"
If 'dead' matter has reared up this curious landscape of
fiddling crickets, song sparrows, and wondering [humans], it must be
plain even to the most devoted materialist that the matter of which he
[or she] speaks contains amazing, if not dreadful, powers." -- Loren Eiseley in
The Immense Journey
In opposing the Vietnam War, Senator J. William Fulbright wisely
understood: "In a democracy dissent is an act of faith. Like medicine,
the test of its value is not in its taste, but in its effects."
Similarly for science. The efficacy of science rests not primarily in
its assumptions but in its powerful methodology. Despite the demise of
most of science's once-sacred assumptions (
Science's Sacred Cows--Part I), science remains alive and well. How remarkable!
It's been said, "In science, truth always wins." Evolution, Big Bang
cosmology, and plate tectonics, each ridiculed when first proposed, are
now solidly mainstream. I had not fully appreciated until recently --
thanks to the observations of a psychologist friend -- what may be
the hallmark of scientific methodology:
consensus.
Scientific protocol institutes enough formalized give and take to forge
a high degree of consensus. Consider, for example, the issue of climate
change. Despite the complexity of the issue, recent studies (
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
2010) reveal that 97 to 98 percent of climate scientists concur with
the findings of the International Panel on Climate Change regarding the
anthropomorphic origins of current climate instability. That's a
stunning degree of consensus.
By highlighting that science is more robust than its assumptions, I
do not mean to levy implicit criticism that science should not have
imposed the assumptions that it later cast aside. Most were necessary at
the time. The universe is too complex a subject without the imposition
of simplifications. But periodically science must jettison its blinders.
Two historic moments of profound paradigm shift were the Copernican and
Darwinian revolutions. The former dislodged the geocentric and static
cosmology of Ptolemy and Aristotle, ultimately replacing it with the
heliocentric and dynamic cosmology of today. Similarly, the latter
undermined the assumed "stability of species" by demonstrating that
biology is also dynamic.
To come clean, my purpose in this series of posts is simple, namely to offer a cautionary tale:
Science,
be careful what you assume, for in addition to limiting your vision,
assumptions carry unintended consequences, some of which are
deleterious.
To date, previous posts have discussed the abandonment of four of science's once-cherished notions:
absolute space and time,
determinism,
dualism, and
locality. Two additional posts addressed other assumptions that may be on their last legs:
realism and
reductionism. This brings us to the last -- and most intransigent -- of science's sacred cows: materialism.
Materialism
is the presumption that all attributes of the cosmos, including human
consciousness, derive from the properties of matter. To put it bluntly:
matter -- or its alter ego, energy -- is all there is.
Materialism, I believe, harbors a multitude of sins. Today I'll argue
that the materialistic paradigm is detrimental both to science and to
the human condition. And in the final post of the series, we'll examine
some evidence that the paradigm, at long last, is collapsing.
In fairness, materialism is a tacit rather than a formal assumption
of modern science. Nevertheless, it remains the prevailing paradigm,
especially among many prominent scientists, as the following example
illustrates.
On page 14 of
Ever Since Darwin
(1977), a collection of beautifully written essays by the late
evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, the writer drops a bombshell:
"Evolution is purposeless, nonprogressive, and materialistic." When a
scientist of Gould's gravitas makes such claims, it is tantamount to
engraving them in stone.
One wonders why Gould felt the need to interject the sentence. Such
assertions, which ultimately lie beyond the ken of science, are more
akin to religious dogma than scientific fact. Scientists are often quick
to challenge incursions of religion into the domain of science, and
rightly so. But those same scientists may be blind to their own
infractions. Why should science be wary of overreaching?
Polls show that 46 percent of Americans self-identify as "young-earth
creationists" by responding affirmatively to the following statement:
"God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time
within the last 10,000 years." (See
http://ncse.com.)
Surprisingly, the percentage of affirmative responses has hardly varied
in the 30 years since Gallup began conducting the survey. Why do
nearly half of Americans reject evolution despite 150 years of
substantiating evidence? And why is America, which has produced 270
Nobel laureates -- far more than any other country -- so anti-science?
I suspect it is because of the cognitive dissonance between science's
intimations of our "purposeless" origins in a "materialistic" cosmos
and our own instincts to the contrary. Faced with the choice between "an
antiscientific philosophy and an alienating science," many Americans
opt for the former. "Do we really have to make this tragic choice?"
pleaded the late Nobel laureate in chemistry, Ilya Prigogine.
In the current era, the choice is indeed "tragic." There is strong
correlation between those who deny evolution and those who deny climate
science. Climatologists pull out their hair in frustration at the
difficulty of awakening Americans to the seriousness of the crisis. The
wake-up call goes unheeded because nearly half the American public is
tone-deaf to science. Could science's "alienating" overreach be partly
at fault?
*****
I grew up on the edge of Appalachia, where mining interests have
removed 500 mountaintops to extract the "black gold" therein. Only a
nation that has been lulled into the belief that mountains 300 million
years in the making are simply resources for our plucking would permit
such desecration of the earth. Our Native American forebears, for whom
even rocks were sacred, could never understand the peculiar insanity of
the white man, who treats the earth as a commodity. That insanity is the
natural legacy of a worldview that proclaims the cosmos an "It" rather
than a "Thou."
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