Dedication I’d like to thank Sabine Tyrvainen for her tremendous support and countless suggestions which have made such an improvement. CONTENTS Cover Dedication 1 The Ant and the Ferrari 2 Your Most Precious Girl 3 Tools for the Journey 4 The MythBusters’ Origin of the Universe 5 It’s Only a Theory 6 The Secret Code 7 The Compass of Truth 8 Is There Absolute Truth? 9 Genesis Revisited 10 A Moment’s Reflection 11 Something Spooky is Going On 12 The Psychology of Belief 13 Evolution: A CSI Crime Scene Investigation 14 What Caused it All? 15 Quantum Mechanics 16 Is There Life After Death? 17 It’s All Too Brief 18 Purpose and Meaning 19 Ethics 20 Society 21 A Personal Challenge to You Copyright CHAPTER 1 THE ANT AND THE FERRARI I want you to imagine a really close-up shot of an ant walking on a shiny red surface. Because the zoom is so tight the ant’s tiny body fills your entire view. At this range you can even see its minute antennae waving around. You notice its six little legs struggling for grip because the red surface on which it walks is so highly polished. Now allow the view in your mind to slowly zoom out. As the image widens notice how the ant becomes smaller and smaller while the vast red surface on which it’s walking begins to fill your vision. Before long the ant is just a black dot on a desert of shiny red emptiness — stretching without end. On this scale the ant has become insignificant. And as you let your field of view widen even further you notice the shiny flat surface actually starts to curve. It begins to form a shape you recognize — the hood of a Ferrari. This image reminds us there are many things the ant will never understand no matter how hard it tries. Its view of the world is so limited it has no idea what lies beneath the bonnet or even that there is a world existing under the hood at all. Its senses simply aren’t powerful enough to see the overall picture. But even if we could somehow show the ant all the complex electronics and hydraulics hidden under its feet, it would never understand how they work because an insect’s brain is just too small to comprehend all that information. It’s obvious from this story the ant understands only a tiny fraction of the Universe and how it works. But are our brains equally limited? Maybe we’ll never know more than 1 per cent of how the Universe works either. After all, it would be a surprising coincidence if our brains were exactly the right size to understand everything, particularly when it’s clear every other animal only knows a fraction of what’s going on around it. Maybe we are also just like ants crawling across the bonnet of the Universe — blissfully unaware of how the vast majority of the Universe really works and missing out on the most interesting aspects of our short lives. This book is partly about ‘lifting the hood’ to reveal all the interesting things normally hidden underneath so you can have a richer and more fulfilling life. Instead of just being carried along for the ‘ride’ you’ll be able to understand the ‘how’ and the ‘why’ of the journey. More importantly, this book is about Truth — about what is actually under the hood rather than what our common sense tells us to believe is under there. For we’ll soon find out our common sense and unaided logic are little more effective than the ant’s vision. Instead, we’ll need some metaphysical tools to help us see further and in more detail. Doing so will allow us to discover the purpose and meaning of life. Now if you’re like the thousands of people I’ve spoken to over the years, you’ll probably raise some objections as soon as I mention the word ‘Truth’. The most common objections usually go along the following lines: There’s no such thing as ‘absolute’ Truth. All Truth is relative. What’s true for you isn’t necessarily true for me. What anyone calls Truth is just a human approximation to Reality. Science is just another ‘belief system’ and is no more valid than any other belief system. What makes you think you’ve got a more valid or special way of finding Truth than I have? The only way we can know Absolute Truth is by revelation from a higher being. Humans are just too limited to ever discover Absolute Truth by themselves. There are many paths to Truth and it is arrogant to think anyone can say which way is better. I’m not sure if any of those ideas had any resonance with you, but they’re all extremely serious issues and so we’ll treat each of them with the respect they deserve. As we do, we’ll use them to answer some of the biggest questions that have puzzled mankind since the beginning of time: What is the origin of the Universe? Was a creator involved or can the Big Bang explain everything? Is there life after death? Can we ever know? How should we organize society and what are our greatest political and economic threats to peace and happiness? Has capitalism had its day? If every event has a cause then what caused God or the Big Bang? Can you really have ‘free will’ and a ‘destiny’ at the same time? Is Evolution really able to produce something as complex as a human or is there still something missing? Is there any basis for ethics or is it everyone for themselves? PLAY LIFE BY THE WRONG RULES The reason why these questions are so important is because our beliefs influence every aspect of our life. If our beliefs don’t match Reality, it would be like playing the game of life by the wrong rules. For sure you’d be upset if you were playing blackjack and had bet your entire life savings on what you thought was a winning hand, only for the casino owner to