This Is What Built the Mighty Castle of Materialism

Materialism is the belief that everything that exists is just matter or energy. Materialism denies the existence of things such as souls, spirits or any deity. Claiming that all life arose through purposeless accidental means, materialism is associated with belief systems such as Darwinism (the idea that all life descended from a common ancestor, through unguided natural processes), and also the idea that the human mind is merely a product of the brain, or the same thing as the brain or brain processes. 

Having taken root in many universities and colleges, materialism is rather like a mighty castle. But what built so mighty a castle? What is it some series of great discoveries that established such an ideological edifice? There never was any such series of discoveries. Darwinists can point to no experiment or observation which ever proved the idea of macroevolution, the claim that one species evolved into some drastically different species. Darwinists can point to no fossil discovery that ever showed the truth of Darwinist claims. When they try to do such a thing, the results they offer are meager. For example, the famous set of bones called the Lucy skeleton was a set of bone fragments scattered over many square meters, which were arbitrarily arranged as if they were parts of a single skeleton, even though we do not know whether they ever came from a single organism. There was never any clear story told by such fragments. 

A very big discovery was the discovery that DNA contains information specifying which amino acids make up particular proteins in the human body, using a simple system of representation called the genetic code. This discovery occurred in about the middle of the twentieth century. Materialists tried their hardest to portray discoveries about DNA as discoveries supporting Darwinism. Their claims along these lines were all centered on the idea that DNA was a blueprint specifying how to make an organism.  Around 1950 materialists started to tell us that evolution occurred because random mutations made changes in a blueprint for making organisms stored in DNA.  This was the central idea of what was called Neo-Darwinism  or "the Modern Synthesis."  

But it was all a great big lie. DNA has no specification for making an organism, and no specification for anatomy. DNA does not even specify how to make any of the more than 200 types of cells in the human body. DNA does not even specify how to make any of the organelles that are the building blocks of cells.  DNA also does not specify how to make the protein complexes that are the building blocks of organelles.  DNA merely specifies very low-level information such as which amino acids make up a particular protein. The chart below tells us the truth about this matter:

Far from being discoveries that backed up the claims of materialism, the biological discoveries of the mid-20th century and early 21st-century were actually discoveries that enormously defied the claims of materialism. It was discovered that humans have more than 20,000 types of protein molecules, with most of these types being types of very complex inventions requiring a special arrangement of hundreds of amino acid parts. The average protein molecule has more than 400 well-arranged amino parts, and requires more than half of this special arrangement to exist in order for the protein molecule to be functional. Protein molecules are very sensitive to small changes. You can read five quotes by scientists discussing this fragility of protein molecules in the section "The Fragility of Fine-Tuned Protein Molecules" in my post here.  For example, on page 123 of his work "The triple helix : gene, organism, and environment," evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin confessed this: "It seems clear that even the smallest change in the sequence of amino acids of proteins usually has a deleterious effect on the physiology and metabolism of organisms."  The existence of so-many very-hard-to-achieve types of molecular inventions in every body cast the greatest doubt on all claims of unguided biological origins.  

Moreover, no anatomy specification was found anywhere in DNA, leaving the origination of every mammal body as a great mystery that materialism had no answer for. DNA does not even specify how to make any type of cell. So how does a speck-sized zygote progress to become the vast organization of a human body? Materialists had no credible tale to tell to explain such a miracle of organization, and resorted to a lie to cover the shortfall: the lie that DNA is a body blueprint. 

In the years between 1950 and 2023, neuroscientists around the world eagerly tried to back up their claims that the brain is the source of the mind and the storage place of memory. They found no robust evidence to back up such claims. Despite developing microscopes vastly more powerful than those used to discover the genetic code around 1950, scientists were unable to find in brains any memories  that could be read by microscopic examination. There were no successful attempts to discover a neural basis for thinking, imagination, self-hood, memory formation, 50-year memory preservation and instant memory recall.  While learning more about the brain, scientists discovered extremely important neural shortfalls that tend to rule out claims that the brain is the source of the human mind.  Such shortfalls included the short lifespans of the protein molecules that make up synapses and neurons (two weeks or less),  the unreliable transmission of signals across chemical synapses (with a transmission likelihood of only 50% or less), multiple types of severe signal noise in the brain, and the complete lack of any addressing system or indexing system in the brain that could help to explain the wonder of instant human recall.  You can read about 11 such neural shortfalls in my post here. 

So there were no great discoveries that built the mighty castle of materialism.  But there was something else that was the main factor behind the rise of modern materialism: various forms of misleading speech and deception. The mighty castle of materialism was built from lies and deceit, built upon a host of misrepresentations and misleading equivocations and deceptions and word tricks, large and small. 

