Reviews, Paradigms & Beliefs

Four Core Paradigms and Nine Key Books for Understanding, Awareness, and Achieving Inter Group Peace

December 9, 2021

We have reached the point where we actually can build a paradigm about pretty much everything that gives us a context to explain and categorize just about everything that exists.

Pure religions have been able to do that in their own ways for a very long time — but this new package of explanations is anchored in — and directly supported by — our science.

We have now had a magnificent explosion of scientific learning that lets us see physics, biology, human existence, and now metaphysics as a package and as what now seems to be clearly and intentionally a gift.

We can now explain and we can understand just about everything in the context of four core, key and macro overarching paradigms that work together in ways that we did not even suspect to be possible until very recently.

The beautiful and amazing synchronous flights of thousands of birds have amazed and delighted us forever, but we always thought that those beautiful interactions happened for purely biological reasons in their own context and in their own developmental trajectory, and we had no clue about the synchronous consciousness of all living things that we now get and see from Quantum physics.

Quantum physics gives us science about the role of consciousness even into the behavior of quarks and into our learning processes — and we have a growing sense that time functions on multiple dimensions that include relativity and synchronous linkages in addition to pure sequential chronology — and that all makes some sense if we stand back and see it as a package that interacts with itself in discernable and not discernable ways.

Physics, Biology, Sociobiology, and Metaphysics — as a package — can pretty much create a context and a framework for everything. And that set of insights is reinforced in exploding and absolutely enlightening ways by our science.

This is almost a new development as a package and process. Every area of science is giving us new insights, new tools, and new ways of interacting with both life itself and with the physical components of our universe and world.

We have great new information in a wide range of areas and we are blessed with powerful new science that can help us understand and use each of those four paradigms for our lives.

We have an explosion of new, enhanced, irrefutably credible, brilliant, clearly legitimate and foundationally solid and valid science that anchors, grounds, explains, defines, quantifies, delineates, explicates, contextualizes and basically validates and affirms our evolving sense of reality and of the universe we live in that creates the actual functional context for our existence in the newly understood interwoven context of those four paradigms.

Science has turned out to be massively useful for that validation and understanding process.

We now have a much better scientific and functional understanding of the key component parts of the universe that we live in and of our role, function, and status as conscious and aware human beings in that universe.

Science is our friend at several levels.

We are in a golden age for scientific learning that gives us an extremely useful opportunity at this moment in time to build strong working belief systems and functional paradigms about the key component parts of that universe and about our own role and behaviors and beliefs in that universe.

We are just now reaching the historic point in our growth of knowledge where it is possible, very useful, intellectually legitimate and scientifically credible for us to believe and understand that we actually exist in the context of four macro paradigms that combine and interact to functionally contain and explain the working context for basically everything as an overall package of creation.

Current science-based paradigms on those four topics are key to that understanding and to helping us figure out what to do now from where we are now in all of those areas of existence.

Paradigms are extremely useful at multiple levels in our lives much of the time, and they are particularly invaluable now for understanding the context we live in and for perceiving and utilizing the context we have for our lives and for our world.

Paradigms, at their finest, give us a construct to interpret information, understand processes, make decisions, and take actions in ways that the paradigms help guide us to think about and to understand in whatever the paradigm topic functionally is.

Paradigms are lenses into key areas of our existence. Our brains are both genetically and epigenetically wired to build and use paradigms to construct and channel our beliefs and our thoughts. We generally build paradigms well when we have enough information to construct them, test them, and then use them to interpret information in the area that they function to explain and define.

We generally build them well when we have enough information and knowledge to bring them into being, and we have reached that point now in each of those areas.

For existence, itself, it now is useful, intellectually legitimate and functionally accurate to think that we can group everything into those four macro paradigms that actually include and encompass every key area that we need to understand and that work together as a package of paradigms to help us understand the world we live in and what to do about it.

We have good and growing evidence for each paradigmatic train of thought and belief.

All four of the macro paradigms lend themselves to rich veins of scientific research, analysis, and thought, and all four are currently in an explosion of scientific and functional learning about their contents and their composition.

Four Key Paradigms — Physics, Life, Us, and God

There are obviously other ways of thinking about our existence, but that set of paradigms gives us a working model that deserves consideration because it seems to work.

Those paradigms pass the two key tests of paradigms.

Test 1: Does it explain why something is happening.?

Test 2: Does it predict what will happen in the future in the area that the paradigm describes?

Those four paradigms pass both tests.

Paradigm 1 for everything is physics.

Paradigm 2 for everything is biology and life.

Paradigm 3 for everything is Us — people — and our role as conscious and self-aware beings who are functioning in the context of the first two paradigms.

Paradigm 4 for everything is metaphysics and it includes creation, itself.

Metaphysics includes cosmology, faith, religious experiences, religious beliefs, religions, and the actual underlying non-physical causation and guidance factors that exist for both life and the physical universe.

That paradigm includes the causation and the reason for our own existence as conscious beings with free will who are functioning in the context of it all in the overarching context of the first three paradigms.

All four paradigms are currently benefiting hugely from our growing levels of understanding and our expanding and continuously improving science in each of those areas. We know far more about the world than we have ever known in each of those areas and what we now know in every field very much reinforces the four-paradigm construct for existence.

Paradigm 1 Is Physics and Quantum Physics

We are clearly in a golden age for physics.

Paradigm 1 as a pure science is learning about itself in powerful, self-reinforcing and expanding ways.

We are in the midst of a huge explosion in learning about physics and the world we live in. Pure classical physics has been replaced by relativity theories and then by significantly enhanced quantum physics, and we now have a rich vein of learning in quantum physics that is hugely supported by brilliant reinforcing, delineating, illuminating and functionally enabling mathematics that has now given us lasers, computers, nuclear energy, nuclear weaponry and an entirely new sense of what it means to be a particle or a wave as key elements of construction for everything around us and for us, ourselves, in the process.

Quantum physicists are doing magnificent and brilliant work — and we can clump all of their learning into the current version of Paradigm 1 and know that we collectively are benefiting from that learning and know that they are steering us down the right directions for us to benefit at multiple additional levels from what they now know and are continuing to learn.

Quantum physics is giving us an expanding universe of quantum formulas that have been amazingly perfect so far in predicting and guiding our science, mathematics, and our most basic functional interactions with the world that we are part of.

Our repeatedly verified and growing levels of insights into the role of consciousness into several key elements of quantum mechanics is extremely reinforcing for seeing and understanding all four paradigms as a package and not as separate trains of thought or as independent processes and realities.

Our growing awareness and understanding of synchronicity and of multiple dimensions built in to Paradigm 1 is also giving us much broader senses of both time and connectivity in the surface world that we live in and are part of.

Paradigm 2 is Biology and Life

Paradigm 2 for everything is biology and life.

Our science about biology and life is also currently exploding at a rate that matches and even exceeds what we are learning about quantum physics. We are entering into new levels of composite and detailed learning about life processes that could actually be legitimately be labeled as ‘quantum biology.’

Life, itself, is an intentional code.

Intentional design elements of core and key processes of life are increasingly obvious and they are useful to us in a growing number of functional ways.

Codes are extremely important to that paradigm.

Codes are absolutely key to life.

We can now see how multiple codes, coded processes, and intentionally inter related and interacting obviously intentionally coded processes structure our lives and life itself in ways that have the codes interacting with each other in amazingly complex, obviously intentional and undeniably effective ways that we did not see or even suspect until our recent science and our new computer building skill sets taught us about those coding tools and pointed us in those directions.

This definitely is an almost perfect time for learning for us in biological science.

We can now actually see and understand what the clearly functional biological programs and codes and interacting processes are for the first time in our existence because we actually now have various levels of absolutely intentional codes and we use them all in our computers and in our other physical productions and interactions.

We now have the ability and the context to understand life processes and basic and key life tools in ways that were literally not possible for Darwin and for the subsequent and current generations of academic believers in the prior classical levels of pure Darwinian evolutionary theory who did not have the context of computers to learn from to ground their thinking and beliefs.

The original classic Theory of Evolution had some clear genius and it had some deficiencies — and we now can enhance and repair some of the conceptual deficiencies with our growing and far more detailed understanding of how those actual tools and processes very explicitly structure and guide life.

We clearly need a blend of the old evolution beliefs with the new science at this point in time to take full advantage of that tool kit and to understand it more clearly.

We need the Theory of Evolution to evolve.

Some parts of the old Theory of Evolution will survive. Processes that clearly have situationally and circumstantially evolutionary interactions and outcomes clearly happen all the time in the context of that core coding for some areas of life. We can understand that entire process much more clearly now because we now know and understand that we have explicit and intentional coding for both current and potential processes built into DNA and RNA that enable that kind of evolution to happen and we actually have progressed in our science to the almost amazing point where we can now both read and manipulate those codes.

We actually could choose to evolve as humans in some interesting ways at this point in our history using the new CRISPR gene coding and editing tool kit that was not part of Darwin’s paradigm of life or even suspected by him in his thinking and his own extremely useful research into the development and preservation of species on this planet.

