less like a great machine, and more like a great thought”. He uses Plato’s allegory of the cave as the epigram for his book⁸.

For anyone not familiar with this allegory, Plato compares the human condition to prisoners in a cave, chained so that they can only look straight ahead of them and cannot turn their heads. All they can see is a wall onto which are projected shadows of figures who are in reality standing behind them. Since that is all they have known, they take these shadows to be reality, and do not understand that what they are seeing is something emanating from elsewhere, a by-product of a different level of reality.

Max Planck expands upon Jeans’s idea: “There is no matter as such! All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particles of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together… We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent Mind. This Mind is the matrix of all matter”⁹.

Sir Arthur Eddington, clearly thinking of Plato in his use of the words shadow and shadowy, says similar things. Since shadows are non-material, this is a decisive statement in favour of the philosophy of Idealism — what appears to be matter is an illusion.

This is, of course, exactly what Eastern religions, the Ancient Wisdom, have been saying for thousands of years; the word they use is maya. So, the early quantum physicists were unknowingly rediscovering the Ancient Wisdom. Here are a few examples:

1. As Heisenberg and Planck say, in subatomic analysis, solid Newtonian matter disappeared. So, (I’m quoting Cox): “elementary particles are viewed as being created constantly and annihilated constantly at a frequency that transcends all means of empirical observation”. Was this something discovered only in the 1920s? Actually no. Without the benefit, we assume, of modern technology, the Ancient Wisdom came to exactly the same conclusion: “In the Vedic texts, this constant process of creation and annihilation was called nitya pralaya”. This is a quote from the Bhagavata Mahapurana: “Some men, knowing the subtle state of things… declare the creation and dissolution of all beings, from Brahma downward, as taking place all the time. The successive stages undergone by all changing things serve as an index of the constant creation and dissolution of those things, as carried out by the force of time. These high frequency stages of creation and annihilation… are not perceived by ordinary men”. Who did manage to perceive them then, we might reasonably ask?¹⁰
2. One of Tim’s Ten Key Ideas is: “There is a unity of existence throughout the universe… Everything, seen and unseen is interconnected and therefore one”. Physicist Fred Alan Wolf says: “Quantum Mechanics, perhaps more clearly than any religion, points to the unity of the world”¹¹.
3. Tim: “There is nothing but life in the universe. There are no vast expanses of empty space or inanimate matter. It is a living being and we are an integral part of it. Nothing in it is dead. Although appearing as separate aspects, there is only one life and one consciousness”. Gary Zukav says: “In the subatomic realm, a vacuum obviously is not empty, so where did the notion of a completely empty, barren, and sterile ‘space’ come from? We made it up! … ‘Empty space’ is a mental construction, an idealization, which we have taken to be true”¹².
4. Physicists were shocked when in certain experiments sub-atomic particles appeared to be conscious, that is to say, seemed to know about and respond to the behaviour of other particles. Tim says: “Everything visible and invisible is a conscious life-form. Even atoms have consciousness”. On this issue the Ancient Wisdom seems to be ahead of quantum physics. As Cox puts it, in quantum theory: “there is no notion that one of these properties of particles is consciousness, so that an elementary particle can be conceived as an elementary soul — but that was precisely the position of the ancients: each elementary particle was viewed as a perishable point value of consciousness”.

Despite the quantum revolution, however, the materialist paradigm continues to dominate modern science, apart perhaps from physics. It is reasonable to ask whether scientists from other disciplines have taken quantum physics on board — I would single out evolutionary biologists as the main culprits — Bilimoria says that biology is in another time frame, compared to quantum physics — and sociologists. One problem may be that of specialisation; do experts in one field have time to read widely, and inform themselves about developments in science in its totality?

========================================

Bilimoria thinks that there are “four gigantic blockages” which are preventing the reunification; he says: “remove these four and the rest will follow”. I’m now going to take a look at two of these, and one of my own, where scientific materialism is in direct opposition to the Ancient Wisdom. Because I want to go into detail with the third topic, and because there is already extensive literature about the first two, including several articles on my website, I intend to deal with them only briefly.

The first is the nature of consciousness. According to materialism, matter is fundamental, consciousness is an accidental by-product of the brain, and the self and free will are often considered to be illusions. According to the Ageless Wisdom, on the other hand, consciousness is primary, and matter is an illusion.

Here are some statements by materialist scientists on this issue. The first one crops up a lot in books I read. This is Nobel-prize winner Francis Crick opening his book on his ‘scientific search for the soul’: “The Astonishing Hypothesis (his title) is that ‘You’, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules”¹³. The hypothesis is astonishing, perhaps, because nobody in their right mind could believe it.

In 2016 the neuroscientist David Eagleman presented a series for BBC4 called The Brain. Here are two quotes:

• “For the past twenty years I’ve been trying to understand how what happens in three pounds of jelly-like material somehow becomes us”.
• “For a long time the answer was an immortal soul, or spirit, something that goes beyond mere matter and gives you your life and your identity. But the modern study of the brain tells a different story. Who we are can only be understood in terms of the three-pound organ in our heads”.

