Are cultural beliefs modulated by evidence? Not really. Religion used to be a method which morphed quickly into a list of rules. Science is now the method that is becoming entrenched in its own methods. It too, has rules and the guard is academia. Soon a new guard may grant some leeway. Normality is like a spell—since we typically live by habits, routines and codes that we take for granted. The problem arises when you can make a spell but cannot break it. Science and scripture are the current codes of modulation, entrenched by the sacred writings of its founders. For example—
Science has now proven beyond any doubt that physical realism (physical entities of any known kind) do not have stand-alone reality. They are not the primal of nature, or what the world is like, it is just how the world presents itself to our measurements—to our observations. Before that the world is not physical, but mental—and is still only comprehended by mentation. Without mentation is there any thing to comprehend. It appears not. Science is clinging to the old scripture and explains each hypothesis with so many add-ons and explanations it can no longer be falsified. It’s a last grasp at its original hypothesis of physical realism.
It is not saying there is no world “out there” but that until it is observed it is not physical, but mental. It collapses into what our senses believe are physical properties by the cultural conditioning of science and, the egoic barrier, the skin, the membrane, between individuation and the rest of reality.
The typical person assumes that the scientific worldview asserts and underpins physical realism. But science over the past 40 years has proven exactly the opposite. How long will it take to change that paradigm? Considering the average person still lives in a Newtonian world with an 18th century mind, the change could be hundreds of years. Likely we will never live as quantum-minded people, but will leap-frog to another form of belief as the underlying model of reality. In its favor, most people that believe physical realism don’t really know what that means or it’s implications—that all experience of color, sight and sound, are only inside your head—and the sacrifice of meaning and purpose that has humanity right where it is today. Simply, we may not be smart enough to incorporate this understanding into our daily lives and how we see the world.
You would think given enough time this evidence would percolate through the culture and other sciences. Unfortunately history shows us it takes an incredible amount of “in your face” evidence to change a scientific paradigm.
“science progresses not through a linear accumulation of new knowledge, but through periodic revolutions, also called “paradigm shifts.”—Thomas Kuhn. We are in the verge of such a revolution, where the new guard will accept the evidence before us without the entrenched bias of the old.
Max Planck said that science advances one funeral at a time. Or more precisely: “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”
In this current religious mindset, captivating nearly the entire world, we have religion (which prescribes rules on behavior) and we have science, which is what religion was in the first place—a method of discovery that has taken on its own set of rules to prove a metaphysical assumption without evidence—that mentation is a primary source of mentation. But it’s the other way around, and if it wasn’t you’d never know it.
Jesus tried to teach a method—but in our infantile ignorance we enshrined the messenger and and believe in him (or any other religious innovations) vs the methods they were trying to teach.
TheCommonAtheist 