Those tools that enable, structure and maintain life clearly are intentional at multiple levels.

We do know now with a reasonable level of certitude that those explicit tools that do the work of situational evolution were not themselves serendipitously built by circumstantial reproduction relative success levels or by the random mutation tools and the actual reproduction-based selection processes that anchor and define classic Darwinism.

We are reaching the point now where our academic community is coming to know and understand that those tools, processes and linked channels of development, and of biological interactions could not possibly have been constructed through any classically Darwinian combination of purely serendipitous species modification processes that were each triggered entirely by random mutations and then chosen and selected for survival in each species for each feature only by their relative reproductive fitness and by their own direct and individual propagation level success.

Classic Darwinian evolution processes that takes thousands of generations to make each change could not possibly have functioned to create and serendipitously design the 25 million enzymes that we now identify in our human DNA.

Processes that were entirely mysterious and extremely hypothetical to our scientists are now visible and identified, and we are reaching the point where we can both identify and define our DNA and change it.

We now know the particular actual tools that are used in functional Evolution so well that the vaccine we just built for the Covid epidemic actually looked directly at the coding instruction kits already built into our RNA and the new vaccine instructed our bodies to respond using targeted pieces of our own messenger RNA to build the antibodies and to create the defenses that old vaccines would have built by giving people a mild case of the disease and then having the programming built into our RNA, building a response to resist and deal with that infection.

Our growing understanding of the processes, pathways, and potentials of epigenetics has also allowed us to learn more about the potentials we have built into the process by DNA to the point that we are on the verge of a golden age of life sciences learning — and that expanded learning will give us tools that we can use to give ourselves and our children and our grandchildren better lives.

All of that science is now very rapidly being built into Paradigm 2 about biology and life and we need to be responsible stewards of that information, because it can be used to provide benefits and it can also be used in dangerous ways that could damage us at multiple levels for a very long time if people choose to use that information and those tools in evil ways.

Paradigm 3 Is People

We are paradigm 3.

Paradigm 3 for Everything That Exists deals directly with Us and that level of thoughts and understanding about that major, important and core component of existence now needs to learn extremely important things about us.

We have been given Gifts from God in our growing science and knowledge about both physics and biology, and we are also at a point where we have a growing body of knowledge about us, ourselves.

We know patterns in quantum physics and in quantum biology — and if we are going to both succeed and survive as people, we need to learn, understand, and manage the most important patterns in our lives that are creating the most relevant and important directions, actions, and interactions in our lives.

We humans are the third key paradigm of existence that we need to understand and deal with in enlightened and effective ways in order to optimize our success and even our individual and collective survival in the context of all four paradigms.

We are special.

In the midst of this vast, massive and immense universe, and nested on our own tiny, possibly fragile, and very special Eden-like planet, and knowing clearly that we are a very long way down the passage of the billions of years of linear time from the Big Bang moment that our science now believes started this time line and that simultaneously began the processes that have served both to build the physical parts of the universe and life itself in its various forms, we know that it is a very legitimate part of the overall existence paradigm for us to have our own paradigm as humans.

We need to recognize our own legitimate part of the overall package, and we need to include and recognize our remarkable, capable, and very unique and clearly conscious minds as a key part of that explicit paradigmatic package.

We actually have some clear reasons to believe that we are special.

We have intellects.

We seem to be alone and unique in the level of intellectual consciousness that we have.

Other living beings are also clearly conscious and do have emotions and reactions and responses of various kinds to their world — and some even have hierarchies and relationships and a number of clearly intentional and conscious strategies for interactions with each other, but we seem to be unique and alone in pure intellectual capacity and in actually understanding and doing mathematics and in doing creative things like music and art and both creating and appreciating beauty.

We are not just a lump of serendipitously energized, functionally interacting, situationally activated, complicated coal.

We think.

We have amazingly complex brains.

Our brains actually have about the number of neurons that we now believe exist in total as stars in the known universe.

Our brain has 100 billion neurons and those neurons are actually connected by a 100 trillion synapses.

Those are spectacular and amazing numbers — and their magnitude seems to be unique to us.

So — we definitely are not the same as everything else around us.

We need to think directly about what we are.

And about what we do.

We actually think.

We conceptualize.

We create things.

We understand things.

We have scientists of various kinds who are doing deeply important discovery and discernment work into biology, chemistry, energy, macro and micro productions of various processes, and who are doing that wide range of consciousness directed work with amazing competence in a wide range of sites and settings all over the planet.

We build amazing structures of learning and we build both intellectual interactions and schools of thought that extend over generations into areas like mathematics and both quantum and classical physics.

We instinctively build cultures in every setting and we have built cultures in science that have achieved amazing brilliance in understanding the world we live in.

We have learners everywhere in many settings and we obsessively love to learn and to share what we learn.

We have tools and concepts and growing levels of formulas in our quantum physics and in our DNA-related science of biology, and even in our quantum biology, that let us create interactions at multiple levels with the environment that we did not think possible a very short time ago.

We have a growing sense that quantum interactions between and inside of living things create functionalities like photosynthesis, mass migrations, and synchronized flight patterns for birds and swimming patterns for fish in packaged and linked ways — and it appears now that some of the quantum physics interactions with life may, if fact, make life possible at levels that we did not suspect until very recently.

Photosynthesis seems to have quantum components that allow it to happen.

Other living beings clearly are also conscious of the world around them. Even bacteria exhibit some conscious behaviors.

So we are not alone in being aware of ourselves and of our surroundings.

But —

We are completely and uniquely and wonderfully alone, in our intellectual interactions with the world.

We do seem to be the only element of creation that actually thinks deep thoughts.

We also seem to be unique in our ability to conceptualize about both Paradigm 1 and Paradigm 2.

Only people do math.

Mathematicians are often in love with the beauty of mathematics as they uncover it and as they discover it, and we can safely say that no one else does square roots.

We Build Weapons and Tools

We have the ability to make tools to help us interact with the world around us.

We also, unfortunately, can build weapons.

The cold hard and somewhat frightening truth is — and our basic programming gives us instinctive behaviors and behavior patterns that can cause us to do serious damage to each other and to feel entirely justified, even supported, for damaging other people in our world.

Physics and biology and people all have obvious patterns.

We have instincts to divide the world into Us and Them and to damage them. We tend to support and protect and reinforce whoever we believe is an Us in our lives — and we have the ability to damage, deceive, murder, ethnically cleanse, enslave, suppress, and oppress whoever we determine is a Them and to feel that is a legitimate thing to do.

We too often feel no guilt in damaging them.

That combination of instinctive negative sets of reactions to other people that too often feel very right to us can create a major danger to us with the new science we are building for both biology and physics.

We are increasingly at risk because our expanding science gives us the ability to build nuclear bombs and to build and use poisonous chemical weapons, and it now even gives us the ability to build an entirely new set of highly lethal CRISPR-based biological weapons that can have the ability and the potential to actually do major damage and to even destroy or permanently damage the human race if we channel several of those new powerful tools in those very wrong directions in very unfortunate ways.

Knowledge is power and the lack of self-knowledge can be very dangerous — and we tend to lack knowledge today about those patterns of behaviors that are wired so deeply into our thoughts, behaviors, and emotions at such deep levels.

We need to have an intellectual understanding of that entire package of instinctive emotions, beliefs, thought processes and behaviors, because we are reaching a point with our science where we can damage future generations in addition to hurting people here now and today.

We need to be sure that our Paradigm 3 role and function adds value and does not do irreparable harm to us or to the Eden we live in — and we are actually at the point where either outcome can happen if we do some wrong things right now.

Potentially channeling those extremely powerful and dangerous tools in both physics and biology in the wrong directions is sadly relevant to us right now as a current danger and as a real risk. because we also clearly have the kinds of programming as people for our interactions with the world and with each other that Far too often steer us into doing evil and damaging and destructive things to one another.

We unfortunately, actually too often, tend to feel very right and justified and emotionally legitimate in doing those damaging things to each other.

We have been known to commit genocide. Genocide is happening somewhere today.

We build weapons and we use them.

It’s hard to imagine a quark destroying another quark out of sheer spite — but we see humans doing extremely destructive, evil, and spiteful things to other humans all the time and we see people doing evil things feeling very justified in doing the evil that they do.

We Are All Saints and We Are All Sinners

We all have the programming to be saints and we all have the programming to be sinners, and we need to increase in our collective and individual self-awareness to the point where we actually choose to be saints and then use our magnificent biological and physical tools to give our children and our grandchildren great and safe futures and current lives and to function as saints for those settings and for that future in those settings.

We need to understand who we are and what we can do and then we need to make enlightened choices about our actual behaviors.

We have strong instinctive programming to be extremely tribal — and to feel pride and a sense of achievement when help our tribe and also to feel pride and justified at a core level when we damage the other tribe.

We also have very strong programming to be inclusive — and to provide our best support and our clear nurturing, beneficial, supportive, loving and direct protection to whomever we include at an instinctive level as Us in our world.

