[Skybird]

Karl Popper was one who explicitly showed that the correctness of scientific theories never can be proven, and that scientific research data never should be understood as being evidence. Thus, sciences never are an argument for or against theistic deities, and in the end: miracles as well.

But to argue that something like evolution as a theoretic construct (more it is not and never has been!) does not exist and thus, claims of religion necessarily must be true, is not less absurd like saying scientific theories could be proven. Evolution and religion: it is no "either this or that" case. It is two different things, and any attempt to make conclusions on the one by thinking about the other, is comparing apples with oranges.
Considering that there are millions of variables that need to stay in a fragile balance in order to enable this spectacle we call life on planet earth, it is hard to imagine that it is by random, by cosmic trial and error over 13 billion years. To argue there was a big bang, raises serious problems. What was before Big Bang? And if there was nothing before, how could come something from nothing? What and how triggered the starting event of Big Bang? Why is there something at all today, instead of simply "nothing"? Also, the concept of an expanding universe raises problems: those questions about Big Bang with only minor adjustments could be asked regarding the universe as well, and if it is expanding, it is limited in size, so the question is: what is beyond it's borders? How can there be something beyond it's borders, if the universe includes all? And if there is nothing beyond - how could the universe being just limited then? It all just makes no sense for a reasonable mind, and lets you run into logical contradiction neither science nor religion can solve.

We even have no reason to think of the world being existent in the form we usually, during our everday-life, think that it is, with houses and roads and meadows and forest and other people and a blue sky. Neither sight nor sound, neither smell nor taste nor fingertips give us any evidence at all that things are what they form up as images in our mind. Our senses just function in the way they were meant to do, they react with electric potentials and chemical reactions when chemical agents, physical pressures, waves and photons hit according receptors, they translates these into certain cascades of electric pulses running into our brain, and inside our brain "something" all of a sudden decides to turn electricity that is pulsating in changing frequencies and jumps from one neuron to another by exchange of chemical agents, into forms and images, smells and tastes, and inside our brain it all is put into relation to each other (and the very same inputs can very well lead to very different ways of establishing these mutual relations between signals, which is obvious in case of mental illness, but also happens regarding the differences between cultural and social environments), and we do not just "perceive" things (well, it should be clear now that we NEVER perceive things and cannot even say that things are there), and even more: we attach meaning and sense to them. All this our brain does, it all exists in our brains only. Not to mention philosophy and gods and religion, Big Bang and extending universes. Its all just in our brain. It all comes down to what we call "mind".

Cognito ergo sum - I think, therefore I am. That"we" exist, is beyond doubt for us: we know it, we are aware of us, we thing, we see, we have memories, we have sympathies and antipathies, and although all atoms in our body have been exchanged with new ones from the environment in which we live every six years, and although in a material understanding after 6 years we literally are no longer the person we used to be, we still know beyond doubt: "this is me, this is what I am, this is what I see as my personality and persona history, this is what links my present to my far away childhood".

Neurologists say they are able to locate certain brain areas that show typical activity patterns when man does something like deep meditation, or a believer has something that is called an experience of God. They try to link all other qualities of mind to certain brain activities, arguing that with the brain dyeing, everything is over, and that scientific concepts are just patterns in the brain as well as are any conceptions and imagined realisations of gods and deities. Memories, just twenty years ago being focused on as being stored in chemical molecules, today are mostly seen as changes in the hard-wiring of brain's neurons, while others claim memories are affecting all the brain's structure and are present in all the brain like the smallest detail of the complete pictures is present in both the complete hologram as in the smallest quantity of the hologram as well. All that is nice and well, but it is just mind playing with itself, like is philosophy as well. Because you could ask a neurologist the same questions about big Bang and universe and still will not get any reasonable answer from him. Neurologists, in their effort to create artificial intelligence by creating copies of the brain's complexity, a simulation of the brain so to speak, do not seem to realise that by their work, which I do not want to minimise at all, they only realise the mechanics and ways of functioning of the brain - but that they do not explain how mind emerges from neurons firing, and they have even less an answer to the question: why? They cannot explain what mind is, and will never be able, necessarily, for they actually only deal with what I would call the condensate of mind. I call it that because in the end not only are all images of reality and world just inside our mind, or b rain, as I said above, but our understanding of brain itself: also is just an image in our minds. Brain and mind to certain degrees correlate - but obviously the one includes the other, mind includes brain, and not th eother way around: brain does include cognitions and perception processing, memory storage, intellectual activity: but brain does not include this certain something that points, shows and leads beyond it.