I suggest that the last statement is an article of faith, rather than a scientifically proved fact. The story the brain is telling is obviously somewhat muddled, if Eagleman has still not understood it after twenty years. What he rejects is obviously what the Ageless Wisdom believes. As I said, these extreme materialist ideas are being rejected by many scientists in modern times. I refer you to two extraordinary books which comprehensively refute the materialist understanding of consciousness and the self. If you need good material in a debate check out Irreducible Mind and Beyond Physicalism. These are by a team of writers under the general editorship of Edward Kelly. They provide an encyclopedia of information in favour of the ancient understanding of consciousness.

Other books on this theme with fascinating titles are:

• The Self and Its Brain by Nobel Laureate John Eccles, and Karl Popper¹⁴
• Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness, by Alva Noë¹⁵
• The Spiritual Brain: a Neuroscientist’s Case for the Existence of the Soul by Mario Beauregard and Denyse O’Leary¹⁶

========================================

My second topic is Darwin evolutionary theory, more properly known nowadays as the neo-Darwinian Synthesis. Its central dogmas are that life emerged from non-life, and then evolved from a common ancestor through an unguided, blind process of natural selection acting upon random genetic mutations.

Tim refers to the “unproven and incomplete theories of Charles Darwin”, and I believe he is right. Again, there is not enough time to go into detail, and there is a lot of critical literature. I’ve made an extensive list on my website of objectors to Darwinism, and written several articles, if anyone is interested. Instead, for some light entertainment, I offer an insight into the quality of debate which this issue brings forth.

In 1990 Richard Milton, a scientific journalist, published The Facts of Life: Shattering the Myth of Darwinism¹⁷, an obviously provocative title. In a review Richard Dawkins described it as “twaddle that betrays, on almost every page, complete and total pig-ignorance of the subject at hand”. It’s worth quoting the review at some length¹⁸:

“Every day I get letters, in capitals and obsessively underlined if not actually in green ink, from flat-earthers, young-earthers, perpetual-motion merchants, astrologers and other harmless fruitcakes. The only difference here is that Richard Milton managed to get his stuff published. The publisher — we don’t know how many decent publishers turned it down first — is called ‘Fourth Estate.’ Not a house that I had heard of, but apparently neither a vanity press nor a fundamentalist front.

“So, what are ‘Fourth Estate’ playing at? Would they publish — for this book is approximately as silly — a claim that the Romans never existed and the Latin language is a cunning Victorian fabrication to keep schoolmasters employed?” He continues, suggesting that the unscrupulous publishers might be out to make money from a gullible, but ignorant public.

On the other side, Theosophist John Gordon called Milton’s book a “tour-de-force work, which almost single-handedly took apart the morass of modern scientific concepts in the fields of geochronology and evolution. In doing so, he showed how and where the whole edifice of popularly accepted theory in these and other associated areas is actually built on highly unstable foundations and held together by a mass of none-too-safe assumptions”¹⁹.

Some of Milton’s statements and the Theosophical position on the history of humanity are controversial and, if I may dare to say so here, Gordon’s enthusiasm for Milton’s book may have been a little over the top. My purpose in quoting these authors is to show the passion which this ostensibly scientific question generates, arguably even more intense than the Brexit/Remain debate.

Briefly, the main problems with neo-Darwinism — and there are many others — are that it has never adequately explained the emergence of life from non-life, nor the evolution of consciousness from the brain. Nor will it ever be able to do so because, as the Ancient Wisdom says, neither of these things are true. The consciousness problem led the atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel to write Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False²⁰.

In this dispute the most obvious thing that the Ancient Wisdom has to offer, over and above its belief that evolution is directed and purposeful, is that it can occur at levels higher than the physical body. Just that one idea would help to resolve many of the difficulties that ordinary scientific critics observe, but cannot explain.

Richard Dawkins is well-known for saying: “Darwin made it possible to become an intellectually fulfilled atheist”. So we see here that the debate is not really about science, rather religion. If one’s primary motivation is a passionate desire to be an atheist, then it is possible and likely that one will accept uncritically anything that appears to support this stance. Thus Darwinian theory has become akin to a religious faith, with its own dogma. Its advocates, of course, don’t notice this and think that it is science. Outsiders can see this, however, hence the philosopher Mary Midgley’s book Evolution as a Religion²¹. Another quote on that theme is:

“The modified, but still characteristically Darwinian theory has itself become an orthodoxy, preached by its adherents with religious fervour, and doubted, they feel, only by a few muddlers imperfect in scientific faith”²².

I have other similar quotes, but not enough time to say them. But this, believe it or not, is a quote from the foreword to an edition of Darwin’s Origin of Species: “Belief in evolution is… exactly parallel to belief in special creation — both are concepts which believers know to be true, but neither, up to the present, has been capable of proof”²³.

I would suggest therefore that Darwinism has become so established, despite the many objections that can be made about it, primarily because of its great appeal to atheists, or materialists. The interesting question is therefore why so many scientists have such a desperate desire to be atheists.

