The Science Delusion: Freeing the Spirit of Enquiry (NEW EDITION)

by Rupert Sheldrake

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. These beliefs are powerful, not because most scientists think about them critically but because they don’t.

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.

The philosopher David Chalmers has called the very existence of subjective experience the ‘hard problem’. It is hard because it defies explanation in terms of mechanisms. Even if we understand how eyes and brains respond to red light, the experience of redness is not accounted for.

In 1927, with the recognition of the uncertainty principle in quantum physics, it became clear that indeterminism was an essential feature of the physical world, and physical predictions could be made only in terms of probabilities.

Whether or not they share this faith in human progress, all materialists assume that science will eventually prove that their beliefs are true. But this too is a matter of faith.

Living organisms, unlike machines, are themselves creative. Plants and animals vary spontaneously,

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.

however many subatomic particles there may be, organisms are wholes, and reducing them to their parts by killing them and analysing their chemical constituents simply destroys what makes them organisms.

Attempts to explain organisms in terms of their chemical constituents are rather like trying to understand a computer by grinding it up and analysing its component elements, such as copper, germanium and silicon.

As Terence McKenna expressed it, ‘What orthodoxy teaches about time is that the universe sprang from utter nothingness in a single moment . . . It’s almost as if science said, “Give me one free miracle, and from there the entire thing will proceed with a seamless, causal explanation.” ’18 The one free miracle was the sudden appearance of all the matter and energy in the universe, with all the laws that govern it.

Scientists, like most other people, accept evidence that agrees with their beliefs much more readily than evidence that contradicts them. This is one reason why established orthodoxies in science remain established.

Most scientists take it for granted that the laws of nature are fixed. They have always been the same as they are today, and will be for ever. Obviously this is a theoretical assumption, not an empirical observation. On the basis of two or three hundred years of earth-bound research, how can we be sure that the laws were always the same and always will be, everywhere?

Some philosophers of science avoid these awkward questions by denying that scientific laws are transcendent, eternal realities; they argue instead that they are generalisations based on observable behaviour. But this amounts to an admission that the laws of nature evolve and may not be fixed for ever. In

Some pin their faith on what they call a ‘final theory’, a unique mathematical formula that would predict every detail of our present universe, including all the so-called constants of nature. The uniqueness of the universe would then be a necessary consequence of mathematics.32 This ultimate Platonic dream is far from coming true. But suppose that physicists really did one day discover The Formula. The next questions would be: where did it come from? And why did it exist in the first place?

Roger Penrose has suggested that the exponential expansion of the universe will ultimately dilute everything so much that it will iron out all space-time features. Black holes will evaporate, stars and galaxies will disassemble, and even elementary particles will decay into photons. Finally, the late universe will resemble the early universe except in size. Penrose magics this problem away by suggesting that, at these extremes, scale becomes irrelevant, and the late universe can become the early universe of the next in the series.

Habits alone cannot explain evolution. They are by their very nature conservative. They account for repetition, but not for creativity. Evolution must involve a combination of these two processes: through creativity, new patterns of organisation arise;

Creativity consists in the manifestation of eternally pre-existing possibilities. In other words, the new pattern has not been created at all; it has only been manifested in the physical world, whereas previously it was unmanifest. This in essence is the Platonic theory of creativity. All possible forms have always existed as timeless Forms,

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.

‘Almost all the molecules in our bodies, with the exception of DNA, the genetic material, turn over in a matter of days, weeks, or at the most a few months. How then is memory stored in the brain so that its trace is relatively immune to molecular turnover?’

when all the data were taken into account, not just the positive results published by the manufacturers, Prozac and several other antidepressants turned out to be no more effective than placebos, or than a herbal remedy,

Another problem is that scientists usually publish only a small proportion of their data. If they cherry-pick the results that suit their hypotheses, this will introduce another source of bias, sometimes called ‘publication bias’, and sometimes called the ‘file-drawer effect’, because negative results are left in files

The status of the journal is quantified in terms of its citation index, based on how many of the papers in it are cited in other publications, and on its impact factor, based on the yearly average number of citations received by recent articles in the journal. These methods of measuring scientific achievement are called bibliometrics. This system creates strong incentives for scientists to publish papers with positive results and striking conclusions. Journals themselves have a similar incentive to publish papers with a high impact. One effect of this system is to encourage and reward the selective publication of positive data. Another effect is to discourage original, risk-taking research. To work in a new field in which very few other people are working means that there will be fewer citations and less impact, with career-damaging effects.

the goal of scepticism is not the discovery of truth, but the exposure of other people’s errors. Scepticism plays an essential role in science, religion, scholarship, business, journalism, politics, the legal system and common sense. But we need to remember that it is often a weapon serving belief or self-interest.

The illusion of scientific objectivity is sustained by a false separation of facts from values, on which institutional science has been based from the outset.