Most Westerners accept as scientific fact the idea that we live in a materialist world--a world in which everything is made of matter and in which matter is taken as being the only fundamental reality.

   In no small part, this scenario owes its origins to the French mathematician, Rene Descartes, who, 400 years ago, proposed his famous philosophy of dualism, one that divides the world into an objective sphere of matter and a subjective one of mind. Together these enshrined his ideas of the world as simply being a machine.

   Worse still, a century later Newton and his heirs conclusively established the principle of causal determinism--the concept that all motion can be predicted exactly using only the physical laws of motion and the initial conditions of the system in motion.

   Imagine a bunch of billiard balls on a perfectly even billiard table. Given Newton's equations of motion and the initial positions, masses and velocities of all of these balls at some initial time then, so determinism claims, the whole future of these billiard balls can be calculated.

   The philosophical import of this kind of thinking took root to such a degree that another French philosopher-scientist, Pierre Laplace, was able to propose  that if some superior intelligence, at a given instance, was acquainted with all the forces by which nature is animated, and at some initial moment also knew the position and velocity of each and every particle of matter then, to that superior-intelligence, neither the past nor the future of the universe would be uncertain.

   Laplace also wrote a highly successful book on celestial mechanics. This caught the attention of his emperor, Napolean, who asked  why it was that he made no mention of God--to which Laplace responded, "Your majesty, I have no need of that hypothesis." In a fully deterministic Newtonian world,  God was no longer needed!

   To these principles of objectivity and determinism in classical physics, a third was added by Einstein. This came as a consequence of his declaration that the velocity of light was a limiting velocity in a vacuum--the velocity of light was a constant that no material thing could exceed.

   The implications of this speed limit were far reaching, perhaps none being more important than that all interactions between things material in space-time must travel through space one piece at a time and with finite velocity. Hence all such interactions must be "localized"--they must occur within the boundaries set by the speed of light. This fact has been given the name, 'the principle of locality.' Later we will learn that certain important quantum events ignore the principle and can occur instantaneously, even if at opposite ends of the universe. Such events are said to be 'non-local.'

   For about 200 years Cartesian dualism went more or less unchallenged. But then scientists, in particular, began to challenge the mind side of dualism, substituting the principle of material monism, which means there is only one central principle, in this case, matter. Hence, mind, consciousness, and spirit were relegated to being epiphenomena, existing only as derivatives of matter.

   And that, roughly, is where the majority of the Western world finds itself today--all without realizing they are more than fifty years behind the empirical findings of modern science--something we will now seek to demonstrate.