Navigating Materialistic Minefields
Viv Bartlett
GEORGE RONALD • OXFORD
George Ronald, Publisher Oxford www.grbooks.com
© Viv Bartlett 2022 All Rights Reserved
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-0-85398-653-9
CONTENTS Acknowledgements
x
1. Days of Search 2. Becoming Aware
1 15
PART 1: Navigating the Minefield of Materialistic Assumptions 3. Materialistic Assumption 1: There is a Beginning of the Universe, which Occurred by Chance 4. Materialistic Assumption 2: Man is No More than an Intelligent Animal 5. Materialistic Assumption 3: Man’s Rational Faculties are the Product of His Brain 6. Materialistic Assumption 4: It is Impossible to Change Human Nature Because Humans are Selfish and Aggressive 7. Materialistic Assumption 5: An Innate Sense of Human Dignity Will Prevent Man from Committing Evil Actions 8. Materialistic Assumption 6: There Should Be No Limit to Personal Liberty Providing One’s Freedom Does No Harm to Others
29 42 47 60 71
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PART 2: Navigating the Materialistic Minefield of Existential Questions 9. Evidence of the Human Spirit and a Spiritual World 10. The Extent of Suffering
95 117
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11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.
Suffering: Responsibility and Detachment Oppressors and the Suffering of the Innocent Free Will Free Will and the Power of the Manifestations of God Evil and How to Counter It Does God Allow Evil? A More Involved Answer
127 151 161 169 182 189
PART 3: Understanding Spiritual Processes and Systems 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.
No Imperfections in Creation Gradual Emergence of Maturity Interpreting History in Terms of an Evolutionary Process Divine Intervention or Not? God Is Always Involved in His Creation Disbelief in God Linked with Exalting One Messenger Above Another Hell – Justice and Forgiveness Heaven – Inner Condition or Destination? Material and Spiritual Progress Should Go Hand in Hand The Proof of the Sun is the Sun Itself A Focus on Bahá’u’lláh Some Concluding Thoughts for All Who Wish to Navigate the Materialistic Minefields of this Age
Bibliography Notes and References About the Author
201 211 233 240 261 268 286 297 310 319 328 349 361 369 389
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DAYS OF SEARCH The death of my brother, Peter, smashed into our family like a comet hitting the earth. And the repercussions of that tragic event are still operating over fifty years later. That happened in 1960 and I was 15 years of age; my brother had just turned 14. Cycling home from work one bright summer’s day I saw a crowd of neighbours gathered around our home in Ely, Cardiff. They were not looking happy, a few tried to prepare me for the shock to come. I raced inside the house, my mother was being comforted by friends and my brother, Peter, was on the floor receiving artificial respiration. This was not the modern, mouth to mouth resuscitation, but the arms being pulled over the head and placed back by the side. Peter was breathing, or so it seemed to me, as I heard air coming out of him; but this was just the result of the respiration process. I thought he was joking around again as he often did this, to my annoyance, and I remember getting angry with him. But it was no practical joke this time. The ambulance arrived, and he was taken to hospital to get better, so I thought. So, I broke through the arms of the neighbours who tried to restrain me and cycled like mad, trying to catch the ambulance. Peter was dead even before respiration was applied, which was confirmed at the hospital after I arrived. I don’t know how I got back home, everything went black and hazy. I do remember my father arriving home from work and being told the shattering news that his son was dead. He ‘lost’ it, couldn’t process the information; it took four men to hold him down as he started to rip a door off its hinges. 1
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How did Peter die? Well, I had some part in it, although an innocent part. After leaving school at fifteen and a half I started work in preparation to become an apprentice engineer in a firm of manufacturers of pulley blocks and lifting tackle. The factory was situated in Bute Street, Cardiff, more popularly known as ‘Tiger Bay’. One of the very first mosques in the UK was in the same street as the factory, but I didn’t know anything about diversity in those days, even though a cross-section of the world had gathered in Tiger Bay. My wages at this time were £1 and 15 shillings a week, a huge increase over the money I had earned as a paper-boy. I gave my mother, Doreen, all my wages, out of which she gave me back the 15 shillings (75 pence in today’s money). I was anxious to spend this money, so I bought a reel-to-reel tape recorder and happily spent hours recording songs from the radio. The start of the 1960s exploded with new music, new stars, new freedoms, and I was excited to be part of it. Peter, like many younger brothers, wanted what his older brother had. So, after school one day, he took my tape recorder onto the garden lawn, fixed up his home-made extension lead and happily lay down to listen to the songs. Mother was talking to a neighbour while sitting on the garden wall. Then it happened; one of the two bare wires making up the extension lead disconnected. How this happened is still the subject of speculation. Peter leaned over on the humid grass, caught hold of the live wire and instantly electrocuted himself. Massive internal brain damage, we were told; death by misadventure, the coroner’s verdict. The most heart-rending thing is that my mother saw this horrific scene – her son being electrocuted in front of her eyes and she could do nothing to save him! Coincidentally, the song he was listening to on the recorder was ‘Halfway to Paradise’, a popular song by pop star Billy Fury at the time. Dad’s response to Peter’s death was to switch off to enquiry, watch TV and automatically assume there is no God, because if there was how could He let such a terrible thing happen to an 2
