Despite their great achievements, science and technology have brought us to the brink of nuclear annihilation and launched what may be an irreversible climate catastrophe. As I write, arms sales are sky-rocketing all over the planet. Meanwhile, the corporate energy magnates show few signs of shifting toward sustainable forms of energy production. They lie and temporize, anything to cling to their enormous profits.
The climate crisis is denied and the weapons salesmen insist on the need for self-defense. Can a society with a warped sense of truth long survive? Can we manage when the basic concept of factual truth is spat on. We are, after all, hacking our way through an age of fake news. The fakery is pervasive. AI, ChatGPT and related programs enormously raise the specter of new forms of deception.
From all sides the idea of truth is facing a crisis. By far the most spectacular assault on truth is the phenomenon of the Trumpian base and Republican affiliates. Truth here lies in bloody pieces thrown into our faces, thanks to the pathological liar, rapist, and polymorphous criminal. Donald Trump.
No surprise about the lying that revolves around the American gods of money and power. But what about science? Science, by definition, is dedicated to knowledge and truth. We expect more from scientists when it comes to matters of truth. Follow the facts wherever they lead us, is the ideal of authentic scientists.
But scientists are human beings, subject to forces that can deform even their sense of truth. Scientists take bribes from corporate entities in exchange for endorsing—lying about—products on sale. The money motive for lying here is plain enough.
Scientists are sometimes compelled to lie by the government for security reasons. For example, since 1947 the U.S. Government and scientific personnel actively concealed the truth about UFOs and UAPs from the American people. So, when a psychiatrist like John Mack reported his research on alien abductions he was attacked by his Harvard compatriots.
Since 2017 the Government has opened the question for discussion, and admitted the reality of an alien technology that regularly enters our airspace—a “technology” that clearly transcends anything known to current science. In fact, the presence of this super-technology operating with impunity in our midst is a topic of great significance—but oddly has retired to the files of YouTube and is rarely discussed in mainline venues.
There’s something else. A scientist may deny or trivialize a matter of fact because it has implications he doesn’t like. This is the more egregious sin against science. One example that comes to mind is the Big Bang Theory of the birth of the universe 13.7 billion years ago. This is the theory widely accepted by scientists today, especially in light of the most recent research. The theory at first was dismissed with contempt by many scientists.
Why? The Big Bang seemed to imply something obnoxious to physicists firmly committed to materialism and atheism. In 1927, Georges Lemaître published a paper that confirmed the expansion of the universe of galaxies. There were observations suggesting that startling fact. The idea of an expanding universe was not consistent with what Einstein, Eddington and others believed to be an eternal, static, steady-state universe.
Lemaître inferred that an expanding universe must have originated at a previous time from a super dense singularity of some physical reality. The universe exploded out of this physical singularity creating time and space, a universe that is still expanding and at an accelerating rate. Big Bang cosmology has clearly ousted the steady-state cosmology, in spite of the physicists that first rejected the theory. The atheists were appalled. In a broad way, the Big Bang seems consistent with Biblical creationism. But so what? The truth is that nobody has a clue to what really caused the Big Bang, if indeed there was a Big Bang. The universe seems to be an effect with an unknown cause, but a reality with a finite history. Sorry Einstein.
The atheist physicists had a hard time processing this cosmological surprise. Moreover, Lemaitre, in addition to being a brilliant mathematician and physicist, was a Catholic priest. But, as Lemaitre rightly understood and clearly stated, the Big Bang model of cosmic creation favors no religion. Nonetheless, the antagonism toward the theory was (and still is) weighty, precisely because it can be construed as having religious significance.
There is another example of science denying or ignoring highly significant empirical data. In a way that exactly parallels the hostile reception of the Big Bang theory, most scientists (not necessarily physicists) have been and still are instinctively on guard and reluctant (at least publicly) to engage with the wide world of paranormal phenomena. Paranormal phenomena like levitation, precognition, instantaneous healing, the materialization of physical objects, indications of postmortem survival, and so on, are construed as supportive of mentalistic worldviews where miracles, life after death, and supernatural beings may in fact be real. All this is rightly construed as a mortal threat to reductive scientific materialism.
Respect for factual truth needs to be restored to the common consciousness. Without it we’re easily misled and manipulated. Materialist science would deny truths that may hold the secret of our evolutionary advance as a species. The unidentified beings the government lied about point to our potential evolution. For a more exact picture of what that may look like, look at the data called supernormal or miraculous—our extended mental, physical and spiritual powers. In a fact-based model of what is possible, we can contemplate an outline of our futuristic identity.
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