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The Breaking Point
Some of these were standard works in their field, whereas others were more speculative, such as Colin Wilson's history of astronomy, Star Seekers, and Jeffrey Goodman's book on human evolution, The Genesis Mystery.
I already knew that most materialistic scientists would answer that my methods of investigation, and those of everyone else who has drawn similar conclusions, simply aren't scientific.
However, the more I studied the history and methods of science, the more convinced I became that there really is a materialistic bias in science: a literal closing of people's minds to factual evidence if it concerns spirituality.
They were things with immediate practical use, like better plows, harness, wagons, water mills, spinning and weaving devices, sails and rigging-plans for ships, etc. They included gunpowder, the eyeglass lenses that led to the telescope and microscope, better methods of preserving food, and many other things.
Taken together, they produced profound demographic, economic, and political changes in European society.
The Protestant churches still exerted a major influence over society in Northern Europe, but they didn't control the crowning of kings, the running of schools and universities, the certification of doctors and lawyers, the writing and circulation of books, etc., to nearly the extent that the Catholic Church had dominated them in the Medieval times.
Until the first half of the Seventeenth century, when Galileo was prosecuted by Pope Urban VIII for supporting the Copernican astronomical theory, European scientists had not yet been put in a category separate from other intellectuals doing research into the nature of the universe.
They were all called simply "philosophers," and one person might do research in many different fields: botany, medicine, astronomy, astrology, theology, and even ceremonial magic.
Physicians dispensed as many healing prayers as they did pills, and practiced "laying on of hands" as freely as they set broken bones or bandaged wounds. One writer might produce bestiaries, herbals, and catalogues of the different types of demons and angels. The books written by the medieval alchemists show they experimented with sex magic and psychedelic drugs to develop their psychic powers as well as doing primitive experiments in chemistry.
Much of this research did not involve scientific experimental techniques in the modern sense; but when such methods were employed, they were just as commonly applied to studying spiritual and psychic phenomena as to studying purely physical phenomena.
In 1600, the Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno was burned for heresy. It's widely believed that the reason for his immolation was his support of the Copernican theory, but this was not mentioned in the charges against him.
It is true he was a Copernican; but what the Church executed him for was not his scientific views, but applying empirical methods of research to occult and religious subjects. He wrote treatises on Hermetic Magic and general philosophical works that challenged both the infallibility of the Pope and the omnipotence of God.
However, one of the first steps in making my personal breakthrough was to realize that Galileo's victory was a hollow one. Galileo was not only one of the founders of modern science because of his contributions to physics and astronomy, he was also one of the instigators of the materialistic bias that has plagued science ever since.
The only reason why Galileo refused to back down when Pope Urban objected to his acceptance of the Copernican model of the solar system was that he felt the Pope was overstepping the bounds of his spiritual authority by getting involved in matters that were purely physical.
Galileo never tried to challenge the Pope's right to interpret the Bible on spiritual matters, but felt that he, as a natural philosopher, shouldn't be over-ruled from the Papal Throne on enquiries into phenomena that are physical rather than spiritual.
Since the time of Saint Augustine, this had been interpreted by the Catholic Church as proof that the Sun moves around the Earth. Augustine himself had been a bishop in Egypt not long after Ptolemy, another Egyptian, had published his astronomy texts endorsing a geocentric model of the Solar System.
This effect could just as easily happen because a spinning Earth stopped as because a moving Sun stopped. Above all, he never argued that the passage was false because it involved a miracle. Miracles were part of the supernatural, and not the business of a natural philosopher.
His next book was smuggled out of Italy by French diplomats and published in Holland, and the opinion of intellectuals all over Europe was in his favor. Star Seekers states that Pope Urban was afraid to execute Galileo, as his predecessor had Bruno, because he knew that such an outrage would seriously damage his reputation and undermine his power.
Pope Urban could probably have had Galileo closely watched and prevented him from publishing any more books without suffering serious political harm. He'd already withstood the opposition raised by passing the sentence, and the public outcry over enforcing it would probably have been weaker, provided that Galileo was not harmed physically.
The fact that the Pope didn't carry through and effectively silence Galileo is evidence he didn't consider the debate over the Copernican theory important in itself. He was punishing Galileo for openly challenging his political and spiritual authority, not for doing scientific research.
The earlier immolation of Bruno had already sent the negative half of this message:
I call this unspoken, unwritten agreement "The Copernican Compromise," and believe it's the origin of the whole materialistic bias in Western science.
The Copernican Compromise was never openly discussed by either the scientists or the Catholic hierarchy, and it is likely that both sides simply drifted into it without being consciously aware that the Church was still actively persecuting scientific occultists while becoming increasingly tolerant towards scientists who avoided research into psychic and spiritual phenomena, especially those who claimed such research was impossible.