Below is a list of some of these misrepresentations and deceptions and word tricks that helped build the great academia castle of materialism:

• More than 160 years of using the misleading phrase "natural selection," which does not actually refer to any selection (selection is a word meaning a choice by a conscious agent). Darwin himself in a letter to Charles Lyell dated June 6, 1860 said, "I suppose  'natural selection' was a bad term ; but to change it now, I think, would make confusion worse confounded." Darwin wrote in 1869,  "In the literal sense of the word, no doubt, natural selection is a false term."
• The use of doubly-deceptive phrases such as "selection pressure," a reputed effect that does not actually involve either selection or pressure. 
• The very massive current occurrence of misleading university press releases, very often announcing new research and making claims about such research not matching anything shown by the research (with the press release claims very often not matching anything even claimed in the corresponding scientific paper). 
• The extensive use of deceptive brain scan visuals, which "lie with colors" by using misleading coloring effects in which very tiny brain activity differences are depicted in bright colors, leading people to think that particular regions of the brain "light up" and are much more active during certain cognitive activities, when in reality the difference is only about 1 part in 200 (the type of difference we might expect from random fluctuations, even if brains do not produce minds and do not store memories). 
• Ever-occurring misrepresentations in which it is claimed that brain scans (done through fMRI machines) are measuring brain activity, a claim that is not correct because such scans  merely tells us about blood flow in the brain, and do not measure an intensity of the chemical or electrical signals that are at the core of brain activity. 
• The massive repetition of enormous deceits about DNA, genomes and genes, with endless repeats of the strategically motivated false claim that DNA, genomes or genes contain a blueprint, recipe, program or specification for making a human body,  an idea that is untrue because  DNA, genomes and genes merely specify low-level chemical information such as which amino acids make up proteins, and do not specify any anatomy structures or even how to build any type of organ or cell. 
• Extremely misleading experimental studies that try to fool people into thinking that you can tell what a person was thinking or hearing or seeing by scanning his brain. The type of "smoke and mirrors" trick that typically goes on is that the study involves both brain scanning and also the use of AI system or databases or data backdoors, and the prediction of what the person was thinking, hearing or seeing usually is powered mainly by such things that are not the brain scans.  
• The use of enormously deceptive claims that there is no fundamental difference between the minds of humans and animals, or only quantitative differences.
• The frequent use of misleading language trying to make animals sound like they have minds rather like humans, and trying to make humans sound like beings who have minds like animals. 
• Misleading equivocations involving the word "evolution" that shift between four different definitions of evolution, switching between defining evolution as (1) mere gene pool variation; (2) macroevolution (dramatic anatomical transformations such as dinosaurs turning into birds); (3) common descent (the idea that all organisms are descendants of the same ancestor), or (4) the claim that all earthly organisms have natural accidental origins  (the factuality of the first definition being used to "prove" the correctness of the three vastly more presumptuous definitions, none of which involve things proven or observed). 
• Misleading equivocations involving the words "variant" and "variations" that switch around between mere assertions of variations in the size, weight and health of some organism to assertions that nature produces "variants" that involve dramatic new features (something not well-observed in the study of any generation of organisms).
• The frequent use of misleading cell diagrams that depict cells as being thousands of times simpler than they are. A Nature article says that "textbook depictions of the cell’s innards have changed little since 1896," and quotes a scientist saying, "Nothing is drawn the way the cell actually looks."
• Frequent misleading uses of the term "building blocks of life," which include both calling biologically irrelevant molecules not used by living things "building blocks of life" (as in this article), and also referring to amino acids as "building blocks of life" (a misleading term because building blocks do not have to be used in any particular sequence, but amino acids only make proteins when they are arranged in very special sequences as special as the letter sequences needed to make intelligible paragraphs). 
• Misleading claims that "trees of life" (speculative social constructs of analysts made after countless arbitrary analysis choices) are "yielded" or "produced" by genomes, things that do not naturally tell any story about a "tree of life."  
• Innumerable appeals to a "primordial soup" claimed to exist billions of years ago, one supposedly filled with the lowest building blocks of life, despite a lack of evidence that any such thing ever existed, and despite the failure to produce any such soup in any experiments realistically simulating the early Earth. 
• Frequent misleading uses of the phrase "body plan," in which a body plan is strangely defined as the mere rough shape of all organisms in the same phylum, despite the term suggesting something vastly different: a blueprint for how to build the whole structure of an organism. 
• The massive occurrence in scientific papers of inaccurate citations, claiming that some paper showed or supported some claim that it never showed or supported, typically made by scientists who never read the paper they are citing (a scientific paper estimated that only 20% of people citing a scientific paper actually read the paper they are citing). 
