The Blackberry Walk

I've eluded to this idea before, that the scientific worldview - a belief system we'll shorten to scientism - does not prove the spiritual world, or the world of invisibles, is false, but rather is unable to comprehend them. Of all the arguments I've come across or come up with, this argument, which argues that science is blind to the majority of the world's happenings, is the strongest I know of for exiting the Platonic cave of Dawkins in which many today are trapped. Let's begin with a brief explanation of scientism. Fundamental to the scientific worldview is matter. Matter is the thing which makes up the world, the raw materials out of which all things are made. Looking around the house, you can spy materials like wood, plastic, steel, cotton, each with their own materials and material structure. For materials in science aren't stationary objects: they have a position in time and space which defines how they interact. For instance, structure and arrangement distinguish wood from cotton, despite similar chemical compositions. The atom which was once thought to be the fundamental particle (a-tomos, not cuttable) was further spliced into protons, neutrons, and electrons, reducing ninety or so unique building blocks into various arrangements of three unique ingredients. Building blocks is an apposite description, since this model is a bottom-up model of the world. As we went deeper and deeper from, say, the wooden coffee table we saw in the house, the scientific worldview showed us smaller and more fundamental particles, but notably has little to say about what comprises the form of the table - a more top-down conception. Continuing our look into scientism, let's mention the one invisible permitted: energy. All other aspects in the scientific model are reduced down to energy, whether they be force, entropy, or the operation of molecules. In a sense, the interaction of objects, the events without which the scientific model would be pointless, are regulated by the modulation and transfer of energy. However, science cannot see energy. Being an invisible factor, it cannot be analysed in isolation, but rather only through changes in other qualities, like temperature or light. Energy is the currency of the hard sciences, acting as a medium of exchange between qualities and phenomena; for instance, the electrical energy flowing towards a light bulb is transformed into light with a little bit of heat and sound. It's important to remember that a rigorous scientist would understand that energy is somewhat fictional. Science is based upon experience, quantification, and mathematics, wherein the mathematics is a kind of digestion of the data into something both descriptive and prescriptive. Energy, therefore is a mathematical puzzle piece designed to fit every scientific discipline's gap, so that the measurements of each discipline are in concord. A god of the gaps, if you will. The first issue with the scientific worldview is that scientific inquiry must be quantifiable. Most things in this world aren't quantifiable. How much you love someone and care about someone is not quantifiable, and nor is willpower. Beauty is not quantifiable, and nor is kindness. Attempts at the quantification of intelligence have been made, but the success of IQ is debatable. But no attempt has been made into quantifying how 'chair-like' something is, or how perfect a tulip looks. None of these things are quantifiable, so they are trashed as 'subjective'. The subjective world to scientism is a world of human preference, of mere mind, of what doesn't matter. For 'chair-ness' or beauty to be a quality relegated would be unthinkable to thinkers of old; Plato would've seen beauty as an underpinning principle of all things, percolating down into the visible realm. The scientist, however, has little time for the subjective, the unquantifiable - and why should he? What use is the scientific method if the data cannot be plotted, and the results cannot be repeated? When given subjective data, the true scientist is like a blacksmith who's been given clay and asked to make a mug: not only has he no clue as to what's needed to make a mug, but his tools are wholly inadequate for the task. The scientist's hammer and forge are his calipers and his calorimeter; when asked to study behaviour and intelligence he can't help but begin measuring skulls and sticking patients beneath the fMRI scanner. The scientist isn't equipped to tackle the unquantifiable, and neither is the scientific worldview equipped to deal with the multi-faceted nature of the world around us. The second issue with the scientific worldview is that all science must be reproducible. Social sciences suffer from studies and results sets which cannot be reproduced - in part because they deal with fundamentally unquantifiable qualities - but also because most of the natural world doesn't operate like clockwork. Under the electron microscope, at the most granular level of chemicals and particles, there is a mathematical clockwork to the world. This in it's mathematical fullness, the physicist describes with quantum mechanics. Then, with the radio telescope, the physicist looks at the greatest scale, of nebulae and galaxies, and sees the mathematical