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In this thought-provoking episode, Real Science Radio hosts Fred Williams and Doug McBurney engage with Dr. Rupert Sheldrake, a renowned scientist known for his bold challenge to scientific norms. The conversation explores the historical variability of scientific constants and the concept of morphic resonance, suggesting a world where nature’s laws are seen as habits rather than immutable codes. Delve into the deep philosophical discussions that connect scientific findings with broader metaphysical and spiritual concepts.
SPEAKER 01 :
The usual scientific assumption is that all the laws of nature and all the constants of nature were fixed and emerged from nothing at the moment of the Big Bang, along with all the energy and matter in the universe. And as my friend Terence McKenna used to say, modern science is based on the principle, give us one free miracle and we'll explain the rest. And the one free miracle is the appearance of all the matter and energy in the universe and all the laws of nature from nowhere in a single instant.
SPEAKER 04 :
I see what you did there. One free miracle. I love it.
SPEAKER 02 :
and DNA Scholars can't explain it all away Get ready to be awed by the handiwork of God Tune in to Real Science Radio Turn up the Real Science Radio Keepin' it real
SPEAKER 05 :
Greetings to the brightest audience in the country. This is Real Science Radio. I'm Fred Williams.
SPEAKER 03 :
And I'm Doug McBurney, Bible student, science geek, amateur comedian. Fred, it is great to be back with you talking about real science on Friday.
SPEAKER 05 :
Today we have a very special guest joining us, an absolutely brilliant scientist. And it's none other than the renowned Dr. Rupert Sheldrake. He's coming to us from the United Kingdom. So welcome to Real Science Radio, Dr. Sheldrake. Good to be with you.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yes, yes, Dr. Sheldrake, I have been looking forward to this interview literally for years. Ever since I watched your video experiment with dogs and their owners, and it wasn't just watching the video, it was then doing a little bit of research and discovering the controversy around dogs. The intensive efforts to disprove anything you said. And you have quite a biography. And for time, I'll have to summarize for our audience. Dr. Sheldrake earned his Ph.D. in biochemistry from Cambridge University. He is... an author or co-author of 15 books and more than 100 research papers. In fact, on ResearchGate, Dr. Sheldrake's research interest score, which combines the number of reads, recommendations, and citations, is in the top 4% of all scientists. Dr. Sheldrake is best known for his theory of morphic resonance and his ability to cause acute discomfort among those he's dubbed, quote, a scientific priesthood with an authoritarian mentality. And for time, I've left a great deal out, Dr. Sheldrake. Is there anything else in particular that you would like to add?
SPEAKER 01 :
I think that's enough to start with, Doug.
SPEAKER 05 :
Well, Dr. Sheldrake, a couple years ago on one of our shows on the Universal Constance, we played a clip from a TED Talk that you had that apparently got banned. And I think it was on your book, The Science Delusion. And you questioned some dogmas in science, such as the Universal Constance. And at the time, we were particularly interested in your view on the speed of light and how it had, and I emphasize past tense, had changed in the past. Can you elaborate a little bit on that for our audience? Because there's a topic related to plasma cosmology that you may be familiar with that our audience tends to, we tend to have a view that the speed of light did change in the past.
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, I didn't come to this with any particular presuppositions, but I got interested in the so-called constants of nature because I thought this is a kind of dogmatic assumption that they're constant constants. Are they really? So, you know, I believe in empirical evidence. I took a look at the historical record. I had to go to the Patent Office Library in London because most libraries throw away the handbooks of physical constants when a new edition comes along. But fortunately, they kept them. So I managed to get them to get, you know, from the 1910s, 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, etc. They brought them out from their reserve stock room, dusting them off. And I found that if you looked at the actual records, almost all the constants vary quite a lot, including the speed of light, which dropped by 20 kilometers per second between 1928 and 1945 all over the world. And the figures they were showing have tiny error bars. You know, it's not as if they had errors of 30 kilometers per second. They had errors of, you know, 0.001 kilometer per second. And so there's a huge change. Well, I went and talked to the head of metrology, the science that measures these things, at the National Physical Laboratory in London. I asked him about it, and he said he was a little bit embarrassed by it. He actually said, you've discovered perhaps the most embarrassing incident in the history of our science. So I said, well... How do you explain the fact that all around the world people were getting at 20 kilobytes per second lower than before? And I said, were they just fudging the results to get what they expected? He said, we don't like to use the word fudge. I thought, what do you prefer? He said, we prefer the more delicate phrase, intellectual phase locking. Anyway, well, I said, it changed in the past, so how do we know it's not going to change in the future? And he then said, it can't. And I said, why not? He said, we fixed it by definition. And he said, we've then defined the units of time and space, the meter and the second, in terms of light itself. So if the speed of light does change, no one will ever notice. Nobody will ever notice that. Right.
SPEAKER 05 :
So they tied the speed of light to the meter itself, and so you can never, ever detect another change in the speed of light. That's amazing.
SPEAKER 01 :
They fixed that one, but they haven't fixed the gravitational constant, which still varies quite a lot. And as I was leaving, he was very friendly. As I was leaving, he reached down to below his desk. There was a cardboard box down by his desk. He said... You might be interested in this. He said, these pamphlets have just come from the printers. He handed one to me and said, the latest values of the physical constants.
SPEAKER 05 :
That's amazing.
SPEAKER 03 :
Now, did he say that without a trace of irony? Yes. Yes.
SPEAKER 05 :
So intellectual phase locking, is that because all these different people from different parts around the globe were coming up with the same numbers, and in order to fudge them, they had to all interlock? Yeah.
SPEAKER 01 :
there is that that's referring to i think he's just referring to the fact they had to they got the expected answer and gotcha that is they they correct their answers they discard outlying values that kind of thing and you know when they get the expected answer they just sort of stop the correction process so um you know that's basically what was going on apparently
SPEAKER 05 :
Gotcha. So are you aware of Barry Satterfield's idea that speed of light was faster in the past?
SPEAKER 01 :
I'm not sure if you've ever... No, I haven't actually, no.
SPEAKER 05 :
Yeah, because I know I've listened to some of your stuff. Your intellect is incredible and you know so much about physics and like zero point energy. And so he believes zero point energy increased in the past so that the speed of light, it's like swimming through molasses. So... You know, we're creationists here and we believe, you know, that the universe isn't that old. It's, you know, seven, maybe 7,000 years old. But we have a real difficult time explaining distant starlight. And so he had come up with this idea that speed of light was faster in the past. And because of zero point energy increased, the light was traveling slower as that energy increased. And what was super interesting, and I wish I could get any physicist to work on this, is he's provided scientific data that the quantized red shifts that we see as we look out match the electron jumps, you know, the quantized differences in electrons in the atom. And I, you know, I haven't, had anyone really look into that to confirm if it's true. I just wanted to kind of run that by you and see what your thoughts are on that. And I wasn't sure, again, if you'd even heard of any of this before.
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, I'm sorry to say I haven't, so I can't really comment on it. Well, how do you explain the redshift, or have you thought about the redshift? Well, I have thought about the redshift, yes. The theory, I mean, there's the standard theory, of course, that it's the recession of the Doppler effect. But I'm interested in the unconventional cosmologist Halton Arp. I don't know, is he on the radar?
SPEAKER 05 :
Oh, yeah, they're definitely familiar with his work, yes.
SPEAKER 01 :
Yes. Well, as you know, he thinks that in quasars, they're creating new matter. He thinks that matter's being created all the time. It wasn't just in the Big Bang. And he thinks newly minted matter is being spat out of quasars. And newly minted matter has an intrinsic redshift because it takes time for the rest of the universe to register that it's there. And that sort of... It affects the redshift. So anyway, that's another theory of redshift, Halton Arp's newly minted matter theory. I'm sure there are others. Anyway, I quite like Arp and his ideas, so I've paid more attention to that than the others.
SPEAKER 05 :
Gotcha. So do you have an issue with dark matter as an explanatory device for why a galaxy's stars seem to be moving a lot faster than the amount of matter can allow?
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, I mean, dark matter I see as just a fudge factor invented by physicists to explain their equations. And basically, the stars and the galaxies don't behave as they're supposed to, according to standard gravitational theory. So they're able to make them fit. by adding in arbitrary amounts of dark matter, which is invisible and unobserved, just to make the equations balance. And, you know, it's like if you were dealing with a spreadsheet of an account and there are huge gaps in the account. It's like adding virtual money to fill in the holes. Or actually, banks do it all the time with quantitative easing. They just sort of create extra money. Well, dark matter, I see, is a kind of quantitative easing of matter within the universe to fit the facts.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah. Well, very well said. I've often observed that many of our atheist friends, they accuse us, Christians, creationists, of any time we don't know the answer, we just add God. and who they call magic, but we would say that there's an awful lot more evidence for the Creator, God, than there is for dark matter. I mean, you have the Jewish race persisting for 4,000 years through history, and the Christian religion persisting for 2,000 years in the face of not academic banishment, but actual execution, even crucifixion. And so there's an awful lot more evidence for what they call our fudge factor than what we recognize as their fudge factor. And I'm very encouraged that you recognize that as a fudge factor. That's encouraging to me.
SPEAKER 05 :
Yeah. And I wanted to ask you, Dr. Sheldrake, so, you know, you've got your hypothesis on morphic resonance, but maybe for our audience, perhaps a backdrop that they may be interested in is I know you view yourself as a Trinitarian, you know, from a science point of view. And maybe if they had a better understanding of what you're referring to, I'd like to kind of jump into that a little bit before we talk about morphic resonance, which I think ties into this view.
SPEAKER 01 :
You mean my view on the Holy Trinity?
SPEAKER 05 :
Well, no, not necessarily. But just your position as a Trinitarian, you know, that there's three different ways of explaining things. And, yeah, if you do have a view on the Holy Trinity, that would be awesome, too. But I'm thinking more along the lines of, is everything just matter and energy? Or is there a third element? You know, is there information? Is the mind and the consciousness separate? I know conscience is something that science has tried to deny for centuries. many decades, if not centuries. And I don't know, I guess I wanted to maybe start with you elaborating on where you come from on this particular topic of matter, energy, and information.
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, I prefer the word form to information because information is in-form-mation. It's that which puts form into things. And I think it's easier to think in terms of form, just form itself, you know, like the shape of flowers or the shape of an animal or a building or a chair. We're used to forms and information is a theory about how the form gets there. So I'd rather stick to form. But you see, basically, I think that the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, which I find a very helpful view, is that the ground of all being is consciousness. And the first revelation of God to Moses in the Old Testament, when Moses says, who are you? He says, I am who I am. Well, that's a definition of conscious being in the present, of conscious being, I am. it couldn't be simpler and clearer. But the doctrine of the Holy Trinity says that then in the Logos, the second person of the Holy Trinity, in the beginning was the Word. The word Logos, given its background in Greek philosophy and the fact that the New Testament is written in Greek, basically means forms, ideas. Hindus call it nama-rupa, names and forms. It's the principle of form or order in the universe. And then the Holy Spirit is the principle of movement or change. All the images of the Spirit are of movement and change. you know, wind blowing over the water, breath, flames of fire, flying birds, and so on. And so, basically, I think what it's saying is there's a ground of consciousness behind everything, and this is manifested through the Logos which comes before Jesus of Nazareth. I mean, it says in the Creed, through him all things were made. Well, All things weren't made through Jesus as Nazareth in AD 0. The whole universe, we differ no doubt how long we think it existed before Jesus, but it certainly existed before him in almost everyone's view. So I think that basically the principle of form, the Logos is the principle of form and order. And if we look in physics at what his view of matter and energy is, basically physics says that Matter itself is made of energy bound within fields. Fields are what in nature represents form, order, structure, and is what gives shape and structure to the universe. The gravitational field gives the spherical shape to the Sun and the Moon and the Earth and the stars. The electromagnetic fields and the quantum fields shape all matter and all things. So I think that there's a principle of form and there's a principle of energy. that moves through them. And what physics calls energy, I think, is the physical manifestation of the Holy Spirit. So I see the whole universe as a manifestation of the divine, not just in an initial act of creation, but in the ongoing sustaining of the whole of nature as it is.
