Dr. Rupert Sheldrake on "The Science Delusion"

"The Science Delusion is the belief that science already understands the nature of reality in principle, leaving only the details to be filled in. This is a very widespread belief in our society. It's the kind of belief system of people who say, 'I don't believe in God: I believe in Science.' It's a belief system which now has been spread to the entire world. But there's a conflict in the heart of science between science as a method of enquiry, based on reason, evidence, hypothesis, and collective investigation, and Science as a belief system or worldview. And unfortunately, the worldview aspect of science has come to inhibit and constrict the free enquiry which is the very lifeblood of the scientific endeavour."

-- Rupert Sheldrake, Ph.D


This is precisely what I have been saying about science vs. Science for a long time. Only it carries more weight when Dr. Sheldrake says it, as he is an actual scientist, with degrees from Cambridge and Harvard, and a Fellow of the Royal Society, an honor granted to such trivial contributors to science as Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, and Stephen Hawking. The Science as a worldview people dominate all scholarly and public discourse, and are as shackled and blinded by dogma as any Medieval Catholic or first-century Pharisee.

So, for instance take the lady scientist who discovered actual dinosaur DNA in tyrannosaur bones. Her findings were dismissed and attacked by the scientific community because it simply was "not possible", because dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago, and no DNA can possibly survive for 65 million years. Logic, reason, and actual science would, when faced with the factual reality that she DID recover said DNA that either a) DNA can, in fact, survive for 65 million years in certain conditions or, b) Dinosaurs went extinct much more recently. And then, based on those two possibilities, would conduct further investigations to discover which one was the better hypothesis.

Or, for another example, look at the timeline of the Exodus. Historians have an "accepted" timeline for Egyptian history, and have dated the Exodus "if it occurred" at a certain point. Then they looked for archaeological evidence of the Exodus at that time, didn't find it, and therefore concluded that it did not happen. However, there is ample evidence for it at a slightly different time, by a few hundred years, which gets completely ignored because they are unable to even consider the possibility that their timeline is wrong (and also, I suspect, because they want very much for the Exodus, and therefore the Bible, to not be true).

When you summarily dismiss a line of inquiry without giving it due consideration, for the sole reason that it does not fit your already-fixed assumptions; when you label a field of study as "pseudo-science" not because its methods are flawed, but because its conclusions are ones that you do not allow to be possible in your belief system, then you have left logic, reason, and science behind and have entered the realms of philosophy, religion, and dogma.

"As my friend Terence Mckenna used to say, modern science is based on the principle, 'Give us one free miracle, and we'll explain the rest.' And the one free miracle is the appearance of all the matter and energy in the universe, and all the laws that govern it, from nothing, in a single instant." -- ibid.

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