========================================

I have focused on the idea that Darwinian evolution has become a quasi-religious dogma because I want to suggest that among modern cosmologists there is an even greater quasi-religious dogma, greater in the sense that it is adhered to with almost total unanimity, and with deep conviction. It has truly become a faith. This is my third topic, the theory of the Big Bang.

One of Tim’s Ten Key Ideas is that the universe is infinite. “With neither beginning nor end, the universe is eternal and immortal”. The Big Bang is “as yet still theoretical”. Other Theosophists concur, so I am taking it as read that the Ageless Wisdom rejects the idea of the Big Bang as understood by modern cosmologists. Of my three battles with materialist science, this is probably the most difficult to win, given the almost complete unanimity of the opposition, even among some new-paradigm scientists. Why are they so certain?

The term Big Bang was coined by astronomer Fred Hoyle, and it has been adopted even though he intended it to be pejorative. His alternative was called the Steady State theory, which proposed that the universe was both expanding and eternal. This therefore has some relationship to the Theosophical understanding.

In a 1987 New Scientist article²⁴ Marcus Chown asked: “How do we know there was a big bang?” Why could he not say, why do we think there was a Big Bang? His justification included the phrases “armed with a growing mass of evidence” and “so confident of the scenario”. I’m going to investigate whether such confidence is justified.

Here is an outline of why cosmologists think there was a Big Bang, the orthodox history, or myth if you prefer, churned out on BBC4 Horizon documentaries, and in various science books for popular consumption. I transcribed my next paragraph from a BBC Horizon documentary. This whole talk was checked by a friend of mine who is a University of Cambridge Physics Professor. He marked this next paragraph “not good”. If he’s right, that shows how unreliable a Horizon documentary can be.

The idea of an expanding universe could have been predicted by Einstein from his General Theory of Relativity, although he held back from doing so, preferring for non-scientific reasons, a static universe. He introduced into his equations the Cosmological Constant, which he later described as the biggest mistake of his career. I understand, however, that more recently some cosmologists are wondering whether he might have been correct. If the universe is indeed eternal, perhaps he should have trusted his intuition.

(Returning now to a more reliable account.)

Then, in the early 1920s, the Russian mathematician Alexander Friedmann published solutions to Einstein’s equations, making no attempt to force a static-universe solution. This work later became the foundation for Big Bang theory, although it was the Belgian cosmologist and Catholic priest Georges Lemaître who in 1927 independently first proposed the idea of a universe born at a single instant in the past, and expanding outwards.

Around this time the astronomer Edwin Hubble was analysing the light from distant galaxies, and discovered that the wavelength was shifted to the red end of the spectrum. Astronomers interpreted this as a Doppler effect, familiar to anyone who has noticed how the pitch of a train or a police siren changes as it passes by. The sound becomes deeper because the wavelength is stretched out. Similarly with light, the wavelength of light from a galaxy which is moving away from us is stretched out to the longest, or reddest, wavelength. This suggested that most galaxies are receding from the Milky Way, in other words, that the Universe is expanding. Logically then, the Universe must have been smaller in the past. There must have been a moment when the Universe started expanding, the moment of its birth, hence the concept of the Big Bang. By imagining the expansion running backwards, cosmologists deduce that the Universe came into existence between 13.5 and 15 billion years ago.

According to the scientific method, a hypothesis or theory is required to make predictions which can be tested; if the predictions prove correct, this lends support to the theory, although not definite proof.

In 1948 Big Bang advocates Robert Herman and Ralph Alpher, a student of George Gamow, who also made a significant contribution, predicted the existence of the cosmic microwave background radiation (which I’ll call CMBR from here on), believed to be the afterglow of the Big Bang. In 1965, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson detected an odd signal with a radio horn they were using for satellite communications. The signal did not come from the Earth nor the Sun. It seemed to come from all over the sky. This appeared to be the evidence required, and scientists rushed to the conclusion that they had discovered the CMBR. Hoyle’s steady-state theory was rejected, Stephen Hawking no less saying later that the discovery of the CMBR was the “final nail in the coffin for the steady-state theory”.

So far, so good. Later on, however, it was decided that the observable universe did not fit with the predictions of Big Bang theory. The universe had to start off extremely uniform, with only tiny variations in the distribution of matter and energy, and had to be geometrically flat. These starting conditions seemed unlikely. It was therefore hypothesised that there must have been a very early spectacular growth spurt which would have spread out energy until it was evenly dispersed and straightened out any curves and warps in space. This spurt was named inflation.

One could argue that this was just an elaborate fantasy designed to preserve Big Bang theory. After all, what could possibly have caused this inflation (apart, perhaps, from a divine mind)? Soon after inflation was hypothesised, perhaps unsurprisingly since the desire to preserve the theory was so strong, it was concluded that it had indeed occurred.

So everything seemed to be fine again, at least for the time being. I’ll just mention that recently there has been a complication, in that Paul Steinhardt, one of the original contributors to inflation theory, had second thoughts, and wrote a paper in 2011 which expressed doubts about it²⁵.

