We are all aware of science and what it means to the modern world, but how many really know the central reasons behind science, its overall methodology, or how it came about? In this post, I’ll attempt to offer a glimmer of light.
But in doing so, I want to highlight something else. Namely, science, today, is arriving at concepts that seem to invalidate the very processes of science itself. The discipline remains uneasy with this – perhaps because it would open up ‘truths’ about the paranormal.
EARLY IDEAS
The first awareness of science in a modern, western sense came from the ancient Greeks. Imbued with a curiosity about the world separate from the machinations of gods, a methodolgy was finally devised by Aristotle in the 4th century BC. To him, we should understand the world by a process of experience and observation separate to the old accepted ways of belief.
Europe was to lose touch with Classical knowledge, with Christianity rising as the only, belief-based, system. Science proper was carried on by the Islamic world. However, the 11th century Reconquest of Spain caused a rediscovery of Classical texts as western minds began to study the libraries left behind as Islam retreated.
Such alternative knowledge to the Bible put pressure on Christian intellectuals. Hence, when it was realised that Aristotelian cosmology agreed with the Bible on certain factors - a stationary Earth at the centre of the universe, for instance - some theologians attempted to place Classical knowledge within a Christian system.
Such intellectualism came to a head with St Thomas Aquinas, who theorised that there were two ways to understand God’s Creation. We can work with revealed or natural theology. The former was our belief in God; the latter became the first official acceptance that man’s mind could work alongside God to understand the world.
PHILOSOPHY
This attempt to allow a degree of science into the Medieval world was to prove a can of worms. For once an idea is out, it is hard to put back or hold at bay. Hence, by the 13th century the monk, Roger Bacon, began to argue that science could best understand the world through experimentation.
By the early 14th century, the need to use man’s mind to understand the world was fighting for acceptance. Principal to the process was William of Occam, arguing for less secular power in the hands of the Church.
He even dared to moot such ideas as democracy. But of most importance to science was his invention of ‘Occam’s Razor’. Stated simply, he argued that the simplest form of statement is superior to endless hypotheses. It was the beginning of reductionism, where a simple answer becomes more sensible than the more complex.
DEFINING PARAMETERS
Such a methodology became the rockbed of scientific methodology. And it was to find further acceptance at the beginning of the 17th century with Francis Bacon. Arguing against belief, he said that if a man begins with certainties, he will end with doubts. Yet, if we were to begin with doubts, we shall end in certainties.
This reversal of knowledge was vital to a world beginning to feel confident with itself intellectually. Bacon had reversed belief in favour of science. And the stakes were high.
It was about what constituted knowledge. And Bacon understood very well that knowledge is power. But whilst the basics of a scientific methodology were being put in place, it still required a master-stroke to validate science above all doubt. This came with the father of modern philosophy, Rene Descartes.
THINKING RIGHT
In his 1637 ‘Discourse on Method’, Descartes laid the foundations for the modern intellectual mind. Introducing Radical Doubt, he argued that we should deny everything. Only with absolute scepticism can we look at the world and realise how it works. And to do that, man needed a frame of mind by which he could discover.
Discounting belief, discounting everything about him, at the basis of man’s mind was the ability to think. In his famous dictum, ‘I think, therefore I am’, he placed man’s mind as central to how he discovers the world.
EMPIRICISM
As the 17th century was coming to a close, one vitally important essay appeared - ‘An Essay Concerning Human Understanding’. Written by the philosopher John Locke, it was the final piece in the scientific methodology that was soon to rise supreme.
Validating empiricism, Locke argued that man is born with a mentally clean slate. There is nothing in the mind until impressions enter it from experience of the outside world. Only through experience could we know things. And mentation itself was simply reflection upon the sensations we experience.
The method of science was complete. Today, science is accepted as a process by which we observe and experiment. In this way, we collect data. And from analysis of this data, we put forward theories.
Once the theory is in place, further experiment and observation goes on to prove or invalidate the theory, nudging science forever onwards. It is a process that led to the modern world, confirming our sciences as the path to knowledge.
RETURN TO DOUBT
This, then, is the story of how science became what it is. And whilst I would never deny the vital importance of the process, the whole system presents some severe difficulties, today, regarding knowledge, and the paranormal in particular.
First of all, science was created to understand a material world, working in predictable and mechanistic ways. Unfortunately, though, science itself has now gone a long way to invalidating these processes.
Typically, quantum theory has shown that, at a fundamental level, the universe is anything but mechanistic, or probabilistic. Rather, the universe is a state of flux which somehow produces the world we think of as material.
PARTICULAR IMPROBABILITY
Essential to what we perceive as the material world is, it seems, consciousness. We can come to this conclusion by realizing that when a measurement is made in the world of particles, to carry out the test, the particles must be bombarded with light.
Light is, itself, made up of particles. Hence, in ‘looking’ into the quantum world, we are actually affecting it in terms of a collision. Until this point, a particle can be in any probable state it could be in.
Only in ‘observing’ does a definite, hard reality present itself. But the problem is, that reality is essentially a result of our observation, rather than its true state. Hence, an essential element of ‘reality’ is our ability to observe it.
ROLE OF THE MIND
This places consciousness at the heart of our ability to observe and experiment with the universe, and everything in it. Descartes’ dictum – I think, therefore I am – is suddenly not only a process of methodology, but of creation.
The problem of the role of mind in the world is made even more difficult when we think of Locke, and his idea of the mind being a ‘mentally clean slate’. As the world has history before we are able to conceive it, how can we not have something in the mind that gives reality its validity?
To go even deeper into this paradox, if a conscious observer is essential to creating the world we experience in the first place, who was viewing the universe before life existed?
As the universe is said to have existed right back to the Big Bang, then consciousness must also have existed for this to occur.
VALIDATING THE PARANORMAL
This all suggests that science, as understood today, is alien to how the universe really is. Rather, the universe must hold, within itself, a form of connective consciousness with everything in the universe.
Such a view holds vital importance for the paranormal, for such a connective consciousness would permit the free-flow of information throughout the universe, and allow mind an ability to affect matter.
Further, such a consciousness would be eternal, giving a hint of credence to the existence of ‘entities’ existing before our time, probabilities of ‘time’ yet to come, and the troubling possibility of ‘consciousness’ surviving death.
IN CONCLUSION
Of course, at this stage in our understanding of the universe, such concepts must remain basically supernatural, with no rational way of conceiving them. Similarly, science must go on in the way it has been conceived to exist.
But maybe it is time for a slight change in the ‘over-view’ of the scientific mind. For whilst it is slowly drawing back the veil of this enigmatic universe, it could peak intellectually over the horizon and accept the material world may not be all there is.
By Anthony North, November 2007
