Phillip Mann – writer, teacher and theatre director

I have just finished reading Rupert Sheldrake’s most recent book The Science Delusion.

In this remarkable work, Sheldrake calls for a greater openness of mind in scientific research and an abandonment of the dogmas – and indeed the metaphors – which inhibit or give a particular bias to scientific thought. Equally, he reveals exciting avenues of research which are not followed at present either because they are not well-known and not well-funded or because they do not fit the current materialist paradigm.

For a multitude of reasons, I feel this book deserves to be widely known. It is controversial in the best way – being both provocative and positive – and addresses issues that are rarely raised in formal scientific discourse or, when they are raised, are treated in a derisory manner. Hence this brief essay.

At the same time, while conducting research for this article, I have been astonished at the rudeness which this book has been received in some quarters, and at the way Sheldrake has been treated by a major disseminator of knowledge – the BBC .

I feel I must speak out.

[NB. The page numbers at the end of the quotations are from the Hodder and Stoughton hardback copy  2012.  

ISBN 978 444 727 092]

Experiment with a bird in an air pump.

This complex and beautiful picture by Joseph Wright of Derby (1768) shows a natural philosopher using the Boyle air pump to deprive a bird of air.

The bird is dying, and the expressions of the onlookers tell us a great deal about their feelings. These range from the dispassionate philosopher who stares out at us, somewhat challengingly, from the canvas to the interested father who is calmly explaining to the members of his family what is happening. The family are singularly thoughtful, intrigued,  distressed, or preoccupied with other thoughts – of love perhaps..

The painting can be viewed at the National Gallery inLondon.

In his introduction, Sheldrake makes his intentions clear. “Science is being held back by centuries-old assumptions that have hardened into dogmas.” (p 6) At the very core of these dogmas lies an entrenched belief in materialism, a vision which both directs and restricts scientific enquiry.

Contemporary science is based on the claim that all reality is material or physical. There is no reality but material reality. Consciousness is a by product of the physical activity of the brain. Matter is unconscious. Evolution is purposeless. God exists only as an idea in human minds, and hence in human heads.

These beliefs are powerful, not because most scientists think about them critically, but because they don’t. The facts of science are real enough: so are the techniques which scientists use, and the technologies based on them. But the belief system that governs conventional scientific thinking is an act of faith, grounded in a nineteenth-century ideology.

This book is pro-science. I want the sciences to be less dogmatic and more scientific.  I believe  that the sciences will be regenerated when they are liberated from the dogmas that constrict them. (pp 6/7)

In this extract from Sheldrake’s Introduction, you will have noted the presence of the words, ‘Evolution’, ‘God’, ‘ideology’ and ‘faith’ – provocative words given the fierce contemporary debate: Creation versus Evolution. Even if the title of the book has not alerted you, echoing as it does The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, you will be aware that Sheldrake’s book is a polemic. It is not greatly concerned with the Creationists or with religion for that matter. It enters the debate on its own terms and its main target is science’s  failure to live up to its own ideal of being a dispassionate search for truth.

Sheldrake identifies ten core beliefs which, he claims, most scientists take for granted. Each of these provides the substance for the main chapters. In summary, these core beliefs are:

1.    That everything is viewed as essentially mechanical including living things. Dogs for example are seen as complex mechanisms. Even people are seen as machines and Sheldrake reminds us of Richard Dawkin’s famous reference to humans as being “gigantic lumbering robots” in his book The Selfish Gene. A bit theatrical perhaps, but ominous all the same, because metaphors matter.

2.    All matter is unconscious. Human consciousness is an illusion produced by the material activity of the brain.

3.    The total amount of matter and energy in the universe is always the same.

4.    The Laws of Nature are fixed being the same today as they were in the beginning – ie. after the Big Bang – and as they will continue to be.

5.    Nature is purposeless and evolution has neither goal nor direction.

6.    All biological inheritance is material and carried in the genetic material and the DNA.

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.

Stated baldly like this, one sees the immense chasm that has opened up between the beliefs of materialist scientists and what, for want of a better phrase, I must call ordinary people… and I do not mean creationists. Many people – scientists included – have a sense that life has meaning, though they may be at a loss to describe that meaning. Equally, many people may be reluctant to accept the explanations offered by established religions preferring something more personal and (yes) anecdotal, unprovable and mystical. Sadly, we lack a ready vocabulary with which to explain our intuitions.