Later on, however, it was again decided that the observable universe did not fit with the predictions of Big Bang theory. Cosmologists were attempting to correlate the estimated mass of the galaxy with the known laws of gravity. Their results were inconsistent to the extent that their estimate of the galactic mass was off by as much as 90 percent. It was decided that the missing mass could be accounted for by postulating the existence of non-luminous, therefore invisible, dark matter. To date no one has detected it, or observed it for certain, but this does not prevent New Scientist articles from announcing frequently: “we know that the vast majority of the mass of the galaxy is hidden”.

So, once again, Big Bang Theory was back on track, assuming that dark matter actually exists. Something akin to Groundhog Day happened, however, when it was noted that galaxies were accelerating away from each other, whereas, if the initial cause of the expansion was the Big Bang, it was assumed that the expansion should be slowing down. Dark energy was therefore hypothesised, to account for the discrepancy.

It seems that there are two possible solutions to the dark matter and dark energy problems. Either, cosmologists have just forgotten that, when data conflict with the predictions of a theory, according to the scientific method, you are meant to reexamine the theory. It seems, however, that the Big Bang has become so accepted that this is no longer deemed necessary. I have actually heard a Harvard Professor of Physics being interviewed on the radio, discussing dark matter, and saying “We have to defend the theory”. Why?

Alternatively, the cause of the dark matter and energy problems might have an esoteric or occult explanation. Esotericist Douglas Baker says: “The dark matter and energy now being probed by modern science are the mental matter and energies known to ancient sages”²⁶. This is also the line that Cox adopts, saying that the existence of dark matter conforms with the Ancient Wisdom. He wonders: “Is it possible that this represents the discovery (or rediscovery) of the galactic field of tamas known to the ancients thousands of years ago?”, and says that the dark-matter halo of modern science “corresponds directly to the dark neck of Shiva, which extends above his galactic torso”.

Therefore intriguing was an article in New Scientist February 2007 with the headline: “What is behind the mysterious force we call dark energy? One way or another, it will overturn our ideas about how the universe works”. Bring it on!

So, even though Big Bang theory has presented very serious, perhaps insoluble, problems, it is still accepted uncritically by the majority of those involved. As Cox puts it: “Although this theory is enormously popular it amounts to little more than a modern creation myth. …its starting premise is flawed logically. The dictates of pure reason tell us that something cannot be created from nothing. (The universe) must have been made from something, though modern science is mute as to what that mysterious something might have been. If we assume the Big Bang as a starting premise, the subsequent explanation of creation can be expressed logically, though it is rooted in an unexplained miracle”. Science accepts this last point, calling it a singularity, invoking uses of the word ‘infinite’ usually reserved for God. Cox’s last sentence is especially important, suggesting that the whole structure of Big Bang cosmology is a series of logical deductions based on the a priori assumption that Big Bang theory is correct. What if this assumption is wrong?

I’m now going to outline what I believe to be the actual history of the Big Bang theory, the true story. (Obviously as a non-scientist I am relying upon sources²⁷.) Before I do that, it would be interesting to know if any of you are aware of what I’m going to say. Just raise your hands, but please don’t say anything, if you know of any other credible alternative, scientific not spiritual, to the Big Bang theory, apart from Steady-state. (At this point, no one raised their hand.)

There are two features of the conventional history especially worthy of comment. I’ll begin with the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMBR).

As we have seen, Alpher and Herman predicted the existence of the CMBR in 1948. In 1933, however, the German physicist Erich Regener had predicted the existence of a microwave background produced from the warming of interstellar dust particles by high-energy cosmic rays, thus not a product of a Big Bang²⁸.

Now, if CMBR is predicted by Big Bang theory, and also by a non-Big Bang theory, then surely its discovery says nothing whatsoever about the origin of the universe. This becomes even more interesting when you consider that Alpher and Herman predicted in 1948 a microwave temperature of about 5 degrees Kelvin, which they revised upward to 28 degrees Kelvin in the three years that followed. This turned out to be ten times too high. Regener, however, had predicted a temperature of 2.8 degrees Kelvin, this estimate erring from the actual value by less than 3 percent.

So Regener was not only the first to predict the existence of the CMBR, but also the one who predicted it with the greatest accuracy. According to the scientific method, therefore, this alternative theory should have been considered superior to the Big Bang. So why did Big Bang theorists win? Apparently, they were better organised, and lost no time in claiming the newly discovered CMBR for their own cause. It is even claimed that Gamow was somewhat economical with the truth about his earlier predictions at that time.