SPEAKER 05 :
Okay. Yeah, you know, we've got a really good website, a webpage on number three. So it's called RSR brought to you by the number three. It's at rsr.org slash three. And it's really interesting because in the Bible, there's all kinds of references to number three. We could go through all kinds. Like, you know, the Hebrew scriptures are composed of three sections, the law, prophets, and writings. God created three archangels and, of course, the Trinity. And then you look at nature and you've got the number three, all over the place. I mean, you've got, you know, the universe exists in space, matter and time. Space itself exists in three dimensions, height, width, and length, as does time and past, present, future. And even matter appears to be a wave, a particle, and information. And it's interesting you bring up fields, because I know the late John Wheeler, and I'm sure you're familiar with him, he said his career was kind of broken into three parts. First particles, then fields, and then everything's information. So you've got a theory on, and if you can maybe get a little bit more into this theory of yours, morphic resonance, because it kind of ties into this, right? So your thought process behind developing that kind of ties into this Trinitarian view in a sense?
SPEAKER 01 :
Yes. I mean, I didn't have a Trinitarian view when I first developed Morphic Resonance. That sort of came later. I went through an atheist phase, like many scientists. Many are still in it. You know, I went through an atheist phase and I came back to a more spiritual view, partly through India, living and working in India, and actually through living and working in India, came back to a Christian path. I was actually confirmed in the Church of South India. And so I found my way back to a question via India. It's an unusual route, I know. But morphic resonance came earlier than that, and it came because I was trying to understand inheritance of form. I was working on the development of plants at Cambridge, doing research in developmental biology, and I was trying to understand how form is inherited. And I came to the conclusion that genes were grossly overrated. You know, people like Richard Dawkins were going around saying everything's shaped by selfish genes. I thought genes were very grossly overrated because what they do is code for the structure of proteins, the primary structure of proteins. They don't code for the shape of your face or the pattern on a bird's wings or the color of a butterfly's wings, the patterns on the wings. I thought form had to be inherited in some other way, and instincts which are like the habits of a species, its behavior. And I came up with the idea that if there's a memory in nature, if there's a direct connection across time, then many of these surprising puzzles could be explained. Now, most people don't see them as puzzles because they think genes explain it all. But I was a biochemist. I was teaching biochemistry. about DNA and molecular biology to students at Cambridge. And it wasn't as if I didn't know about this. I was personally quite friendly with Francis Crick, who discovered the structure of DNA. I was sort of in the middle of that world, and I came to the conclusion it just wasn't enough. So the idea of morphic resonance is that there's a kind of collective memory in each species inherited directly through an influence from all the past members of the species. Each individual contributes to that collective memory and draws upon it. And so, in the most general sense, this suggests that the so-called laws of nature are more like habits. They develop through a kind of natural selection, but they're not like a kind of fixed Napoleonic code, as most scientists assume, that was given at the moment of the Big Bang. The usual scientific assumption is that all the laws of nature and all the constants of nature were fixed and emerged from nothing at the moment of the Big Bang, along with all the energy and matter in the universe. And as my friend Terence McKenna used to say, modern science is based on the principle, give us one free miracle and we'll explain the rest. And the one free miracle is the appearance of all the matter and energy in the universe and all the laws of nature from nowhere in a single instant.
SPEAKER 04 :
I see what you did there. One free miracle. I love it.
SPEAKER 03 :
And they accuse us. I wanted to explore. this just a little bit you talk about a collective memory that strikes me as inherently materialist are you saying that there is a material that there is a collective memory that is stored in the material of things or are you referring to something spiritual
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, neither really. What I'm saying is that there's a collective memory which is not material, it's not stored in things. The idea that memory is stored in things, you see, treats the question of memory as if it's something in space. The question where is about something in space, where is it stored? So then you'd have an answer like in the brain or in the genes or something like that. But memory is a relationship in time, not in space. And what I'm suggesting is a direct connection across time, a resonance across time. We're used to the idea of resonance across space, as in radio waves, as in mobile telephones, as in acoustic resonance, and so on. electro-nuclear magnetic resonance as in scanning devices in medicine. All of these are resonance in space. But what I'm suggesting is a resonance in time from the past to the present based on similarity and that there's a direct connection. Now that's not the same as the spiritual realm because I think that this is the way in which all memory in nature works. I think everything in nature has a kind of memory underlying it. The so-called laws of nature have a kind of memory aspect. Even crystals and molecules have a kind of memory from previous crystals and molecules. So it's not spiritual in the sense it's not conscious and beyond nature or in a realm of spiritual freedom or anything. It's part of nature. but it's not part of nature as conceived by materialists who have on the one hand a belief in eternal non-material laws and on the other hand a kind of nature with no memory in it at all, kind of amnesic matter governed by material laws which are beyond nature. Basically their conception of natural laws is based on a kind of Greek Platonic philosophy of rational principles outside the universe. So, you know, it's not as if materialists don't believe in anything. They believe in some supernatural laws which are present at all times and in all places, utterly immutable and totally omnipotent. In fact, they have all the properties of God as traditionally conceived, and like God they're invisible. So it's not as if they don't believe in anything. They have their own very, very strong belief. What I'm saying is I think that belief is misconceived. I think it comes from a Greek philosophical assumption that ultimate reality is eternal and there's nothing changeable within, truly changeable within nature. Whereas I think the key feature of the whole Judeo-Christian tradition is that there's a developmental process in nature. Even though we disagree in our interpretation of the book of Genesis, it's clear that the whole universe isn't created at once. Those six days, whether they're days, eons, or ages, we don't need to discuss now, but it's a series of stages or processes, the creation story. It's a process, and the whole Old Testament shows a process, and the New Testament shows a process, a developmental process in time. And so the idea of evolution is, I think, a kind of generalization of the Judeo-Christian view of history as being an unfolding process in time, whereas Greek, Hindu, and Buddhist cosmologies see history as entirely cyclical, just repetitive cycles including reincarnation. Everything just goes in cycles with a kind of eternal basis. Whereas I think this key point of the Judeo-Christian tradition is this process view. And evolution, however one interprets it, or process, is a development in time. And I think that morphic resonance is part of that because it's... History is changed by what happens. I mean, Christians believe, and I believe as a Christian, that history and the destiny of humanity was changed through the death and resurrection of Jesus. And that changed things for everyone else thereafter. And I think there's a kind of memory process there. You see, it changes things. Yeah, that's interesting. No, I'm just saying I think morphic resonance is compatible with a view of developmental change in history and where what's happened in the past influences what happens now. And it differs from the conventional assumption that it all depends on eternal mathematical laws that are not affected by anything that actually happens.
SPEAKER 05 :
Yeah, it's interesting that in this discussion that you've weaved in kind of the Greek philosophy of immutability, because we could go off on a whole other tangent on that, you know, because we're not Calvinists here at Real Science Radio. But, you know, maybe what would help our audience on your hypothesis is some examples of what supports it, you know, some evidence that supports it. the idea of morphic resonance. And I think you've had examples of like how you can train rats to do something and then somehow rats across the globe learn the same thing without it being taught. It was taught locally and yet globally, rats kind of learn this technique or this new thing.
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, there was an actual experiment started at Harvard where they trained rats to escape from a water maze. They had to swim to the right exit. And it took them to start with more than 250 trials before they cottoned on and got it. Within about 25 generations, it only took them about 25 trials to learn. This rate of learning speeded up tenfold. They assumed that it was because of the inheritance of acquired characters, or what we now call epigenetic inheritance. But when this was checked out in Australia and in Scotland, they found their rats started off where the Harvard rats had left off, with about 25 arrows, and they got better and better. But not only did the rats descended from trained parents get better, but all the rats of that breed were getting better. Now that's what I'd expect with morphic resonance. If a lot of animals learn a new trick, all around the world it should be easier for others to learn it. If lots of humans learn something new, like programming computers, playing video games, surfboarding, snowboarding, it should get easier for others to learn it. And one line of evidence comes from the rather amazing fact that average intelligence in intelligence tests improved all over the world by about 30% over the course of the 20th century, not because people were getting 30% smarter, but because the tests were getting easier to do. And I think the tests were getting easier to do because so many people had done them. And right now, I have an experimental project going on to find out whether it gets easier every day for people to do the New York Times five-letter word puzzle, Wordle.
SPEAKER 05 :
Please tune in next week for the conclusion of our interview with the renowned Dr. Rupert Sheldrake.
SPEAKER 02 :
Scholars can't explain it all away. Get ready to be awed by the handiwork of God.
SPEAKER 1 :
Tune into Real Science Radio. Turn up the Real Science Radio. Keepin' it real.
In this engaging installment of Theology Thursday, Pastor Bob Enyart challenges listeners to discern the pervasive clichés that have crept into Christian teaching. The conversation shifts toward understanding the rightful place of judgment and forgiveness in our lives as believers. With a focus on cultivating meaningful relationships and spiritual growth, this episode encourages you to reflect on the key teachings of Christianity and how they apply to our contemporary church environment.
SPEAKER 02 :
Greetings to the brightest audience in the country and welcome to Theology Thursday. I'm Nicole McBurney. Every weekday we bring you the news of the day, the culture, and science from a Christian worldview. But today join me and Pastor Bob Enyart as we explore the source of our Christian worldview, the Bible.