As one turns the pages of this book, one becomes aware that the materialists seem to have constructed a philosophical box of their beliefs. Having entered it, they have then closed the lid, refusing to acknowledge that there is anything outside their philosophical box. In a way, The Science Delusion can be seen as Sheldrake’s attempt to lift the lid a little. He wants to show that there is much more to be discovered than the materialists allow in our strange and complex universe. He provides evidence that the materialists may be at best simply prejudiced, and at worst, wrong. Hence, the box they have constructed is not a box in reality, any more than the emperor’s new clothes were actually clothes. The problem is in the mind set and hence the metaphors.

Reading the book, I found myself wondering how many scientists actually hold such extreme views. Or to put that another way, I wondered how many scientists maintain such strict attitudes simply as their professional creed rather than as a heartfelt belief. Is adherence to this creed just the way things are done: the proper attitude, the modus vivendi of contemporary science, donned in the morning with the white laboratory coat? I do not know, but I look forward to the debate – the reposts and affirmations of atheism, as well as the plaudits which I am sure Sheldrake’s book will provoke.

In the main body of the work, Sheldrake examines the ten ‘core beliefs’ quoted above and demonstrates effectively why, if seen as metaphors they limit our understanding or, if seen as real, they can only be maintained by ignoring data which does not fit the current model or consensus.

Expanding core belief number one – that everything is mechanical – Sheldrake turns the statement into a question: Is Nature Mechanical? As he demonstrates, the problem resides in the metaphor. What does it tell us about life, other than those physical parts which are clearly analogous to mechanical operations? [A ball and socket joint springs to mind – my example.] Beyond that, the metaphor misdirects us.  If we try to think of Nature as mechanical then we miss the very things which characterize Nature – the creativity and the complexity whereby the whole is always greater than the sum of the parts. Sheldrake quotes the  philosopher David Hume, a religious sceptic if ever there was one, to good effect.. [See Wikipedia – Hume > Religion – for a brief commentary on Hume’s religious beliefs.] Published posthumously in 1779, Hume said, “The world plainly resembles more an animal or a vegetable than it does a watch or a knitting-loom… And does not a plant or an animal which springs from vegetation or generation, bear a stronger resemblance to the world than does any artificial machine, which arises from reason and design?”

Could it be that the materialist scientists themselves have, in a way, designed rather than discovered the universe they perceive? Has a particular philosophical predilection become defined by mechanistic metaphors – ‘stumbling robots’ and their like? Certainly, if we change the metaphor, we change the message!

Here is Sheldrake again, concluding his discussion of ‘core belief’ one.

In recognizing the life of nature, we can allow ourselves to recognise what we already know, that animals and plants are living organisms, with their own purposes and goals. Anyone who gardens or keeps pets, knows this… Instead of dismissing our own observations and insights to conform to a mechanistic dogma, we can pay attention to them and try to learn from them.

In relation to the living earth, we can see that the Gaia theory  is not just an isolated poetic metaphor in an otherwise mechanical universe. The recognition of the earth as a living organism is a major step towards recognising the wider life of the cosmos. If the earth is a living organism, what about the sun and the solar system as a whole? If the solar system is a kind of organism, what about the galaxy? Cosmology already portrays the entire universe as a kind of growing super organism, born through the hatching of the cosmic egg.

And  in his summary, he states.

The Mechanistic theory is based on the metaphor of the machine. But it is only a metaphor. Living organisms provide better metaphors for organized systems at all levels of complexity, including molecules, plants and societies of animals, ….

In the light of the big bang theory, the entire universe is more like a growing, developing organism than a machine slowly running out of steam.

I wonder how many of you felt a sense of surprise allied to excitement or perhaps relief, when you read that phrase ‘a growing, developing organism.’ It is us. We are it, and we are part of it. A vast new future of possibilities opens up and with it a whole new range of questions.