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innocent child? His heart was broken, his whole world collapsed even though he had four remaining children. Dad (George) eventually carried on in life, but he never did recover, nor did it prompt him to search for answers to the tragedy. Strange indeed, that although our family, working class as it was, had, through Dad and Mam’s hard work, many of the material benefits of living, yet these were of little benefit to any of us to be able to cope with the calamity of Peter’s sudden and violent death. Black grief descended and enveloped every thought, every hope, every aspiration! Mam’s response to Peter’s death was so different to Dad’s. She had to find out ‘why’! Is there a purpose and meaning to life beyond just physically existing? If we are here today, gone tomorrow, why is life so transient? Why do innocent children die while some adults who commit heinous crimes live long? Perhaps in the back of Mam’s mind was the thought that Peter’s death should not be in vain. She certainly set about searching for answers with a driven sense of mission. Over years she visited many churches, beliefs and religious societies. From time to time I accompanied her, learned quite a bit, but developed a distinct dislike of clergymen, not necessarily the person, but the ‘office’ they represented. I remember wanting to ask questions during their sermons, but centuries of passivity by the congregation and a general air of superiority by the clergy rendered the atmosphere impermeable. So, I sat there quiet, but fuming inside. In some cases, I would approach the minister after the sermon and ask questions, particularly where science and religion seemed to clash. Responses ranged from polite snubs to beliefs that deny the existence of a rational human being, never mind an intelligent Creator. Mam, however, was not there to argue, an activity I was beginning to enjoy – she was a seeker and truth was her goal. The most pressing question after Peter’s death, however, was ‘is there life after death?’ Quite naturally we wanted to know that if there is life after death, could we contact Peter? Together we visited several Spiritualist Churches in the Cardiff area and were 3
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spoken to by some clairvoyants who assured us that Peter was alive on the ‘other side’ and wanted us to know that he was ‘doing well’. The sessions we attended were centred on mediums providing personal messages from loved ones in the next life with the aim of proving that life is continuous. Most sessions included hymn singing and a little talk based upon some teachings in the Bible that supported their belief that life does carry on after the physical body dies; teachings such as when Christ disclosed that ‘In my Father’s house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you.’1 We were approached a few times to train as clairvoyants but never took up their invitations. Absent healing, or healing by psychic means, was of great interest to us so we visited the Spiritualist Centre in London for a sitting with Harry Edwards, a well-known Spiritualist healer. Edwards, apparently, was told by a medium when he was a young man that he was ‘born to heal’ but he had no idea as to what was meant by a ‘healer’, so ‘he joined a development circle to see what would happen’. He quickly developed trance mediumship and then attempted absent healing. After years of successfully healing many people, Edwards brought to attention the fact that divine laws are universal and not contained in denominational rituals or performances of the Church of England, Methodists, Congregationalists or for that matter Spiritualists. The power of healing according to this divine law ‘is our common heritage,’ he pointed out. ‘This universal power would fail those who ‘try and control it by ritual or set performances of any kind . . .’2 I liked the concept of divine laws being universal and not restricted to narrow-minded religious ownership. It reminded me of physical laws discovered by eminent scientists and great thinkers through the centuries. In fact, at about this time I reflected a lot on the first law of thermodynamics which states that energy under normal conditions cannot be created or destroyed, simply transformed from one type of energy to another. And the reason I gave a lot of thought to this was because I felt there could be 4
3
MATERIALISTIC ASSUMPTION 1: THERE IS A BEGINNING OF THE UNIVERSE, WHICH OCCURRED BY CHANCE A materialistic assumption is made when all facts depend upon and are reduced to physical causes and processes, and explanations of them. However, their veracity must be questioned. This I now attempt to do by providing a perspective, viewed through a spiritual lens, when trying to answer the question: Did the universe have a beginning and did it come into existence through chance circumstances? Answers to these questions are of intense interest to cosmologists as well as those who are interested in cosmology. Unfortunately, many support materialistic arguments pertaining to this issue. However, these arguments are not based on facts because they are not provable by the scientific method. The scientific method requires a process – in this case, of investigation that allows the investigator to observe the universe at its beginning, or the investigator to have gathered incontrovertible material evidence, to be able to deduce that the universe came into existence by fortuitous occurrences. Even stating this, another assumption is made, that is – the universe had a beginning. The Big Bang theory is the prevailing cosmological model for the beginning of the universe, time and space. It was first posited by George Lemaitre in 1927, coming quickly on the heels 29
