Science Set Free: 10 Paths to New Discovery

by Rupert Sheldrake

I have spent all my adult life as a scientist, and I strongly believe in the importance of the scientific approach. Yet I have become increasingly convinced that the sciences have lost much of their vigor, vitality and curiosity. Dogmatic ideology, fear-based conformity and institutional inertia are inhibiting scientific creativity.

I argue that science is being held back by centuries-old assumptions that have hardened into dogmas. The sciences would be better off without them: freer, more interesting and more fun. The biggest scientific delusion of all is that science already knows the answers. The details still need working out but, in principle, the fundamental questions are settled.

some physicists insist that quantum mechanics cannot be formulated without taking into account the minds of observers. They argue that minds cannot be reduced to physics because physics presupposes the minds of physicists.

This multiverse theory is the ultimate violation of Occam’s Razor, the philosophical principle that “entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity,” or in other words, that we should make as few assumptions as possible. It also has the major disadvantage of being untestable.7 And it does not even succeed in getting rid of God. An infinite God could be the God of an infinite number of universes.8

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.

Until the seventeenth century, university scholars and Christian theologians taught that the universe was alive, pervaded by the Spirit of God, the divine breath of life. All plants, animals and people had souls. The stars, the planets and the earth were living beings, guided by angelic intelligences. 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.

from around the time of the French Revolution (1789–99), militant materialists rejected this principle of dual magisteria, dismissing it as intellectually dishonest, or seeing it as a refuge for the feeble-minded. They recognized only one reality: the material world. The spiritual realm did not exist. Gods, angels and spirits were figments of the human imagination, and human minds were nothing but aspects or by-products of brain activity. There were no supernatural agencies that interfered with the mechanical course of nature. There was only one magisterium: the magisterium of science.

Twenty-first-century atheists, like their predecessors, take the doctrines of materialism to be established scientific facts, not just assumptions.

within science itself, evolutionary cosmology, quantum physics and consciousness studies make the standard dogmas of science look old-fashioned.

A consistent atheism stripped of the humanist faith paints a bleak picture with little ground for hope, as Bertrand Russell made so clear. But secular humanism arose within a Judaeo-Christian culture and inherited from Christianity a belief in the unique importance of human life, together with a faith in future salvation. Secular humanism is in many ways a Christian heresy, in which man has replaced God.26

Organisms are self-organizing; they form and maintain themselves, and have their own ends or goals. Machines, by contrast, are designed by an external mind; their parts are put together by external machine-makers and they have no purposes or ends of their own.

A change from the metaphor of the organism to the metaphor of the machine produced science as we know it: mechanical models of the universe were taken to represent the way the world actually worked. The movements of stars and planets were governed by impersonal mechanical principles, not by souls or spirits with their own lives and purposes.

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.

we are not forced to choose between chance and an external intelligence. There is another possibility. Living organisms may have an internal creativity, as we do ourselves. When we have a new idea or find a new way of doing something, we do not design the idea first, and then put it into our own minds. New ideas just happen, and no one knows how or why. Humans have an inherent creativity; and all living organisms may also have an inherent creativity that is expressed in larger or smaller ways. Machines require external designers; organisms do not.

the belief in the divine design of plants and animals is not a traditional part of Christianity. It stems from seventeenth-century science. It contradicts the biblical picture of the creation of life in the first chapter of the Book of Genesis. Animals and plants were not portrayed as machines, but as self-reproducing organisms that arose from the earth and the seas,

“God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle and creeping thing and beast of the earth after his kind.” In theological language, these were acts of “mediate” creation: God did not design or create these plants and animals directly. As an authoritative Roman Catholic Biblical Commentary expressed it, God created them indirectly “through the agency of the mother earth.”

Mind blown. It is right in front of our eyes, and we somehow channeled the mindset of intelligent design and mechanism. Latent right there is causative evolution.

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. Modern economies are built on these foundations. On the other hand, children are often brought up in an animistic atmosphere of fairy tales, talking animals and magical transformations. The living world is celebrated in poems and songs and in works of art. Nature is most strongly identified with the countryside, as opposed to cities, and especially by unspoiled wilderness.

Chambers, Lamarck and Erasmus Darwin not only undermined mechanistic theology, they also, perhaps unwittingly, undermined the mechanistic theory of life. No inanimate machinery contained within it a power of life, capacity for self-improvement or creativity. Their theories of progressive evolution demystified the creativity of God by mystifying evolution.

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 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,

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.

In Whitehead’s words, “Biology is the study of the larger organisms, whereas physics is the study of the smaller organisms.”53 In the light of modern cosmology, physics is also the study of very large organisms, like planets, solar systems, galaxies and the entire universe. The philosophy of organism points out that everywhere we look in nature, at whatever level or scale, we find wholes that are made up of parts that are themselves wholes at a lower level.

The machine metaphor has long outlived its usefulness, and holds back scientific thinking in physics, biology and medicine. Our growing, evolving universe is much more like an organism, and so is the earth, and so are oak trees, and so are dogs, and so are you.

The recognition of the earth as a living organism is a major step toward recognizing the wider life of the cosmos. If the earth is a living organism, what about the sun and the solar system as a whole? If the solar system is a kind of organism, what about the galaxy?

SUMMARY In the Big Bang all the matter and energy in the universe suddenly appeared from nowhere. Modern cosmology supposes that dark matter and dark energy now make up 96 percent of reality. No one knows what dark matter and energy are, how they work or how they interact with familiar forms of matter and energy. The amount of dark energy seems to be increasing as the universe expands, and the “quintessence field” may give rise to new matter and energy, more in some places than others. The evidence for energy conservation in living organisms is weak, and there are several anomalies, like the apparent ability of some people to live without food for long periods, that suggest the existence of new forms of energy. All quantum processes are supposed to be mediated through the quantum-vacuum field, also known as the zero-point field, which is not empty but full of energy and continually gives rise to virtual photons and particles of matter. Could this energy be tapped in new technologies?