SPEAKER 01 :
Please turn to the epistle to the Hebrews chapter 5 verse 12. Now as we go on assuming we get into the next chapter before the end of this lesson will introduce the subject of eternal security it's called the endurance, perseverance of the saints, whether or not you could lose your salvation. That, of course, is a topic that interests many Christians. It's very controversial. At Denver Bible Church, we teach that under the law, you had to endure to the end to be saved, but under grace, you are sealed with the Holy Spirit until the day of redemption. So that there are many Bible verses that teach both. Some people think, well, the Bible would only teach one. Well, there are two covenants for God's two covenant peoples, and God teaches different things for his different covenant peoples. So we think that that's the reason why so many people have their proof texts showing, say, you can lose your salvation, and then their problem texts, the ones that seem to say you can't, and then they have to fight one set or the other. We think both sets are true. that'll come up in a little bit now I'd like to reread the last few verses were were up to Hebrews 512 but to give us the context speaking of Jesus in verse 9 having been perfected and we saw last week that Plato was horribly wrong when he claimed, without any kind of defense, he just asserted that anything perfect cannot change, and one of the many examples you can give to refute that is the baby Jesus, the holy child. As with any baby, Jesus changed enormously, certainly his physical body, and he was perfect. Adam and Eve were perfect. The Garden of Eden was perfect, yet they changed tremendously. So, having been perfected, he, Jesus, became the author of eternal salvation to all who obey him. called by God as high priest according to the order of Melchizedek. And notice that to all who obey him. We'll get into that idea as we get into chapter 6 with the question of eternal security. Is it possible to lose your salvation? What if someone puts their trust in Christ, becomes identified with him as a member of the body of Christ, and then stops obeying him? What happens then? verse 11, of whom, speaking of Melchizedek, of whom we have much to say, and we'll get to that in chapter 7, and hard to explain since you have become dull of hearing. So this is where we left off last week, and that's quite an insult, right? You wouldn't want that said of you. I wouldn't want it said of me, but easily it could be said of us. It's so common that that human beings become dull of hearing. Now, what might be a symptom of someone who has become dull of hearing? How do you know? How do you know if you or I, if we are dull of hearing? Well, one symptom would be if you notice yourself or someone else putting one ear towards something, sort of half paying attention, half and then concluding that, well, that's too confusing, or criticizing the speaker instead of my own inattention. Oh, he doesn't know what he's talking about. That's too confusing. It's whatever. That's an example or a symptom of being dull of hearing. It's like, please, don't bore me any further. But what's being presented might be important, true, even fascinating but it could come across as boring if somebody's not investing themselves in trying to understand what's being said but now what if something really is boring or false or unimportant and somebody's going on and on and on about something that's not important well of course that happens and so then when listeners tune out it's the fault of the speaker of course when his or her message is boring or unimportant, and it's also good that the listeners tune out if the material is false. If it's just downright false, you tune in to the radio, or you pop in a teaching tape or a podcast, and you're listening, and you could discern that what's being said is not true, well, then it might... dull your hearing very quickly, and that'd be the fault of the speaker. So as with all conflicts, there are two sides to the matter. In this case, though, here in Hebrews, it is the hearers that are being reprimanded, appropriately so, we know, because this is part of God's Word, and God's Word is inspired, so they're at fault. I think in the days that we live in, when we could be intensely entertained at any moment. Isn't that true? At any moment, merely by pushing a button on a remote control or sliding in a DVD or turning on a podcast, entertainment easily could hit us like in a maximum way because it's all recorded and because of technology. And so it's easy to get addicted to things that produce adrenaline, whereas a Bible study probably doesn't produce as much adrenaline as, say, a Tolkien story made for a major motion picture. There's a huge difference. And you could entertain yourself with the one and so end up being lax on the other. So... we need to pray and ask god for the strength to focus on what is important and especially on what is important to him and then also to have healthy relationships with family and friends lord god help me to focus on what is important to those i love because if i'm only interested in what's important to me then i'm not going to have good relationships And I won't have a good relationship with God if I'm only interested in what's important to me. So March for Life is coming up. Somebody's going to pray for good weather. There's bad weather. Then they're upset. Their prayer didn't work. Why did God let it rain on our event? And so they're focusing on what's important to them and not to others. That is especially to God. Regarding being dull of hearing, sometimes the Apostle Paul, we can tell from reading the New Testament and others in the Bible, undoubtedly even the Lord, Paul would give Bible studies that lasted for hours. Remember in Acts, there was a guy named Eutychus. And he was listening in an upper window. The home was full. And Paul was going on and on. He's getting ready to leave the next day. So he doesn't want to leave any moment to waste. So he's going to keep teaching as much as he can. So it's midnight now. The guy falls asleep, falls out of the window, down, and to his death, gets killed. So, as we've often said, if there are no casualties, it's not a Bible study. That story is in Acts chapter 20. And you read it, and you see Paul speaks to midnight. Here's this crisis. Paul then, with God empowering him, restores this man to life. And then he continues talking until daybreak. So... we need to focus focus on the text focus on what's important focus on the strategy focus on our relationships so that we can apply the mind that God has given us to make wise decisions and take proper actions so verse 12 For though by this time you ought to be teachers. Now, who ought to be teachers? Only a few people? No, those who are reading this, if they've been believers for a while, then they ought to be teachers. For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the first principles of the oracles of God. And you have come to need milk and not solid food. So everyone should become a teacher eventually. The purpose of being nurtured spiritually, intellectually, is not just to fill up, but then to share what we've learned with other people. Friday night, some of us went to Rocky Mountain Creation Fellowship, and Peter here was there, and he brought his friends, telling them about what's important, so that we receive not only from God for our own edification, but then we can impart to others what we've learned. And one of the things, we heard a creationist expert on astronomy speak about planets, and And it was to the glory of God. It was very exciting. And so it's so important not to view our own edification as an end in and of itself. But I learn so that I can share with others the truth about the Lord. So because those reading this, the book of Hebrews, because they have not learned They need to start over again with the basics. But that's sad for these people because they should be mature by now. And they have come to need milk and not solid food. For everyone, verse 13, for everyone who partakes only of milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, for he is a babe. So there is something beautiful about coming back to the foot of the cross. We become Christians at that moment when we realize that Jesus Christ is real. He died on the cross. He loves us. He was raised from the dead so we could have eternal life if only we trust in him. And then we could get busy with our lives and even with Christian ministry and lose that first love. So there is a real fundamental way in which returning to the basics is so important when it involves our relationship. Return to your first love, as Jesus said in the book of Revelation to some believers who had left their first love. So return to your first love. But when it comes to matters of theology, doctrine, the scriptures, it's sad if we've gone five years, 10, 20, 30, and really don't know much. Then that's unfortunate. Is everyone called to be a theologian? No, definitely not. And there are people who are theologians, they study Greek and Hebrew, they study theology, and a theologian might be a man or a woman, but either way, they might be married to a spouse who's busy providing, earning a living, or taking care of the kids, or taking care of the house. And so the spouse is not going to be able to take the time to become proficient at the various intricacies of doctrine when that's not their profession. And so in a body that As with the body of Christ, there are many members. The members have different gifts. But it doesn't mean, therefore, that, well, I don't need to know about the Bible because I'm not called to be a theologian. That would be an overreaction in a bad direction. And so some of us easily get all head knowledge, and our Christian life is not experiential, it's only head knowledge. Others have intense experiential Christian living, but not the knowledge of the Word of God. So both are errors. And we ask God to help us to be whole and well-rounded, to live the Christian life, to experience it, that our emotions themselves might be honoring to God. I'm not self-indulgent. I don't get carried away. But I honor God in the way I have empathy for other people, in the way I've learned to love Him, the way I love my kids and my family, my friends. So I serve God with my emotions also, not only my actions, not only my mind, but as a whole person. And so we need to be able to become spiritually mature, including and understanding God's word, regardless of what part of the body of Christ we're in or that we make up. But that doesn't mean that one person will be as proficient as another. Of course not. Now, This here was a sad state of affairs, that these believers were so immature that the analogy is made to an infant who cannot eat solid food, but they can only drink milk, that's it. So then today, if they were that bad then, I think you can make a case that we're worse off today. that today forget milk the body of Christ is lactose intolerant they can't handle the milk and I'll give some examples we could think of Christian cliches which are only popular because we are lactose intolerant as a body we cannot handle even the simple truths as a result While the Bible is set aside, there are cliches that are paramount, that no one dare challenge any of the cliches. And they are, don't judge anyone ever at any time for any reason. Even though Jesus said, don't judge you hypocrite, first stop committing the same sin, then you can judge your neighbor. Then you can judge your brother. But we stop where Hillary Clinton stops. Don't judge. That's it. As though we're an absolute. So that's an example of being lactose intolerant. There's an entire book in the Bible called Judges. What are the judges? The evil people? No. They're the good people. Jesus commanded us to judge with righteous judgment. Paul says we are going to judge on Judgment Day. We'll judge the angels, the fallen angels. We will judge the world. Christ commits judgment into the hands of the saints. And he says, if we're going to judge angels in the world, shouldn't we be able to judge even the least matters? I'm embarrassed about you guys, he writes to the Corinthians, because you're not judging. Start judging. We have the mind of Christ. He who is spiritual judges all things. So that's the other side of the coin. And that's the side that's ignored because the body has become lactose intolerant. If you think you can't judge people selling drugs to kids on a playground, well then you're pretty much setting yourself up to be thwarted in any kind of spiritual or emotional growth. You're not gonna be able to grow if you think you can't judge. And it set yourself up for being a hypocrite because in my perspective, the most judgmental Christians are the ones who say they can't judge. Intensely judgmental. Not against homosexuals or child killers, but against those who would rebuke homosexuals and child killers and atheists and so on. Another of the clichés is to forgive everyone. That forgiveness is an absolute. And if that were true, that means that repentance is superfluous. It's not necessary. And if we forgive everyone, we're teaching the world that God will forgive everyone without repentance. Whereas Jesus said, if someone sins against you, rebuke him, and if he repents, forgive him, Luke 17.3. If he repents. So we could throw that out too, because that doesn't fit in with the cliche that the body of Christ has accepted, because we've set aside the Bible for these easy, super-spiritual rules that which contradict the scriptures, but they make us feel good. Sort of makes us feel self-righteous. Takes me out of the battle. Hey, I can't judge anybody. Besides, I forgive them anyway. Well, what do you forgive them for? You can only forgive someone that you've judged to be wrong. So the cliches tend to contradict themselves. Does that make sense? How can you forgive someone if you don't think they're wrong? And how could you think they're wrong if you can't judge them? So judge not and forgive everyone is a contradict, where truth doesn't contradict. Truth is non-contradictory. All sins are equal. That's a cliche. Makes it easy, right? If somebody is apathetic about killing unborn children, and then, hey, that's the same as stealing a Tic-Tac. And so what's the difference, really? And I hear that kind of thing on Christian radio. So all sins are equal. That's what the Bible says, right? The Bible says, all sins are equal, thus saith the Lord. No. Jesus said some people have the greater sin. In fact, that guy there, he has a lesser sin than these guys, because to whom much is given, they're more accountable. And so you have a whole... a whole chunk of the teaching of the Bible that shows that some sins are far more grievous to God than other sins. That's why there's a judgment day. Judgment day is not to determine who's going to go to heaven, who's going to go to hell. That's determined when somebody dies. And when they die, then they're separated. Those who go to hell, they die and they go to Sheol, to Hades. The believer dies and he goes to be with the Lord. So Judgment Day is not to decide your eternal residence, but Judgment Day, Jesus said, some will be punished intensely, others will be punished less so, and it will depend on many factors. So if you sin and you're not forgiven by Christ, you'll suffer for that sin. But what if you teach others to commit the same sin you did? Then you'll suffer worse. And these are all fundamental principles of scripture that are contradicted by the cliches. But the cliches go unchallenged. And one reason is because they take the Christians out of the spiritual battle. And the Christians no longer are a challenge. So if you have a large church, and the church is sort of uninvested from the battle that's raging around it, for example, with our godless public schools, So giving your child a godless education, I believe, is inherently sinful. It's inherently wrong. So you have a big church, a megachurch, thousands of members. How many send their kids to public schools? Well, a lot. So if the pastor stands up and says it's a sin to send your kids to public school, then what happens? Those people all leave, and then you can't meet your budget, and you have 20 people on staff and property, eight acres and building. So what happens is the kind of thing that goes for doctrine today is really superficial cliches that are false. And all sins are equal, so it really doesn't matter. Even if it's wrong to put your kids in public school, who are you to judge and forgive everyone? So what does it matter? And pretty soon, the only thing that matters is tithing, putting it in, but not taking it out. And if you're not supposed to judge, then when the plate comes by and you took out, would the church that says don't judge, would they somehow all of a sudden find a backbone and be very critical? Say, we're not going to tolerate that. Well, why not? Don't judge. Forgive. So you can very quickly find out where people stand when it comes to money quite often. Sort of follow the money. Don't call anyone a fool. The Bible does frequently. Jesus, David, Paul, they call people fools. But you can't call anybody a fool. That's more important than do not commit adultery. More important. Hate the sin, love the sinner. We paraphrase that, hate the gin, love the dinner. When God sends people to hell for all of eternity, is he sending their sin or is he sending the sinner? Who goes to hell? Is it the sinner or the sinner? It's the sinner. It's not their skin that gets judged. It's not the finger that pulls the trigger that kills an innocent person. It's not the action that gets judged. It's the sinner. And so hate the sin, love the sinner. Of course, God loves the whole world. But he also hates those who shed innocent blood. He hates those who sow dissension unnecessarily. So God can hate and love at the same time, and we can too. We can hate the person who kills the innocent, but love them enough to share with them that they need God, and Jesus Christ will forgive them. So you could do both. You could hate the perversion, the homosexual who is trying to undermine the truth of God, but love him enough to share the gospel with him. You could do both. And the Bible calls on us to do both. that God has a plan for your life. So, you know, what car do I have to buy? What job do I take? Who do I marry? So, God told me to marry this person, and everybody's so happy, and then a year later, there's a divorce. And what happened? God told me to divorce this person? No, it's just we make claims and we attribute our own decisions to God as though God is the one who got me into this mess. And why? And that's common in prison if you have a jail ministry. Everybody who's in jail because of their own sin and decisions and actions say, why did God do this to me? God has a plan for my life. This is part of his plan for me. Why? Why? Why does he have nicer plans for other people and my life is miserable? You see how it's a victim mentality. It's not biblical. God's plan for our lives is very general. It's an umbrella plan. It is that we would love him, serve him, become conformed to the image of Christ, love and serve our family and our friends. That's God's plan for my life. Now, which car I buy, the myriad of decisions I make day to day, every year, God is not micromanaging my life. As our kids become adults, we don't want them to call us and ask every decision they make, should I do this? Should I do this? Should I do that? What should I do on every decision? Because then they would never grow up and mature. So God, he doesn't want to make every decision for us. He's given us a mind, faculties, so that if we honor him, we could make decisions that are good. They don't have to be the perfect decision. Like, am I hiring the perfect person? That's no such thing. That's a make-believe thing. Am I marrying the perfect person? Am I buying the perfect car? That's all make-believe. Right? God gave Adam Eve, and they fell into terrible sin. So, what? If God would have given Adam someone else, then... It's not God, if only God will show me the right person to marry, then my life will be great. That's false. There's only one person for me to marry in God's perfect plan. If I find that person, then everything will be great. Is that true? Well, what if you find the wrong person? You marry, some guy marries the wrong woman, right? She was supposed to marry another guy. Now that poor slob, his life is ruined. Because some other guy he never even met married a woman he never met that he was supposed to marry. So now he's stuck with second best. Isn't that absurd? And then just within a few iterations of that, everyone in the world has married the wrong person, everybody. But if we have no free will, if we have no will, and everybody has to marry whoever God picked, then God is picking all these people and it's a catastrophe because divorce is epidemic. So all these superstitious ways of trying to simplify the Christian life, they're all cliches that are so popular because we're lactose intolerant. The body of Christ can no longer even handle the milk. Forget the meat, we can't handle the milk. So it's easier to get someone who's an unbeliever and bring them to the Lord and then build them up than it is to take a Christian who's already been ruined by 20 years of teaching and try to help them to grow. If they want to grow on their own and come along, great, but you can't force feed to someone who's an adult. God does not change in any way. The utter immutability, of course, that's not true. God the Son humbled himself, became flesh, took on the sin of the world. The Father poured out his wrath on the Son. All those were terrible changes, important changes, but terrible. God became nicer in the New Testament. Old Testament, he was mean. New Testament, he's nice. And that contradicts the God cannot change attitude. cliche. So cliches tend to contradict each other.
