Science and the defacement of Reason

(An improved and updated version of this essay has appeared in my book Brief Peeks Beyond. The version below is kept for legacy purposes.)

Kali and Shiva, the destroyer/transformer.
Source: Wikipedia.

Right, this one is going to be controversial. Even as I write these opening words, I still harbor some doubt about whether I should be doing this at all. I'll postpone thinking further about it until the point when there's nothing left to do but to click on the 'publish' button. If you are reading this now, you know that, eventually, I did click on it.

You see, the problem is that I am about to commit sacrilege. I am about to attack my alma mater in the original latin sense of the words. I am about to attack science; or, at least, science as most people know it in our society. I come from the womb of science. Yet, doing what I am about to do is, I guess, the price of brutal honesty. This article has been inspired by private discussions I've had with Alex Tsakiris and Niclas Thörn. I gratefully acknowledge their input. Having said this, I am solely responsible for the opinions I am about to express.

In an earlier article I wrote for New Dawn Magazine, which is now freely available online, I elaborated upon what true science should be and how it differs from how science is presented to the public today. In that article, my concern was to protect an idealized, archetypal view of science from the defacement it is suffering at the hands of those responsible for promoting it. Since I wrote that article, however, I've come to realize that my archetypal view of science is more a personal ideal than an objective reality. More than a kind of Platonic Form, science is what scientists do in practice. As such, the reality of the situation may be the opposite of what I painted in that earlier article: actual science may be the culprit, not the victim. To separate my archetypal, idealized view of science from the reality of science today, I will refer to the latter as science-as-you-know-it.

Archetypal science is ontologically neutral: it is merely a method for unveiling the empirically-observed patterns and regularities of reality, without philosophical interpretations. But science-as-you-know-it implicitly adopts the materialist ontology. Perhaps not all scientists do this; perhaps even only a minority does. But this minority is vocal and influential. They clearly control where the research funding goes, for projects that do not assume the materialist metaphysics collectively get much less funding than projects that do. If you ask me to substantiate this assertion with data, you will be simply revealing your naiveté about what's going on: it's like asking for proof that the Earth is round. Moreover, this vocal minority also controls how science-as-you-know-it is presented in the media, in school curricula, and to the culture at large. Just think of people like Lawrence Krauss, Richard Dawkins, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Stephen Hawking, and others such specialized prodigies of rhetoric and intellectual puzzles, who cavalierly ignore rigorous logic, epistemology, and ontology. As much as it pains me to admit this, the fact is that science-as-you-know-it has become synonym with the materialist metaphysics. Even if, as assumed, only a minority of scientists are responsible for this association, the institutions of science seem to be in no hurry to correct the situation. As such, they and all their members are guilty, at least by omission, of allowing it.

As argued in my latest book Why Materialism Is Baloney, as well as in recent essays and videos in this blog, materialism is a fantasy. It's based on unnecessary assumptions, circular reasoning, and selective consideration of evidence and data. Materialism is by no stretch of the imagination a scientific conclusion, but merely a metaphysical opinion that helps some people interpret scientific conclusions. It's not the purpose of this essay to elaborate on this; the references I just provided make my case. The point here is this: the emperors with no clothes that promote the materialist belief on TV, books, and what not, are seen as spokespeople of science-as-you-know-it. When these people promote their flawed logic in the media as an expression of Reason, the irony is distasteful. As such, science-as-you-know-it, with all the funding and respect it has accumulated as enabler of technology, has become the chief promotor of a philosophical worldview that is not only false, but corrosive, demeaning to the human condition, and a threat to a sane and healthy future for your children. As much as its continuing positive contributions to civilization cannot be ignored or dismissed, science-as-you-know-it has also made itself part of a great threat. Allow me to elaborate.

The implicit materialist belief that is now intrinsically associated with science-as-you-know-it limits the horizons of scientific research. Many interesting and promising phenomena do not get studied because, according to materialism, they are a priori decreed to be impossible. Interesting data, which could point the way to entirely unexpected and promising avenues of research, get discarded because, according to materialism, they cannot be valid. By adopting materialism, science-as-you-know-it has surrendered its neutrality and openness; it is now biased. How many healing methods, amazing technologies, and ways of improving our lives will not be discovered because of this? How many new horizons that could bring great meaning, excitement, and unimagined possibilities to the human condition won't be opened? Instead of a force for impartial exploration, science-as-you-know-it is turning into a strait jacket for the human spirit. Instead of working on truly new discoveries, science-as-you-know-it is now busy with fantasies that make for great entertainment but not much more, as cogently argued in a recent Huffington Post essay.

Worst yet, science-as-you-know-it now claims to have rendered philosophy redundant, a philosophical statement recently made by, among many others, Lawrence Krauss. The insanity and danger of this position have been cogently argued by Prof. Austin Hughes. By projecting all reality onto abstract matter, and then by proceeding to deny the value of philosophical inquiry, science-as-you-know-it is sucking the meaning out of the human condition.

Yet, science-as-you-know-it is not the sole culprit of this tragic and dangerous state of affairs. We all are. It is our society and culture that project wisdom onto people who are just smart in their very-highly-specialized-and-narrow fields. To ask Stephen Hawking – someone who had the nerve to state that, 'because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing,' apparently ignoring the quaint fact that the law of gravity is not nothing – about the underlying nature of reality (i.e. ontology) is like asking a chess player about quantum physics. The chess player is pretty smart, alright, but those smarts don't apply to all and everything. Smart scientists can be, and often are, surprisingly foolish when it comes to epistemology, ontology, psychology, art, poetry, and all those things that matter much more to actual human life than mathematical puzzles. Yet we, as the people, still can't resist the temptation to project general wisdom onto them. This projection is what has invested them with the power to speak nonsense and not be either ridiculed or ignored.

But if we have been enablers of this situation, we can also counter the situation by withdrawing our projections. Let's look upon the militant spokespeople of science-as-you-know-it for what they truly are: confused human beings like you and me, potentially beset by hubris, narrow-mindedness, prejudices, agendas, circular reasoning, projections, hidden insecurities, neuroses, unconsciousness, and the entire gamut of human limitations. In doing so, we may lose some of the anchors that ground our lives: we may feel lost in the jungle, without guides. But those anchors were illusory to begin with. We need wisdom, not narrow intellectual prowess. We need guides, not puzzle-solvers. We need people who are conscious of, and in touch with, their humanity, in all its horror and beauty, not unconscious nerds living in denial.

It started with us, but it can change with us.

At the same time, we have to be extraordinarily careful. To simply get rid of science would be a catastrophe for the human condition, setting us back hundreds of years. A quick look at the fringes of the culture shows the dark tides of delusion, hysteria, nonsense, fundamentalism, and sheer madness waiting at the sidelines. But the real risk of catastrophe cannot justify accepting the prospect of slow but sure death that scientific materialism now presents us with. Finding the right balance here is crucial and not at all easy. Our culture will be faced with this critical crossroads not too long from now. The human spirit cannot tolerate the starvation of meaning and the limited horizons that science-as-you-know-it is forcing upon us. The collective human unconscious will rebel. Our challenge will be to channel those erupting energies in a way that balances their destructive and constructive aspects. Shiva and Brahma are both needed; in this order. Vishnu must stand on the sidelines for a while.