Physics, Hindu Cosmology, God and New Age Inspiration

[Confused Ape]

Smart people are better equipped to exploit credulity & ignorance?

I don't doubt that some are jumping on the bandwagon to exploit credulity for fame and fortune.

Others, however, seem to genuinely believe in the world views they are promoting.

Keyword: seem

I said 'seem' because I'm not telepathic so don't know what anyone is really thinking. All I can go by is what they say they believe in and what they are doing in relation to what they say they believe in, no matter what their world view. This includes Richard Dawkins - he seems to believe in what he says so I can only assume that he does rather than wondering if he's jumping on the atheist bandwagon just to be controversial.

Seriously, though, some scientists' world views might well be coloured by their background. A few years ago there was a survey of scientists in India and the results were very different to that survey taken of the members of the National Academy Of Science. The full report in PDF format doesn't appear to be available now (or maybe it's been moved elsewhere and I could find it by googling). This is a copy of the article which was printed in the Times Of India -

http://lists.goanet.org/pipermail/goanet...61908.html

NEW DELHI: Indian scientists are making rapid advances in their respective
fields but when it comes to God, one in four are firm believers and many
more accept existence of a "higher power."

A survey of 1,100 scientists across 130 universities and research institutes
across the country threw up interesting results as 29 per cent believed in
the philosophy of 'karma', 26 per cent accepted the principle of life after
death and seven per cent researchers gave credence to existence of ghosts.

Have you read any Robert Anton Wilson?

No, I haven't. I'll google him after I've posted this.

Why would the world be the shit hole that it is if everything was ultimately created by the observer(s)

We know for a fact that a lot of what makes the world a shit hole is created by humans so there's no need to bring quantum mysticism into it. Maybe our species is just barking mad in the collective.

PS: I've found the survey of Indian Scientists - it makes very interesting reading. This is the part I ended up in after doing a keyword search but anyone who wants to read the entire survey can just scroll up to the beginning.

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=hB8vm...&q&f=false