Nature is more and better than a plan in course of realisation. A plan is a term assigned to a labour: it closes the future whose form it indicates. Before the evolution of life, on the contrary, the portals of the future remain wide open. It is a creation that goes on for ever in virtue of an initial movement. This movement constitutes the unity of the organized world—a prolific unity, of an infinite richness, superior to any that the intellect could dream of, for the intellect is only one of its aspects or products.58

Henri Bergson

When chemists make new chemical compounds that, as far as we know, have never existed on earth, they should show an increasing ease of crystallization as time goes on, as discussed above. But what if these crystals have existed on other planets? If morphic resonance does not fall off with distance, then these new crystals should be influenced by morphic resonance from crystals of the same kind on other planets, and should crystallize readily, without an apparent learning effect.

The idea that the “laws of nature” are fixed while the universe evolves is an assumption left over from pre-evolutionary cosmology. The laws may themselves evolve or, rather, be more like habits.

Scientific orthodoxy has not always been materialist. The founders of mechanistic science in the seventeenth century were dualistic Christians. They downgraded matter, making it totally inanimate and mechanical, and at the same time upgraded human minds, making them completely different from unconscious matter. By creating an unbridgeable gulf between the two, they thought they were strengthening the argument for the human soul and its immortality, as well as increasing the separation between humans and other animals.

In practice, most people take a dualist view for granted, as long as they are not called upon to defend it.

But what if these materialist beliefs are delusions? Perhaps you are really free to choose your beliefs on the basis of arguments, evidence and experience. Perhaps you are really conscious. Perhaps other animals are conscious too, and capable of free choice to some degree. Maybe all organisms, physical and biological, have experiences and feelings, including atoms, molecules, crystals, cells, tissues, organs, plants, animals, societies of organisms, ecosystems, planets, solar systems and galaxies.

All creation sings the glory of the lord - perhaps truer than thought

instead of assuming that materialism and dualism are the only options, some philosophers have explored the idea that all self-organizing material systems have a mental as well as a physical aspect. Their minds relate them to their future goals and are shaped by memories of their past, both individual and collective. The relationship of minds to bodies is more to do with time than space. Minds choose among possible futures, and mental causation runs in the opposite direction from energetic causation, from virtual futures toward the past, rather than from the past toward the future.

Purposes or motives are causes, but they work by pulling toward a virtual future rather than pushing from an actual past.

the attraction in these epigenetic models is analogous to gravitation. Developing systems are attracted toward their ends or goals. They are not only pushed from the past, they are pulled from the future.

Are attractors in morphogenetic fields just abstract mathematics? Or do morphogenetic fields really exert a causal influence, drawing organisms toward their goals? Is there another kind of causation in nature, over and above the forces and fields already known to physics? I think there is, and I think it is related to the flow of influence from the virtual future toward the present

Mental causation flows backward from the realm of possibilities in the virtual future, and interacts in the present with the energy flowing forward from the past, resulting in observable physical events. The push of energy from the past and the pull from virtual futures overlap in the present,

The architecture of the building cannot be worked out from a chemical analysis of the rubble, nor can the form of the pigeon and its homing behavior be reconstructed from an analysis of its molecules. Even if its genes are fully analyzed and sequenced, it is not possible to predict the structure of the pigeon and the organization of its behavior,

All organisms within the universe are like scaled-down versions of this cosmic process: unifying fields pull them toward attractors in the future, and energy flowing from the past propels them forward. All are embedded within larger wholes—atoms in molecules, organelles in cells, animals in ecosystems, the earth within the solar system, the solar system within the galaxy—and all have their own ends and attractors.

One essential feature of the universe seems to be fertility, multiplicity and creativity. Yet at the moment of the Big Bang there was none of this diversity. Multiplicity and diversity have increased through time, and so have complexities of organization.

Self-organizing systems have their own ends or goals, attractors toward which they move. All living organisms show goal-directed development and behavior. Developing plants and animals are attracted toward developmental ends, and if their development is disrupted they can often reach the same end by a different pathway. Animal behavior is directed toward ends or “consummatory acts.” In physics, goal-directed behavior is modelled in terms of attractors, as if future ends had an influence working “backward” in time, and several quantum theorists have proposed that causal influences move from the future toward the past, as well as from the past toward the future. Chemical processes like protein folding also seem to be directed toward attractors or ends. End-directed behavior is usually unconscious; even in humans, most purposes and goals are habitual. Conscious purposes are the exception rather than the rule. Both evolution and progress can be interpreted in terms of attractors, with influences working backward in time from future goals.

All four causes are necessary: the house would not exist without the materials of which it is made, or the energy of the builders, or a plan, or a motivation for building it. In living organisms, immaterial souls provide both plans and purposes.

Mechanistic biology grew up in opposition to vitalism. It defined itself by denying that living organisms are organized by purposive, mind-like principles,9 but then reinvented them in the guise of genetic programs and selfish genes. The dominant paradigm of modern biology, although nominally mechanistic, is remarkably similar to vitalism, with “programs” or “information” or “instructions” or “messages” playing the role formerly attributed to souls.

In 2001, the director of the chimpanzee genome project, Svante Paabo, anticipated that when the sequencing of the ape’s genome was completed, it would be possible to identify “the profoundly interesting genetic prerequisites that make us different from other animals.” When the complete chimpanzee sequence was published four years later, his interpretation was more muted: “We cannot see in this why we are so different from chimpanzees.”15

and this effect was passed on from fathers to sons for four generations.

Effects of toxicity on epigenetics - pairs strangely with Deut 5:9