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October 10, 2015 - October 31, 2019
The only thing that is certain in science is that it will change.
Some key concepts in science have hardened into unshakeable, unquestioned dogma. Science Set Free exposes ten of the key dogmas of modern times.
then the scientific world is in for a shock, and the aftershocks will have huge impacts on technology, medicine, and religion.
“apoptosis,”
Dogmatic ideology, fear-based conformity and institutional inertia are inhibiting scientific creativity.
I have written this book because I believe that the sciences will be more exciting and engaging when they move beyond the dogmas that restrict free inquiry and imprison imaginations.
am grateful for the financial support that has enabled me to write this book: from Trinity College, Cambridge, where I was the Perrott-Warrick Senior Researcher from 2005 to 2010; from Addison Fischer and the Planet Heritage Foundation; and from the Watson
financial suppor
The “scientific worldview” is immensely influential because the sciences have been so successful. They touch all our lives through technologies and through modern medicine. Our intellectual world has been transformed by an immense expansion of knowledge, down into the most microscopic particles of matter and out into the vastness of space, with hundreds of billions of galaxies in an ever-expanding universe.
The biggest scientific delusion of all is that science already knows the answers.
Contemporary science is based on the claim that all reality is material or physical. There is no reality but material reality. Consciousness is a by-product of the physical activity of the brain. Matter is unconscious. Evolution is purposeless. God exists only as an idea in human minds, and hence in human heads.
the belief system that governs conventional scientific thinking is an act of faith, grounded in a nineteenth-century ideology.
The scientific creed Here are the ten core beliefs that most scientists take for granted.
ten core belief
Together, these beliefs make up the philosophy or ideology of materialism, whose central assumption is that everything is essentially material or physical, even minds. This belief system became dominant within science in the late nineteenth century, and is now taken for granted. Many scientists are unaware that materialism is an assumption: they simply think of it as science, or the scientific view of reality, or the scientific worldview. They are not actually taught about it, or given a chance to discuss it. They absorb it by a kind of intellectual osmosis.
In everyday usage, materialism refers to a way of life devoted entirely to material interests, a preoccupation with wealth, possessions and luxury.
For more than two hundred years, materialists have promised that science will eventually explain everything in terms of physics and chemistry.
the materialistic promess
They explained there were two major unsolved problems in biology: development and consciousness.
majorr issues in science
Crick and Brenner failed. The problems of development and consciousness remain unsolved. Many details have been discovered, dozens of genomes have been sequenced, and brain scans are ever more precise. But there is still no proof that life and minds can be explained by physics and chemistry alone (see Chapters 1, 4 and 8
The fundamental proposition of materialism is that matter is the only reality. Therefore consciousness is nothing but brain activity. It is either like a shadow, an “epiphenomenon,” that does nothing, or it is just another way of talking about brain activity.
Even if we understand how eyes and brains respond to red light, the experience of redness is not accounted for.
First, some physicists insist that quantum mechanics cannot be formulated without taking into account the minds of observers.
The original hope of physics to produce a single theory explaining the apparent laws of our universe as the unique possible consequence of a few simple assumptions may have to be abandoned.4
Third, since the beginning of the twenty-first century, it has become apparent that the known kinds of matter and energy make up only about 4 percent of the universe. The rest consists of “dark matter” and “dark energy.” The nature of 96 percent of physical reality is literally obscure (see Chapter 2).
known universe
Materialism provided a seemingly simple, straightforward worldview in the late nineteenth century, but twenty-first-century science has left it behind. Its promises have not been fulfilled, and its promissory notes have been devalued by hyperinflation.
I am convinced that the sciences are being held back by assumptions that have hardened into dogmas, maintained by powerful taboos. These beliefs protect the citadel of established science, but act as barriers against open-minded thinking.
Francis Bacon (1561–1626), a politician and lawyer who became Lord Chancellor of England, foresaw the power of organized science more than anyone else.
Consider an intelligence which, at any instant, could have a knowledge of all the forces controlling nature together with the momentary conditions of all the entities of which nature consists. If this intelligence were powerful enough to submit all these data to analysis it would be able to embrace in a single formula the movements of the largest bodies in the universe and those of the lightest atoms; for it nothing would be uncertain; the past and future would be equally present for its eyes.10
If the fundamental proposition of evolution is true, that the entire world, living and not living, is the result of the mutual interaction, according to definite laws, of the forces possessed by the molecules of which the primitive nebulosity of the universe was composed, it is no less certain the existing world lay, potentially, in the cosmic vapour, and that a sufficient intellect could, from a knowledge of the properties of the molecules of that vapour, have predicted, say, the state of the fauna of Great Britain in 1869.11
In the twentieth century it became clear that not just quantum processes but almost all natural phenomena are probabilistic, including the turbulent flow of liquids, the breaking of waves on the seashore, and the weather: they show a spontaneity and indeterminism that eludes exact prediction.
