The Science Delusion, by Rupert Sheldrake
US title Science Set Free.
"The sciences," says Sheldrake, "are now wholly owned subsidiaries" of materialism, a "default world view" held by most educated people worldwide. To rejuvenate science, we need break out of this dogma.
Sheldrake's statement to this effect was considered so radical that his talk of the subject was banned from TED. Along with a review of the controversy, it has been reposted on Collective Evolution.
I've been thinking about the social enslavement to a belief in "science" since I was in my twenties, and I was thrilled when I discovered Sheldrake -- one of a very few people who talks about this. He states that scientific knowledge has been elevated to a quasi-religious status in our society, even as the scientific method of constant questioning is lost among a welter of orthodoxies.
Based on some of the currently ingrained orthodoxies of "science," Angelina Jolie decided that undergoing a double mastectomy would protect her from breast cancer. Such muddle-headed decision making would not be so prevalent and unquestioned, if people were more willing to seriously entertain the urgent scientific questioned by Sheldrake while contemporary scientists ignore them.
For instance, Sheldrake asks whether nature is actually mechanical, and whether its laws are really fixed. It is from assuming that both of these are true, that orthodox scientists have reached that conclusion that Jolie has an 87% chance of getting breast cancer because she carries a certain gene. Her unquestioning belief in the same scientific dogmas has led to her radical decision to opt for preventive surgery.
Another intriguing and essential question raised by Sheldrake is whether matter is unconscious, as science has so far assumed without ever undertaking to prove this claim.
Other questions raised include whether minds are confined to brains, and something many scientists have shied away from, whether psychic phenomena are strictly illusory.
The most important question "empowered patient" Jolie failed to consider before she scheduled her painful and drastic surgery was this: "Is mechanistic medicine the only kind that really works?" She is not alone in assuming the answer is yes. Mostly, contemporary society backs her up without question.
The Science Delusion is a refreshing and thought-provoking book. For that very reason, many take exception to the questions raised by this leading thinker. After all, orthodoxies are comfortable, and as thinkers have observd, new knowledge is usually denied and reviled before being considered and tested.
Not surprisingly, TED ran into some trouble after banning a talk in which Sheldrake raised his ten radical questions. Then Deepak Chopra and others wrote an open letter to the Huffington Post, and Chris Anderson of TED replied with his own open letter to which Chopra then replied.