clockwork they follow. This, the physicist explains with general relativity. The great irony of physics is that general relativity and quantum mechanics - the explanation of the very biggest and the very smallest things - cannot be reconciled to one another, for the mathematics of each sees the other as alien. There is a good reason for this: it is that science has little to say about what's in-between. Whilst knowledge of physics has brought us bridges and architecture, an explanation which weds the Wailord and the Skitty of physics ought to have a far more comprehensive understanding of the every day. For the every day is not, as anyone could attest, clockwork - nor a kind of mathematical formula followed day in and day out. There is a subtlety, a spontaneity, an unexpectedness: there are miracles. The scientific worldview argues the flap of the butterfly's wings can cause a hurricane, but such thinking assumes a clockwork view of the everyday. Man is no biological computer, balanced by delicate neurotransmitter release and neuronal interchanges: there is more to us than that. Such radical reductionism to nature as billiard balls is the result of the reign of reproducibility, the belief that however many times the current save state is replayed, the same series of actions shall continue to unfold, just as water in a river never fails to flow downstream. But it is science which is blind, for it is science which is reliant on reproducibility - the world is not. Reproducibility is a kind of Procrustean bed unto which the scientific worldview demands the world conform; not by any means clear-sighted view of how the world really is. The third issue with the scientific worldview is that science can only observe material. Science cannot help but reduce the world to matter, for science is the study of matter! Many the psychologist thinks the world can be reduced to mind, as does many the philosopher see philosophy as the over-arching explanation - and there's the mathematician who sees the world as equations and fractals, like Pythagoras once did - and, to nobody's surprise, so the scientist sees the world as matter. Science is predicated upon observation, whether that be of objects, of sound, or of light. Where the senses of touch, taste, smell, sight, and sound have proven too qualitative and not quantitative enough, tools have been developed to describe amplitude and luminosity (although curiously never smell). These sensing tools augment the scientific worldview by gathering into the fold of matter aspects like noise and light which would never have been traditionally seen as material in the sense an oak tree is material. But despite the inclusive nature of this broad church of matter, many aspects have been ostracised. First and foremost, consciousness. If I were to look back in my own life as to where my interest in philosophy and my first disillusionment with the corn syrup of the folk philosophy I was fed began, it was with the question of consciousness. I stayed up at night when I was in early adolescence trying to figure out how consciousness, a fact so undeniable and intimately proximate in my experience, could be alloyed with the scientific worldview. The two are like oil and water. The problem was emulsified, however, once I discovered Kantian metaphysics. The realisation that we're confined to the phenomenal world, or world-as-it-appears, which has material explanations, but is wholly subsumed by the noumenal world, or world-in-of-itself, was a watershed moment for me. And whilst I rarely think about Kant now, the jolt of the frame-shift was enough to get me to realise that matter is merely one aspect of reality; that science is concerned only with matter; and that the scientific worldview does not hold water when a wider, more expansive scope is being observed. In summary then, the scientific worldview can only see what's quantifiable, reproducible, and material. It is the scientist with one eye. The one-eyed scientist sees only what he wants to see, never able to see with fullness and depth of the scenery around him. The world is abound with that which his one eye cannot see, a world of unique happenings, once in a lifetime moments, and deeply moving scenes. The scientific worldview is fundamentally anti-human. Science concerns itself with analysing qualities which can't be found in people. People aren't quantifiable: they aren't merely a number, or a statistic. People aren't reproducible: they aren't fungible, wherein one person will act like any other. People aren't material: you shouldn't treat anyone like an object. Therefore, scientism elevates that which isn't human as being more real than humans. Humans are mere wishy-washy subjective aberrations in a world otherwise built of neat clockwork. Scientism is an alien creed. On a lighter note, I implore you to see the world through both eyes. The world is far more beautiful than science can waffle otherwise. And when you feel the pull back towards the flat, secular, materialism simply by living in a world marinated in its presuppositions - an affliction I often suffer from - remember the image of the one-eyed scientist, whose method limits his view of the world so severely; and hopefully you'll be dragged back to sobriety.