© 2023 Antti Roine
© 2023 International Urantia Association (IUA)
The physical world around us seems very concrete because it is tangible, and we can perceive it with our own senses. That’s why it’s easy to think that all the reality we live in is made up of matter – and the facts of our lives are based on this matter. However, this visible illusion breaks when we begin to examine the real world around us through the eyes of science.
According to scientific measurements, there is about 99.9999999999996 percent empty space in the visible matter around us because the nuclei and electrons of atoms are extremely small particles compared to the size of atoms and molecules.
So, we’re made of nothingness, but we can’t walk through walls because the electrons in matter repel each other. When we hit a stone with a hammer, the steel and granite do not actually touch each other, but the hammer stops in the thin electromagnetic field on the surface of the granite.
The behavior of matter is governed by four fundamental forces: electromagnetism, weak interaction, strong interaction, and gravity. In fact, when we touch a coffee cup, we are not touching matter but force fields. So, the invisible forces are always with us. However, particles of matter such as neutrinos do not react with these force fields, they travel freely, even through the Earth.
Nevertheless, the materialistic world full of emptiness is not transparent because force fields bend and reflect light rays (i.e., photons). However, transparent substances, such as heavy lead glass, give us concrete evidence of the basic empty nature of matter.
Emptiness takes on new dimensions if we also consider the starry sky and the entire universe, where physical matter is only 0.000000000000000000004 percent of the volume of the entire universe. To top it all off, even this small amount of matter is made up of various particles, which are actually just small packets of energy.
In this sense, the materialistic and scientific worldviews are largely based on beliefs, because they do not tell us anything about the boundless emptiness that dominates the world – and especially because science has not been able to create a single new natural law, new matter, energy, or life.
Science has only given names to natural phenomena and discovered the mathematics behind them. However, scientists have no idea what these invisible and massless force fields are made of, even though space is full of different force fields. Almost 100 percent of scientific truth is still waiting to be discovered.
From the perspective of philosophical idealism, reality is ultimately spiritual in nature, and the materialistic world is only a shadow of the spiritual world. Furthermore, spiritual and materialistic reality cannot conflict with each other, because spiritual values cannot be measured with physical sensors, nor physical values with spiritual sensors.
You cannot put spiritual joy under a microscope; you cannot weigh love in a balance; you cannot measure moral values; neither can you estimate the quality of spiritual worship. UB 196:3.18
We cannot know for sure why we have ended up on such a virtual stage. We can, however, humbly and with an open mind try to deduce the meaning of our lives from the wonderful world around us – one dominated by uncertainty.
On any other kind of stage, we could not practice the use of our own free will, compassion, justice, equality, and faith; make mistakes and learn from them; support the weak; choose between right and wrong; and experience pain, pleasure, trust, and love. So, this stage could be the first grade in our school of life.