SPEAKER 02 :
Hey, this is Nicole McBurney jumping into the broadcast. We are out of time for today, so be sure to come back next Thursday to hear the rest of this study. To find other resources and Bible studies, be sure to go to kgov.com. That's kgov.com.
Join us as we delve into the provocative views of Dr. Rupert Sheldrake, who confronts materialist orthodoxy by proposing a world where consciousness is as widespread as life itself. This episode covers Sheldrake's critiques of the atheistic perspectives common among scientists, his belief in a spiritually infused universe, and the remarkable influence of psychic phenomena in both humans and animals. Discover how his unique ideas defy conventional scientific dogmas and offer a broad, embracing vision of nature.
SPEAKER 05 :
Please stay tuned for the conclusion of our interview with Dr. Rupert Sheldrake and his theories on everything from dog intuition to a conscious sun and stars to the mind's influence on health.
SPEAKER 02 :
and DNA Scholars can't explain it all away Get ready to be awed by the handiwork of God Tune in to Real Science Radio Turn up the Real Science Radio Keepin' it real
SPEAKER 05 :
You know, maybe what would help our audience on your hypothesis is some examples of what supports it, you know, some evidence that supports the idea of morphic resonance. And I think you've had examples of like how you can train rats to do something and then somehow rats across the globe learn the same thing without it being taught. It was taught locally and yet globally rats kind of learn this technique or this new thing.
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, there was an actual experiment started at Harvard where they trained rats to escape from a water maze. They had to swim to the right exit. And it took them to start with more than 250 trials before they cottoned on and got it. Within about 25 generations, it only took them about 25 trials to learn. This rate of learning speeded up tenfold. They assumed that it was because of the inheritance of acquired characters, or what we now call epigenetic inheritance. But when this was checked out in Australia and in Scotland, they found their rats started off where the Harvard rats had left off, with about 25 arrows, and they got better and better. But not only did the rats descended from trained parents get better, but all the rats of that breed were getting better. Now that's what I'd expect with morphic resonance. If a lot of animals learn a new trick, all around the world it should be easier for others to learn it. If lots of humans learn something new, like programming computers, playing video games, surfboarding, snowboarding, it should get easier for others to learn it. And one line of evidence comes from the rather amazing fact that Average intelligence in intelligence tests improved all over the world by about 30% over the course of the 20th century, not because people were getting 30% smarter, but because the tests were getting easier to do. And I think the tests were getting easier to do because so many people had done them. And right now, I have an experimental project going on to find out whether it gets easier every day for people to do the New York Times five-letter word puzzle, Wordle. Every day there's a new puzzle. Millions of people do it. Is it getting easier to do in the evening compared with the morning? Well, we don't know yet, but there's a student looking into this here in Britain at the moment, and she's going to measure the first, when it's first published in New Zealand, then it sweeps around the world with the day and the last people doing it in Hawaii. So she's getting the scores from New Zealand and Hawaii, which would be right to an extended day to see what's going on. Now, this also applies to crystals. If you make a new chemical and crystallize it for the first time, it may take a long time to crystallize. But if you keep making the same chemical, it should get easier to crystallize all over the world as a new habit develops. And that seems to be what happens. Chemists find that new compounds often get easier to crystallize. So these are all examples of morphic resonance.
SPEAKER 04 :
Okay, and I want to jump in real quick. Dr. Sheldrake, the examples you just gave, they seem to terrify materialists. I watched your debate with Michael Shermer, and at the very early stages of the debate, as soon as you mentioned anything... I can't remember the exact phrase, but you mentioned something immaterial, and Michael Shermer immediately crossed his arms, and pretty much for the rest of the debate, he sat in this defensive cross-armed position, and I've read a number of the criticisms of your experiments online, and it seems to me that there is some measure of actual hysterical fear on the part of materialists whenever you get into mentioning things like this that cause them to attack your methods. Rather scrupulously, I must say. They do attack your methods rather scrupulously. What do you think is the source of the fear that is obvious in their hearts and in their eyes when they're confronted with this idea that there may be things outside of the material universe that are worthy of consideration?
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, some materialists have made materialism into their worldview. It is a kind of religion for them. It's an anti-religion. I mean, it's an atheist worldview. And if you look at the actual personal history of many materialists, they're people who themselves or whose parents or grandparents have rejected a religious worldview, usually Christian, sometimes Jewish. But Christianity is the religion that generates the largest number of atheists. Islam isn't so atheist-generating as Christianity. Christianity is like a kind of engine for generating atheism. Now there's an interesting concept that we should look into. That is profound. Well, I think it's a very important fact, and we need to recognize it. You see, I think what happens with materialists is that they've personally rejected Christianity or Judaism for various reasons. I mean, Oliver Sacks, the Jewish neurologist, was a militant atheist. He rejected Judaism because he was gay. And when he was a teenager, His Jewish family told him that God was against everyone who was gay, and he was utterly condemned for being gay. So he decided he was against God. And so, if God was against him because he was gay. So he found a ready basis for that in materialist atheism, putting his faith in science. Some people reject Christianity because, you know, for a variety of reasons, they've had oppressive puritanical upbringings, etc. And if they take up materialism, then it provides them with an alternative worldview that seems to explain everything with no afterlife. So no need to be, if you've been brought up to be afraid of hell, then you don't need to be afraid of hell anymore because there's no such thing as any afterlife. If you've been brought up to feel guilty about sex, no need to feel guilty about sex. But above all, the big payoff for materialists is the feeling that if they become materialists, they're smarter than everyone else. They've seen through the dogmas of religion. They've seen through these childish beliefs that have held back humanity for centuries. They've seen through all that, and they've risen above it. And basically, their stance is they're smarter. So materialism is very important for them because it justifies their atheism and their self-satisfaction at being smarter than everyone else. And what happens, why I get a lot of flak, is that, you know, I'm a scientist, I've studied at Cambridge, I've studied at Harvard, I got a PhD, I've published papers in peer-reviewed journals, including Nature and the Proceedings of the Royal Society. And they can't dismiss me as being someone who's just ignorant and stupid, who doesn't know these things, who hasn't studied science. So I get under their skin. And then what I'm basically doing is trying to point out, as in my book, The Science Delusion, called Science Set Free in the US, the ten dogmas of materialism, which are part of their belief system. actually are not very well supported by science. They're not supported by science at all. It is a dogmatic belief system. And they're very, very resistant to that being pointed out because basically their whole sense of personal identity would collapse without it. So it does trigger off anxiety, anger, fear, because it is essentially a dogmatic belief system. They like to portray religious people as dogmatic believers and taking everything on faith and authority, but actually nowhere is that more true in the modern world than among materialist atheists. Most of them actually don't know very much science, and when they say they put their trust in science, basically they put their trust in what the high priests of science tell them, They haven't personally gone to the Large Hadron Collider and conducted experiments or personally sequenced DNA or personally analyzed genes or anything. They've just taken the whole lot on faith. So I think that is the real reason they get so upset and angry and why they're so immune to evidence. I mean, in the debate with Michael Shermer, he showed not the slightest interest in evidence for anything that went against his point of view. He just thought it must be rubbish.
SPEAKER 05 :
yeah yeah so instead they do things like ban your talk on ted tv i mean was that i guess that really was banned i know you can watch it it was uh we've played clips of it before well they tried banning it but um they the thing is that you can't really ban anything nowadays and when word got out they were planning to ban it people cloned the talk and put it up all over the internet
SPEAKER 01 :
Actually, they did me a good turn. You see, I think Providence works through atheists as well as through Christians and believers. And, you know, before my talk had been planned, it had about 30,000 views. It's now had about 8 million in various formats on different websites. By far the most successful thing I've ever done in terms of exposure. And that would not have happened without a helping hand from the militant atheists.
SPEAKER 05 :
Well said, well said.
SPEAKER 04 :
It goes back to the truism that God's Word never returns void. And God's Word, whether the atheists want it to or not, God's Word does govern everything to a certain degree. Now, you had mentioned earlier, when I asked you about spiritual versus physical things, It seemed like you implied that spiritual is necessarily separate from nature. Is that your belief? Can you clarify that? Is the spiritual necessarily separate from the natural?
SPEAKER 01 :
No, actually I think the spiritual underlies the whole of nature. As I was saying, I think the energy in nature is a manifestation of the Holy Spirit. So I see God as sustaining the whole universe from moment to moment, underlying all reality, not just setting up a universe in the first place, pressing a start button, and then having it all go on automatically like a machine. I think that God is sustaining all things. So in that sense, the Spirit of God pervades all nature all the time. But as we experience the spiritual, I think we experience it through our consciousness. And I think we experience our consciousness is not the same as the material activity of our body. It's obviously permeates the body and depends on it. But the distinction I really make, which I think is important, is between the bodily, the psychic and the spiritual. You know, because when St. Paul says, the natural man knoweth not the things of the Spirit of God, the natural man in Greek is anthropos psychikos, the psychic man or the ensouled man. And I think there's a realm of the psychic. which includes telepathy, premonitions, and what some might call the sixth sense, which is part of animal nature as well as human nature. I've done a lot of research, as you know, with psychic dogs, as in dogs that know when their owners are coming home. And I think the psychic level is to do with survival abilities and skills. I think wolves know what other wolves are doing when they're miles away. It's part of the way they coordinate the social group. Dogs become part of a human family and pick up our intentions, our thoughts. I don't think these are spiritual powers. I think they're to do, they're like the senses. I mean, smell, taste, touch, vision. I think they're like a kind of invisible sense, like a sixth sense, which, like everything in nature, has a spiritual underpinning, but it's not in itself spiritual. So I think I distinguish between psychic and spiritual. Now, this is one area where I run into problems with our friends, the materialists, because they don't believe in psychic phenomena. They don't think telepathy and things are possible. They don't think dogs can possibly pick up their owner's intentions and so on. And the reason they're so down on psychic phenomena is they think that if you let in any invisible influence at all, then God's going to come back through the back door. And so they feel they have to deny all these psychic phenomena. I spend a certain amount of time speaking to skeptic groups. If they invite me, I accept their invitation. I go and address them, you know, atheist organizations. And one of my messages to them is you don't need to be afraid of telepathy and psychic powers because these are part of nature. They're natural, not supernatural, normal, not paranormal. They're just something science hasn't dealt with yet, but they're part of nature. Whereas spiritual things are somewhat more different. They're about choice. They're about the most fundamental choices we make. They're about morality. They're about our connection with the divine, our openness to God and the influence of God. And they're not quite the same as totally survival instinct level. This is something of a different level of consciousness. So, I think all of them, everything is ultimately pervaded by the spirit. But I think there's a distinction between body, psyche, and spirit in our own lives, which is important to recognize.