So, as a nation, we need to expand our sense of Us to expand our zone of safety, and we need to do that soon because our tribal instincts are being activated by too many people who have their own personal extremely seductive and neurologically rewarded alpha instincts activated and who do not want us to achieve Peace.

We need to be collective sociobiology experts at this stage of the learning process and we need to make enlightened decisions about our interactions with the world and with each other.

We Need to Rise Above Tribal Instincts

For Paradigm 3 — we need to rise above our worst activations of our tribal and divisive sets of instincts and we need to turn the entire package of inter group and inter personal instincts into a tool kit for enlightened behavior and Peace rather than having it steer us to tribal animosity, inter group conflict, inter group anger and then inter group destruction.

We have more than 130 very real ethnic and tribal wars going on in the world today. We also have tribal anger and instinct fueled inter group conflicts and anger happening to us in our own country right now in very real ways.

The people on each side of the conflicts in all of those areas in the world, including the people engaged in the growing levels of inter group conflicts here in our country, feel very justified in their emotions and their actions and in doing damage to one another with no guilt or adverse conscience impacts at any level for their harmful behavior.

We need the functional science of us dealing with us to be as strong as the science that we use now for building lasers and for producing RNA enabled vaccines and in creating new species of animals or plants or chemical compositions.

We need to know and understand that we are just as predictably patterned in our approaches to ourselves and to our world as quarks or seed corn are to their existence and to their trajectories.

We have territorial instincts, sexual instincts, maternal and paternal instincts, and levels of hierarchical instincts and we build cultures in every setting to help us achieve our instinctive goals. We have hierarchical instincts, so our cultures invent chiefs or captains or heads of some kind for every setting — and we tend to feel right both following our setting’s leader and in aspiring to be our settings leader.

We have strong instincts to be loyal to our group and to never be a traitor to our group.

Our instincts to divide the world into Us and Them and to have very different behaviors and values for Us and Them are hugely important to us because they are both a blessing and a curse, depending on how they are activated and who we include in each category.

“We are all Saints and we are all Sinners,” is a truth that actually quotes both the original Martin Luther, the reformer, and his more recent namesake Martin Luther King, Jr. That potential is in each of us to go down either path, and that means we each need to make the right choices for our lives because our future is sculpted by the paths we choose.

We need to expand our sense of Us in most settings — and that expanded sense of Us can steer us to completely different emotions, perceptions, and behaviors in those settings.

We can actually create the best communities, the best thought processes, and the most effective and intentional collective strategies for safety, prosperity and Peace if we clearly understand what our instincts are and if we know how to use them as tools in enlightened ways to create Peace and to achieve our goals.

So we need to steer Paradigm 3 in enlightened ways to the right sets of behaviors, perceptions, beliefs and emotional linkages — and we should be able to create inter group Peace at some level in almost every setting if we do that in effective ways that fit the needs of each setting.

The four InterGroup books described below explain some of those approaches.

Being Us is extremely situational — and we need to use that knowledge for good results in situational ways everywhere — and we should do it all keeping in mind that Paradigm 4 provides an overarching context for everything to exist and function.

Paradigm 4 is God

When we look at the four overarching paradigms of existence, it is absolutely clear that the first two paradigms did not spring spontaneously into existence. The codes and the elements and the quantum physics formulas are all clearly intentional, and only metaphysics can tell us why the things that are intentional actually happened.

That entire set of physics tools and biological tools are clearly a package. The birds flying in unison in vast flocks of birds clearly have quantum synchronicity in the mix to make that possible.

Our planet is a magnificent and beautiful Eden for human life to exist and thrive — and it exists in a fine-tuned universe in key ways. if the basic size of the protons were a micro measure different, the whole thing would have been impossible and it would have been not functional…

Great physicists like to have paragraphs in their books where they point out that the tiniest bit of difference in any of the formulas would have kept Earth from ever forming or being inhabited.

Life has built in tools.

Evolution has clearly happened in hugely aided DNA and RNA construction and coding process and linkages.

Organisms have the coded ability to interact with one another, and when a flower and the wing of a butterfly look identical, that clearly was supported by processes that were clearly built to support that kind of result.

So the first thing that we should recognize about Paradigm 4, our Metaphysics underpinning for the entire package, is that there is a Creator in the process and it seems obvious that the Creator loves beauty, enjoys math, and has a sense of humor.

What we don’t know is exactly which set of beliefs about the Creation process gives us the best and most useful way of thinking about the paradigm.

Who created everything?

So we need to look at that issue as we look at the entire package of existence. We need a metaphysics to supplement and explain the functionally physical physics.

Classical metaphysics generally includes cosmology, causation, belief system alignments, compositions and commitments, personal religious experiences and encounters, and both personal and collective levels of faith and comfort with the metaphysics of our lives. George Ellis wrote a great piece about the key issues and challenges of Cosmology that is worth reading.

The Creator, Creation itself, and The Creation Process are all part of the natural logical and conceptual anchors for Paradigm 4.

Paradigm 4 — at the core — is actually, structurally and functionally, God.

One of the truly interesting questions that we need to deal with is to figure out what we believe when we say and believe that God exists. We have a wealth of religions who all point towards what they each believe to be God.

Unfortunately, the religions don’t all agree and our very strong Paradigm 3 instinctive, tribal, and hierarchical behaviors tend to structure each of the religious organizations and settings. Instead of ending up with alignment on key issues and behaviors, we sometimes have people flying flags that they claim to represent their perception of God doing damage to other people in their settings and believing that they have Metaphysics on their side in those encounters.

We need our religions to lead us to Peace and not to stir up and reinforce conflict.

Some of our best scientists want that to happen.

The current explosion of science in biology, physics, computer science, and even cosmology has also given us the blessing of having some of the best thinkers in those fields writing books that lead us to both an understanding that that entire set of tools is a gift from God and a strong sense that we should be taking that belief to heart and using it to both guide our science and our ethics.

George Ellis wrote a couple of great books on physics, interlocking systems, and the cosmological underpinnings of creation that steer us in the right directions in several key areas.

He just did a new thought piece on Cosmological Issues of Creation that is worth reading. His Quaker alignments have made him an icon with the theologians in that group of Christian believers.

Nobel Prize winning physicist Frank Wilczek just wrote an exceptional book explaining Quantum Physics called Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality.

He breaks quantum physics down into its key parts in almost laypersons language. He said his goal was to have his smart friends to be able to understand that set of thoughts. He also believes that the entire process is a gift — and he is deeply grateful for the gift.

Francis Collins has been running the lead health team for our government ever since he chaired the Human Genome project a couple of decades ago. He is an Evangelical Christian who believes that God wants us to be at Peace with each other and with other believers.

He wrote a couple of excellent books in that context and his great book, The Language of God, is reviewed here.

Perry Marshall, computer engineer and internet guru wrote several pieces on the links between consciousness and the functioning of life — and his book Evolution 2.0 does an excellent job of explaining how wonderfully and brilliantly programed both DNA and RNA obviously are.

His book is also very much worth reading.

Theologian John J. Thatamanil looked at the classic fable of the Blind Men and the Elephant and applied it to religious thinking. Instead of concluding that the blind men who each perceived the elephant to be something very different and were all wrong because of that.

Dr. Thatamanil writes that it’s also possible that the blind men were all right. His book, Circling the Elephant makes that point and discusses the possibility that in the context of the Christian Trinity belief where Christians believe in The Father and The Son and The Holy Spirit — maybe the other religions of the world are somehow being guided by the Holy Spirit.

He wrote an interesting book.

Two additional authors who have linked quantum physics to a belief in God include Carlo Rovelli — iconic physicist quoted above in this piece — and Joseph Selbie — who wrote The Physics of God.

Selbie looks at the fact that quantum physics calls for additional dimensions and suggests that the additional dimensions might include an underlying, time free, linking and connecting fabric for everything.

Time becomes simultaneous with that model, and life after death possibly ends up in one of the quantum physics linked dimensions. Selbie takes quantum physics in interesting additional dimensions — anchored in the belief that God created the entire package.

The Dalai Lama wrote a book endorsing scientific study that also is worth reading for overall context.

All of those books end up believing in a Loving God who interacts with us in a context of us having free will and who wants us to do supportive and loving things for each other.

Both atheists and theists tend to believe in free will and tend to believe that we each need to make up or own mind about the direction we go with our lives.

The reality seems to be that we each have a level of choice about our own decisions and we each have the opportunity to reach our own understanding about the existence of God or the non-existence of God.

We don’t have that programming to believe in a theist universe wired into us. People who end up with religious beliefs tend to get there on their own from whatever context they are in.

People who have a sense that they want to have a religious belief often have a foundational underpinning from their childhood family linkage to a religious belief or a faith tradition.

Most people with religious beliefs have that underpinning for their beliefs from their earliest years — and it often tends to feel right to people to use the belief system of their family, group, or setting, because they know and understand it and because it can be very reinforcing to have other people in our life sharing our belief.

We increasingly have groups of people who have a vague sense of alignment with a benevolent force in the universe and a growing number of people in our country have a general New Age belief in a benevolent God without having a tie to a specific religion or organization.

