The Next Awakening: How Religion and Science Are Both Wrong

By Dr. Ricky L. Cox

Did man evolve accidentally, or is his existence the result of a creative act?
Is there life after death? Am I given a purpose?
Where do we look for answers to such questions, assuming we care?

In Christianity alone, statisticians tell us there are over thirty thousand denominations. Which of these offers authentic truth? It is no small inquiry. I venture to say there is no man, woman, or child who will not contemplate the questions of how they came to exist, the purpose behind it, whether they will continue to exist and in what way. Furthermore, the central question of the existence of a higher power and its consequences for us has vexed and divided mankind since he first aspired to ask it.

In the seventeenth century, when Galileo described the earth as rotating the sun, science began to assert itself as the arbiter of the yet unknown. With the Age of Reason, the authority of the scientific method of inquiry began its rise to occupying the place of rational authority. Religion experienced a relatively humbling categorization as quaint mystery. Most unsolved material questions that were matters of competing views have fallen to the credit of the scientist. We now know why volcanoes erupt, in other words.

But the scientist has overextended himself. He rose from the high seat to mount the high horse; explaining all things by reducing them to their smallest elements. His accounting for cosmogenesis, arrival of life, evolution, and the nonexistence of God is an accounting he cannot make without assumptions. So he assumes for us all.

This creates a troublesome dilemma for modern man. Is he required to reject his faith, or in practicing faith in God, is he required to reject the rationality of science?

In The Next Awakening, a solution is offered to the wrangling debate of the atheistic scientist with the fundamentalist Christian.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press
• Release date: Dec 29, 2011
• ISBN: 9781452541792

Dr. Ricky L. Cox

Ricky Cox began writing poetry at age seven. His kindly teacher, Mrs. McDermott, asked for another sampling and then another; soon it became a weekly exercise. He knew he would be an author, but the idea would wander in the wilderness for forty years. Dr. Cox was born in one of the poorest parts of Kentucky to parents who nourished their ten children from the tilling of thin topsoil. His pursuits in science led to many academic distinctions and eventually to a profession in dentistry. He was raised in close-knit Christian fundamentalism, teaching classes, leading seminars, and eventually having his own weekly radio show. Events in his life came about which caused him to question the authority of his religious and scientific instruction, and to search for fundamental truths. Dr. Cox, having realized the shortcomings of the religious and scientific paradigms, now seeks a more authentic, unifying truth. The truth is evolving, and it is the next awakening. It is an offering of peace and comfort.

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Copyright © 2011 Dr. Ricky L. Cox

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ISBN: 978-1-4525-4179-2 (e)

ISBN: 978-1-4525-4180-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4525-4181-5 (hc)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2011962045

Printed in the United States of America

Balboa Press rev. date: 12/23/2011

Contents

PREFACE

CHAPTER ONE

THE PORTAL

CHAPTER TWO

ARE WE THERE YET?

CHAPTER THREE

THE FIRST AWAKENING

CHAPTER FOUR

LET US BUILD A CHURCH

CHAPTER FIVE

HIDING THE KEYS

CHAPTER SIX

WHAT ARE THE KEYS?

CHAPTER SEVEN

OH YEAH, ONE MORE KEY

CHAPTER EIGHT

RELIGION HAD

A GOOD RUN

CHAPTER NINE

THE NEXT JESUS

CHAPTER TEN

SCIENCE AND THE NEXT AWAKENING

CHAPTER ELEVEN

DARWINISM:

THE RELIGION THAT DARE NOT SPEAK ITS NAME

CHAPTER TWELVE

THE BIG BANG -

IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE LOGOS

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

THE HARD PROBLEM -

CONSCIOUSNESS

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

AWAKENING –

THE FINAL PICTURE

BIBLIOGRAPHY

To my wife Connie, for your kind spirit

and for showing me I am loved.

Thank you for your sweet silent grace.

Enlightenment is a destructive process. It has nothing to do with becoming better or being happier. Enlightenment is the crumbling away of untruth. It’s seeing through the facade of pretense. It’s the complete eradication of everything we imagined to be true.

—Adyashanti

PREFACE

Everything evolves. At their own speed, the universe and all things in it are becoming something different than they used to be. I am convinced our understanding must follow suit. We all seek to understand. I do not know of any man, woman, or child who will not contemplate their origin and meaning. We all ask who we are, where we came from, and why we are here.