SPEAKER 05 :
Okay. Well, that's interesting. So, this gives me a better picture of this morphic resonance. And you've got… Isn't there evidence, for example, of like dogs who kind of react when their owner's on the way home? So there is evidence. It's not just a thought and an idea. And one of the things about science is a hard currency of science is predictions. And I love that you're doing that test with that dog. Werbel? Is that the name of it?
SPEAKER 01 :
I don't play it. W-O-R-B-L-E.
SPEAKER 05 :
Werbel, yes. Okay. And, you know, I will have to say anecdotally, it's not working on my dad. He's still terrible at those games, no matter what time of day it is. But, wow, that's really interesting. And I know you've even talked about... And I know this is going to be foreign to a lot of people, but maybe even the sun and the stars, they have a consciousness about them. And that somehow plays into this morphic resonance, that there's a third element. It's not just matter and energy, that somehow there's an interaction. And I'm curious, because I've heard you talk about that. Would you believe that that's kind of tied together electrons with a magnetic force? Because, you know, that's what plasma cosmology does. thinks that magnetic forces are not considered enough by the secular standard cosmology.
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, I think that somehow, in a way we don't understand yet, that electromagnetic fields are a kind of interface with consciousness. Our brains are mainly electromagnetic in the way they work, and somehow our minds interact with our brains. No one knows how. But I think that if we take the view that what interfaces with our bodies and brains is this electromagnetic activity, then the Sun has vastly more complex electromagnetic activity than we do. I mean, solar flares, sunspots, 11-year cycles, all these NASA space probes and space observatories monitoring solar weather. It's changing all the time. And I think the mind of the Sun could interface with these electromagnetic fields which are basically within plasma. The Sun's made of plasma. And I think the Sun and the other stars may be conscious beings. I don't think that consciousness is confined to brains. And, you know, one of the things materialists believe is that the whole universe is completely unconscious, except in human and perhaps a few animal brains, the light bulb of consciousness is switched on for unknown reasons. That's the materialist worldview. And they have an awful problem explaining why anything's conscious at all. That's why it's called the hard problem, the very existence of human consciousness. But in the past, people thought consciousness was much more widespread in nature, that nature was alive. In the Middle Ages, it was taken for granted. It was taught in medieval universities that nature was alive. Animals are called animals because they have a soul. Anima is the Latin for soul, built into our language. So they didn't believe they had an immortal soul like humans, but they thought they had a soul that organized their bodies and their instincts. And so I think that the stars and nature are all a reflection of an ultimate conscious source of all things, which I think of as God. And there's no reason why consciousness should just be confined to human brains. That's why I'm exploring the idea that sound is conscious, because I think from a scientific point of view, this is an open question. It's not because it's a dogma of religious belief or anything like that. It's not part of my religious faith that it's conscious or not conscious. It's an open question. And I think it's the kind of thing scientists should look at.
SPEAKER 05 :
Yeah, it's a fun topic to consider. It's definitely not out of the realm of possibility in God's created nature. I love how you referred basically to Hebrews 1, 3, that God upholds all things by the word of His power, so He's upholding all things now.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yes, yes. You know, it's a question, I'm afraid, that is off-limits. for materialist scientists. It simply can't be looked into because, as you said earlier, it would threaten their entire worldview. You said something earlier that could be construed by Christians and Jews to be a threatening statement. You mentioned a fellow who rejected Judaism because he was taught by his family that God is against everyone who's gay, and he decided since he was gay that he was going to be against God. And I could go like this and start to get a little bit defensive, but of course... You know, we all understand that God's not against any man. He's not against anyone. He's for everyone. God recommends against certain behaviors for obvious reasons, and God wants what's good for all of us. But I don't feel the kind of the knee-jerk need to defend every aspect of God against any question at any time. The way I saw Michael Shermer respond to your question implications that there was something beyond the material. Michael Shermer said, first of all, he said, I'm not God, you're not God. And he said, there's an objective reality. I don't know what it is, and you don't either. Dr. Sheldrake, I think that's an overstatement.
SPEAKER 01 :
What do you think? Well, I think it would be definitely true to say that no one understands the whole of reality, including the mind of God, the whole of nature, etc. We're limited humans, and obviously, by definition, our minds are human minds with a limited power of understanding. So I think that confession of ignorance is reasonable for anyone. So I don't have a problem with that. I think the idea that there's an objective reality to which science has unique access is questionable because scientists are humans. And as some physicists have pointed out, Our theories about nature are theories in human minds. And the so-called laws of nature are not out there. You don't actually run into a law of nature when you're sort of looking through a telescope. You don't see Newton's laws or Maxwell's equations. These are invisible things which are accessed only through minds. And so for scientists to understand nature, they can only do so through their minds. So the very idea of objective nature relies on human minds to formulate that very idea. So I think that the idea that somehow nature is totally independent of all minds and all consciousness is an illusion that materialists have created and they themselves are the first to say they believe in science and reason and reason itself implies mind. So if you're going to have mind in nature and mind in underlying nature which makes it comprehensible, their belief that it's comprehensible through mathematical laws implies that underlying nature is something mind-like. And it can only be appreciated through minds. And they're very proud of their own minds and how smart they are. So it's actually to think of it as objective out there with no consciousness is not what science is actually telling us. True. And not what Schirmer could possibly believe, given that he's a devotee of science and reason.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yes, yes, and that's why the statement struck me as disingenuous. I'm not God, you're not God, that's not an overstatement. That's true. I don't necessarily believe that Michael Schirmer believes that he's not God. But I also believe it's an overstatement to say... that we don't know what reality is. I think we do know what reality is, and I think that Michael Shermer's statement that he doesn't know is simply a revelation of the fact that he doesn't know God. And so, Dr. Sheldrake, I don't want to imply that I absolutely understand everything about nature, but because I do know who God is, I can say that I do know what reality is and I know that it will all be explained to me. The things I don't understand will be explained at some point. Michael Shermer does not have that touchstone. Michael Shermer and other materialists do not have that touchstone in their mind and in their heart and not even in their psyche. And so, anyway, that seems to me to be the source of some of the inherent fear that you seem to strike into their heart.
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, it certainly doesn't help, the fact that I make no secret of the fact that I'm a Christian. I mean, that arouses tremendous prejudice in a lot of scientists, just to start with. And it doesn't help that I have unorthodox theories, and it doesn't help that I think there's evidence for telepathy in dogs and people and so on. None of that helps. But it doesn't help with dogmatic scientists. But the interesting thing is that a lot of dogmatic scientists, when I'm talking to them alone in the evening and stuff, become much less dogmatic. A lot of them are frightened of not agreeing with the party line when they're at work. But when they get home, many of them have had psychic experiences, some have had spiritual experiences, some have had near-death experiences, some have dogs waiting for them when they get home from the laboratory. The fact is that most dogmatic materialists Some are really dogmatic. I mean, Michael Sherman's made a living out of it, and Richard Dawkins, it's his whole public persona. But we recently did a survey, the Scientific and Medical Network in Britain recently did a survey of scientific, medical, and engineering professionals in Britain, France, and Germany, working scientists, and asked them, we had it done by a professional public opinion survey organization, How many of them are atheists? It's about 25%. Quite a lot compared with the normal population, but it's certainly not the majority. About 20% more describe themselves as non-religious agnostics. 45% describe themselves as atheists or non-religious. about 45% have described themselves as religious or spiritual or spiritual but not religious or spiritual and religious. So about 45%, about 10% didn't say or didn't know or whatever, but about equal numbers were sort of non-religious and spiritually bleak religious. And the atheists are certainly not a majority, even within Europe, where atheism is much more predominant than it is in the United States. And I know from my own experience of giving talks in scientific institutions that after the talk, one after another, people come up to me and they look both ways to make sure no one's listening. And then they say, you know, I'm really interested in what you say. I agree with a lot of what you say. I've had these experiences myself, but I can't tell my colleagues because they're all so straight. And after three or four have done this, I said, well, actually, you're not alone. I said, there's at least three or four other people in your institute who think like you do. They said, well, how do you know? And I said, because they've just told me, him and her and him. And what I say to them is, you know, your life would be so much more fun if you come out of the closet. Spiritually-minded scientists who've had psychic or spiritual experiences are quite common, and they behaved like gays did in the 1950s. You know, they were all in the closet, I think they couldn't possibly admit it. So my slogan to them really is, you know, come out of the closet, and you'll find that if you talk freely in your laboratory tea room or with friends after work and stuff... you'll find a lot of them who actually agree with you. So right now, people who do have these views are hiding them from their colleagues. Another metaphor for this is the Soviet Union under Brezhnev. You know, in the last days of communism, how many people in the Soviet Union really believed in communism? I mean, there were certainly some, but the majority didn't. But they didn't become outright dissidents because then they'd be locked up in psychiatric institutes or sent to Siberia. So they pretended to go along with it. You know, party congresses, they dutifully clap at the right moments and stuff. I think that within the world of science, it's rather like that at the moment. I think there's this materialist orthodoxy, which is held in place by inertia and by fear, but which is not actually sincerely believed in by most scientists. And if you include among most scientists, Indians and South Americans... There are more scientists in India than there are in the United States. I lived and worked in India. I hardly ever met an atheist in India. Most of the scientists, my colleagues, were devout Hindus or Muslims or Sikhs or Jains or Christians.
SPEAKER 03 :
Stop the tape. Stop the tape. Hey, this is Dominic Enyart. We are out of time for today. If you want to hear the rest of this program, go to rsr.org. That's Real Science Radio, rsr.org.
SPEAKER 02 :
Intelligent design and DNA Scholars can't explain it all away Get ready to be awed By the handiwork of God Tune in to Real Science Radio Turn up the Real Science Radio Keeping it real That's what I'm talking about
Delve into a thought-provoking discussion on the boundaries between science and spirituality as Dr. Rupert Sheldrake questions materialism's resistance to the existence of non-physical phenomena. Listen as he argues that consciousness might be embedded not only in human brains but possibly in stars, electromagnetic fields, and the cosmos at large. Engage with his insights into how this perspective could reshape our understanding of reality, offering a profound connection between the physical and spiritual realms.
SPEAKER 05 :
Please stay tuned for the conclusion of our interview with Dr. Rupert Sheldrake and his theories on everything from dog intuition to a conscious sun and stars to the mind's influence on health.
SPEAKER 02 :
and DNA Scholars can't explain it all away Get ready to be awed by the handiwork of God Tune in to Real Science Radio Turn up the Real Science Radio Keepin' it real
SPEAKER 05 :
You know, maybe what would help our audience on your hypothesis is some examples of what supports it, you know, some evidence that supports the idea of morphic resonance. And I think you've had examples of like how you can train rats to do something and then somehow rats across the globe learn the same thing without it being taught. It was taught locally and yet globally rats kind of learn this technique or this new thing.