Even though their motivations were mostly subconscious, more and more scientists adopted a materialistic bias during the 16th and 17th centuries; and if they also were involved in occultism or other spiritual research, they hid their activities in secret societies.
Goodman has impressive formal credentials as an anthropologist, and has published three reasonably popular books:
His scholarship seems perfectly sound, but his books have mostly been ignored or dismissed as pseudo science by other professionals in his field because he includes psychic powers, reincarnation, and disembodied spiritual beings in some of his scientific hypotheses.
This might be too far out for the scientific establishment, but it was exactly the push I needed to make my breakthrough.
Wallace called himself a practicing Christian, though his beliefs seem to have been what we would call "Liberal Christianity" today. He was also one of the scientists who investigated the nineteenth-century Spiritualist movement and decided there was empirical evidence that the spirits of the dead really do sometimes communicate with the living.
Even though he contributed at least as much as Darwin himself to the basic Darwinian Theory of Evolution, Wallace's personal opinions on the matter were that spiritual forces were involved along with the random mutation and natural selection described in the theory itself.
Interventionists believe that, although random mutations account for most evolutionary change, some parts of the evolutionary process - especially the creation of human beings out of pre-human stock - were directed by a conscious outside agency. Wallace called this agency "God," and so do many liberal Christians today, but occultists and New-Agers talk about "spirits" and "cosmic intelligences."
Most American Christians, except for the staunch Fundamentalists, see no real conflict between their religious cosmology and the scientific theory of evolution.
They simply say that the evolutionary process was the means their God used to create people and other species of animals and plants, and that the materialistic Darwinists are wrong only in asserting that the process is random rather than guided by an outside intelligence.
All the materialists can say is,
However, as new information is discovered in every scientific field related to evolution - biochemistry, genetics, paleontology, etc. - the evidence against traditional, materialistic Darwinism gets stronger, not weaker.
This is especially true of the appearance of modern human beings on Earth: recent fossil evidence shows that human beings may have evolved almost simultaneously from different pre-human species in different parts of the world. The probabilities of that happening by chance are almost zero, yet the paleontological evidence showing that it did happen grows stronger every year.
He mentions three possible sources for this intervention:
I was already familiar with
everything Goodman had to say about the first two concepts, but I
found the third original and extremely thought provoking. Here is Goodman's "hitch-hiking spirits" hypothesis in his own words:
The concept that certain human souls are not native to Earth, that they came here from another world or plane of existence, is mentioned in many different religious mythologies and occult theories, though most of the references are cryptic and hard to understand.
Authors seem reluctant to discuss such a wild idea openly, but I've always found it plausible because of my past-life memories and numerous telepathic contacts with spirits who say that they were extraterrestrials in former lives.
When he said in so many words that the first human souls might have come to Earth from elsewhere, started incarnating in pre-human bodies, and assisted in the creation of the human race as a fully intelligent species, my immediate reaction was to say,
This was a purely instinctive reaction.
The idea just seemed true and obvious when I read it at that particular time in my life.
However, when I began thinking analytically about the subject, I realized that modern occult and psychic research provides a lot more evidence to support Goodman's speculations than he presents in his book. The idea that spirits could cause genetic mutations in pre-humans that would help them evolve into true human beings is not nearly as implausible as it appears on the surface.
During the last thirty years, many different occultists and parapsychologists have speculated that human beings might be able to manipulate genetic material psychokinetically at the sub-molecular level.
If the DNA of cancerous cells can be manipulated by psychokinesis to turn them back into normal cells, then there is no reason why something similar can't be done to germ cells to produce controlled mutations in the organism's offspring. How people could do this without being consciously aware of it was not yet clear to me; but I had no doubt that psychic healing occurs, and I was aware that there is also evidence from other sources that psychic genetic manipulation exists.
They keep on saying that the genetic diversity in domestic plants and animals was already present in the ancestral stock, and that all present forms were produced by selective breeding to bring out desired traits, or by hybridization between different species. They insist that actual mutations in domestic plants and animals are extremely rare and due to pure chance, but they also record the data to disprove this conclusion.
They postulated that this gene-splicing might have been caused when genetic material was transferred from one organism to another by viruses. Now, evidence has recently been discovered to support this idea on the mechanistic level, but the theory still doesn't explain why a useless weed would turn into a corn plant useful for human food. Natural selection doesn't account for it, because domestic corn isn't even viable in the wild state: even the most primitive forms cultivated by the Amerindians have to be pollinated by hand.
Geneticists say it does, but they can't offer proof. Personally, I think a mutation was involved.
The hairless cats now appearing in cat shows are an example. So are flop-eared rabbits and common rats in sizes and colors never observed in the wild. Again the geneticists say the potential to produce all these new forms was present in the original stock, and again I doubt it very strongly.
Actually, I'm sure I still haven't received all of it, but Parts Two and Three of War in Heaven describe what I've learned so far.
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