Among the things I noted was how the bleak materialist metaphors have become – almost without our being aware – the background to our thinking. Books such as When the Clock Struck Zero by Professor John Taylor, in which the future of humanity is contemplated amid the wreckage of traditional beliefs, have had their dark effect on us,  making us almost ashamed of any feelings that life has meaning. Taylor is talking about people when he says on his final page, “They may still believe in religion, being unable to accept the ultimate lack of meaning to life shown by science.” He then goes on to talk about, “The fear of suicide of the human race as it comes to realize the apparent meaninglessness of life.” True, he tries to put a positive gloss on this suggesting new kinds of fulfilment will arise, but it will be a world without philosophic depth or purpose. Fortunately, this prediction is not the absolute and final truth – it is merely a nightmare of the materialist mind.

Replace the metaphor. See, rather, humanity as part of an evolving universe and with powers as yet undreamed of but already latent within us. That vision is actually closer to the truth of our experience than the image of meaningless existence. Think how different things would have been if, instead of a ‘Big Bang’ – a logical impossibility as sound does  not travel in a vacuum – we had  ‘The Great Birth’. That is an equally acceptable metaphor, but with this difference, that it contains the ideas of growth, evolution and consciousness. We would still have discovered quarks, but we might have been more cautious about deciding that space was empty when it is actually alive (note the metaphor) with particles, fields and energies of all kinds, mostly unexplored.

What is more, there is some evidence that science as currently understood is starting to crack at the seams because it can not adequately explain the phenomena it is discovering at the micro level of the quantum and the macro level of the cosmos. The box is breaking of its own accord.

What lies beyond will still be rational – but the premises upon which its conclusions are based will be larger and more comprehensive; more open and more real.

Arguably, materialist thinking and its allied metaphors, is one of the most corrosive forces on earth, especially when it manifests itself in politics and economics. It leads to people who, in Wilde’s phrase, know ‘the price of everything, and the value of nothing.’ In saying this I am going beyond Sheldrake who contents himself with science. But the topic Metaphor into Action may be one I shall explore in a future essay.

Finally, let no one think I am anti-science. I am not. I love science, just as I love thinking and learning and feeling. Had my life worked out differently, I would probably have ended up in a laboratory amid microscopes and test-tubes rather than in dusty rehearsal rooms amid stage-sets. I am not complaining.

When you think about it in terms of discovery, the two worlds are not that dissimilar. Both partake of discovery and delight; and those make pleasant bed-fellows.

This picture captures for me the delight of science, the quest for knowledge and the willingness and bravery required to move beyond the safe and known and into the future.

The author of the wood cut is not known but he has captured a moment of time which repeats every time we push beyond our limits .

***

I wish now to echo Sheldrake’s own practice and offer you ten reasons why The Science Delusion is excellent work, well worth the reading.

1.    Good writing.

The sine qua non of all good books… and the test is that once started it is hard to put down. The writing is lucid. No matter how difficult the topic – and this book covers a wide range – he always manages to keep the reader with him.

2.    Personal

One can feel the engagement of the writer in the prose. He is there in light touches of humour: but more importantly, he is there in his conviction, in his willingness to share data and in his reporting of the way his work has been marginalized – not because it is wrong- but because it challenges some of the current assumptions of Science. However, he is not pleading for sympathy – rather the opposite. He reports things as he sees them and the tone is one of sober confidence, being intellectual but without condescension.

3.    Chapter Structure.

All the chapters follow the same pattern, except the last, and this gives the book a special kind of unity. The pattern begins with a question taken from the ten ‘core beliefs.’ An example is “Are psychic phenomena illusory?” Then follows a historical overview beginning with the earliest formulation of the question – most typically in Greek or Roman philosophy – and then showing the different stages of discovery to the present. Then the author provides an up to date analysis of the data as a means of showing that the ‘core belief’ is a misconception at best and simply wrong at worst.

In the case of psychic phenomena, much of the data is unknown because not widely publicized or else has been gathered as a result of Sheldrake’s own research.

4.    Superb bibliography. Enough reading here for a lifetime.

5.    Up to date.

The book appeared on the shelves this year. No doubt some new discoveries will have occurred since it was released, but by and large it speaks of recent developments. If chapter one is mainly concerned with showing that the belief which the materialist scientists promote as reality, is defective, then the following chapters reveal ways in which data has been marginalized or suppressed or averaged or ignored to make it fit the approved patterns.

