from Rob Brezny: I Love Science and I Love Goddess As someone who loves science, I understand why scientists get impatient and riled up about those who reject the overwhelming evidence for evolution and human-caused climate change. I, too, am disturbed about the damage done by fanatical believers who not only insist on cultivating their ignorance, but also want to foist it on others. But I am far less sanguine about the scientists and science-lovers who wax arrogant and authoritative as they dogmatically dismiss all alternative medicine as pseudo-science that cant possible work . . . I am perplexed by the scientists and science-lovers who assert with an angry omniscience that there are absolutely no concerns, none, never, about the safety of genetically engineered foods . . . I am amazed by the scientists and science-lovers who pontificate with unskeptical certainty, with a despotic and doctrinaire condescension more befitting a religious fundamentalist, that all so-called paranormal phenomena is impossible, that all consciousness stems solely from the activities of brain chemicals, that there is and cannot be any such thing as a soul or non-material intelligences or life after death. Ideas about evolution and human-caused climate change may come as close as we humans can approach to absolute truth about the material world. But those other things I mentioned dont belong in the same category. To vehemently insist that they do is not warranted or logical. And its certainly not scientific. *** Maverick biologist Rupert Sheldrake thinks there is a big problem in science, caused by those who employ it as a belief system, rather than using it as a method of inquiry. He thinks science is being held back by the former, and in his book *Science Set Free* he offers the ten dogmas of science that he thinks need to be treated with more suspicion than they currently are: 1. That nature is mechanical. 2. That matter is unconscious. 3. The laws of nature are fixed. 4. The totally amount of matter and energy are always the same. 5. That nature is purposeless. 6. Biological inheritance is material. 7. That memories are stored as material traces. 8. The mind is in the brain. 9. Telepathy and other psychic phenomena are illusory. 10. Mechanistic medicine is the only kind that really works. The science delusion is the uncritical belief in these dogmas, treating them not as beliefs but as truths. Science is much more fun, much more interesting, much more free, when we turn these dogmas into questions.
Posted on: Tue, 05 Aug 2014 18:02:35 +0000