​If scientists and engineers want to build a skyscraper, put a person on the moon, develop a recyclable plastic, maintain a nuclear power plant, improve crops, or make parachutes, they must follow rules. Those rules are derived from the truthful natural laws of math, geometry, chemistry, physics, genetics, and so on. They dictate reality and thus success or failure.
 
All of us in our day to day lives must follow the same rules, be it for driving the car, cooking a meal, or balancing the checkbook. Even putting one foot in front of another must be in tune with these absolute laws. Although we may not know how to make their precise calculations, we know the laws intuitively. We also learn about them by experience, like a child discovering the law of gravity by falling from a tree, or the laws of motion by taking a corner too sharply and fast with a bike. It’s called coming to grips with reality, the truth as it can be known.
 
When you get right down to it, other than our free will, everything is locked in to the laws of nature. Only to the extent we discover these laws and principles can we learn truth. Since that's the case, then truthful answers to the Big Questions must be consistent with these laws.
 
Nobody approaches the Big Questions from this obvious starting point. Epistemology (the investigation of the difference between justified belief and opinion) is ignored in favor of faith, hope, and preconceived ideas. Such human notions can float absolutely free from reality. However, insofar as these disregard and conflict with the real laws of nature, they are wrong. As wrong as asserting that apples don't fall to the ground, but rather shoot out into space.
 
The disregard for natural laws began long ago when they were not understood. Birth, death, and all aspects of nature and the heavens were mysterious and scary. State religious leaders took advantage of this ignorance and came up with their own explanations to give the impression that they were in control of nature. The ignorant masses had no way of refuting the dogmas and no will to flout powerful leaders and suffer the consequences.
 
Today there is sophisticated understanding of natural laws. But nothing has really changed. Dogmas still prevail. Since easy answers to the Big Questions don't immediately come to mind, and people prefer to believe in something rather than nothing, they surrender, follow, vow, and pledge allegiance to the authorities and institutions promulgating the dogmas. Although this compliance is no longer demanded under threat of burning at the stake or torture, there are social and personal forces. For many, being wrong doesn't matter; being part of a group or consensus is better than being right all alone. Peer pressure, ego, economic ties, livelihood interests, loyalty to parents, and obedience to teachers all can influence what is believed.
 
Moreover, modern political correctness venerates opinion, belief, and faith. They are thought to be like sacred personal rights, private, and concern the bearer of them alone. But, in fact, what we put in our heads as dogma creates ideologies that serve as the "mission control" guiding life and the world. Enshrining nonsense with belief and faith has shrouded the planet in ignorance and misery from time immemorial. Think Mayan human sacrifices, Inquisitions, Crusades, witch trials, Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, Jonestown, religious ostracisms, jihads, medical myths . . . and so on.
 
(When using the terms belief and faith, I am using them synonymously with dogma: an idea accepted from an authoritarian as incontrovertibly true without being questioned or doubted and then retained using only selective and superficial information input. Please keep in mind the distinction between valid belief and faith, like in the law of gravity and 2+2=4, and dogmatic belief and faith.)
 
Dogma leaves no room for discussion, denies any mechanism for testing and revision, and excludes alternate explanations by assuring their defeat before they're fairly considered. Dogma creates bias and intolerance resulting in contempt prior to investigation. Faith is the go-to word to consecrate and further immunize a dogma against challenge.
 
The nebulous realms of belief, faith, and dogma are refuges where people go when they tire of thinking. The resultant ignorance may be bliss, but it makes us unaware of our incompetence, not knowing what we do not know. If we don't have time or capability for study, analysis, introspection, and a sober and open examination of the evidence, we should have no time or capability for belief, faith, or even an opinion.
 
In our Internet age, there is no excuse for being unaware of how the facts may contradict our dogmas. One’s access to knowledge is not limited by the scope of the local library, one’s willingness to travel there and use it properly, or by what was learned at school or in the encyclopedia set at home. Search any word or phrase and a world of knowledge opens. The Internet is the best truth facilitator ever invented.
 
But in spite of the wealth of information now at our fingertips, we're inherently lazy and tend toward reliance. Searching and thinking is hard; shifting work to others is easy. We look for easy fixes and quick neatly packaged beliefs to give us succor and fill empty spaces in our brains.
 
When I say we, I include myself. At some time in my life, I have taken on beliefs for all the wrong reasons listed above. I now look back on that history with shame. But it was a necessary gauntlet I needed to pass through to awaken myself. This book is a sort of biography of my coming out from under all the naïve false ideas. Hopefully, I can short circuit that path for you.
 
I now feel embarrassed because I've come to learn that morally and ethically, I had a legitimate claim to a belief only so far as reason and evidence stood at its back. Instead, effectively, I heeded the words of the great sage, Willy Wonka: "Let us never ever doubt, what no one is sure about."
 
Clifford, the ethicist, so aptly wrote: "It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone to believe anything on insufficient evidence . . . If a man, holding a belief which he was taught in childhood or persuaded of afterwards, keeps down and pushes away any doubts which arise about it in his mind, purposely avoids the reading of books and the company of men that call in question or discuss it, and regards as impious these questions which cannot easily be asked without disturbing it—the life of that man is one long sin against mankind."
 
Wrong beliefs begin with wrong premises and wrong motives. If we assume a certain thing is true, or we simply want it to be, we'll seek and accept only those facts that fit. The result is endless and contradictory political, religious, health, and scientific views that have forever plagued the world. Each may appear logical, given the starting premises and using only the evidence that fits, but usually turn out to be silly when measured against natural law, reason, intuition, conscience, experience, and the full array of evidence.

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