In my lifetime, there have been two methods of inquiry into these questions – religion and science. Since the scientist Galileo challenged the biblical view of the sun rotating the earth and was placed under house arrest by religious authorities, these two modes of inquiry have intermittently clashed. Science has gotten the better of it, for the most part. The scientists have compiled an impressive resume of solving mystery. We now know the reasons for the earthquakes and the volcanic eruptions – they are not caused by angry gods or God.

But something happened along the path of science and its inquiry. It is not the fault of science, per se. But science is an instrument operated by people. It has pleased these people to move from a position of knowledge to a position of authority. Their measurement has become so exact, they are now fooled into thinking that what they can measure is all that exists.

What course is there for the man of faith, in light of the success of modern science? Does he abandon his faith in God where it is contradicted by science? Or does he hold to faith and reject the rigor of the scientific method? I contend the dilemma posed is a false one. When we get down to the why questions, the scientist does not possess a clue. He will simply pretend it doesn’t matter. He offers us no purpose, and ridicules the idea that purpose should be contemplated. We are biological machines who live and die, he will say. Propelling our DNA to the next generation is the reason given to existence. This bottom-up reduction to elements is the path to knowledge for the man of science. But does scientific reasoning suffice as a solution to the questions that trouble mankind?

The believers could take a lesson from science. The science of today is not the science of Copernicus; it is not even the science of Newton any more. Our understanding of the science of God should also progress. If it does not, the understanding of God will be relegated to the shelf as another superstition. In other words, it will die.

The scientist and the believer should borrow a page from one another. The believer should see purpose in a new understanding, and get away from the faith in the literal words of antiquity. The words contradict themselves on many important points, and we do not even know who wrote them. The imperfect could not be handed down from the Perfect One. The scientist could profit from a pinch of humility; from some grace, if you will. He does not know everything, or nearly everything. The more he discovers, the wider becomes the cosmic canvas for exploring the unknown. His cosmology, his evolution, and his metaphysics contain multiple assumptions. He aspires to assume for us all.

There is a difference in science and scientism. The latter is atheistic in philosophy, and presumes to tell us that no good or compelling reason exists for believing in God or Spirit. The scientist will claim the ground of rationality, arguing from what he presents as a default position of not proven. The atheist knows he cannot logically prove God’s nonexistence. So what is he to do? Easy, he simply changes the meaning of the terms. He redefines atheism to mean an absence of belief in god, rather than the actual definition of a denial of god’s existence.

This is an innovative and contrived definition, which morphs atheism with agnosticism. The legitimate academic thinkers in philosophy rightly define an atheist as a person who maintains that there is no God.

There are a number of reasons why scientism is inadequate as a rational world view. It cannot adequately explain existence. Existence cries out for explanation. If the scientist argues that the world is eternal, then he is going against evidence which states that the universe had a beginning and is gradually running down. If he accepts the evidence that the universe has a beginning, he is encumbered with the open question of its cause.

An atheistic world is ultimately random, disorderly, and unpredictable. It is therefore incapable of providing an account for the laws of science, the universal laws of logic, and the human need for moral standards. In short, it cannot account for the meaningful realities we encounter every single day in life.

Both sides in the controversy suffer from the acceptance of faulty logic and bare assumptions to support their particular template for viewing claims of truth.

Truth is humbling and unifying. It has no turf. It is compatible with all other truth. The authentic truth of religion agrees with the authentic truth of science, whatever it is, when they have gotten to the bottom of things. At present, neither explanation gets to the bottom.

I think we can get closer to the truth. A new paradigm is needed. This is The Next Awakening.

CHAPTER ONE

THE PORTAL

I came to earth for the experience.

In a formless, timeless realm, I was quickened for birth, pulled into a portal, and carried at the speed of light to my terrestrial place and time. It is mine to live and to be as I was to be. Bundled in me were my talents; done up tightly, bearing no mark. God saw my fear and only smiled.

For over fifty years now, my face has been a well-placed observatory for the saga of certain mundane events that are widely known but seldom noted. It is the earthly and earthy story of people of the common soil who were raised by it to move in widening circles of men, but for a lifetime are drawn back to its rough, uneven fields. Their course is a rendering and a harvest. Strength is given to the lifting and turning of earth, and it becomes their constitution.