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, there was an actual experiment started at Harvard where they trained rats to escape from a water maze. They had to swim to the right exit. And it took them to start with more than 250 trials before they cottoned on and got it. Within about 25 generations, it only took them about 25 trials to learn. This rate of learning speeded up tenfold. They assumed that it was because of the inheritance of acquired characters, or what we now call epigenetic inheritance. But when this was checked out in Australia and in Scotland, they found their rats started off where the Harvard rats had left off, with about 25 arrows, and they got better and better. But not only did the rats descended from trained parents get better, but all the rats of that breed were getting better. Now that's what I'd expect with morphic resonance. If a lot of animals learn a new trick, all around the world it should be easier for others to learn it. If lots of humans learn something new, like programming computers, playing video games, surfboarding, snowboarding, it should get easier for others to learn it. And one line of evidence comes from the rather amazing fact that Average intelligence in intelligence tests improved all over the world by about 30% over the course of the 20th century, not because people were getting 30% smarter, but because the tests were getting easier to do. And I think the tests were getting easier to do because so many people had done them. And right now, I have an experimental project going on to find out whether it gets easier every day for people to do the New York Times five-letter word puzzle, Wordle. Every day there's a new puzzle. Millions of people do it. Is it getting easier to do in the evening compared with the morning? Well, we don't know yet, but there's a student looking into this here in Britain at the moment, and she's going to measure the first, when it's first published in New Zealand, then it sweeps around the world with the day and the last people doing it in Hawaii. So she's getting the scores from New Zealand and Hawaii, which would be right to an extended day to see what's going on. Now, this also applies to crystals. If you make a new chemical and crystallize it for the first time, it may take a long time to crystallize. But if you keep making the same chemical, it should get easier to crystallize all over the world as a new habit develops. And that seems to be what happens. Chemists find that new compounds often get easier to crystallize. So these are all examples of morphic resonance.
SPEAKER 04 :
Okay, and I want to jump in real quick. Dr. Sheldrake, the examples you just gave, they seem to terrify materialists. I watched your debate with Michael Shermer, and at the very early stages of the debate, as soon as you mentioned anything... I can't remember the exact phrase, but you mentioned something immaterial, and Michael Shermer immediately crossed his arms, and pretty much for the rest of the debate, he sat in this defensive cross-armed position, and I've read a number of the criticisms of your experiments online, and it seems to me that there is some measure of actual hysterical fear on the part of materialists whenever you get into mentioning things like this that cause them to attack your methods. Rather scrupulously, I must say. They do attack your methods rather scrupulously. What do you think is the source of the fear that is obvious in their hearts and in their eyes when they're confronted with this idea that there may be things outside of the material universe that are worthy of consideration?
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, some materialists have made materialism into their worldview. It is a kind of religion for them. It's an anti-religion. I mean, it's an atheist worldview. And if you look at the actual personal history of many materialists, they're people who themselves or whose parents or grandparents have rejected a religious worldview, usually Christian, sometimes Jewish. But Christianity is the religion that generates the largest number of atheists. Islam isn't so atheist-generating as Christianity. Christianity is like a kind of engine for generating atheism. Now there's an interesting concept that we should look into. That is profound. Well, I think it's a very important fact, and we need to recognize it. You see, I think what happens with materialists is that they've personally rejected Christianity or Judaism for various reasons. I mean, Oliver Sacks, the Jewish neurologist, was a militant atheist. He rejected Judaism because he was gay. And when he was a teenager, His Jewish family told him that God was against everyone who was gay, and he was utterly condemned for being gay. So he decided he was against God. And so, if God was against him because he was gay. So he found a ready basis for that in materialist atheism, putting his faith in science. Some people reject Christianity because, you know, for a variety of reasons, they've had oppressive puritanical upbringings, etc. And if they take up materialism, then it provides them with an alternative worldview that seems to explain everything with no afterlife. So no need to be, if you've been brought up to be afraid of hell, then you don't need to be afraid of hell anymore because there's no such thing as any afterlife. If you've been brought up to feel guilty about sex, no need to feel guilty about sex. But above all, the big payoff for materialists is the feeling that if they become materialists, they're smarter than everyone else. They've seen through the dogmas of religion. They've seen through these childish beliefs that have held back humanity for centuries. They've seen through all that, and they've risen above it. And basically, their stance is they're smarter. So materialism is very important for them because it justifies their atheism and their self-satisfaction at being smarter than everyone else. And what happens, why I get a lot of flak, is that, you know, I'm a scientist, I've studied at Cambridge, I've studied at Harvard, I got a PhD, I've published papers in peer-reviewed journals, including Nature and the Proceedings of the Royal Society. And they can't dismiss me as being someone who's just ignorant and stupid, who doesn't know these things, who hasn't studied science. So I get under their skin. And then what I'm basically doing is trying to point out, as in my book, The Science Delusion, called Science Set Free in the US, the ten dogmas of materialism, which are part of their belief system. actually are not very well supported by science. They're not supported by science at all. It is a dogmatic belief system. And they're very, very resistant to that being pointed out because basically their whole sense of personal identity would collapse without it. So it does trigger off anxiety, anger, fear, because it is essentially a dogmatic belief system. They like to portray religious people as dogmatic believers and taking everything on faith and authority, but actually nowhere is that more true in the modern world than among materialist atheists. Most of them actually don't know very much science, and when they say they put their trust in science, basically they put their trust in what the high priests of science tell them, They haven't personally gone to the Large Hadron Collider and conducted experiments or personally sequenced DNA or personally analyzed genes or anything. They've just taken the whole lot on faith. So I think that is the real reason they get so upset and angry and why they're so immune to evidence. I mean, in the debate with Michael Shermer, he showed not the slightest interest in evidence for anything that went against his point of view. He just thought it must be rubbish.
SPEAKER 05 :
yeah yeah so instead they do things like ban your talk on ted tv i mean was that i guess that really was banned i know you can watch it it was uh we've played clips of it before well they tried banning it but um they the thing is that you can't really ban anything nowadays and when word got out they were planning to ban it people cloned the talk and put it up all over the internet
SPEAKER 01 :
Actually, they did me a good turn. You see, I think Providence works through atheists as well as through Christians and believers. And, you know, before my talk had been planned, it had about 30,000 views. It's now had about 8 million in various formats on different websites. By far the most successful thing I've ever done in terms of exposure. And that would not have happened without a helping hand from the militant atheists.
SPEAKER 05 :
Well said, well said.
SPEAKER 04 :
It goes back to the truism that God's Word never returns void. And God's Word, whether the atheists want it to or not, God's Word does govern everything to a certain degree. Now, you had mentioned earlier, when I asked you about spiritual versus physical things, It seemed like you implied that spiritual is necessarily separate from nature. Is that your belief? Can you clarify that? Is the spiritual necessarily separate from the natural?
SPEAKER 01 :
No, actually I think the spiritual underlies the whole of nature. As I was saying, I think the energy in nature is a manifestation of the Holy Spirit. So I see God as sustaining the whole universe from moment to moment, underlying all reality, not just setting up a universe in the first place, pressing a start button, and then having it all go on automatically like a machine. I think that God is sustaining all things. So in that sense, the Spirit of God pervades all nature all the time. But as we experience the spiritual, I think we experience it through our consciousness. And I think we experience our consciousness is not the same as the material activity of our body. It's obviously permeates the body and depends on it. But the distinction I really make, which I think is important, is between the bodily, the psychic and the spiritual. You know, because when St. Paul says, the natural man knoweth not the things of the Spirit of God, the natural man in Greek is anthropos psychikos, the psychic man or the ensouled man. And I think there's a realm of the psychic. which includes telepathy, premonitions, and what some might call the sixth sense, which is part of animal nature as well as human nature. I've done a lot of research, as you know, with psychic dogs, as in dogs that know when their owners are coming home. And I think the psychic level is to do with survival abilities and skills. I think wolves know what other wolves are doing when they're miles away. It's part of the way they coordinate the social group. Dogs become part of a human family and pick up our intentions, our thoughts. I don't think these are spiritual powers. I think they're to do, they're like the senses. I mean, smell, taste, touch, vision. I think they're like a kind of invisible sense, like a sixth sense, which, like everything in nature, has a spiritual underpinning, but it's not in itself spiritual. So I think I distinguish between psychic and spiritual. Now, this is one area where I run into problems with our friends, the materialists, because they don't believe in psychic phenomena. They don't think telepathy and things are possible. They don't think dogs can possibly pick up their owner's intentions and so on. And the reason they're so down on psychic phenomena is they think that if you let in any invisible influence at all, then God's going to come back through the back door. And so they feel they have to deny all these psychic phenomena. I spend a certain amount of time speaking to skeptic groups. If they invite me, I accept their invitation. I go and address them, you know, atheist organizations. And one of my messages to them is you don't need to be afraid of telepathy and psychic powers because these are part of nature. They're natural, not supernatural, normal, not paranormal. They're just something science hasn't dealt with yet, but they're part of nature. Whereas spiritual things are somewhat more different. They're about choice. They're about the most fundamental choices we make. They're about morality. They're about our connection with the divine, our openness to God and the influence of God. And they're not quite the same as totally survival instinct level. This is something of a different level of consciousness. So, I think all of them, everything is ultimately pervaded by the spirit. But I think there's a distinction between body, psyche, and spirit in our own lives, which is important to recognize.
SPEAKER 05 :
Okay. Well, that's interesting. So, this gives me a better picture of this morphic resonance. And you've got… Isn't there evidence, for example, of like dogs who kind of react when their owner's on the way home? So there is evidence. It's not just a thought and an idea. And one of the things about science is a hard currency of science is predictions. And I love that you're doing that test with that dog. Werbel? Is that the name of it?
SPEAKER 01 :
I don't play it. W-O-R-B-L-E.
SPEAKER 05 :
Werbel, yes. Okay. And, you know, I will have to say anecdotally, it's not working on my dad. He's still terrible at those games, no matter what time of day it is. But, wow, that's really interesting. And I know you've even talked about... And I know this is going to be foreign to a lot of people, but maybe even the sun and the stars, they have a consciousness about them. And that somehow plays into this morphic resonance, that there's a third element. It's not just matter and energy, that somehow there's an interaction. And I'm curious, because I've heard you talk about that. Would you believe that that's kind of tied together electrons with a magnetic force? Because, you know, that's what plasma cosmology does. thinks that magnetic forces are not considered enough by the secular standard cosmology.
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, I think that somehow, in a way we don't understand yet, that electromagnetic fields are a kind of interface with consciousness. Our brains are mainly electromagnetic in the way they work, and somehow our minds interact with our brains. No one knows how. But I think that if we take the view that what interfaces with our bodies and brains is this electromagnetic activity, then the Sun has vastly more complex electromagnetic activity than we do. I mean, solar flares, sunspots, 11-year cycles, all these NASA space probes and space observatories monitoring solar weather. It's changing all the time. And I think the mind of the Sun could interface with these electromagnetic fields which are basically within plasma. The Sun's made of plasma. And I think the Sun and the other stars may be conscious beings. I don't think that consciousness is confined to brains. And, you know, one of the things materialists believe is that the whole universe is completely unconscious, except in human and perhaps a few animal brains, the light bulb of consciousness is switched on for unknown reasons. That's the materialist worldview. And they have an awful problem explaining why anything's conscious at all. That's why it's called the hard problem, the very existence of human consciousness. But in the past, people thought consciousness was much more widespread in nature, that nature was alive. In the Middle Ages, it was taken for granted. It was taught in medieval universities that nature was alive. Animals are called animals because they have a soul. Anima is the Latin for soul, built into our language. So they didn't believe they had an immortal soul like humans, but they thought they had a soul that organized their bodies and their instincts. And so I think that the stars and nature are all a reflection of an ultimate conscious source of all things, which I think of as God. And there's no reason why consciousness should just be confined to human brains. That's why I'm exploring the idea that sound is conscious, because I think from a scientific point of view, this is an open question. It's not because it's a dogma of religious belief or anything like that. It's not part of my religious faith that it's conscious or not conscious. It's an open question. And I think it's the kind of thing scientists should look at.