• Inaccurate descriptions of what was stated by people who were brain zapped to try to produce an out-of-body experience, in which the subjects hesitating and ambiguous responses (often in response to "leading" questions) are described as reports of an out-of-body experience, when such a report was not given by the subject. 
• The very frequent use of misleading analogies, such as comparing Darwinian evolution to a tinkerer (a tinkerer is a conscious agent willfully attempting to improve something by trial and error, and evolution is no such thing). 
• Misstatements about the complexity of protein molecules,  such as documented here and here and here,  such as when an author claims that a typical protein molecule involves only about 100 amino acids, when the median number of amino acids in a human protein molecule is about 431, exponentially harder to achieve than merely 100. 
• The frequent use of misleading language designed to "sweep under the rug" the vast levels of organization and purposeful molecular machinery in organisms, such as language describing humans as "bags of chemicals" or "star stuff." 
• Deceptive appeals to artificial selection (a purposeful guidance of breeding) to try to support claims about so-called "natural selection" (claimed to involve no purposeful agency).
• Frequent misleading uses of the term "early human" to describe long-extinct organisms without any evidence to show that such organisms had any of the defining characteristics of humans (such as language and the ability to use symbols). 
• Frequent claims that certain parts of the human body are "vestigial structures" with no current use, despite evidence that such structures do actually have a function. 
• Frequent profoundly misleading claims or insinuations that the origination of life from non-life merely requires "the right ingredients," as if you could get life from non-life by just dumping in some ingredients like someone making a soup. 
• Equally misleading claims (ignoring the state of vast organization required for even the simplest living thing) that there could have been some lightning bolt "spark that started life on Earth." 
• Extremely misleading statements that Darwinian evolution is not random, evoking some special, uncommon definition of the word "random" different from the normal definition of that term: "happening, done, or chosen by chance rather than according to a plan."
• Extremely misleading language in which non-biological reactions in lifeless chemicals are referred to as "metabolism" (contrary to the definition of metabolism, which is chemical reactions required for the maintenance of living thing), used for the sake of deceptively blurring the difference between life and lifeless chemicals.
• Many decades of extremely misleading claims of universal acceptance or near-universal acceptance of Darwinist dogma or other materialist dogmas, claims not well-established by secret ballot opinion polls (the only reliable way to measure the opinion of scientists), and contrary to the published opinions of experts rejecting such dogmas. 
• Extremely misleading claims in which mere gene pool fluctuations are referred to as evolution. A biologist complains about such deceits on the page here, noting that it is often claimed that bacteria are "evolving very quickly," and saying emphatically that "this is not true" because "for millions, or even billions of years, bacteria have not transgressed the structural frame within which they have always fluctuated, and still do."
• Misleading claims that when scientists say something is a theory, it means it is well-established (a claim that can be refuted by many examples, such as the common example of the term "string theory" to describe a completely unsubstantiated type of physicist speculation).
• Very frequent misleading characterizations of Darwinism nonbelievers, often involving attempts to insinuate people making no reference to scriptures are fundamentalists.
• Deceptive papers in which purely software implementations are passed off as things that help to explain human memory, by means of outrageous language abuses in which sections or layers of software code are improperly given anatomical names corresponding to parts of the human brain, and in which tricky equivocation occurs involving mixing up the human definition of memory (involving mental experiences) and the computer definition of memory (not involving mental experiences). 
• Deceptive claims about chance protein evolution, such as the assertion by one authority that if you have "trillions" of random protein molecules you can get "any function you want" (because the average amino acid length of a human protein is more than 400 amino acids, and because there are 20 possible amino acids in each position of a protein, such a statement underestimated by about 10 to the 500th power the difficulty of getting by chance "any function you want"). 
• Misleading language about natural history, such as failing to describe enormous leaps of organization and complexity as very complex innovations, but merely describing them as "variants" or "diversification."
• Misleading language using the phrase "missing link," often referring to things that are not credible evolutionary missing links, such as claiming that a type of dinosaur is a missing link between dinosaurs and birds, because it has a triangular membrane on its front similar to a triangular membrane on the back of birds.
• Misleading claims that evolution might have occurred before life existed, claims evoking a special use of the word "evolution" very different from  normal definitions. 
• A very large number of misstatements and misrepresentations by psychiatrists, very carefully documented in Peter Gøtzsche’s "Critical Psychiatry Textbook" that can be read here, with the misstatements often occurring to try to bolster weakly supported or unfounded claims that various types of mental illness are caused by brain states rather than life histories or socioeconomic conditions or personal life conditions. 