This is not so much a matter of deceit, but of competition for scarce resources and the pressure to achieve results. Current research, especially in physics and astronomy, is very expensive. The truth is that things are not getting simpler. The dream of having a small group of equations which would explain everything, after which we could shut up shop and lower the blinds, is blindingly not true. [ En passant. Anyone who wants to get a sense of the sheer pace of change in (say) genetics research should consult The Genome Generation by Dr Elizabeth Finkel (2012  Melbourne University Press)   which shows how the confident assertions of one generation of researchers can be completely over-turned by the discoveries of the next generation. Generations in gene research last a very short time – about a couple of years. Equally, no one can tell where that research will lead,. This fact alone adds strength to Sheldrake’s argument that a greater openness to fresh ideas is necessary.]

6.    Educational value.

Closely related to above is the educational value of this book. Whether one agrees with Sheldrake or not, The Science Delusion serves as an introduction to many areas of research. On of its more charming characteristics is the absence of un-necessary jargon. And where the jargon of science is necessary to avoid confusion – for all subjects have their vocabulary – then he explains the etymology. Thus, when he talks about (say) entelechy he provides not only the definition but also indicates the roots from which the word is derived. That is a courtesy to the reader.

7.    Interdisciplinary.

The text moves easily from scientific research to conclusions from ancient and modern philosophy. Also, it is not restricted to one science but ranges from physics to botany, to the experiences of shamans, to telepathy, and yes, to religion somewhat…. Hence we gain a comprehensive picture. However, the focus never varies and we do not end up in a muddle or a conflict of intentions.. The quest is for knowledge and understanding with an open mind, but with a humanitarian conscience to guide it.

8     Challenges the imagination and evokes a world with meaning.

9     Tackles subjects rarely tackled. Telepathy, precognition, etc. 

I mention this simply because most people when asked can recall a moment in their lives when they had a psychic experience. Some people receive warnings in dreams; other people experience precognition as when they think of someone and moments later that person rings them on the telephone: some people can dowse and find water or underground cables; other people may be overcome by a sudden feeling of apprehension which makes them change their behaviour.

In today’s paper, [Dominion Post March 15, 2012} a man who had just survived a head on collision which left his car like a concertina, reported that he had a strange feeling in the morning and on the basis of this did not take his young son in the car but left him at home with a relative. The implication is that, given the damage to the car, it is likely that a young child could have been killed. But it did not happen because the man felt warned. My own belief is that a story such as this is just the tip or a very, very large iceberg. If this is so, surely it is a matter worthy of serious investigation? The implications on almost all aspects of our life could be enormous.

10   Morphic resonance.

Like a good performer, I have saved the best to last. Morphic resonance an exciting hypothesis which may, in time, be conclusively proven. Here is Sheldrake’s own explanation.

[Morph is from the Greek and means ‘form’ or ‘shape’.]

… the formation of habits depends on a process called morphic resonance. Similar patterns of activity resonate across time and space with subsequent patterns. This hypothesis applies to all self-organizing systems, including atoms, molecules, crystals, cells, plants, animals, and animal societies. Al draw on a collective memory and  in turn contribute to it.

A growing crystal of copper sulphate, for example, is in resonanace with countless previous crystals of copper sulphate, and folloss tht same habits of crystal organization, the same lattice structure. A growing oak seedling follows the habits of growth and development of previous oaks. When an orb web spider starts spinning its web, it follows the habits of countless ancestors, resonating with them directly across space and time. The more people who learn a new skill, such as snowboarding, the easier will it be for others to learn it because of morphic resonance from previous snow boarders.

What  excited my attention regarding this is that it explained the way that rehearsals for a play can suddenly come alive. I have noticed this often. At a certain point, repetition becomes resonance, and the whole play/rehearsal moves forwards with greater coherence. Actors suddenly find they know their lines and the whole emotional tone lifts. When the experience is too fragmented this does not happen.

And of course, if Sheldrake’s theory is correct, then the more people who begin to think and seek for morphic resonance, the more it should manifest.