Recently I had an unpleasant discussion on these things and the question of free will. Neurologists today say there is no free will , because they are able to show that the decision process that leads to a given outcome is already activated and came to a result before people become aware of the choice they want to make. They would say: you do not decide but yo get decided and being made to feel you decided yourself. I do not wish to argue from a position of "it cannot be what shall not be", when pointing out that such an understanding means most dramatic consequences for all the world's cultural fundaments of civilisation, because it strips you of all argument for having laws and penalties for not obeying them (because a penalty only makes sense if you have the free choice between good and bad doing), as well as all philosophy and ethics that implies free will and free choice, and base on both. I spare me to point at the implications in context with the various religions, of whom only those would make sense anymore that say that "everything is written", "everything is predetermined and man cannot do anything to escape of being doomed in advance". In the end, if this empty void that neurologist's conclusions of "no free will" and "all and everything dying with our brain" would create, could lead to to the greatest nihilistic, depressed breakdown in man's history, and could mean very well the end of history, the breakdown of civilisation, ratio and reason, and turning life on earth into a meaningless existence in a fatalistic hell-hole ruled by anarchy and the law of the strongest. Because, if I may lend that phrase, "God is dead". In fact i would say: "meaning is dead, life makes no sense anymore". Because as a ex-psychologist I know some things on man for sure, and one of these is this: man needs to have a meaning in life in order to be survivable, and if there is no meaning, he will invent and self-construct a meaning in which to believe. Or in the words of KZ-survivor and psychotherapist and founder of Logo therapy and existence analysis Victor Frankl: "Man does not want to be happy. He wants a reason to be happy." You do not need to make people happy. All you need is showing them a reason to be, and they will become happy all by themselves. That the neurological nihilism glooming at the horizon creates existential problems form man, sciences have realised by themselves already: that's why they have build new creative disciplines like neuro-theology (no joke).

On a side-line one can also ask: when neurologists say they will be able one day to create intelligence, and if the network of data processing is only complex enough this intelligence eventually will become aware of itself and that way: alive, well, then the question can be asked: is this possible or reasonable to assume? Can the copy serve the same that the original did: will the simulation of reality be able to become reality itself? I don't go deeper into it, but I see this question again leading to a mind that goes much beyond just brain functions. All the universe in one mind only? Actually I think: it could be. actually as I see it would say: there is just one mind anyway, and like all is linked to everything, there cannot be different types and kinds of mind. This is where some religions maybe would start to translate it into "universal spirit". But the religion's language is not my language.

But this depressing perspective does not really bother me, since I can see and understand the serious holes in neurologists' concept of future things to come. It is not that they are wrong in what they say, it is that they are not complete. take the result of god-experiences being linked to activity in certain brain areas. You can even stimulate these areas, and trigger that experience.but it is a physical correlate only, and the correlate feeding back on the source. both ways are like a two-dimensional shadow being thrown by a three-dimensional object. That's why I use to say the brain does not create mind, but mind creates a brain. In the end, neurologists today say that all we consider to be our "self", of what we think "this is me", is linked to brain activities of this and that kind, and if the brain is no more, there is neither "me" nor "self". but that is an old hat, and you can find it being described in the most complex system of a psychological system that I know of and that beats Western models hands down: the teachings of the five skhandas, five categories of "existential factors" of different material density, whose interaction and endless flowing creates the image, or may I say: illusion of what we call "ego", and what Buddhism refers to as "wrong/untrue self", or atman. There is more, there is mind that I referred to in my introduction above, and that is hard if not impossible to being pointed at precisely, and that you can only refer to by describing what it NOT is. It is the meaning shimmering through between the lines of illusive reality. It is what tipped an image with its finger, smiling, and turned that image into a brain that gave order and structure to all cosmos: one way of order, one kind of structure. You can see it shimmering through in the image of a mirror held up by mind by which it looks at it's own face, and sees that it is you. You can see it shimmering through in the questions about Big Bang and universe I asked. You can see it shimmering through when meditating and stepping back from yourself and your knowledge of a certain brain area being active now - and then stepping back from this stepping back.

But you cannot see it shimmering through when forgetting yourself and not even wanting to look at the shimmer - but you can become the shimmer itself. If you prefer a more theistic language: leave all your idols and understandings of God behind, for there is no other God than the God you turn out to be yourself. You are He, and you are not the smallest bit different from Him. So, whether God is a tyrant or a loving being, is decided by you and your deeds, and what you do to others, you do to yourself. Heaven and hell do exist for sure, but they are no locations, and no times, but they exist as states of a calm or a disturbed mind. The kingdom of heaven is not here, and you cannot find it there, for it is a kingdom of your heart. why needing to believe in a Jesus or refer to a Buddha? You have all you need and all there is all inside of you. Carrying the picture of two long rotten corpses with you - what's the use of this?