• The massive current occurrence of both misleading titles in scientific papers and misleading claims in scientific paper abstracts, with paper titles very commonly making claims not matching anything established by the research in the main body of the paper, and abstracts also frequently claiming the research showed something it failed to show. 
• A massive repetition by Darwinists of a doubtful claim that human genomes and chimp genomes are 98% or 98.6% the same, ignoring a 2005 paper with the title "Eighty percent of proteins are different between humans and chimpanzees." A 2021 study found that "1.5% to 7% of the human genome is unique to Homo sapiens," suggesting the claim of 98% similarity was probably in error.
• Seventy years of false claims about the Miller-Urey experiment, wrongly suggesting the experiment (using the wrong gases to simulate the Earth's early atmosphere and involving a very special glass apparatus unlike anything that would have been available billions of years ago) did something to show that amino acids would have been common billions of years ago. 
• Innumerable misleading articles announcing an observation in space or a meteorite of some building block of a building block of a building block of one-celled life, and suggesting this supports ideas of abiogenesis (an unguided origin of life), while failing to tell us that the reported observation was some negligible amount such as a few parts in a billion.   
• Chicanery, shenanigans and misrepresentations involving fossils, often including gluing together (using a mixture such as superglue and baking soda) fossil fragments not known to be from one organism and claiming they are from a single organism, and often involving the display of entirely artificial "fossil exhibits" involving no real fossils, with such deceits massively displayed in natural history museums. 
• Visual misrepresentations of organisms, such as a visual attempting to persuade us that giraffes could have easily evolved from okapi, and depicting okapi as being half the height of giraffes (they are actually only about a third the height of giraffes). 
• Frequent appeals to an utterly erroneous principle that any fantastically improbable bonanza of luck can happen as long as there are millions of years of chance events. 
• Frequent appeals to a "many random trials equals some successes" principle that is not generally true (whenever the chance of something happening is sufficiently low, we should expect no successes, even if there are a near-infinite number of random trials). 
• Extremely misleading statements about the quality of evidence for spiritual and psychical phenomena that tend to contradict Darwinist explanations, typically made by people who have never seriously studied such evidence, often claiming very large bodies of solid evidence gathered over decades or centuries are "no evidence," combined with misleading stereotypical, mudslinging or gaslighting characterizations of the people who have reported such phenomena.
• Deceptive drawings of embryos such as used by Darwinist zealot Ernst Haeckel, to try to create some impression that a study of embryos supports Darwinist claims, and the use of such drawings in Darwinist literature to the present day, decades after they had been debunked.  
• The repetition for many decades of false claims by biologists that the developing human embryo passes through a fish-like stage, along with claims that this helps show that humans are descended from fish, the alleged resemblances being merely pareidolia "Jesus in my toast" types of claims.
• Many decades of erroneous claims about origin-of-life studies, which have not made any substantial progress in explaining an origin of life from non-life. 
• Doubly-misleading language in which experiments involving deliberate continuous artificial selection by humans and producing mere disorganized clumps of cells are referred to as examples of "multicellularity evolution," when they are neither multicellularity (examples of organisms with many cells) nor natural evolution.  
• Misleading language about the origin of life, such as referring to amino acids as "seeds of life," which is as misleading as saying bricks are the seeds of cathedrals. 
• Questionable research practices: a survey of evolutionary biologists and ecologists reported that "around 64% of surveyed researchers reported they had at least once failed to report results because they were not statistically significant (cherry picking); 42% had collected more data after inspecting whether results were statistically significant (a form of p hacking) and 51% had reported an unexpected finding as though it had been hypothesized from the start (HARKing)."
• The very frequent use by natural history museums of "fossil exhibits" that are entirely plastic, plaster or fiberglass, with countless visitors getting the idea that such things were real fossils (read here for details).
• The repetition by science writers (and sometimes by neuroscientists) of false claims that certain people who died silently had brain activity that can help explain near-death experiences, despite there being no evidence such persons were conscious, and despite evidence showing that the electrical activity in the brains of such persons disappeared at the same time their hearts stopped (contrary to such claims). 
• Periodically repeating articles trying to suggest that macroevolution (something we cannot observe in the current world) is still occurring, articles with titles such as "Why do animals keep evolving into crabs?" -- titles that are misleading because they refer to speculations about events claimed to have occurred many millions of years ago. 
• The evocation of enormously implausible tales such as the tale of monkeys rafting across the Atlantic oceans millions of years ago, with such wild tales described as facts. 
• Frequent evocation of an utterly fallacious principle which one Darwinist evoked by saying "let us suppose instead that each step made in the good direction provides a small advantage in terms of survival or fecundity to the being that makes it," a principle extremely erroneous because improvements in survival or fecundity (reproduction) almost always require many coordinated changes before any such advantage is achieved. 
