This essay is 60 pages long, and includes 18 small mugshots in color. Price: NOK 200, postage included. Below you will find Overview, Contents and Chapter 1.

What is the quality of the scientific standard of today? Does Science provide that we in knowledge are getting ever closer to Reality? In what way may Science fail? Are we aware enough to notice scientific dogmatism, or are we too indoctrinated by the culture’s strong faith in the basic health of Science?

In this essay Rolf Kenneth Aristos presents:

·       an overview of the history of science.

·       a summary of Ken Wilber’s view on the theory of science.

·       some insights from the sociology of science: how science functions in practice.

·       an overview of the status quo for a dozen scientific disciplines.

·       some suggestions for how to establish a more healthy scientific culture.

Contents

1) An overview of the history of science; of how science, in a rather unscientific way, came to be embedded in the materialistic-naturalistic dogma

2) A summary of Ken Wilber’s view on the theory of science

3) Some points from the sociology of science: how science functions in practice. It seems as if most of the scientific disciplines have turned their paradigms into fossilised dogmas. In these cases the scientific progress that can be expected is limited 

4) An overview of the status quo for a dozen scientific disciplines

5) Some suggestions for how to establish a more healthy scientific culture

6) Personal strategies for the disillusioned

Literature

Notes

                                        1) The history of science

Is the primary dimension of Existence spiritual or material? This is the most fundamental question that science should have clarified before they chose their basic view. All the world’s religions are based on a spiritual world view. This spiritual view may have a prerational and mythological form (most religions), or a more mature and transrational form (e.g. the esoteric systems). Western science is based on a materialistic world view, but this view is not in itself based on science. Very few representatives of science seem to be aware of this fact, even though the Western history of ideas is relatively easy to comprehend.

The renaissance that emerged in the Italian city-states introduced a new era in Western intellectual and cultural history. Man freed himself from both classical and Church authorities. Individualism and independence grew stronger at the expense of collectivism and institu­tionalised faith. The heliocentric model (the theory that the planets orbit the Sun) split the emerging Science from Church. The 1600s saw the scientific revolution, with Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) as its prime spokesman. At that time only mathematics, physics and astronomy had crystallised into science.

Galilei set himself the goal to save the emerging science from the prerational swamp of the Middle Ages, which required a rejection of the contemporary biological and theological mindsets (Aristoteles and Christianity). Galilei rejected these mindsets by stating that science should only concern itself with the material and quanti­tative aspects of Existence; i.e. whatever can be measured (number, size, form, weight and speed). Only this could be a productive scientific methodology. This kind of demarcation of what science can engage in, is today called ”methodological naturalism”. Galilei and the intellectuals were still devoted Christians (Tarnas, 1991).

In England it was Francis Bacon (1561-1626) who was tired of all the talk about invisible biological forces of purpose (teleology) and theological specu­lations, and who wanted to start afresh, based on what could be observed. He was also one of the first to formulate an anti-ecological view of nature. For him, Nature should be subjected, controlled and exploited. Nature only had utilitarian value, not intrinsic value.

The quantitative science did its job with great success, and quantified ever more of what is quantifiable. This quantification resulted in an increasingly mechanical worldview. Phenomena such as qualities, spirit and intentions were pushed ever further out in the fringe of the universe. It seemed as if the representatives of science had totally forgotten that the scientific method at the starting point was restricted to examine only one aspect of reality: the quantitative. Still, most biologists and scientists had their Bible faith intact through the first half of the 19th century. It was only when Darwin in 1859 published his On the Origin of Species that the great cultural turning-point occured, from a spiritual worldview (though a prerational one) to a materialistic worldview.

Twenty years after the book was published, a 2000 years long faith in a divine creation, wisdom and plan in Nature was degraded to prerational superstition. The idea that Nature is purposeless and driven by chance, was turned into a scientific dogma. Darwinism was the most signifi­cant intellectual and cultural revolution ever, greater than Copernicus’ realisation of the heliocentric world­view. The quantitative glasses that, for Galilei, merely served as a scientific method, now gave the West its new basic view on Existence. The success of ”methodological natura­lism” had seduced the academic elite in the direction of ”metaphysical naturalism”.

We still live in the shadows of Galilei’s view on science. As mentioned, he had to rectify an imbalance: so he started the transformation from an unscientific biological and theological mindset to an experimental and empirical (sensory-based) methodology for the study of quantities. Galilei’s contribution was culturally and historically adequate, which he rightly has been honoured for. But with his biased focus on quantities, a new imbalance was created, an imbalance we are still victims of today. The strategy that was culturally and historically adequate in the 1600s, represents stagnation today. We need a new chess move.

The materialistic basic view at the end of the 1800s, combined with the prevailing quantitative method, invited to a circle reasoning difficult to get out of. The less a scientific subject was accessible to quantitative experiments, the less scientific and ”real” the subject was regarded. For a subject to be really real, it had to be quanti­fiable. Thus, when the biological, psychological and socio­logical scientific disciplines turned up, they were expected to imitate as far as possible the metho­dology of natural science. In this way we brought ourselves into a materialistic ”flatland” with a science blind to intensions, depths and values.

The Western world has, in contrast with the East, never had genuine meditative traditions for the development of higher states of consciousness with corresponding higher cognitive abilities. The Western world stopped with the ordinary waking consciousness and reason as the highest possible form of cognition. The distinction between prerational spirituality and transrational spirituality is unknown to most people; in the West this distinction was first introduced by the integral cosmologist Ken Wilber.

The combination of European philosophy, a quantitative science and a materialistic basic view had as a conse­quence the implicit rejection of the idea of a (possible) transrational level of cognition. In the Western world no one and nothing would be allowed to triumph over reason, the intellect and the academics. Everything ”spiritual” was to be classified, per definition, as prerational. And this is the attitude and stance of main­stream academia today.