Stubbornness of Beliefs in Transcendence

The third in a series challenging the beliefs of physicalism. While ardent defenders blow off believers as ignorant, misguided rubes, the stubbornness of belief raises questions that physicalists have failed to adequately answer.

Image: Wikipedia. An estimated 1.6 million Russians and citizens of the Soviet Union died in the Gulag or “Camps.” In addition to mass executions and brutal violence aimed at stamping out religious belief, Russia and the former Soviet states have the highest number of people who identify as Christian. The past century saw concerted efforts of governments as well as cultural leaders to stamp out religion, particularly Christianity. Why have these efforts failed so spectacularly?

The universe is more than the sum total of particles and the forces that dictate how they interact. The vast majority of people in the world today agree with that statement, as have most everyone who lived on this earth since homo sapiens became capable of such thoughts. What that “more” is varies widely. But even among the ranks of scientists and philosophers who spend their lives attempting to answer the question of what is real, there is a general agreement that the physicalist account of reality is at best incomplete and possibly quite wrong.

Truth is not determined by vote — although coming to scientific consensus sometimes looks that way. So, just because perhaps something like 95% or more of the 107 billion homo sapiens who have walked the dust of this earth disagree with the physicalists who firmly declare there is nothing more, does not make it true.

Where does this conviction come from? And why so universal?

Physicalists have offered several explanations for this nearly universal phenomena of belief in transcendence.