Some pretty shoddy science followed. The CMBR was claimed to be proof of the correctness of Big Bang theory. (I’m afraid it’s going to get a bit technical here — I’m quoting a source): “But as more data on the CMBR were gathered, little evidence appeared of any connection between the alleged big bang fireball and this microwave radiation. The uniform manner in which the CMBR is distributed across the sky implied that the fireball should have been extremely uniform and that matter should also be uniformly distributed in space. Instead, the universe is seen to be very clumpy. Matter is gathered in the form of gas clouds and galaxies, which in turn are gathered into clusters, and so on. Just to account for the existence of galaxies, the big bang theory required that the CMBR intensity vary from one part of the sky to another by at least one part in a thousand. To account for the vast structures discovered in the mid-1980s, the supercluster complexes and immense periodic structures stretching across the universe, even greater nonuniformities would have been needed.

But such nonuniformities were not found. In 1992, the most accurate observations of the microwave field were made with the COBE (Cosmic Background Explorer) satellite. These indicate that when the Earth’s motion relative to the CMBR is taken account of, there are intensity variations of less than one part in 100,000, a hundred times smaller than the big bang theory’s most modest prediction. When the COBE scientists first announced the discovery of ‘ripples’ in 1992, they proudly asserted that they had finally proven the existence of the Big Bang. The news media blindly echoed their claims, and even theologians were purporting the ripples to be evidence of the biblical act of creation. Yet if anything, the COBE measurements had definitively disproven the big bang theory by showing that the CMBR was far too smooth to account for the universe’s clumpiness”²⁹.

In the following year an article appeared in New Scientist³⁰ with the heading, Challenge for the big bang: Results from the COBE probe ruled out key elements in the conventional explanation of how the Universe began. Is it time for an alternative theory? The article did indeed suggest an alternative called quasi-steady state cosmology (echoes of Fred Hoyle there).

So, evidence which disproves, or at least challenges, a theory is claimed to be proof of it. How can this be allowed to happen? How can ‘scientists’ not notice that they are doing this? Why are they so desperate to preserve Big Bang theory?

I’ll turn now to the redshift phenomenon, which is not in dispute although, as Cox says: “Hubble’s explanation of the cosmological red shift is not the only possible explanation; it is simply the most popular. There are a number of complementary explanations that do not require any form of galactic recession.”

This sounds like several competing theories. Actually, he says that they all come under the general heading of tired-light theories. (At this point I was intending to ask whether anyone who raised their hands earlier were thinking of that. As no one had raised a hand, this was unnecessary. After the talk one member of the audience, a physicist, said that he had in fact heard of it.)

This was proposed by the German physicist Walther Nernst in 1921³¹. He pointed out that in a universe of unlimited age, whether it be stationary or freely expanding, the temperature of interstellar space should be continually increasing, owing to its accumulation of stellar radiant energy. Noting that the temperature of space has instead remained quite low, he proposed that light photons must lose energy to the ether as they travel through space. He published a further paper on the same theme in 1938, citing Regener’s CMBR prediction³².

Also in 1929, only seven months after Hubble had published his redshift results, Fritz Zwicky proposed a quite different interpretation of his findings, suggesting that galaxies and space were cosmologically static and that the redshift was instead due to light photons gradually losing their energy during their long journey through space, thus supporting Nernst’s tired-light hypothesis³³.

Nernst’s prediction came before Friedmann, Lemaïtre, and Hubble’s discovery of the cosmological redshift-distance relation. Furthermore, and this is really important, in 1935, somewhat alarmed by the velocities involved, Edwin Hubble himself suggested that some mechanism other than expansion might be responsible for producing the cosmological redshifts³⁴. And a year later, armed with a much better set of data, Hubble wrote a follow-up paper that came out decidedly in favour of the tired-light model. His data agreed with a stationary Euclidean universe in which the redshifts were due to some unknown effect, which caused photons to lose energy as they travelled through space³⁵. He was therefore agreeing with Nernst, Zwicky, and Regener.

So, the man whose discovery led to the theory of the expansion of the universe, and therefore to the Big Bang, contrary to what you are led to believe by TV documentaries and popular science books, himself did not believe in the idea, saying in his paper that the data were incompatible, and that “the expanding models are a forced interpretation of the observational results”³⁶. (Even the very knowledgeable Cox seems unaware of this.)

In 1938 Nernst praised Hubble’s conclusions, noting that his own hypothesis had anticipated the redshift discovery as early as 1921. He said: “It is highly significant that Hubble, one of the discoverers of redshifts, should consider the model of the expanding universe to be unreliable”³⁷.

This has been merely a summary; for time considerations I’ve used only the most relevant material. I could also have mentioned Charles Guillaume, Sir Arthur Eddington, Andrew McKellar, Gerhard Herzberg, Erwin Finlay-Freundlich, and Max Born. They are significant figures in this story, whether or not you have heard of them.

Despite all the above, Simon Singh, writing a book almost 500 pages long, called Big Bang: The Most Important Scientific Discovery of All Time and Why You Need to Know About It³⁸, says:

• that Hubble “demonstrated that the universe was expanding” even though, as quoted above, he rejected the idea
• that the COBE results proved the Big Bang model once and for all

and finds no room at all to mention Regener, Nernst, nor the relevant work of any of those just mentioned, claiming incorrectly that Zwicky was the inventor “of the flawed theory of tired light”. He attempts briefly to justify this claim, but unconvincingly in my opinion.

