Science's delusion

Let's start by taking a look at Sheldrake's case.

It may seem odd casting the august notion of science into the guise of religion, but it appears that this is precisely what has happened. As Sheldrake points out, challenging these articles will ensure that you receive no funding for your research. You will be excluded from conferences, you won't get your papers published, and if you insist on pursuing this heretical path, you will eventually be excluded from the community ... what the Church called Excommunication.

The institution that perpetuates this belief, that is the Keeper of Its Keys, of course, is the modern university. Godwin (1986) has drawn a poignant parallel between the role played by the Church in the Middle Ages and the role played by The Academy today, complete with rites, rituals and regalia that reflect the pomp and power of those deemed worthy to go forth into the world to be "experts"; that is, purveyors of the True Faith.

Some of you will take this for an exaggeration, but try obtaining grants for your research without the right papers and credentials, try gaining acceptability and respectability without the proper sigils and seals. You might have the cure for cancer in your head, but without the proper documents, authorizations and blessings of the Key Keepers, you will remain a non-descript, unknown novice, who will long have been forgotten before you were ever really known. Yes, there are vested interests involved, and they broach no rebellion.

It would be worthwhile, I believe, to at least list these ten Articles, for while I will not have time to deal with them individually in detail, they do establish a reasonable and comprehensible starting point for uncovering their true nature. On pages 7 and 8 of Sheldrake's book, he lists them (and discusses them in detail throughout the rest of the text), and I'll state them only briefly here:

1. Everything is essentially mechanical.
2. All matter is unconscious.
3. The total amount of matter and energy is always the same.
4. The laws of nature are fixed.
5. Nature is purposeless and evolution has no goal or direction.
6. All biological inheritance is material.
7. Minds are inside heads and are nothing but the activities of brains.
8. Memories are stored as material traces in brains and are wiped out at death.
9. Unexplained phenomena such as telepathy are illusory.
10. Mechanistic medicine is the only kind that really works.

Two things are immediately apparent. First, Sheldrake, being a biologist and chemist by trade, has focused on what we would call the "natural sciences", not necessarily science in general. Second, the philosophy of science that he is challenging is called "materialism". The idea is that everything ... absolutely everything ... can be explained in terms of the laws of physics and chemistry, for the most part. If it isn't anchored in matter, it can be ignored. Genes are responsible for heredity, mutated genes are responsible for differences over generations, everything happens by random chance, and that's it. Unfortunately, that's not it at all.

And that's where we'll pick up next time.

References
Godwin, Joscelyn (1986) "Priests, Professors, & Gurus: When the Academy is a Church the Hermetic Professor becomes a Heretic", Gnosis Magazine, No. 2, Spring/Summer, pp. 35-38.

Sheldrake, Rupert (2012) The Science Delusion: Freeing the Spirit of Enquiry, Hodder & Stoughton Ltd., London.