Setting Science Free From Materialism

After centuries of psychic, social, and intellectual entrapment by religious predators constipating human evolution in favor of raucous parasitism of religious imperialism, liberation through factuality, material science, and democratic expression and disposition gained prominence around the planet.  Many of today's prevailing bigotries, however, much like those of previous centuries, are now in the hands of pompous skeptics -- vicious deniers of mind and its subtleties -- determined to erase any practice, science, tradition demonstrating mind trumps matter in subtleties and influence upon life.  

Such is reminiscent of Old Major Chairman Mao who all but obliterated Chinese history and the evolutionary excellence Chinese ancestors have contributed to humanity, resulting in today's Chinese youth not having a clue as to who native Chinese such as Lao tze, Chuang tze are, of the influence of Buddha's teachings affecting Chinese life for millennia, or of the substantial contributions they've made through Taoism and Buddhism and their extraordinarily positive influences around the world.  

Rupert Sheldrake clearly articulates properly disposed breadth of mind germane to scientific dispositions, while contrasting such healthy-mindedness with the current state of affairs by most of whom define what science is today, a nefarious dementia of intellectual and moral perversity that is the very antithesis of what science actually is.  

See Video Below  

Guest article  

by Rupert Sheldrake  

**Editor’s Note:  Reprinted with permission from Rupert Sheldrake, the ideas in this article are further explored in Rupert Sheldrake’s book, Science Set Free:  10 Paths to New Discovery.  Please also visit his website, Sheldrake.org, for more of his fascinating articles and insight into nature and human consciousness. **  

The “scientific worldview” is immensely influential because the sciences have been so successful.  No one can fail to be awed by their achievements, which touch all our lives through technologies and through modern medicine.  Our intellectual world has been transformed through an immense expansion of our 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.  

Yet in the second decade of the 21st century, when science and technology seem to be at the peak of the power, when their influence has spread all over the world, and when their triumph seems indisputable, unexpected problems are disrupting the sciences from within.  Most scientists take it for granted that these problems will eventually be solved by more research along established lines, but some, including myself, think that they are symptoms of a deeper malaise.  Science is being held back by centuries-old assumptions that have hardened into dogmas.  The sciences would be better off with-out 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 the fundamental questions are settled, in principle.  

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 do not.  The facts of science are real enough, and so are the techniques that scientists use, and so are the technologies based on them.  But the belief system that governs conventional scientific thinking is an act of faith, grounded in a 19th-century ideology.  

The Scientific Creed

Here are the 10 core beliefs that most scientists take for granted.

1. Everything is essentially mechanical.  Dogs, for example, are complex mechanisms, rather than living organisms with goals of their own.  Even people are machines, “lumbering robots,” in Richard Dawkins’ vivid phrase, with brains that are like genetically programmed computers.  

2. All matter is unconscious.  It has no inner life or subjectivity or point of view.  Even human consciousness is an illusion produced by the material activities of brains.  

3. The total amount of matter and energy is always the same (with the exception of the Big Bang, when all the matter and energy of the universe suddenly appeared).