Mechanistic science rejected these doctrines and expelled all souls from nature. The material world became literally inanimate, a soulless machine. Matter was purposeless and unconscious; the planets and stars were dead. In the entire physical universe, the only non-mechanical entities were human minds, which were immaterial, and part of a spiritual realm that included angels and God.
The evangelists of science and technology have succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of the missionaries of Christianity. Never before has any system of ideas dominated all humanity.
Mechanistic science in itself gives no reason to suppose that there is any point in life, or purpose in humanity, or that progress is inevitable.
It is not anti-scientific to question established beliefs, but central to science itself. At the creative heart of science is a spirit of open-minded inquiry. Ideally, science is a process, not a position or a belief system. Innovative science happens when scientists feel free to ask new questions and build new theories.
science is a collective activity.
[T]he picture of non-scientists drawn by scientists becomes bleak: a few minds discover what reality is, while the vast majority of people have irrational ideas or at least are prisoners of many social, cultural and psychological factors that make them stick obstinately to obsolete prejudices.
Copernicus’s revolution in cosmology was a powerful stimulus for the subsequent development of physics. But the shift to the mechanical theory of nature that began after 1600 was much more radical.
Most of our experience is not mathematical. We taste food, feel angry, enjoy the beauty of flowers, laugh at jokes.
The final step in the mechanistic revolution was to reduce two levels of explanation to one. Instead of a duality of matter and mind, there is only matter. This is the doctrine of materialism, which came to dominate scientific thinking in the second half of the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, despite their nominal materialism, most scientists remained dualists, and continued to use dualistic metaphors.
As a “belief engine,” the brain is always seeking to find meaning in the information that pours into it. Once it has constructed a belief, it rationalises it with explanations, almost always after the event. The brain thus becomes invested in the beliefs, and reinforces them by looking for supporting evidence while blinding itself to anything contrary.23
Machines only make sense if they have designers.
The better the world-machine functioned, the less necessary was God’s ongoing activity. By the end of the eighteenth century, the celestial machinery was thought to work perfectly without any need for divine intervention. For many scientifically minded intellectuals, Christianity gave way to deism. A Supreme Being designed the world-machine, created it, set it in motion and left it to run automatically. This kind of God did not intervene in the world and there was no point in praying to him. In fact there was no point in any religious practice. Several Enlightenment philosophers, like
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These different worldviews can be summarized as follows:
differebt wotld views
The Romantic movement created an enduring split in Western culture. Among educated people, in the world of work, business and politics, nature is mechanistic, an inanimate source of natural resources, exploitable for economic development.
Materialism is like an unconscious cult of the Great Mother. The word “matter” itself comes from the same root as “mother”; in Latin the equivalent words are materia and mater.
No machine starts from small beginnings, grows, forms new structures within itself and then reproduces itself. Yet plants and animals do this all the time. They can also regenerate after damage. To see them as machines propelled only by ordinary physics and chemistry is an act of faith; to insist that they are machines despite all appearances is dogmatic.
The mechanistic approach is essentially reductionist: it tries to explain wholes in terms of their parts.
Until the nineteenth century, most scientists thought that atoms were the solid, permanent, ultimate basis of matter. But in the twentieth century it became clear that atoms are made up of parts, with nuclei at the center and electrons in orbitals around them. The nuclei themselves are made up of protons and neutrons, which in turn are composed of components called quarks, with three quarks each.
The bottom has dropped out of the atom, and a zoo of evanescent particles seems unlikely to explain the shape of an orchid flower, or the leaping of a salmon, or the flight of a flock of starlings.
Reductionism no longer offers a solid atomic basis for the explanation of everything else. In any case, however many subatomic particles there may be, organisms are wholes, and reducing them to their parts by killing them and analyzing their chemical constituents simply destroys what makes them organisms.
by grinding it up and analyzing its component elements, such as copper, germanium and silicon. Certainly it is possible to learn something about the computer in this way, namely what it is made of. But in this process of reduction, the structure and the programmed activity of the computer vanishes, and chemical analysis will never reveal the circuit diagrams; no amount of mathematical modelling of interactions between its atomic constituents will reveal the computer’s programs or the purposes they fulfilled.
Atoms are not inert particles of stuff, as in old-style atomism. Rather, as revealed by twentieth-century physics, they are structures of activity, patterns of energetic vibration within fields.