• Very frequent misleading claims using the ambiguous and imprecise term "consensus," a term with multiple meanings (including unanimity of opinion or a mere majority opinion), with the claims misleadingly suggesting that scientists agree about matters such as whether Darwinism explains the complexity of the biosphere and matters such as a natural origins of humans and a brain cause of minds, even though there is no good evidence scientists agree about such matters, and some polls and some long "dissenter lists" suggesting they do not agree about such matters, along with very many candid confessions statements by scientists sounding like the statements someone would make if he had little or no confidence about such matters (see here for a very long set of such statements by scientists). 
• Decades of poor research practices in neuroscience, such as the use of way-too-small sample sizes of fewer than ten subjects, failure to follow blinding protocols, lack of pre-registration, and the use of an unreliable "see-whatever-you-want-to-see" method for trying to measure animal recollection ("freezing behavior" estimation) rather than the reliable measurement techniques discussed here.  
• Passing off deliberately faked fossils as important evidence of evolution (such as the fraudulent Piltdown Man fossil which for forty years was hailed as a fossil of key significance). 
• The use for many decades of the misleading term "organic molecules," using a terminology in which any and all molecules containing carbon are called "organic," even when the molecules are not used by any living things (a habit that has fueled innumerable misleading science stories in which people are led to believe that the discovery of biologically irrelevant molecules have some biological significance).  
• The repetition by neuroscientists of utterly absurd claims that it takes hours for a human to form a long-lasting memory, claims that are contrary to every person's experience, which is that permanent memories can form instantly, with the claims being made because the people making such claims want us to believe that memories are formed through synapse strengthening known to take at least hours.  
• The frequent appearance of highly speculative "tree of evolution" charts not labeled as speculative, and wrongly suggesting some consensus opinion exists about some detailed evolutionary ancestry scenario for humans, with the great variation in the details of such charts showing that no such consensus exists.
• The frequent appearance of highly speculative "brain functional map" charts suggesting some knowledge that particular parts of the brain produce cognitive functions, suggestions that are unwarranted (see here for evidence against one of the standard elements of such charts). 
• The use of misleading opinion survey tactics to try to get people to believe that many more people believe in Darwinist ideas than the actual number of people who have such beliefs, tactics that include carefully worded poll questions asked about whether you believe that man has "evolved over time," with any yes answer being depicted as support for the Darwinist account of unguided human origins (even though you can believe humans have evolved without believing in such an account), and also misleading poll result summaries in which people merely saying that they somewhat agree with some Darwinist claim being described as people who agree with that claim (with no mention being made of the use of "somewhat" in their poll answer). 
• The extremely severe lie by materialists that a split-brain operation (severing the nerve fibers connecting the two hemispheres of the brain) results in two separate human minds, contrary to the facts that no such thing occurs, and that such an operation leaves people with a single self.   
• The use in neuroscience experiments of tortuous extremely convoluted analysis pathways in which brain scan data or biological data is passed through a series of programming iterations, often involving poorly documented gobbledygook code that no one but the original programmer could have ever understood, with the effect of the rigmarole iterations being some "black box" manipulation that not even the original programmer can now understand, and the resulting mess (perhaps having some desired pattern) being passed off as some enhancement of the original data, even though there is every season to suspect the result is a corruption, distortion or contortion of the original data. 

If you strip away all the digressions and distractions and deceptions and diversions and misdirection and paper-padding and "covering of tracks" through obfuscation and thick jargon, and if you look carefully at the core ideas behind today's materialism, you will find that these ideas are very slight ideas with the intellectual weight of fortune-cookie slogans, ideas such as "lucky changes can happen, and luck can accumulate." These core ideas of materialism are contradicted by various mountains of evidence, such as the evidence for extremely precise fine-tuning in the laws and fundamental constants of physics and very precise fine-tuning in the expansion rate of the early universe, the evidence for very precise fine-tuning in thousands of types of marvels-of-engineering molecular machines within the bodies of organisms, the evidence for undisputed commonplace mental phenomena that cannot be credibly explained by brain activity,  and the mountainous evidence for paranormal psychical phenomena gathered for nearly two hundred years, often by very distinguished and credible researchers. How was it that the core ideas of materialism (so very slight and so massively contradicted by so much evidence)  were ever able to rise to the top in academia? Long story short, it was because for many decades materialists lied like crazy all over the place and practiced dozens of types of deceits large and small.