BBC4 Horizon documentaries continue to churn out the orthodox story. In two different programmes within the space of two months³⁹, Jim Al-Khalili went over the same material, failing to mention any of the above, and claiming that the main opposition to Big Bang theory was the Steady-State theory. There was no mention of the tired-light theory, even if only to dismiss it, and explain why it is wrong. I don’t wish to claim conspiracy, even if I sometimes suspect it, but such ignorance, and failure to do proper research is inexcusable.

In passing, let’s note that tired-light theory goes along with a static universe, which is consistent with Einstein’s 1917 theory including the cosmological constant, and with a theory of dynamic equilibrium advanced by Andre Assis and Marcos Neves⁴⁰. It is also at least in name related to Hoyle’s Steady-State theory. Perhaps the Ancient Wisdom got it right after all. Cox says that the Vedic seers described an all-pervading force field, unknown to modern science, “the universal field of rajas which is characterized by redness and incessant motion”.

So to summarise, once it had been decided that the discovery of the CMBR had proved the Big Bang, even though it had been predicted more accurately by non-Big Bang theory, the Big Bang became a fact. Thereafter, every time that observations, actual data, contradicted the predictions, the rules of the scientific method were ignored, and something fanciful was invented to fix the theory. I have focused on inflation, dark matter, and dark energy. Interestingly, in 2005 New Scientist reported on a conference of Big Bang dissenters in Portugal⁴¹ described as “doubters thinking the unthinkable”, asking “the question no one is supposed to ask”. One attendee, Riccardo Scarpa was quoted: “Every time the basic big bang model has failed to predict what we see, the solution has been to bolt on something new — inflation, dark matter and dark energy”. The data contradicting the theory at the time of writing were argued to be: the temperature of the universe, the expansion of the cosmos, and even the presence of galaxies. All these were said to have cosmologists “scrambling for fixes”.

The article further said: “For Scarpa and his fellow dissidents, the tinkering has reached an unacceptable level. All for the sake of saving the notion that the universe flickered into being as a hot, dense state”. Eric Lerner, author of Big Bang Never Happened, attended and is also quoted: “Big bang predictions are consistently wrong and are being fixed after the event”.

The author of the article, Marcus Chown again, offered the orthodox CMBR story, then asked: “So if there was no big bang, where did the CMBR come from?” As if there were no alternative explanation! He draws a comparison between Lerner’s ideas and Hoyle’s Steady-state theory, but seems to have no knowledge of Regener and Nernst. And he is a physics graduate, professional science writer, and cosmology consultant for New Scientist.

One more detail from the article. Following significant data obtained by the Spitzer telescope, “some of the stars in distant galaxies appear older than the universe itself”. This is not the only time this has happened. Down the years there have been occasional articles in New Scientist describing stars which are calculated to be as old, if not older than the universe, at least according to the date of the origin of the universe according to the predictions of Big Bang theory.

So, is Big Bang theory a terrible error of modern science? There remains, of course, the enormous weight of contrary opinion; such a claim would obviously be dismissed by orthodox cosmologists. Who am I to challenge them? Is everything I’ve just said an erroneous, fringe viewpoint, easily disproved by the experts?

Searching for further confirmatory material, therefore, I had a look at a book called Let There Be Light, Modern Cosmology and Kabbalah: a New Conversation Between Science and Religion⁴². As you can imagine from the title, I was hoping for agreement with the general thrust of all that I have been saying above. However, the author Howard Smith, a senior astrophysicist, and lecturer on cosmology and Kabbalah, turned out to be a dedicated believer in orthodox Big Bang theory. For example, he says: “The basic theory and its derivatives have enabled scientists to explain with remarkable accuracy the intricate birth and early evolution of the universe and to understand its salient attributes, such as the rapid expansion that we see. Many subtle predictions have been verified, and meanwhile, as increasingly ethereal features of the observed universe are being uncovered, the model continues to provide either credible explanations or a solid framework for variant ideas. So far, the essential picture remains robust”. Smith has persuaded himself that the Big Bang is in accord with the ideas expressed in the Zohar.

Christians also have enthusiastically accepted the Big Bang model, since creation ex nihilo seems to be in accord with the Genesis account. An example would be a book called Developing a Christian Worldview of Science and Evolution by Charles Colson and Nancy Pearcey⁴³.

From my perspective, the problem with both books is that they accept the orthodox story of the Big Bang, and are completely ignorant of what I have chosen to call the true history. Thus we read the conventional ideas about redshift and CMBR. My suggestion, therefore, is that anyone who claims the truth of the theory, should be asked to explain in detail:

• why the tired-light theory is wrong
• why Hubble himself rejected the idea of the expanding universe
• and why the Big Bang explanation for CMBR was accepted, rather than the alternative which made much more accurate predictions of its temperature.