SPEAKER 05 :
Yeah, it's a fun topic to consider. It's definitely not out of the realm of possibility in God's created nature. I love how you referred basically to Hebrews 1, 3, that God upholds all things by the word of His power, so He's upholding all things now.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yes, yes. You know, it's a question, I'm afraid, that is off-limits. for materialist scientists. It simply can't be looked into because, as you said earlier, it would threaten their entire worldview. You said something earlier that could be construed by Christians and Jews to be a threatening statement. You mentioned a fellow who rejected Judaism because he was taught by his family that God is against everyone who's gay, and he decided since he was gay that he was going to be against God. And I could go like this and start to get a little bit defensive, but of course... You know, we all understand that God's not against any man. He's not against anyone. He's for everyone. God recommends against certain behaviors for obvious reasons, and God wants what's good for all of us. But I don't feel the kind of the knee-jerk need to defend every aspect of God against any question at any time. The way I saw Michael Shermer respond to your question implications that there was something beyond the material. Michael Shermer said, first of all, he said, I'm not God, you're not God. And he said, there's an objective reality. I don't know what it is, and you don't either. Dr. Sheldrake, I think that's an overstatement.
SPEAKER 01 :
What do you think? Well, I think it would be definitely true to say that no one understands the whole of reality, including the mind of God, the whole of nature, etc. We're limited humans, and obviously, by definition, our minds are human minds with a limited power of understanding. So I think that confession of ignorance is reasonable for anyone. So I don't have a problem with that. I think the idea that there's an objective reality to which science has unique access is questionable because scientists are humans. And as some physicists have pointed out, Our theories about nature are theories in human minds. And the so-called laws of nature are not out there. You don't actually run into a law of nature when you're sort of looking through a telescope. You don't see Newton's laws or Maxwell's equations. These are invisible things which are accessed only through minds. And so for scientists to understand nature, they can only do so through their minds. So the very idea of objective nature relies on human minds to formulate that very idea. So I think that the idea that somehow nature is totally independent of all minds and all consciousness is an illusion that materialists have created and they themselves are the first to say they believe in science and reason and reason itself implies mind. So if you're going to have mind in nature and mind in underlying nature which makes it comprehensible, their belief that it's comprehensible through mathematical laws implies that underlying nature is something mind-like. And it can only be appreciated through minds. And they're very proud of their own minds and how smart they are. So it's actually to think of it as objective out there with no consciousness is not what science is actually telling us. True. And not what Schirmer could possibly believe, given that he's a devotee of science and reason.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yes, yes, and that's why the statement struck me as disingenuous. I'm not God, you're not God, that's not an overstatement. That's true. I don't necessarily believe that Michael Schirmer believes that he's not God. But I also believe it's an overstatement to say... that we don't know what reality is. I think we do know what reality is, and I think that Michael Shermer's statement that he doesn't know is simply a revelation of the fact that he doesn't know God. And so, Dr. Sheldrake, I don't want to imply that I absolutely understand everything about nature, but because I do know who God is, I can say that I do know what reality is and I know that it will all be explained to me. The things I don't understand will be explained at some point. Michael Shermer does not have that touchstone. Michael Shermer and other materialists do not have that touchstone in their mind and in their heart and not even in their psyche. And so, anyway, that seems to me to be the source of some of the inherent fear that you seem to strike into their heart.
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, it certainly doesn't help, the fact that I make no secret of the fact that I'm a Christian. I mean, that arouses tremendous prejudice in a lot of scientists, just to start with. And it doesn't help that I have unorthodox theories, and it doesn't help that I think there's evidence for telepathy in dogs and people and so on. None of that helps. But it doesn't help with dogmatic scientists. But the interesting thing is that a lot of dogmatic scientists, when I'm talking to them alone in the evening and stuff, become much less dogmatic. A lot of them are frightened of not agreeing with the party line when they're at work. But when they get home, many of them have had psychic experiences, some have had spiritual experiences, some have had near-death experiences, some have dogs waiting for them when they get home from the laboratory. The fact is that most dogmatic materialists Some are really dogmatic. I mean, Michael Sherman's made a living out of it, and Richard Dawkins, it's his whole public persona. But we recently did a survey, the Scientific and Medical Network in Britain recently did a survey of scientific, medical, and engineering professionals in Britain, France, and Germany, working scientists, and asked them, we had it done by a professional public opinion survey organization, How many of them are atheists? It's about 25%. Quite a lot compared with the normal population, but it's certainly not the majority. About 20% more describe themselves as non-religious agnostics. 45% describe themselves as atheists or non-religious. about 45% have described themselves as religious or spiritual or spiritual but not religious or spiritual and religious. So about 45%, about 10% didn't say or didn't know or whatever, but about equal numbers were sort of non-religious and spiritually bleak religious. And the atheists are certainly not a majority, even within Europe, where atheism is much more predominant than it is in the United States. And I know from my own experience of giving talks in scientific institutions that after the talk, one after another, people come up to me and they look both ways to make sure no one's listening. And then they say, you know, I'm really interested in what you say. I agree with a lot of what you say. I've had these experiences myself, but I can't tell my colleagues because they're all so straight. And after three or four have done this, I said, well, actually, you're not alone. I said, there's at least three or four other people in your institute who think like you do. They said, well, how do you know? And I said, because they've just told me, him and her and him. And what I say to them is, you know, your life would be so much more fun if you come out of the closet. Spiritually-minded scientists who've had psychic or spiritual experiences are quite common, and they behaved like gays did in the 1950s. You know, they were all in the closet, I think they couldn't possibly admit it. So my slogan to them really is, you know, come out of the closet, and you'll find that if you talk freely in your laboratory tea room or with friends after work and stuff... you'll find a lot of them who actually agree with you. So right now, people who do have these views are hiding them from their colleagues. Another metaphor for this is the Soviet Union under Brezhnev. You know, in the last days of communism, how many people in the Soviet Union really believed in communism? I mean, there were certainly some, but the majority didn't. But they didn't become outright dissidents because then they'd be locked up in psychiatric institutes or sent to Siberia. So they pretended to go along with it. You know, party congresses, they dutifully clap at the right moments and stuff. I think that within the world of science, it's rather like that at the moment. I think there's this materialist orthodoxy, which is held in place by inertia and by fear, but which is not actually sincerely believed in by most scientists. And if you include among most scientists, Indians and South Americans... There are more scientists in India than there are in the United States. I lived and worked in India. I hardly ever met an atheist in India. Most of the scientists, my colleagues, were devout Hindus or Muslims or Sikhs or Jains or Christians.
SPEAKER 03 :
Stop the tape. Stop the tape. Hey, this is Dominic Enyart. We are out of time for today. If you want to hear the rest of this program, go to rsr.org. That's Real Science Radio, rsr.org.
SPEAKER 02 :
Intelligent design and DNA Scholars can't explain it all away Get ready to be awed By the handiwork of God Tune in to Real Science Radio Turn up the Real Science Radio Keeping it real That's what I'm talking about
Join us as we journey into the heart of Jerusalem's reconstruction, where faith was not only a weapon of the soul but a practical means of defense. Pastor Bob Enyart shares valuable insights from the Book of Nehemiah, emphasizing the importance of readiness and righteousness when confronted with opposition. Through intriguing comparisons of biblical and modern-day scenarios, this episode offers a profound reflection on how true faith combines trust in God with wise stewardship and action.
SPEAKER 01 :
Greetings to the brightest audience in the country and welcome to Theology Thursday. I'm Nicole McBurney. Every weekday we bring you the news of the day, the culture, and science from a Christian worldview. But today join me and Pastor Bob Enyart as we explore the source of our Christian worldview, the Bible.
SPEAKER 02 :
So they're mocking these people for trying to accomplish their vision and it was a vision that God was behind and so it was the natural tendency of men to mock it. It seems that human beings have a radar system built in. And if someone is doing miracles and they're false miracles, like if it's the Antichrist or the false prophet, the masses will flock to follow and to take heed of the miracles. If it's a prophet or an apostle of God or Christ himself and he's doing miracles, the masses will reject him. Now why is that? Why would they reject Jesus and reject the apostles and the prophets who did miracles and Moses reject all them and God but if the devil does miracles they're going to believe. Why? It's because of the built in antenna that human beings have. If God does it we're against it. We might not even know for sure that God is doing it but if we have an inkling that God does it we're against it. On the other hand if the devil does it, or anyone that's in league with the devil, then we'll consider it. At least we're not going to get all that angry about it. So this Ammonite, now Sanballat, we talked about he was a Moabite. Moab and Ammon, they were the result of Lot's incest, and they became two peoples, Moab and Ammon, and enemies of the Jews for many centuries. And verse 4 says, So they're mocking, even if a fox goes up on the wall, he'll knock the stones down. In verse 4, Nehemiah prays, So Nehemiah is praying that they would be destroyed, that they would be taken away. And that's not very nice. He really should repent of that, right? Doesn't God condemn him for this? Doesn't God put in here that Nehemiah is a bad guy? Not a very good Christian? Well, Nehemiah is a great guy. And this is here in the Bible because God liked it. Verse 5, look at this. Do not cover their iniquity and do not let their sin be blotted out from before you. I don't think I've ever been that harsh in my entire 20... How long? Since 1973. How many years is that? 30 years? Oh, no. 30 years of a reputation for harsh and confrontational ministry. I don't think I've ever asked God not to let anyone repent. I've never been that harsh. That's why I'll never make it into the Bible. I'm only kidding. But the Bible characters were extraordinarily harsh. Many of them, not all of them, but many of them, we could virtually call them brutal. And God liked them. Because when you're dealing with the wicked, it's good to confront the wicked and to let everybody know exactly how bad these people are. Do not cover their iniquity. Do not let their sin be blotted out from before you. Don't forgive them. Don't save them. For they have provoked you to anger before the builders. So we built the wall and the entire wall was joined together up to half its height for the people had a mind to work. They had a really good attitude and they worked really hard. And so often as human beings, it's easier to say, I'm going to go to bed early tonight. But when you have an important job to do You put your shoulder to the grindstone and you get to work. Now, what happened when Sanballat, Tobiah, the Arabs, the Ammonites, and the Ashdodites... Now, Ashdod is a city in Gaza, one of the five cities of the Philistines. And I think in the Gaza Strip today, there's Ashdod still to this day, if I recall. And the Ashdodites... heard that the walls of Jerusalem were being restored and the gaps were beginning to be closed, that they became very angry. And all of them conspired together to come and attack Jerusalem and create confusion. Nevertheless, we made our prayer to our God and because of them, we set a watch against them day and night. And so we're going to find out that Nehemiah was determined to defend Jerusalem the workers, the people who live there, the city, the project, and if it meant using swords or spears in self-defense, that that was his plan. And of course, how many Christians, percentage-wise it's not that huge, but there are many Christians numbers-wise, certainly in the hundreds of thousands, that are pacifists, that you can't kill someone, you can't use a gun, You can't use force to defend yourself. And that's completely against the Bible. They take some particular stories like when Jesus is about to be arrested and Peter uses a sword and Jesus said, no, Peter, that's not it. I'm going with them. And they'll take a story like that and say, see, God does not want us to defend ourselves. But that's not the point of that story at all. Jesus had set his face toward Jerusalem, and he knew he was to be arrested, tried, and crucified. And it was inappropriate to take a sword and try to stop that. Verse 10, Then Judah said, The strength of the laborers is failing, and there is so much rubbish that we are not able to build the wall. And that Judah, that's... The people of Judah, the people said, hey, this is not going to work. We're not going to be able to get this done. We can't even find a place to work. Have you ever tried to do a job and you're standing in filth and a mess? And it's so discouraging. Imagine the city had been destroyed. The wall is knocked down. You can't even get a good footing to get started. And just to carry away the huge rocks, to get them out of the way so you could put them back on, it had to be extremely discouraging. Very difficult. And our adversaries said, verse 11, they will neither know nor see anything till we come into their midst and kill them and cause the work to cease. So that's what their enemies were saying. We are going to put a stop to this and we will kill them. So it was when the Jews who dwelt near them came that they told us 10 times, from whatever place you turn, they will be upon us. In other words, wherever you go, wherever you return from, if you go home to your city to do some work and you come back the next day, in the morning, they're going to get you. Wherever you go home, when you come back, they're going to ambush you. So