Just who is Ron Patterson, what are his credentials, and why does he think he knows what this world is all about?

What are my credentials? I don’t have any. Don’t get me wrong, I have the most tremendous respect for academia. If I could put the letters PhD after my name, my feet would not touch the floor when I walked. But I cannot. I was born in 1938 in a three-room tenant shack, the son of a poor dirt farming sharecropper, while we were still in the throes of a depression. A high school diploma was all I could muster at the time. But I was still damn proud of it.

Nevertheless, I have continued my education every year for 68 years since my high school days. I have studied philosophy, psychology, and the natural sciences, such as geology and physics. I love reading explainers like Isaac Asimov’s astronomy and physics, and Richard Dawkins and Matt Ridley’s biology. I find great joy in reading the explanation of how the world works. But the greater joy is finding disagreements between great men of science and deciding whose argument I find most persuasive.

Perhaps the most significant debate in science today is between philosophical materialism and idealism or dualism. Philosophical materialism, or as some call it, naturalism, is the concept that nothing exists except the material world. There is no god or any supernatural entity, and no type of ESP or psychic phenomena can exist.

While almost none of the giants of quantum mechanics were materialists, nearly all alive today are materialists. Max Planck, Erwin Schrodinger, Paul Dirac, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, and Albert Einstein were not materialists. Yet today, only Paul Davies and a few others are not materialists, while some are kind of on the fence, like Sabine Hossenfelder and Roger Penrose. What happened?

What happened was the twentieth-century decline in spiritual belief among academia. More educated people became aware that the stories recorded in the Bible were pure mythology. Or to put it bluntly, they realized that they were pure bullshit. For many in academia, when they realized that the God of the Bible was a myth, they became atheists. Of course, that is faulty logic, a non-sequitur. The fact that the premise, the god of the Bible, is a myth, does not support the conclusion that no god exists. Nevertheless, from their conclusion that no god exists, they drew the belief that nothing of a spiritual nature exists. No ESP, no psychic phenomena of any kind. Nothing but cold, hard matter.

Of course, the former giants of quantum mechanics knew this. None of them was deeply religious, and most disbelieved in any personal god. But they all realized that since the god Yahweh was a myth, it disproved nothing about the possible existence of any other kind of nonmaterial existence.

To my way of thinking, this grand non-sequitur is so blatantly obvious that it is almost blinding. I have been a biblical atheist all my adult life. But I have always been aware of that “something else.” And to point out that “something else,” with this book and other writings, is what I have dedicated the last years of my life to.