tell you he’d ‘changed the rules’ and now 18 was a winning hand instead of 21. It’s the same with life. If our beliefs don’t match Reality — whatever ‘Reality’ is — we’re likely to end up with a losing hand. Unfortunately, we often acquire our beliefs when we are young and least equipped to audit their validity. But once inside us, even demonstrably false beliefs are remarkably immune to contrary evidence because of the way our brains work. As we’ll see in Chapter 12, The Psychology of Belief, our beliefs distort Reality so that any conflicting information is twisted to match our beliefs and keep them intact. It’s as if we wear ‘blue mental glasses’ for ‘blue beliefs’ and ‘red mental glasses’ for ‘red beliefs’. That’s part of the reason why our own beliefs always seem so sensible to us while everyone else’s seem so silly. As I mentioned before, one of the purposes of this book is to develop tools which will allow us to take off our tinted glasses and see things unhindered by our human limitations. ‘The door of the prejudiced mind opens outward so that the only result of the pressure of facts upon it is to close it more tightly.’ — Ogden Nash A PERSONAL CHALLENGE By now you might be getting a little sceptical as to whether this book can actually live up to its promise. After all, bookstores are packed with books claiming to make you thinner, richer, happier, wealthier and lead you to the path of true enlightenment and most of them don’t live up to their wild claims. Why should this book be any different? The best answer I can give is that after finishing the first draft of this book, I sent out what I called my ‘Editor’s Draft’ to as wide a range of people around the world as I could find. I wanted to get feedback from surfer hippies, Buddhist monks, mums looking after children, scientists, business people, the unemployed, philosophers, writers, teenagers and people who wouldn’t even normally read this type of book. The only thing I asked in return was that they filled out an anonymous survey on what they liked and didn’t like so I could improve the book. To make it easy for everyone, I set up a private little website where they could leave their comments about any aspect of the book. That way they could be totally open and as critical as they liked because I’d never know who’d written each comment. Of course there were a number of surprises as to what was popular and what wasn’t, but one thing stood out that I wasn’t expecting. Every single person who read the book — 100 per cent of readers — said this book had changed some aspect of their ‘belief’ or made them think about something in a different way. Whether it was about Religion, Science, Ethics, Beauty, Politics, Art, Philosophy or how we structure and order the society we live in, something changed in their mind. Maybe I was just lucky with the people who received my book. ‘One of the most important things a person can do in their life is to take in new information and change the way they think.’ — Anon I sincerely hope you will have a similar experience and find ideas in this book which challenge you to view things in a different way. Having said that, I don’t want to sound arrogant and I certainly don’t claim to have ‘all the answers’. I simply want to ask the ‘right questions’ and hopefully provide some reliable ‘tools’ you can trust. Tools you can use to test your own beliefs in ways you might not have previously done. And that seems to be the key. In everyday life the correct tools allow us to do far more than we can in our natural unaided state. A shovel allows us to move dirt more efficiently than we can with our bare hands and a telescope allows us to see further than with our naked eye. In the same way, I hope the tools in this book will open up new vistas and allow you to enjoy a richer, wider view of life. ‘What I see in Nature is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of humility. This is a genuinely religious feeling that has nothing to do with mysticism.’ — Albert Einstein CHAPTER 2 YOUR MOST PRECIOUS GIRL Before we get started, I’d like to give an even stronger reason why I think our ‘beliefs’ are the most important things in life. To do this, I want you to think of the one young girl who is more precious to you than any other girl in the world. If you have a daughter, it will obviously be her, but if not she could be someone close, like a niece or a friend’s child. Ideally, she’ll be aged around seven years old, but she could be a few years either side of that. If you don’t know anyone who is this age at the moment, go back in time and think of someone from your past. It doesn’t matter who this girl is as long as you care deeply about her. So please, take a moment to select your girl and then bring her personality and image vividly to life in your mind. Doing this will be crucial if the next paragraph is to be more than mere words printed on a page. Now I want you to imagine you and your special girl are alone in a quiet park. She’s climbing up and down on a jungle gym on the far side of the park while you sit watching her from a distance on a bench in a cool, shady corner. You hear her excited squeals of joy as she conquers one challenge after another and you see the obvious delight on her face. It’s a lovely summer’s day and the sweet scent of freshly mown grass reminds you of your own childhood all those years ago. So you close your eyes and before long you’re back in those innocent days of your youth when there was nothing to worry about. A wonderful warm, peaceful feeling sweeps over you.