There are a number of faith leaders who are charismatic leaders — often for conservative branches of Christianity or Muslim beliefs — who have very tight and defined beliefs and ideologies and who recruit people into faith alignments that sometimes have rigid expectations for what people should both believe and do.

A number of religious alignments have very tightly defined sets of beliefs about creation, itself, and the role of people in our communities.

This particular four Paradigm piece believes in the approach written by John Thatamanil in his book Circling the Elephant — and believes that there are multiple paths that all work to help channel people’s beliefs into functional and workable religious alignments.

Carlo Rovelli, the most poetic physicist, wrote an excellent book on quantum Physics called Helgoland that also writes about the fabric of Creation that is created in the context of Quantum Physics.

“In every eye, there is an extremely elaborate structure of cells connected to neurons that guide and enable them to live. Every cell is a city, every protein a castle of atoms, in each autonomic nucleus an inferno of quantum dynamics is stirring, quarks and gluon swirl, excitations of quantum fields. This is only a small wood on a small planet that revolves around a small star among 100 billion stars in one of hundreds of billions of galaxies constellating with dazzling comic events.”

The basis of chemistry is understandable in terms of physics, the basics of biochemistry in terms of chemistry, the basic of biology in terms of biochemistry, and so on.

‘The fractures are just gaps in our understanding.’

He summarizes that the paradigms of existence are a package — not separate streams of thought — and he combines poetry and physics to describe the package in ways that each of the other authors includes in their perception of the entire process.

Academic Centers Tend to Resist Deist and Theist Thoughts and Theories

Paradigm 4 is not included as part of the thought process and curriculum in many academic settings.

In fact, many members of our traditional academic communities in both biology and physics will not agree or even discuss any basic theory for their area of science that includes in it an underlying theory or even a supposition or possibility that God or any other religious factor had anything to do with their science or with their set of beliefs.

Many of our traditional academics, in this country and in much of the western world for most of this past century or so, have actually been in strong and open opposition to anyone in their academic fields who looked at either biology or physics and speculated, or postulated, or theorized or directly contended or who even suggested in any way that intentional external design had happened in any of those areas and that God had any part of that process.

In fact, any hint of what some academics in those areas often called Deism was opposed as a teaching subject and it was not allowed in any of the published academic papers created for most settings. One major academic leader recently announced that he was evolving from being an atheist to being an anti-theist because he felt that those deist thoughts were so extremely wrong that they should be actively opposed rather than simply ignored.

The actual issue of how everything began is generally addressed by those non-theist academic thought leaders in those fields of science by saying that it literally “just happened.”

“Just Happened” Is a Strongly Held Belief

“Just happened” is a strongly held belief and explicit conviction for a high percentage of people in both evolutionary biology and academic physics.

They believe in “natural events” that “just happened” for absolutely everything.

The usual approach is for the thinkers in those schools and settings to say that the universe spontaneously began because that was a natural thing for a universe to do — and some contend that life began in an equally spontaneous way because the world we live it just happens to have a set of relevant and useful chemical factors that made spontaneous combustion possible and they believe that the set of circumstances and factors that allowed life to continue once it had spontaneously sparked into being also “just happened.”

They definitely and explicitly believe and state that the RNA codes that reinforce our life processes in such useful and explicit ways also “just happened,” and they acknowledge how extremely fortunate for life itself it has been for those programs and those biological combinations to have come into existence.

Spontaneous existence and independent and spontaneous creation events with no external causality is the official and accepted belief system that exists in most American and Western world academic settings, and that belief tends to be clearly and strongly and even rigidly held in most of those settings.

In that context, Evolution in its classic and clearly explicated explicit theoretical model with all of its component parts functioning is officially considered to be a Science. As a science, — each of the processes that are involved and included in the official Darwinian Theory of Evolution have believers, supporters, and advocates who reject and define any modifications to the component parts and beliefs of that science to be academic and intellectual error, clear and significant intellectual shortcoming and deficiency, intellectual incompetence and even intellectual malfeasance and academic disrespect and heresy if people with other perspectives on those issues persist in their challenge to the theory in academic settings once they have been “corrected” by the experts in that setting about the appropriate theory and given the chance to get it right.

Charles Darwin is considered by a clear set of current intellectuals and by many fully embedded academics to have produced the definitive thinking and the ultimately definitive work on those issues, and his process and theory is clearly and completely accepted by many people as being scientifically true and scientifically accurate beyond contention or modification.

Darwin clearly was a brilliant man.

He actually wrote a magnificent piece of work. He had multiple brilliant insights. He was an excellent writer and he was an extremely competent compiler and gatherer of information and data. He has many very strong believers today and he deserves to be deeply respected for what he did.

However — we now know things that he did not know.

We need, somehow, to persuade those deeply committed believers in his purest functional and theoretical model to overcome their patterns and practice pf strongly rejecting any challenges to their beliefs at the direct belief affirmation level to add what we now know about life to his theory.

We need to build a new evolution paradigm — Evolution 2.0 — to give us all a solid intellectual sense of the actual evolution process that clearly exists and to let academic settings use those tools to give us a better future as a species and a planet.

Darwin Never Saw an Actual Genetic Code

We need clarity in academic circles about what to believe about several of those key processes of evolution now.

We need to understand what the key anchor concepts and the basic processes that achieve what we now perceive evolution to be actually should be and actually are.

We need to recognize that the generations of spontaneous mutations that are core components of the classic Darwinian theory did not actually drive the real evolutionary processes that created life as we know it today.

Spontaneity of change and spontaneity of all mutations is a key anchor concept and belief for classic Academic Darwinism theory at a couple of levels and we now can look at that theory and we can see that it just isn’t how things actually happen.

Classic Darwinians believe that life somehow started spontaneously in some setting with a completely serendipitous and spontaneous chemical spark that fortunately included the component parts necessary to replicate itself over time as life, and they believe that particular event has been successful and that process has continued to perpetuate that spark of life over the billions of years since it began, because the elements of that first spark serendipitously had the right component parts to make that all continue to happen.

Life is defined by many of our Darwinian-based life science scientists as being “functionally self-replicating” as a core piece of their definition of what it means to be alive, and that seems to continue to be an excellent way of looking at that definition now.

Pure Darwinists believe that first spark and all of the sparks that have happened since then have been open to periodic and completely spontaneous and totally random mutations — and they believe with great and explicit clarity and rigor that when any mutations happened in an organism, they potentially carried forward to the next generations of the organism and if they survived into another generation, they became an option for selection for the organisms.

Darwinians believe that the mutations that survived and that became on going components of the organism were the ones who each actually had successful reproductions that out produced and out reproduced the other variations and the other forms of that organism or species that did not have that mutation.

The belief and the core component of that explicit Theory of Evolution was that each random mutation that survived one generation and then functionally had the ability to out reproduce other versions of that organism that were less successful in reproducing themselves was literally the only Darwinian change agent that existed.

Survival was key.

Survival of the fittest or survival of the best producer and survival of the best reproducer were the only processes that Darwinian thinkers believed both created species and enhanced species.

The mutation process for classic Darwinists was never intentional, directed, designed or even scheduled, but the Darwinian believers feel that even though it often takes extremely long periods of time — potentially thousands of functional and linear generations of each species for each piece and for each component of a modification or change to prevail in that explicit selection process — that’s exactly how each and every change happened. There are no exceptions for strict Darwinists.

When people point out how many layers of mutations would have had to happen for that process to actually be how change happened for a species, the Darwinians always point out very accurately that life has existed for billions of years and they have said repeatedly with a high level of conviction that there has been is enough time available for thousands of generations of selection to happen with each change for each organism.

They also believe, as part of the theory package, that entire new species somehow spring into life on occasion through complex and fortuitous levels of purely serendipitous and absolutely coincidental changes from a prior species, and that the fact that literally thousands of generations were functionally needed for each subpoint of each change between the species to happen was not a reason to disbelieve the process or to suspect its validity as pure and perfect science, because the academics who support that belief strongly believe that time is almost infinite for even those kinds of complex multi factorial species level changes to happen.

The self-validating proof point for the Darwinists about the question of whether that time had been sufficient for each species change was that the change had clearly happened, and therefore there must have been enough time for the change to happen.

That particular part of the process support argument was a bit circular, but circular is sometimes intellectually acceptable if you believe absolutely that the basic paradigm is true.

When they looked at the reality and when they discussed the point that some of the changes in a species seemed to have some synchronization with changes in other species — as in having the color of a butterfly wing perfectly match the flower of a plant that they nested on, they pointed out that the fact that the thousands of generations for both organisms that were functionally needed for both the plant and the butterfly to make each of the micro changes in shape or color was not a good reason to believe or doubt that it had not happened in that explicit way because billions of years have been available and because the colors actually clearly matched in that setting, so those thousands of generations simply must have happened for both species in that setting in order for that to be true.

Time was the answer. Darwinism took time. Darwinists rely on time.