The particulars of my placement would have caused the less curious mind to assume it had been assigned to an unremitting dullness. Hours flowed into slow-moving days on hills under the sun. The world extended to the end of a rutted lane, where it joined a road going to somewhere beyond. Always short of somewhere and isolated, there was nothing to see and nothing to learn. Yet some insisting, non-corpus instinct maintained that people were important. They were a puzzle of action, sign, and meaning, and if I wanted to live gainfully, I would have to look to them for answers.

I came to trust what I was told. My parents and my older siblings shouldered their natural role as mentors in dutiful fashion, though at times it fell to them unaware. I took what they said to me directly and the manners they acted out before me as a firm ground. I relied on their experience of having coped with the world longer, coupled that reliance with my lack of confidence, and negotiated the path of a good follower. In the unfolding plot of this rustic play, I focused my search for the sense of a purposeful, lucid, and deliberate life mission. I hoped it would look good on me.

I came to experience a great deal of church. To most, the common encounter is an occasional or somewhat regular church activity or service attended. For me it was more. It was the central outlet of my family when not occupied by the compulsory ones – working, schooling, and uncovering new ways to feel inferior. If the doors of the little church house were open, attendance was a matter of duty. We would be there.

A narrow road of graded creek gravel curved this way and that for about five miles from our house on one end of the ridge, circling past the knob farms and unpainted barns, to the church on the other end. I came to know its dusty curves well at an early age. It was a dry ridge of land. How dry? There was not one above ground stream of water, the nearest seller of beer and wine was thirty miles away, and drinking coffee was a sin.

I can’t remember with certainty how many of the six boys and four girls were stacked into that old Chevy along with Mom and Dad. The older boys may have been driving separately before the latest of the girls came to join us. The Sunday morning contents of the vehicle could be calculated with more care, but the description is sufficient here to say it was elbow to cheek.

There are two things I remember most about those trips. One was the hum of the V8 in the two toned blue and white Chevy, which I did my best to vocally mimic for hours on end as I rolled or pushed anything that was round across the yard, pretending I was driving a car. The other was the occasion when Mom would notice my ears were dirty, then spit on a white handkerchief and ream them out. Eventually this served to focus my habits, somewhat on hygiene, but more on keeping my ears hidden. With my ears, this was no mean feat.

I came to learn how I was supposed to live inside the confines of that little church. Explanations were vague but certain. Some gaps were filled in by my parents and my grandmother on the occasions when I stepped out of line. My older brothers filled in a few gaps of their own, as they went to high school in the town ten miles away and learned things that were not taught on the ridge. Wearing cologne seemed primarily important.

I touched down right in the middle of the colony, being fifth of ten kids. Some people are born to be silent observers; others have it thrust upon them. If I had known the way it all would go, I might have done some things differently. But since I don’t know how the different way would go, it might be as well as it is.

I still visit the little church. It gives comfort, in a way, to see its unchanging presence against the backdrop of new and bigger things. It is an uncommon place where we can know the playing field so well. Walking through its doors, childhood memories greet me with the familiar smell of the varnish on the oak pews. Some places are still held by the same faces from my childhood days there, but more deeply lined by the winds of time. It seems I can yet sense the spent energy of pondering every stage of growing up while sitting bored stiff in the same pews. Were these people a product of my consciousness? Were they conscious and contemplating me? How does it feel to be them instead of me? If they are contemplating me, which perception is the correct one – what I’m thinking of myself or what they are thinking of me? That was one way to kill an hour or two.

Occasionally I came upon new, more practical questions, like the ones asked during discussion in Sunday school. I preferred to sit in with the adult class when I could, as sometimes a willing teacher for the kids could not be found. The most interesting participant to me was an older guy we called Brother Frank.

Frank asked questions I have puzzled over to this day. One in particular was when he spoke up and implored of the teacher, If you had a bicycle upstairs and wanted to bring it downstairs, what would you say? It still bothers me. What did it mean? What is the answer, if there is one? Why would the bicycle be upstairs? Why would the person bringing it down need to say something?

These were the coordinates of my portal entry. I can’t recall where I was before. I remembered it once, but not now. Life here started simple and easy on the mind – a coincidental benefit of not knowing anything. I miss that sometimes. Not knowing who I was or why I was there, I waited impatiently to be told. Early on, from the best sense I could make of it, I was meant to take up as little space as possible, be quiet, and not screw anything up. That seemed fair enough to me. So I endeavored to be good at it.

I started to school at age six. I stood that first day with my back against the blackboard and watched as kids of all shapes and sizes milled around and talked to each other. That was weird. I immediately distrusted every person in what seemed a very large room.