By coincidence, I then listened to the tape of a talk given by the late John Gordon⁴⁴, former President of Blavatsky Lodge (Theosophical HQ London), on a completely different subject. I was pleasantly surprised, therefore, when I came across the following section:

“The modern paradigm theory, put about by orthodox science, is that of Big Bang. Well, as I suggested to an astronomer from Glasgow University a little while ago, much to his dismay, the general theory about Big Bang theory, is as full of holes as a kitchen colander. (The audience laughs.) You laugh, he didn’t. He went ballistic at the very suggestion, on the grounds that I was not a scientist or an astrophysicist, therefore I knew nothing about the background to it. (This is what happens when you challenge the ‘experts’.) But when I asked him about certain of the phenomena associated with it, and the idea that the redshift and the blueshift, which is the basis of Big Bang theory, that redshift and blueshift occur purely also in relation to the movement of planets, relative to our own planet within the solar system, he wasn’t quite so keen on pushing the boat out. Nor the idea that the background microwave radiation, which has also been used to justify Big Bang theory, that this itself is not altogether surprising, bearing in mind that we have a huge number of celestial bodies moving through space. It’s rather like water moving through the ground. It creates an electrical field…

“So, at the moment, Big Bang theory, science’s Big Bang theory, is a paradigm theory. It’s the best one they can think of, but they have to keep plugging the holes”.

He then referred to certain BBC Horizon programmes, in which “some of the foremost astrophysicists in the world have expressed puzzlement, dismay, disquiet over the fact that the whole of astrophysical theory at the moment looks highly suspect”. This was in March 2010. Things must have changed at the BBC since then, because the Horizon programmes I have been watching more recently have reverted to advocacy of the Big Bang theory without any signs whatsoever of puzzlement, dismay, or disquiet.

Interestingly, in the same talk, John Gordon, obviously not sharing Howard Smith’s understanding, goes on to discuss Kabbalah in support of his Theosophical, non-Big Bang viewpoint.

======================================

In the past, societies were inspired and drawn together by their mythologies. The Perennial Philosophist Ananda Coomaraswamy said: “Myth embodies the nearest approach to absolute truth that can be stated in words”. Regrettably, the meaning of the word myth itself has changed. Presumably under the influence of materialistic science, it has come to mean a fiction, or a false idea. It could, however, and perhaps should be merely a neutral term which makes no reference to the truth or falsity of a belief. Myths are the truths people live by; they are true for those who believe in them. This applies equally to some modern secular myths — the Big Bang, the Blind Watchmaker, the emergence of life from non-life — as it does to the ancient stories.

Some call for a new mythology, or a reconnection with the old, to inspire us and unite us. It seems, however, that the age of myth creation has passed, apart, that is, from the myths formulated by modern materialist scientists, some of whom have come up with their own ideas.

“Edward Wilson, the American pioneer of sociobiology… argued that evolution both explained why humans needed religion, and supplied the best religion achievable in a secular world. In the late 1970s, in On Human Nature, he told how scientific materialism ‘presents the human mind with an alternative mythology that until now has always, point for point in zones of conflict, defeated traditional religion. Its narrative form is the epic, the evolution of the universe from the big bang’. Twenty years later, in Consilience, he came back to the idea that ‘people need a sacred narrative… If the sacred narrative cannot be in the form of a religious cosmology, it will be taken from the material history of the human species’.

“A number of writers have picked up Wilson’s cue”, for example the biologist Ursula Goodenough who said: “The big bang, the formation of stars and planets, the advent of human consciousness and the resultant evolution of cultures — this is the story, the one story, that has the potential to unite us, because it happens to be true”⁴⁵.

Science writer John Horgan, who believes that we are coming to the end of science in that we have discovered just about everything important, talks about the impressive narrative of how we came to be: the big bang, DNA, natural selection, Darwinian evolution. He says: “My guess is that this narrative that scientists have woven from their knowledge, this modern myth of creation, will be as viable 100 or even 1,000 years from now as it is today. Why? Because it is true”⁴⁶. So, for him, the word ‘myth’ does not imply a false idea!

The things that Wilson, Goodenough, and Horgan say are true (the big bang, Darwinian evolution of which Wilson is a staunch advocate, the advent of consciousness) are exactly the ideas that I have been challenging here, on behalf of the Ancient Wisdom and Theosophy. Perhaps we don’t need new myths, and it would be better to return to the ancient ones.

New paradigm science indicates that the reunification is coming. Tim says that everything is cyclic. If everything is cyclic, that would include the evolution of consciousness. I would also say spiral; we began with science and religion united, we will return there at a higher turn of the spiral.

The planet is experiencing a crisis at many levels. The answer to our problems might be the reunification of science and religion, the creation of a sacred science, thus a return to the Ancient Wisdom. Why? Here are a couple of quotes from everyone’s favourite atheist Richard Dawkins:

• “ ‘What is the purpose of the universe?’ is a silly question”.
• I don’t suppose he was thinking of the Society’s first founding principle when he said: “Much as we might wish to believe otherwise, universal love and the welfare of the species as a whole are concepts which simply do not make evolutionary sense”.

So much the worse for ‘evolution’ then! How are such beliefs going to help us solve the world’s problems?