People with classic Darwinians beliefs with a deep faith in those beliefs said that the synchronicity effects of design elements between species that are sometimes so lovely and amazing were achieved piece by piece and step by step for each species for each piece of the process over long periods of time.

The lack of any transitional state examples or transitional state evidence for those processes or for those choices in most settings or the lack of examples of either other butterflies or other flowers who were in partial transition with colors that didn’t match quite as well as the perfect fit colors from the current winning species of both species in any setting has been dismissed by Classic Darwinian experts and advocates as being due to the fact that those less perfect versions of both species are now extinct and both do not exist today at any level because the transitional versions for each species were out reproduced by the winning pair in each combination and setting.

Pure functional logic makes that claim at least slightly challenging, because biology leaves footprints, and the footprints of transitional species for those kinds of choices are never found in those settings. The deep faith in time could be intellectually solid in an extremely hypothetical way, but it would be more functionally solid if there were any transitions that were visible for comparison purposes.

We are gaining a growing understanding of how powerful epigenetics are for shaping what we perceive to be evolution for most species.

We also have a growing sense of what the actual component parts of the process are.

Our own human DNA actually has 25 million enzyme components built into it — and we humans haven’t been around long enough as a species to have each of those 25 million enzymes go through at least a thousand generations of people to be established in its current form, and we clearly did not have a long enough history as people for each of those clearly discerned enzymes to spread, by any selection processes that we are aware of, to every human on the planet.

Human history would seem to make that particular Darwinian theory of evolution component and claim wrong and in need of evolution.

We now have great knowledge of our DNA and its component parts.

The full set of tools for our genetic heritage is also good and reinforcing evidence for the four-paradigm context for existence. Our genetic composition has elements of quantum physics, quantum biology, and structural intentionality for the actual world we live on and the planet we call home.

This particular planet is also good evidence for that belief system.

Our world and our planet are clearly extremely well positioned for life itself, and for human life as part of the process. If the laws of physics varied by fraction of a percent in any direction, our world would not exist and our life would not be possible.

Some people reject that obvious perfect fit of this lovely and sheltering world for us as a very good proof point for intentionality. Some extremely intelligent people who don’t want to believe in the perfect-fit planet evidence actually point to a theory in quantum physics that would allow for multiple universes to happen, and they say that anything can happen and anything can occur when there are a billion universes, so it is possible that our universe through sheer happenstance is simply the one among billions of patterns where all of those pieces and component parts just work out so well for us.

Believers in the multi universe model of quantum physics are probably intellectually credible in some perceptions of quantum physics and purely hypothetical probability in making that claim — but it’s interesting that some very intelligent and strongly committed anti deist people in some academic settings would rather literally invent a billion other universes rather than observe, note, and appreciate that this particular planet seems to be made very nicely for us.

String theory is taking us to interesting possibilities — and that’s not unreasonable to recognize and speculate about those possibilities — but it’s also not unreasonable for us to choose to notice, understand, agree, and appreciate that this particular Eden meets our needs very nicely and it’s a good and nice place for us to use our conscious brains to figure out quantum physics and quantum mathematics and quantum biology, and to note that the four-paradigm model of existence at least theoretically makes them all components of an interconnected and mutually reinforcing package that we can celebrate and understand.

We instinctively use paradigms to organize our thinking about almost everything in our lives. We instinctively use paradigms for a wide range of processes. Building paradigms is an instinctive behavior that serves us well in very consistent ways.

Paradigms sometimes limit what we see, however.

We do have a very strong ability when we believe in a paradigm to have the evidence of our surroundings at least seem to fit the belief — and we also have a very strong ability when we believe in a paradigm to discard any contradictory evidence as being extraneous and irrelevant to the belief.

We also have very strong anomaly screens and very effective anomaly rejection processes for our paradigms — and we can fairly easily and comfortably remove or ignore a data point from our consideration process by declaring it to be an anomaly and therefore functionally irrelevant. Our paradigms tend to have extremely strong anomaly screens for multiple levels of information and that’s actually a useful tool when it eliminates actual anomalies and keeps us from being distracted or misled.

We have that ability and the tendency in both our emotions and our belief systems to strongly support old paradigms, because old paradigms tend to exist because they have done their positive lifting in the past and we don’t want to screw up our future by changing a working paradigm that should not be changed.

Some of those kinds of practices exist for groups because they were useful at some point in time and we are supporters of them and tend to be defenders of them as patterns of behavior rather than fully understanding them and defending them based on a full sense of the processes involved now.

We have hunting paradigms and gathering paradigms and child birth, child raising and child protection paradigms and we believe and use them over time with great consistency for our children because they work and it feels right to use them. We emotionally and functionally trust our paradigms and we prefer to be aligned with the practices of whatever culture we are in for each setting because we get support from our groups when we meet the behavioral and cultural expectations of our group and it feel right in our various settings when our group supports what we do.

Strong Darwinians tend to have a similar attachment to the key components of that belief system — and some people with that belief system fully in place can dismiss any contradictory information as being an anomaly rather than a contradiction — and we know from experience and observation that some of the strong believers in classic Darwinian theory can sometimes become unhappy, annoyed, or even angry when the core belief is challenged in their settings in any way.

Some people attach strong religious beliefs to the theory of evolution debate in what can be divisive and angry ways.

That strong and sometimes actually emotional defense of that particular Darwinian evolution paradigm by some Darwinian believers in academic settings is probably linked at least partially to the fact that many of the people who have attacked evolution and many of the people who have attacked believers in evolution most strongly in most settings have clearly and openly done it for religious reasons. Religion often has strong creation theory and creation story elements, and each faith tradition tends to have their own belief about how everything began and why it exists.

In our country, a number of the people who look at those issues with the most energy do it from the perspective that they strongly believe the Old Testament version of the Bible that said creation was done entirely by God and that narrative also says it took exactly one week.

Some people who believe in a week of creation also sometimes believe that anyone who offers a theory of creation story or a belief that has any other key details is actually both wrong and somehow offending God by offering a different version of that event and process.

Other believers in the same Bible — both Christians and Jews — believe that the days described in the Creation Story were actually periods of time and not calendar days, and that the events of creation probably took place in that rough sequence, but not necessarily with that level of specificity, and certainly not that quickly.

So a number of the people who attack the Theory of Evolution do it from the perspective of believing that it all happened in seven days and that it was less of a process than an actual event, and they believe that people who offer a different version are sinners, heretics, or extremely wrong and maybe intentionally evil people.

Our Us-Them Instincts Can Be Activated by Religious Beliefs

We have very strong instincts to divide the world into Us and Them and to believe very bad things and to even do bad things to whomever we perceive to be Them. Those instincts can be activated by tribe, ethnicity, nation, clan, ideological beliefs, and even religious beliefs.

When our religious groups of various kinds choose to activate those instincts, some very ugly results can happen. In the Muslim religion, the Shia and Sunni tribes, the Kurdish tribes, and the Alawite tribes all have a long history of believing the worst of the other tribes. In Christianity, the Protestants and Catholics of Ulster have been killing each other by tribe for centuries. Many other examples of Christian tribes damaging and hating other Christian tribes exist.

Inside our religions, we see not only tribal instincts activated in some settings by being Lutheran, we actually see some branches of Lutherans both disagreeing with each other and expressing what can only be described in some settings for some people, as anger and even some levels of hatred of each other because of those belief differences.

Martin Luther would probably not be happy with those thoughts, emotions, and behaviors by those particular people in his lineage, but he would understand exactly what was happening because he was actually a founder of Protestantism and the key part of that word is protest. He protested 95 times in his most famous writing, nailed to the Cathedral front door.

Some sets of Lutherans tend to be fairly progressive on a number of theological issues, and others are more literal in their beliefs — and anytime we see differences between groups we run that risk.

Leaders often lead the fights.

Any time we form a group, we tend to form a hierarchy and we create alpha leadership, and we tend to identify turf of various kinds set ourselves up for inter group conflict.

The creation story versus Evolution as two dueling faith and belief systems is one of those areas where we have groups who are in conflict over specific elements of each belief and who activate their most negative inter group instincts and values as a result.

It’s interesting that when you look at the basic Genesis sequence of creation, there is some interesting parallels to the science we believe in today — with energy and light preceding life, for example, and with every other species of animal preceding people.

We actually show up as people at about the right place in the sequence — late on Day Six — with God resting on Day Seven in the Genesis version of creation.

Men and women are created together in the Image of God at that very late and almost final point in the timeline on the older version of that Genesis creation story.

Having a billion neuron connections that seem to relate to the current physics estimate of having a billion galaxies as being one way of poetically interpreting that particular line of being created in the image of God in that story.

Those sets of people with very different senses of the time frames for the process of creation clearly do not like each other very much in a number of our communities.

So we need to steer in directions now that will not make us do bad things to each other later.

It would be a good thing to get the people who believe in a literal six-day creation theory to appreciate how supportive it is to the basic foundational faith of a person to believe that all of the first three paradigms of existence are very directly and explicitly gifts from God, and to appreciate that the sequence of creation as we now understand it has strong echoes of the Genesis sequential chronology.