therefore, Nehemiah, what he did was he started a prayer meeting. He said, we'll pray and then we'll be safe. Well, I'm sure he prayed a lot. But he did more than just pray. Therefore, I position men behind the lower parts of the wall at the openings. And I set the people according to their families with their swords, their spears, and their bows. And so we see that Nehemiah made sure that his workers were armed. And throughout history, it is wicked governments that disarm the people. The Philistines had occupied Israel and they passed a law, they imposed a law that no Jew could own a sword or a spear and no Jew could be a blacksmith. They couldn't be a blacksmith even to make plows for their oxen because they might make swords. So if a Jew wanted to have his plow sharpened, he had to bring it to the Philistines and pay them so many shekels to have a plow sharpened. We've seen that through history, that when evil governments conquer or even come to power in their own land, then they will pass a law and confiscate weapons, take away weapons. The Taliban did that in Afghanistan. And it's just a typical thing that governments that are evil will take away the guns. In this country, it's the liberals who fight for gun control legislation, gun registration, and gun confiscation. In England, they virtually outlawed gun ownership. You know, they started with handguns and then rifles and hunting guns, and it's become almost impossible to to have a gun in England. In our country, the states that have the most severe gun control laws typically have the highest crime rates. And when you look at the cities with the most severe gun control laws, they almost always have the highest crime rates. So it's something that empowers the criminals. And a government should be able to trust its people. If the government is righteous, the people will rejoice. And the people are not going to use their guns in a criminal way. Criminals will do that, but criminals don't obey gun control laws. So the gun control laws are counterproductive, and no matter how much evidence there is to show that, people who have their antenna up, their radar against what's right, they will not look at evidence and be persuaded. They're determined for their cause because it's godless. Now, I've always objected to conservative right-wingers when they advocate that we should be allowed to own and carry guns. I agree with that. But then the reason they give, I disagree with. So many of them say, because if the government is corrupt, then we need our guns to have a revolution. And what are you going to do? You're going to go shoot police officers and governors and judges, the president. Is that what you're going to do with your guns when the government is corrupt? We've got two police officers here in this room. Guys, watch out. There's some lunatic right-wingers who might be gunning for you. But no, the Bible teaches that you're to submit to the governing authorities and when they're corrupt, you don't obey their evil command. You don't obey a godless law. So when Saul was king and David had already been anointed as the next king and Saul was a murderer, David had a sword at Saul's throat. He could have killed him, but he didn't. Because he said, Saul is the government. Saul is the official. And therefore, I'm not going to obey him, but I'm not going to kill him. Verse 14, And I looked and arose and said to the nobles, to the leaders, and to the rest of the people, Do not be afraid of them. Remember the Lord, great and awesome, and fight for your brethren, your sons, your daughters, your wives, and your houses. And that's an encouragement that we could use in our lives, even though we're not typically up against an army of people who want to kill us, we're up against the world that wants to mock us, ridicule us, make sure that we fail in our efforts to preach the gospel, to oppose evolution, abortion, homosexuality, and God is telling us here through the encouragement of Nehemiah, do not be afraid of them. Remember the Lord, great and awesome, and fight for your brethren, your sons, your daughters, your wives, and your houses. So that's our motivation. Even if we're out at an abortion mill fighting against the killing of unborn children, to me, And I cannot separate these two. In my thinking, I'm fighting for my family, for my children, for my grandchildren. That's what I'm fighting for. Because as my kids grow up in a society that legalizes child killing, that means that society is intensely evil and my kids will be attacked from every side. And so when I fight that battle, I'm fighting to help my family, to minister, for my neighbors, whether they have anything to do with abortion or not. It's part of the battle between right and wrong. Verse 15, And it happened when our enemies heard that it was known to us and that God had brought their plot to nothing, that all of us returned to the wall, everyone to his work. So it was from that time on, all right, so that plot right then came to nothing. Their enemies... in their effort. So from that time on, half of my servants, half of the people who agreed to help rebuild the wall, half of my servants worked at construction while the other half held a prayer meeting. I'm sorry, I keep misreading that. The other half held the spears, the shields, the bows, and wore armor And the leaders were behind all the house of Judah. So that's more evidence throughout the Bible that God is an advocate of self-defense. He is the one in whom that principle resides. It's right to deter the wicked and to stop them, if you have the opportunity and the ability, from hurting someone. Verse 17. Those who built on the wall and those who carried burdens loaded themselves so that with one hand they worked at construction and with the other they held a weapon. Verse 18. Every one of the builders had his sword girded at his side as he built. And the one who sounded the trumpet was beside me. Then I said to the nobles, the rulers, and the rest of the people, The work is great and extensive, and we are separated far from one another on the wall. Wherever you hear the sound of the trumpet, rally to us there. Our God will fight for us. So Nehemiah kept the guy with the trumpet with him at all times so that if he got word from anyone that there was an attack underway, they would race to that location, blow the trumpet, And then everyone would come, rush in, whether they had an axe or a sword or a spear, they'd engage the enemy. That was the plan. And our God will fight for us. Now, did Nehemiah have any certain knowledge that God would do a miracle and give them a military victory? I don't believe so. The mood that God was in at this time in Israel's history... I think he would have. But if Nehemiah had sinned terribly, as David did in a very important time in Israel's history, as Saul had sinned terribly, as leader after leader had been evil and corrupt, God said, you know, I'm not going to help you. You're on your own. And then they would typically be defeated. And so here also, there's no absolute guarantee that God is going to give them a military victory. But when Nehemiah's heart was right before God and we are God's covenant people, his chosen people, and he's promised us if we are faithful, he will strengthen us. And whether that strength comes from an angel of the Lord who slaughters tens of thousands of Assyrian soldiers in one day, or if it just comes from the courage that the Jews have Because they know that they're in the right. One way or the other, they should be confident in God. And if you're confident in the Lord and you're doing what's right, and you go into battle and you get killed, that's okay. So, you're dead. And you're with the Lord. My brother, Brian, he's had a lifelong fear of flying. And he's going through a hard time right now. My mother was out there for a week visiting him in New Jersey. And she said, come to Denver, come to church, at least for one weekend. You'll have such a great time. Your sister Susan just came. She had a wonderful time. You'll be built up and encouraged. And he said, I don't like to fly. And my mother said to her son, she said, if the plane crashes, you're dead. So what? Just come. And he said, well, that's a good point. Maybe I will. So, of course, we have to be good stewards with what God has given us, our money, our resources, our bodies, our lives, our time. But this life, it's important, but it's not all important. We do what's right and we trust the Lord with our eternity. And if we're saved, our souls are in his hand and we fight the battle. Now, does that mean that We don't use wisdom. And if I have a job with the phone company and my family depends on my paycheck and I've got people at work telling me homosexuality is good and if I say no, it's bad, they're going to fire me. Well, what should I do? Well, I'm a Christian. I trust in the Lord. I'm going to say it's a sin. And then get fired and my family may lose their home. No, we don't have that obligation to risk our family's well-being just to set someone straight. Our first priority as a father and a husband is to our family, to provide for them. Our second responsibility is to others and our neighbors, to tell them about the Lord and to be good and fair to them. So we should have, of course, there are complex issues that come to play when we make decisions. but we trust God with our lives and our future, our families, and at the same time we use wisdom to make good decisions. And the better you know the Word of God, and the more you understand what God is like, the easier it is to make those decisions. Just one example came to mind. Cheryl and I were talking about lying and how in the Bible God blessed people for lying. like the Hebrew midwives. He gave them families of their own after they lied to Pharaoh. And Rahab lied to the king of Jericho and God worked her into the lineage of Jesus Christ. And other examples of deception and lies that God blessed or even originated with God. We were talking about that and the Corrie Ten Boom story. Corrie Ten Boom in the hiding place. And her sister, a Nazi, came to the door and they had a blonde-haired, blue-eyed Jewish woman in the house. And she had false papers. And in the story, her papers were excellent. Not all the forged papers were good. And she didn't look Jewish. And so she'd be easy to hide. And the official came and they suspected them. And they said, well, that's This is the family. You got five people. What's she doing here? Who's she? Is she a Jew? And Corrie Ten Boom's sister, was her name Betsy, said, yes, she's a Jew. And they took her away. And she most likely was killed, percentage-wise. And why did she do that? Because she didn't know God as well as she could have. I have no doubt she's a Christian and with the Lord right now. But she thought, that it's wrong to deceive at all times, and God would be disappointed in her if she lied, even in order to save a life. Now, isn't that a tragedy? You don't have to go to Sunday school for all that long to hear about Jericho, and you don't have to be a Christian for all that long to find out about the Exodus. What do you have to get as far as Exodus chapter 1? And all the other stories. with God saying, when Jesus said, man was not made for the law, but the law for man. And so if you think you're keeping a law and the result of it is that an innocent person will be killed, you're not keeping the law. You're confused. So the better we get to know God, the more we could honor him with the decisions we make and the work decisions we make. And when we trust him, we know what we're doing. We know why we're trusting him. We know that this is a good thing to trust him with. Verse 21. So we labored in the work and half of the men held the spears from daybreak until the stars appeared. Now that's a long day. Jason and I were both whining before the study about how long some of our work days are. Jason, we got it easy. No, not really. You only got a three, four hours sleep in the last 24 hours. That's less than these guys got. So that is worth some whining, I think. They labored in the work. Half of the men held the spears from daybreak until the stars appeared. I was in a debate with a friend of this church. He doesn't go to this church, but he's a friend of the church. Yesterday, Saturday. And he was... saying that if you trust God, you don't have to take these steps of actually defending yourself. He wasn't a pacifist, but he just got into this weird thought. And I said, no, I said, you think you trust God when you don't. protect, say, your property or your money. You think you're trusting God while you're not locking up your wallet or your door. I'm trusting God when I am locking my door. So you trust God with your door unlocked. I'll trust God with my door locked and we'll see who does better. He could not follow that. He thought if I was going to lock my door to physically keep a thief out, I'm not trusting God. And I asked him, I said, did the midwives have faith in God and trust God? And they lied to Pharaoh. And Rahab, did she not trust God and have faith in God? She lied to King of Jericho. And they ended up in the Hall of Faith. That's pretty good. By faith, the midwives lied. And by faith, Rahab lied. And by faith, you can lock your door and trust God to help you. how's he going to help you? He's going to give you the wisdom to lock your door. If you're trusting God and not locking your door, leaving your wallet outside your front door, well, you think it's faith, but it's really foolishness. Verse 22, at the same time, I also said to the people, let each man and his servant stay at night in Jerusalem and they may that they may be by our guard by night in a working party by day. So rather than going home to your village and staying the night with your family and coming back in the morning, don't do that. Because remember the Jews who lived out there, they heard Sanballat and the enemies and they heard the Philistines, what was left of them. And they heard them say, when they go back to their villages, when they're heading back to Jerusalem, we'll ambush them there. So he said, all right, this is good intelligence we're getting. So let's change our plans. When you get done at night, stay here and don't leave. So at night we have an automatic built-in security detail of the entire construction workforce so that they may be our guard by night and a working party by day. So neither I, my brethren, my servants, and this is sort of a funny verse, so that we nor the men of the guard who followed me took off our clothes, except that everyone took them off for washing. I'm really glad to hear that. It was very kind of them. The Mosaic law says, love your neighbor. So why does it say we didn't take off our clothes? Well, even back then at night, you go to bed, you go in your tent and you undress and you get under a blanket and you go to sleep. Not during this project. They worked all day and they slept at night, even if it was out in the open or under a lean-to. And they were dressed and ready to go 24 hours a day. They only bathed when they had to. And aside from that, they were ready to go. And of course, the application of that to our lives is evident. That we are to praise the Lord and worship God and bless Him. In the night, in the day, when the sun rises up, when the sun sets, we're to worship God. The Bible says meditate on God day and night. And the Jewish student who went to the rabbi and said, Rabbi, I'd like to also study philosophy other than the scriptures. And the rabbi said, of course you can study philosophy. Just find an hour. which is neither of the day nor of the night, and in it you may study philosophy. So we are to be prepared to serve the Lord, to do what's right, to defend our loved ones at every moment. Whether we're in front of others or alone, God is there at every moment with us, and so we're to be faithful throughout our lives. May God bless you all.