So, I invite everyone to read widely, think deeply and critically, write, blog, don’t waste time, and challenge the old paradigm wherever you find it. As Michael Gove⁴⁷ might say, it’s time to start getting really fed up with experts. Become part of the solution. Become part of the future.

In conclusion, may I offer a brief quote, which sums up the Ancient Wisdom, and therefore hopefully describes where new-paradigm science will eventually take us. This comes from the preface to an edition of the Bhagavad Gita: “The Lord reveals His cosmic form: universes upon universes, inconceivably vast, created and sustained by the infinite omnipotence of Spirit which is simultaneously aware of the tiniest particle of subatomic matter and the cosmic movement of the galactic immensities — of every thought, feeling, and action of every being on the material and heavenly planes of existence”⁴⁸.

Or, as Beethoven put it more succinctly: “Brahma, his spirit pervades every part of space”. If a musician, albeit a great one, can understand this, why can’t scientists? If only science would start experiments on such ideas!

======================================

I hope you have enjoyed this article. I have written in the past about other topics, including spirituality, metaphysics, psychology, science, Christianity, politics, and astrology. All these articles are on Medium, but the simplest way to see a guide to them is to visit my website www.spiritualityinpolitics.com (click here and here).

========================================

Footnotes:

1. State University of New York Press, Albany, 1984

2. Inner Traditions, 2008

3. Firewheel Books, 2016

4. Theosophical Publishing House, 2006

5. University of Chicago Press, 1962, 1979, 1996

6. quoted in Cox, p10

7. Quantum Questions, Ken Wilber, Shambala, 1984, p51

8. The Mysterious Universe, Cambridge University Press, 1930, my edition 1947, p137

9. https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7819522-as-a-man-who-has-devoted-his-whole-life-to

10. Cox, pp. 75–76

11. Taking the Quantum Leap, Harper and Row, 1989, p249

12. Dancing Wu Li Masters, Fontana, 1979, p257

13. The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul, Simon & Schuster, 1994

14. 1977, my edition Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983

15. Hill and Wang, 2009

16. HarperOne, 2007

17. Fourth Estate Limited, 1992

18. New Statesman, London, August 28th 1992

19. The Rise and Fall of Atlantis, Watkins, 2008, Preface, pXII

20. Oxford University Press, 2012

21. Methuen & Co., 1985. Routledge 2002

22. Marjorie Grene, ‘Faith of Darwinism’, Encounter, November 13th 1959, p49

23. Professor L. H. Matthews, Dent, London, 1971

24. issue 1583, October 22nd 1987

25. ‘The Inflation Debate’, Scientific American, April 2011, Vol. 304 Issue 4, pp 36–43

26. Quantum Worlds Beyond the Atom, talk at Theosophical Society London, November 5th 2006

27. My sources for what follows are:

• Paul LaViolette, Beyond the Big Bang: Ancient Myth and the Science of Continuous Creation, Park Street Press, 1995, p275f. This was later reissued with the title Genesis of the Cosmos, Bear & Company, 2004.
• a paper by Andre Koch Torres Assis & Marcos Cesar Danhoni Neves http://www.dfi.uem.br/~macedane/history_of_2.7k.html
• http://thunderbolts.info/tpod/2006/arch06/060823bigbangscience.htm

The precise details are not always in complete agreement, but the general thrust is the same.

28. ‘Der Energiestrom der Ultrastrahlung’, Zeitschrift für Physik 80, 1933, pp666–69

29. LaViolette, p277

30. Jayant Narlikar, June 19th 1993 issue 1878

31. The Structure of the Universe in Light of Our Research, Berlin: Springer, 1921, p40, translated by R. Monti in SeaGreen 4, 1986: 32–36

32. “Additional test of the assumption of a stationary state in the universe”, Zeitschrift für Physik 106: 633–61

33. “On the red shift of spectral lines through interstellar space”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 15 (1929): 773–79

34. E. Hubble and R. C. Tolman, “Two methods of investigating the nature of the nebular red-shift”, Astrophysical Journal 82 (1935): 302–37

35. “Effects of red shifts on the distribution of nebulae”, Astrophysical Journal 84 (1936): 517

36. ibid. p554

37. as footnote 30, pp. 639–40

38. Fourth Estate 2004, Harper Perennial 2005

39. January 17th 2016, Lost Horizons: the Big Bang, and The Beginning and the End of the Universe, programme 1, March 22nd 2016

40. see footnote 25

41. issue 2506 July 2nd 2005

42. New World Library, 2006

43. Tyndale House Publishers, 1999

44. ‘Atlantis and the Global Warming Cycle’, Theosophical Society London, March 21st 2010

45. quoted by Jon Turney, “What is Life About?”, in Big Questions in Science, edited by Harriet Swain, Jonathan Cape, 2002, p223

46. The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age, Jonathan Cape, 2002, p16

47. a British politician who, during the 2016 referendum campaign, remarked that the public were getting fed up with experts.

48. Paramahansa Yogananda, Self-Realization Fellowship, 1999, Pxii