It would also be a good thing to get the most strongly committed anti-theists to recognize that there does seem to be visible levels of intentional design in both physics and biology, and to simply acknowledge that potential element of design as an intellectual possibility rather than completely resist and reject it.

We need faith leaders to do whatever they believe is the right fit for their own set of people who choose them as leaders. But — we very much need to move away from having our faith settings function as gangs and as tribes and as places for our less enlightened and more primal power and territorial instincts to thrive and flourish.

Christians tell us that Christ did some serious teaching on the Sermon on the Mount message about forgiving people, accepting people, and about treating other people in supportive and loving ways. There is clearly a Peaceful core to a major component of Christianity.

Christians in various settings should probably not trust anyone who is trying to get them to do un-Christian things to one another in any interactions.

The Sermon on the Mount is a simple guideline. Ask yourself: Am I being asked by this person or group to do something that would not fit into that Sermon?

Christians — like Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists — have belief components that are fundamentally loving and inclusive in extremely important ways. Each of those religions also has people who have their own Alpha or Tribal instincts activated rather than their most enlightened religious beliefs and who can steer people to very wrong behaviors relative to other people and do it under the cover of religion.

A basic call to be loving and accepting and forgiving comes very consistently from all faith traditions.

All faiths have their own strongly supportive, sharing and inclusive and loving calls for beliefs and the role of God in their lives and we should encourage that for everyone in the context of their faith and in the context of the values we all share.

We need a paradigm change for people who are channeling religious alignments into negative behaviors through their interpretation of what is relevant and important and right for us in the full context of the fourth paradigm.

We need to build on the most enlightened behaviors in every faith tradition.

We also need to build on the most enlighten science in our biological thinking.

We also need to enhance and evolve that basic Darwinian evolution theory and have it expanded to include current science in those areas. Darwin was brilliant — but on a couple of points, he was not accurate and his theory could not have created parts of who and what we are.

There is no possible way of making enough classic Darwinian selections processes actually work to create RNA for a species, for example.

Having thousands of generations of selections that would be actually needed to make each piece of each change in each string of RNA actually does push us back beyond the Big Bang trigger time frame for the creation of complex inter locking species.

The math does not work.

Darwinian processes might possibly have sculpted some level of DNA, but there’s no possible way for those processes to also create and refine RNA — and that’s the workhorse that actually does what natural selection element did in Evolution 1.0 — The Theory of Evolution.

We need to stop calling that theory a science.

Science is less credible as science when the basic math on any key part of the science clearly does not work.

The historical record of classical evolutionary processes also has huge gaps.

There would also be some serious levels of existing evidence for the other versions of the RNA tool kit surviving in some settings if RNA actually had a Darwinian design process for all of those changes.

Many of the selection processes and a number of the basic the species enhancement processes that we see in our classic evolution studies do work, but we now can see that they actually work in the context of a preprogrammed set of epigenetic life process options and not based on random mutations for each species.

Codes Are Always Intentional

Perry Marshall, engineer, computer program guru, and author says we need Evolution 2.0 to explain the actual process and he is clearly right. Marshall has also written some new work on consciousness driving key elements of physics and biology that both strengthen and reinforce his excellent book and work.

Our new science is extremely useful in giving us functional perspectives on all of those issues.

It was much harder at a purely scientific level to challenge those classical Darwinian evolution paradigms before we knew that DNA and RNA are actually coded with intentional code.

That’s one of the reasons why the knowledge base we have today is so relevant for creating a sense that we do actually function in the context of those four key paradigms.

Codes are key.

We did not know what that meant to have intentional code until we actually invented computers and then started to program them, and then we gained an appreciation for the fact that our computers never program themselves.

They all use huge amounts of code but code for each computer had to come from somewhere other than the computer or it did not exist — and the computer did nothing.

Darwin could not have known how computers actually function. He would have loved the entire process today had it been available to him. He did brilliant research, and what he could have personally contributed to the science with a clear understanding of how those codes and processes work would have been extremely impressive.

Probably awe inspiring.

But he did not have that information and some parts of his theory needed that information to be fully successful.

What we now know about those codes has given us great power to understand and channel key elements of our life.

People in academic settings today who continue to hold strong attachment and full faith and full scope commitment to the classic Darwinian processes in their purist forms after looking at the functional coding interaction issues for life processes should not be too critical of other people who hold other primarily faith-based beliefs about evolution.

Design happened.

The Four Paradigms of Existence paradigm has some solid support from the current science in the world we are in today.

We clearly benefit from intentional design in a number of obvious areas.

That fact that full sets of biological codes exist and that they are intentional actually points us in very good directions.

Likewise, people doing quantum physics get to some similar situations relative to the origin of elements and component parts of that process and field of study and it is clear that there is a package of parts and pieces and the package was created rather than simply happened.

We are now seeing some very powerful linkages between the nonlocality and synchronicity elements of quantum physics and some of the key areas of biological and consciousness connections that let us know that those creation processes were linked at multiple levels.

Even Richard Dawkins, in his wonderful new book The Extended Phenotype, shows and writes that evolution happened in packages and not in solo siloes. His phenotype packages look a lot like the product of nonlocal patterns, epigenetic packages, and even linkages from quantum biology.

Does God Micromanage or Steer or Teach?

Those connections create patterns and those patterns create the opportunity for life itself to exist, thrive, and to be beautiful.

God clearly has a sense of beauty and God also seems to have a sense of humor when some of the designs that make up the various species of our planet become more visible to us all.

The fourth paradigm gives us a wide range of opportunity for our thoughts and our beliefs.

We need to each reach our own understanding of religion, faith. We each need to form our own basic belief about life and God.

We should look to faith leaders we trust and believe from our own faith experience and own personal training, exposure, and history — if we have them in our lives — and we should think about those leaders now in the context of all four paradigms because we want and need them to lead us to inter group Peace and not into division, anger, and conflict.

Many of us were raised in a faith. That faith can give us comfort, context, religious underpinning, and often even a group setting for worship, appreciation, and prayer.

That can be a serious blessing for us when it seems to be the right faith trajectory going forward. We can also make choices — and we can each select a faith path that feels and seems right to us at this point in our lives and aligning with the faith of our youth can be an easy thing to do if we go to that linkage with an expectation that it will bring us together and not push us apart.

We clearly have choices.

We also often have our own personal and collective history.

We have been blessed with a world of possible religious encounters, experiences, and feelings. There clearly have been and there are also a wide range of personal religious interactions that people sometimes can feel as individuals and as potentially spiritual beings.

Many people have a deep sense of having been touched by God or in contact with God in some way.

Those direct religious encounters and experiences tend to point in similar and very positive directions for many people. We should celebrate them for ourselves and for each other.

We do have choices of beliefs and access points to faith.

The world offers us multiple organized theories of God that all seem to point in aligned directions at the end of each process.

The current theories about God have a broad range at this point in time.

Those theories about God range from everything being anchored on an absolutely self-generating and self-creating spontaneity and connectivity for everything at one end of the continuum and it goes over to absolute intentionally created fully choreographed packages for everything and for each thing by a separate and involved God at the other end of the continuum.

Many people have a direct faith-based personal experience of God and the people with those direct personal experiences of God seem to have a significant consistency in their comfort with the legitimacy and the reality and the benefit to them of that experience.

The data base of believers who communicate that they are feeling right about many of those direct and reported experiences tends to be consistently almost overwhelmingly positive.

At the purely intellectual level, some people who believe in God believe that God put a number of macro processes in place in physics and in biology and then functionally got out of the way to watch it all unfold.

Some people who believe in God think that God micromanages a lot of stuff in real time and creates absolute intentionally designed parts and pieces that constitute everything in explicitly designed ways and that then function in ways that are under the constant control of God.

It’s entirely possible that all of those beliefs are true in their own way and that we live in some combination of direct interactions and macro patterns that we actually each need to use our intellects and our personal level of consciousness to discern and even define.

Circling the Elephant deals with those possibilities. That author is a Christian theologian and he believes in the Christian Trinity of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — and he also believes that the Holy Spirit reaches out very inclusively to the non-Christian churches and non-Christian belief systems.

Joseph Selbie wrote a great book called The Physics of God that has extremely powerful information about those processes, design elements, and links. That book is definitely worth reading. He writes about the increasing sense that some researchers have the photosynthesis, itself, might actual utilize some quantum interactions that we absolutely did not expect to see happen.

Time Is Finite, Relative, Simultaneous, Linked, and Relevant

A major issue that should be considered as we decide on our future choices and our current understanding is how do each of those options and choices and paradigms relate to time?

Time is extremely important and it is relevant to each of us and to all of us at several levels.

Time is an issue that is directly important relative to our role in an overall universe that was created at least in part to give us a home and a role.

If we actually believe that the creation of human life and the existence of our functional free will and our conscious minds were a key part of the overall plan of creation — then why did it take so very long for us to get here?

One partial answer to the question of why it has all taken so much time for us to exist is that time might not be relevant at any level to God — and it is possible that the pure passage of time might not be important at any significant level to either us or God.