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of American astronomer Edwin Hubble’s discoveries that there are galaxies apart from our own Milky Way galaxy. It is theorized that the universe is expanding, not exploding, from a super dense point, smaller than an atom (a singularity), of extremely high temperature and density, some 13.8 billion years ago, as galaxies fly away from each other at an immense speed.1 Interestingly, Bahá’u’lláh, revealing the power of God, stated about 140 years ago: ‘It is in Our power, should We wish it, to enable a speck of floating dust to generate, in less than the twinkling of an eye, suns of infinite, of unimaginable splendour . . .’2 The Big Bang theory is tremendously sophisticated – indeed, it is supported by extensive evidence. I have no resistance to accepting its veracity and feel humbled when contemplating the painstaking, detailed work of the scientific community in producing such a wonderful cosmological model. The more difficult question to answer, however, is: what is the origin of the Big Bang, what caused it? Answers are invariably speculative, the singularity mentioned above being just one theory. There are computer-generated models that attempt this, resulting in what could be understood as something that ‘ignited’ or ‘seeded’ the Big Bang. On the other hand, Dr Alastair Gunn states: The Big Bang is the moment that space and time (or ‘spacetime’) came into existence. Before the Big Bang there was no space or time. So, it is actually meaningless to ask what caused the Big Bang to happen – there was no Universe in which that cause could have existed.3
Even so, to make the claim that before the Big Bang there was nothing in existence – that, in fact, everything came from nothing, is an assumption that needs to be questioned. Assumptions around this abound in the form of theories but offer no proof. For the moment, they are just suppositions mostly arrived at by materialistic thought processes applied to limited collected data. Conversely, it is possible to arrive at a different conclusion to 30
there is a beginning of the universe, which occurred by chance
the same question by looking through the spiritual lens provided by Bahá’u’lláh and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá. This is what I have attempted, maintaining the directive of the Bahá’í teachings that science and religion should go hand in hand. It is admitted, however, that this method will not prove, in the scientific sense of the word, the conclusions arrived at. What it does is to give an alternative answer to the questions ‘Did the universe have a beginning, and did everything it contains, including human beings, come into existence through chance occurrences?’ To be fair, this answer could also be called an assumption by those who have not accepted the authority of Bahá’u’lláh and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá to speak on this issue. This does not mean their pronouncements are null and void because they come from the domain of religion, independent of scientific investigation. To counter this objection, one only has to recall that Muhammad, speaking as a mouthpiece for God, indicated the heliocentric system of our solar system centuries before Copernicus did, which was proven later by Galileo.4 It is generally accepted that the universe has been, and still is, evolving since its inception from the Big Bang. We can conclude, therefore, that to enable evolution to run its course, it is logical that evolution must begin from something that exists, even if we have no definite proof of the origin of the universe. From then on, the unfoldment inherent in the evolutionary process proceeds. The implication here is that evolution cannot start from non-existence. So, an acorn is the seed starting point of evolution leading to a mature oak tree. The oak tree cannot evolve to be an oak tree if there is no acorn from which it can grow. Prior to the acorn seed, there must have been an oak tree from which acorns were produced and prior to that tree, there must have been innumerable oak trees and acorns for the continuation of oak trees. Yet we know that we cannot regress indefinitely with this process, as there was a time when no oak trees existed on the planet; indeed there was no planet Earth over five billion years ago in which oak trees could grow. Now we take a huge jump back in time, some 13.8 billion years, to the Big Bang, the point that many say 31
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the universe began, triggering the evolutionary process. From the acorn seed example, the Big Bang, analogously, is the seed of the entire observable universe from which all the planets, stars and galaxies evolved. It is now logical to ask, where did the Big Bang come from? Did it just suddenly come from nothing or was there something in existence prior to it? Could it have come from something beyond our imagination or investigation at this time? But to categorically state it came from nothing is a trite answer; it is like saying that the oak tree that came from an acorn is nowhere apparent in the acorn seed because we have no way of observing it. Inherent in the Big Bang that seeded the universe, it is logical, therefore, to assume ‘something’ caused the Big Bang to happen! And then we regress further with this line of enquiry to ask, what was before this ‘something’ and then what was before that – and so on ad infinitum. Eventually we are forced, by reasoning, to admit that which is stated above – evolution cannot start from non-existence – there must be something in existence from which evolution can proceed. On this point ‘Abdu’l-Bahá states: ‘the world of existence, this endless universe – has no beginning,’ and that ‘absolute non-existence lacks the capacity to attain to existence. If the universe were pure nothingness, existence could not have been realized.’5 Also, Bahá’u’lláh writes about this process, stating that there is ‘a beginning that hath no beginning’ and inevitably proceeds to ‘the end that hath no end.’6 In other words, the universe is ‘eternal’. These are very abstruse points to get a handle on. Even though it cannot be proven, as yet, by scientific processes, our rational faculties may come to rest on the fact that there has never been a time when there was nothing in existence. There has always been ‘something’, even if we have not known what that ‘something’ is. Similarly, there will never be a time when existence degenerates into non-existence – when nothing whatever exists. Within the state of existing, however, we know that things 32
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