Another part of the answer about time might be that time could actually be both sequential and simultaneous — and it is possible that what will be in the future might already be here now if it all also actually happens at once. Processes and events might be simultaneous and time and existence might actually be both a process and an outcome.

That would seem to be a very strange path to go down except for the fact that, quantum physics now gives us actual examples of simultaneous happenings and we now know from quantum entanglement and synchronicity and linkages that simultaneous and instantaneous are both possible and functional as another way that time is happening.

We also know that the perception of time isn’t fixed into a single form and we now know that relativity happens — so the extremely long time involved in having us appear might not be relevant outside of a narrow channel of relative time.

The aspect of time that is most relevant to us, however, is that we seem to live very short and clearly finite lives. Time is a very personal and immediate issue. We clearly don’t live forever in the form we are in now and we do not live very long compared to the time frames involved in everything but us, and our very finite time seems to be focused on us now.

Why are we so finite?

That time limitation for our lives might actually be an inspiration for us to be creative and to be productive while we are here.

Some people who have thought and written about that issue have actually said that if we had more time, we would probably waste it.

Would the absolute geniuses who have done the heavy lifting and who put together some of the intricate and brilliant mathematics of quantum physics have gotten them all done if they each had a million years to live?

Maybe.

But maybe not.

We clearly are motivated by our time frames to learn extremely complex stuff at an intense pace — and it’s not clear how that pace would be affected if we had forever to get those particular things done.

We also know from numerous near-death experiences that the people who seem to at least temporarily cross into the post life existence seem to completely escape the pressure of time when that happens. They seem to have a feeling of merging with infinity when they get to that point.

But —

The most important time factor that we each have is the time of Now.

Now is key.

We do each have Now.

Now gives us a sense of presence and a sense of urgency and it possibly also gives us a perspective for appreciating and creating music and beauty and maybe even love.

The key point to know and keep in mind relative to time is that “now” is extremely relevant to us and it clearly and actually happens to be where we are now so we might as well take advantage of it and interact with the world and smell the roses now.

We need to savor and appreciate and utilize Now.

As Carlo Rovelli wrote in Helgoland, and linking quantum physics to one school of Buddhist thought: “Precisely because of its impermanence, the Now has meaning and it is precious. We do not love in order to live: we live because We love.”

Each Belief System Can Be a Path to God

We should embrace the beauty of the world we are in. We should embrace the tools and the functions and the opportunities — and we should enjoy them and thrive in them.

Religious settings can be part of the package.

We have a practice in every setting for every group and for every context to build a religious tradition and a set of beliefs that people use to have their personal alignment with their direct perception of God and we should know what we are doing when we go down those paths.

Patterns exist in those beliefs.

Different religions seem to have some differences in how they perceive God and there are some overarching patterns that we all can see.

It’s definitely a mistake to reach actual conclusions about any other faith system, but respectful observations about various approaches and faith traditions are probably legitimate for this discussion.

Buddhists seem to tend to have a belief that God is in everything and the moment of enlightenment for Buddha was when he reached down and touched the earth and recognized that he was connected to everything.

The Dalai Lama has written a book on science and Buddhism that embraces science and encourages religious belief with a scientific underpinning.

Hindus tend to believe that God is in some form in every setting, and that particular religion actually has both hundreds of Gods and a unity God that triggered the process.

Some of the New Age believers seem to have a belief that God is in everything and that it’s possible to be aligned with God by making the decision to create that alignment. Ram Dass and EST and Emerge seemed to have belief paradigms that fit that model.

Christians and Jews tend to have a belief in the sense that God created everything and steers everything, at some level — and that God wants people to live good and moral lives and to be supportive of each other in caring and enlightened ways.

The various branches of those religions tend to have some elements who insist on very strict interpretation of the Bible and others who are more open to a broader access to God through a wider range of beliefs and understandings.

The tribal instincts described earlier get activated inside each of those religions — and it would be a good thing for both the people and their leaders to have a sense that the point of the process should be loving and beneficial and not damaging and angry relative to each other.

The five authors whose books are cited in this piece who are all trying to figure out what the new science tells us about God and who have strong personal faith in God each write that they believe that God is love and that God wants us to be loving to one another and not to be at war with one another.

The five authors are all actually Christians.

George Ellis is an active Quaker.

Francis Collins has been on national TV several times recently as an Evangelical Christian.

The scientists who write the books cited here with these book reviews talk only briefly in those books about their own personal experience of God but they each have deep and reassuring levels of trust that God is inherently Good and that God wants each of us to be of service to one another in loving ways.

All five of those authors who books are linked above use and cite their own links to their piece and their part of the Christian Church as a grounding for their personal faith base.

This particular piece and four of the InterGroup Institute books were written by a Concordia-trained Christian with Lutheran leanings and an appreciation for basic Swedenborgian thoughts, beliefs, and ethical standards.

All of those science-based people who wrote books that explain why they each believe in God, are very clear that they each believe in a loving God.

Five of the cited authors have read their book reviews on the InterGroup Institute website and have posted positive references to the reviews on their social media outlets. Four have sent additional research information to The Institute. The new Marshall Piece on consciousness and causality is going to get further exposure at future points in time.

Each of the five authors also all have deep appreciation for their own conscious minds and they value the fact that we seem to have conscious minds as people in a unique and appreciated way. They celebrate free will and conscious thought and the ability to learn important things in the world we live in today and each believes that they were born to learn as their own missions for their lives.

Every one of those brilliant and extremely well-educated and highly acclaimed thinkers — from each context — clearly and explicitly celebrates the remarkable fact that we have both conscious minds and some level of free will and that we actually have the ability to think in somewhat autonomous ways about the universe and events and about ourselves.

Academic America is not at the point today where it is easier to acknowledge those contributions and gifts — but probably will get there to some degree relatively soon because it is too hard to maintain fervent support for rigid Darwinian processes when the new science proves that they did not happen.

Many current academic settings still will clearly not accept or even consider these sets of beliefs or conclusions about the origin of all of those components of existence at this point in time, but we need to remind or recommend to the academic settings that they should at least acknowledge at an intellectual level that there is evidence for intentional design and that they should not demean or attack people who offer that perspective in the scope of full intellectual inquiry and thought-process legitimacy.

A truce on those issues in academic circles would be a good thing and it could be entirely credible in the context of overall intellectual legitimacy.

At the other end of that particular continuum, it would also be good to create a truce of some kind with the people who take the deep fundamental position that creation happened in six days and with a rest by God on Day Seven.

Pointing out that the six days might actually be seen as a different time frame than calendar days but there a strong belief that the universe was created by God and should be seen as a gift from God might soften the strong opposition from some of the most fundamental believers.

It’s almost disrespectful of God not to let God choose the length of those days.

For people who believe in some version of the Genesis story of creation, it is reinforcing that the particular sequence in the Bible starts with a big bang equivalent and then proceeds through the creation of worlds and various creatures, and then doesn’t add people to the mix until the sixth day — and then creates men and women explicitly “in the image of God’ very late on the sixth day.

People who believe that God created people to have another set of conscious minds in the universe might find that “Image of God” description to be poetically aligned — because the old interpretations of what that meant always fell problematically short when the physical body of people was chosen to be the relevant image and when that interpretation created multiple logistical issues at many levels.

Creating men and women in the image of God actually has some current science credibility when we now understand that the billions of neurons in our brains and the billions of stars in the known universe seem to be similar numbers.

The poetry of having Eden threatened by the first people actually eating of the tree of knowledge and learning about evil and good also could be extended to fit the current paradigms about quantum physics and nuclear bombs and genocides and evil tribal behaviors of various kinds that definitely give Evil a role.

The best reinforcement for thinking about the four paradigms as a working construct for our world is our current science.

We are clearly in a golden age of learning and it can be said that we are learning that those tools of existence are, in fact, Gifts from God.

The science of today is massively better than the science of even a decade ago, and we are on the pathway to enhance it even more in the future. We are on the cusp of a golden age for science that is giving us the ability to both destroy our world and enhance it in multiple ways — and the destruction potential clearly exists with the tools we now have.

Just as classic Newtonian physics has now evolved upwards into quantum physics, we now are in a status where classic Darwinian Evolution Theory that said everything happened in completely spontaneous ways with only happenstance outcomes and the relative survival rates for each mutation determining which random mutations survived and became species, we now have the ability to actually see what DNA and RNA actually are and how clearly intertwined and interactive at extremely complex levels they are — and we now have what is the equivalent of quantum biology steering us toward a stronger paradigm for the life sciences.

We now know that various kinds of evolution like selection processes actually do happen at various levels, and we now know they happen in the context of a set of explicit biological codes that we can increasingly use for our life sciences and even for our health care and health.

We created the Covid vaccine by decoding and then recoding the messenger RNA unit and telling it to tell our bodies how to create certain anti bodies against the new virus before we even have any individual and direct contact with the virus. In our earlier vaccine development approaches for every other disease, we exposed the body to the virus and then we had the RNA in our body build a response to the virus after the exposure. That’s what we do for polio — and it works extremely well.

With the new approach, we now have an almost quantum physics like understanding of the process and the tools, and we skipped the direct exposure to the virus step and we told the body to directly build the needed response.

Our science in those areas has reached much higher levels of sophistication and has done it very quickly.

That’s both extremely good news and potentially very frightening news.

The danger we face today is that our ability to easily do that level of programming to build a vaccine for the disease also gives us the ability to do new version of the disease that could kill many more people and that would be much harder to constrain and control.

We actually can now do diseases of mass destruction.

Quantum physics gives us the ability to build atomic bombs that could destroy humanity and quantum biology now gives us the ability to build viruses that could also destroy humanity.

That’s why we need full understanding of Paradigm 3 — and we need to develop the wisdom and the skill set and the clear intention to not destroy humanity with either set of tools.

The Institute for InterGroup Understanding Was Created to Enable and Support Peace

The Institute for InterGroup Understanding was created to give us an understanding of those key instincts and the tools we need to turn those instincts into channels for Peace. The four books that anchor that work should be read as grounding for people who want us to have a better sense of who we are and how to achieve Peace.

We have a very long history of doing very bad things to one another. We have more than 130 ethnic wars going on in the world today — and people in those settings are doing evil and destructive and damaging things to the people from the other group and feeling no guilt, remorse, regret or ethical wrongness or error from those behaviors and their consequences.

We far too easily suspend conscience when we have our Us-Them instincts activated and have a chance to damage Them.

Those patterns of behavior look like the consistent patterns we see for some of the most consistent elements in quantum physics, and we have those patterns because those behaviors are built into the basic structure of who we are at a biological behavioral level. We have the ability to tribalize and to do very good things for our tribe and very evil things to the other tribe, and to feel intellectually and ethically legitimate in what we do to the other tribe.

Our only hope is to learn to extend the feelings, values, emotions, and behaviors that we extend to our tribe to everyone. With the new weapons, we can’t afford to have anyone perceived to be Them.

We have the ability to create win-win outcomes, win-lose outcomes, and lose-lose outcomes and to feel absolutely right creating lose-lose outcomes when we hate the other tribe so much that we are willing to lose ourselves to make them lose.

Anyone who thinks that we have somehow evolved past that point of lose-lose outcomes based on hatred can look at the fact that we literally have suicide bombers every single day strapping bombs to their own body and taking them into position to kill the other tribe. Suicide bombings at some level happen every single day. One suicide bomber equivalent with the CRISPR tool kit could hurt us badly and it only takes one to do it.

So —

We need to focus on Paradigm 3 and we need to get our response to those issues right.

Steven Pinker’s wonderful, well-written, and extremely well-researched book, “The Blank Slate — The Modern Denial of Human Nature,” takes us a very long way down the road to explaining the key new quantum elements and pieces of our evolving sociobiological thinking to give us excellent intellectual grounding for that approach.

We need to understand and enhance and channel in the right directions at this point in our history for the clear set of patterns, formulas, and functional realities that stem from our strong sets of emotional programming tools and instincts that can cause us to protect one another when we perceive each other to be an Us and that can also far too easily cause us to hate, damage, and even destroy one another when we perceive the other people to be Them.

The Institute for InterGroup Understanding actually was created to deal with those sets of instinct triggered inter group issues.

The four books that make up the basic Institute for InterGroup Understanding tool kit are aligned at multiple levels with books written by the other five authors — and they make the point that there definitely is a second paradigm for us to understand because it also has patterns of our existence.

Physics and biology all create discernable patterns, and so does human nature. We call those patterns instincts — and we need to understand them to keep them from doing serious damage to us as both individuals and groups.

We can never be free of our instincts, so we need to understand them clearly and to understand what impact they have on our emotions, thinking, behaviors, values and expectations and goals for our lives.

We have strong instincts to hate traitors and to never be a traitor ourselves. That instinct is a positive and good one when we use it in good ways to protect our community and group and family — and it can be damaging when we It causes us not to have relationships with good people from other groups of people, and it can be very damaging when it causes us to damage or kill someone from our own group for being what we consider to be a traitor.

All of our instincts can be used for good or evil. We live very situational lives with multiple levels of instincts relevant to what we do, so if we end up with our turf instincts helping us make our property into an asset for our group and if we have our turf instincts kill someone from another group who trespasses on our group — both events happening in the world today — then we need to rise to another higher level to understand what we are doing and to determine the most enlightened and beneficial way we have of doing what we are doing.

The Institute has four core books that explain the situation and our options.

The first book — Primal Pathways — explains our basic dozen inter group instincts and explains how our Us-Them instincts can cause us to do both saintly and evil things to one another.

Cusp of Chaos — the second book — explains all of the difficulties that our instincts have created for us across the planet and down through history. Cusp of Chaos explains the end of colonialism, fall of empires, and creation of more than 100 countries that currently have groups of people in conflict with one another.

Cusp of Chaos also identifies the horrible and intentional racist behaviors that have existed as part of our own history as a nation and gets us to a description of the intergroup conflicts we experience as a nation today. The armored vehicle on the cover of that book looks like a middle east war zone but the actual photo is from the protests in Ferguson, Missouri.

The third book, The Art of InterGroup Peace, is an echo of Sun Tzu’s famous Art of War book and explains very specific and very intentional things we can do in the interest of Peace to create Peace in our country. The book explains the six triggers that can get people to align as groups, the 10 ways we can align, seven things we can do to create cultural change, and it even describes the five explicit and intentional things we need to do to change a paradigm and get people to use a new paradigm.

The fourth book — Peace in Our Time — is a book of histories, stories, and case studies and discusses and describes how the alignment pyramid and the tribal and Us-Them insights tool kit have been used in multiple settings to create Peace.

All four of the books can be ordered from the Institute website and can also be read free by the chapter on the website or downloaded for and printed for reading by chapter for people who find that a better way of getting access to the material.

The website also has Peaceand Truth strategies, insight pieces, book reviews, relevant videos, research data and a number of connection tools to Peace resources.

We need to understand physics and biology at core levels to both benefit from their tools and to avoid being damaged by them — and we need to understand our instinctive patterns of behavior to help create Peace rather than falling into extreme tribalism and inter group anger and conflict.

We are headed for significant levels of conflict if we don’t achieve a level of both intellectual and emotional enlightenment about Peace and then do the right things for the right reasons to get to the right outcomes in every setting.

These books and the InterGroup website are intended to help with that process.

The Institute believes that when you understand the basic inter group behavior patterns and instincts, you can predict the future a high percentage of the time for most inter group settings, and you can explain the past for almost all inter group settings, and when you clearly understand those instincts, history both repeats itself and rhymes.

We need the Institute grounding, knowledge, and wisdom to give us the skill set and level of enlightenment we need to build on the first two paradigms and give us a future of Peace and enlightenment and security.

The Five Iconic Authors All Point Us Toward Understanding How Intentional Our Gifts from God Are

The five authors cited in these books — John Thatamanil, George Ellis, Perry Marshall, Francis Collins, and Frank Wilczek — have all chosen to be aligned with the Christian faith and to create their own connection with their beliefs in that context.

It is very encouraging that four of the authors cited in this piece have posted the review of their book from this website on their Twitter Feed and the fifth wrote a very positive note saying that he liked the review and could not actually improve on what was written in the review.

So those reviews of those books on this site are less speculative as links to the points made in them than reviews and websites often are, because the authors have said that the reviews were a good representation of the book and encouraged people to read the reviews and the books.

Three of the books anchor the first two paradigms, one anchors Paradigm 4 — and the four Institute books anchor Paradigms 3 and 4.

The basic underlying tenant and aligning premise behind all four paradigms is the belief in Paradigm 4, that God is in Everything and that God is Love and that God wants each of us to learn and to each find our own path to linking with God and with our faith.

That belief about us actually having multiple valid pathways to God is more flexible than some people from organized religions prefer, but it isn’t anti religion at any level and it aligns with each faith for each person in appreciative ways.

Alignment with Faith structures and other believers can feel very right to people, and encouraging those interactions in ways that feel right to believers from every tradition might become a goal for people from all beliefs if the people who run those organizations want to bring people together in faith-based ways.

We should not have our faith-based settings be the context for other of our most problematic hierarchical, tribal, and alpha linked behaviors except to the extent that the people who lead the people in each setting truly are servant leaders to their flocks and want our children and our grandchildren to have a future of Peace.

We do not want our religious settings to create conflict. That’s easy to do when people co-mingle tribe and belief system — but we can rise above it. We can ask our religious leaders to steer us to Peace. It isn’t hard to find Peace-supporting quotes from each major faith.

We can and should make clear peace-seeking choices about our religious leaders and our faith.

We should each choose the faith pathway to our own faith and to our own faith system that feels most right to each of us — and we should find leaders within that faith who teach Peace, Love, Commitment, Caring and the highest and most enlightened values of our society as guidance for ourselves and for our lives.

Peace.

All four paradigms can and should both support and encourage and enable Peace, and this is absolutely the right time for that to happen.