Science and the Myth of Progress
World Wisdom thanks reader Muniyba Khan for providing the text of this slideshow.
This slideshow focuses on the content of the book Science and the Myth of Progress (World Wisdom, 2003), edited by Mehrdad M. Zarandi. The slides hightlight one or a few of the central ideas found in the essays. The titles of most slides correspond to the titles of the respective essays.
The essays in the book, as well as the Preface and Foreword, take a critical look at modern science from viewpoints as varied as the metaphysical and the traditional scientific. The authors write with authority and state the truth without compromise.
In his Foreword, Giovanni Monastra alerts the reader to the reductionism associated with the modern scientific paradigm:
Modern science has reduced the qualitative aspects of nature to quantitative modalities to better manipulate and dominate matter, following the old program of Francis Bacon.
The purpose of this “reign of quantity”—to use the Guénonian expression, is power and domination:
…Science is more and more becoming a “techno-science”, where even the simple, practical knowledge of daily life is gradually being replaced by a profane lust for power over nature.…
Monastra cites “hyperspecialization”, and a “horizontal dispersion” as hallmarks of modern science and contrasts the modern physician with the traditional “medicine man” to illustrate his point:
Today the physician is an engineer of human health, a superficial specialist who has invested years in acquiring the professional blinkers which allow him to see only the part… and not the whole. This is a sharp contrast to the ‘medicine man’ found in traditional communities who follows a holistic approach to healing.
The essays that follow give us a “holistic” view of modern science, one which reveals its strong tendencies to greed, intolerance of other viewpoints, dishonesty, and danger.
Mehrdad Zarandi, editor of Science and the Myth of Progress, tells us in the Preface that
There are many truths that pertain to the “how” of existence, and modern science offers them in abundance. But these should not be confused with Truth, which pertains to the “why” of existence and to its “final cause.…”
and that modern thought is based on three basic tenets:
- The centrality of material or physical reality.
- The primacy of the rational faculty and the experimental method as the means of human knowledge.
- The definition of the human vocation, and its ultimate wellbeing, as the quantifiable understanding of “how” material reality functions.
He sees the purpose of Science and the Myth of Progress as seeking to challenge these assumptions and to answer the following questions:
- Is material or physical reality the only form, or the central form, of reality?
- Is the rational faculty the only faculty, or the central faculty, of human knowledge?
- Is the most profound and complete definition of human nature given by our knowledge of material reality?
The losses of the transcendent dimension, the transparency of symbols and the awareness of our origin are all consequences of the “Fall” and the results are to be seen in aspects of modern science, as Frithjof Schuon’s essay shows:
Once Heaven was closed and man was in effect installed in God’s place, the objective measurements of things were, virtually or actually, lost. They were replaced by subjective measurements, purely human and conjectural pseudo-values, and thus man became involved in a movement of a kind that cannot be halted, since, in the absence of celestial and stable values, there is no longer any reason for calling a halt, so that in the end a stage is reached at which human values are replaced by infra-human values, up to a point at which the very idea of truth is abolished. The mitigating circumstances in such cases—for they are always present, at any rate for some individuals—consist in the fact that, on the verge of every new fall, the order then existing shows a maximum of abuse and corruption, so that the temptation to prefer an apparently clean error to an outwardly soiled truth is particularly strong.
and again,
Modern science, as it plunges dizzily downwards, its speed increasing in geometrical progression towards an abyss into which it hurtles like a vehicle without brakes, is another example of that loss of the “spatial” equilibrium characteristic of contemplative and still stable civilizations. This criticism of modern science—and it is by no means the first ever to be made—is made not on the grounds that it studies some fragmentary field within the limits of its competence, but on the grounds that it claims to be in a position to attain to total knowledge, and that it ventures conclusions in fields accessible only to a supra-sensible and truly intellective wisdom, the existence of which it refuses on principle to admit. In other words, the foundations of modern science are false because, from the “subject” point of view, it replaces Intellect and Revelation by reason and experiment, as if it were not contradictory to lay claim to totality on an empirical basis; and its foundations are false too because, from the “object” point of view, it replaces the universal Substance by matter alone, either denying the universal Principle or reducing it to matter or to some kind of pseudo-absolute from which all transcendence has been eliminated.
René Guénon’s essay points out that modern science sets itself up as the only valid worldview and denies the existence of that which is beyond its competence:
The modern conception…claims to make the sciences independent by repudiating everything that transcends them, or at least by declaring it “unknowable” and refusing to take it into account, which amounts to ignoring it in practice; this negation existed as a fact for a long time before people thought of erecting it into a systematic theory under such names as “positivism” and “agnosticism,” for it may truly be said to lie at the root of modern science as a whole. It is only in the nineteenth century, however, that one finds men glorying in their ignorance (since to call oneself an “agnostic” amounts to nothing else), and claiming to deny others all knowledge of the things they themselves are ignorant of, and that stage marked a further step in the intellectual decline of the West.
Titus Burckhardt describes traditional cosmology and compares it with modern science:
Traditional cosmology always comprises an aspect of “art” in the primordial sense of this word: when science goes beyond the horizon of the corporeal world or when the traditional cosmologist gives his attention only to the manifestations, within this very world, of transcendent qualities, it becomes impossible to “record” the object of knowledge as one records the contours and details of a sensory phenomenon. We are not saying that the intellection of realities higher than the corporeal world is imperfect; we are referring only to its mental and verbal “fixation.” Whatever can be conveyed of these perceptions of reality is inevitably in the form of speculative keys, which are an aid to rediscovering the “synthetic” vision in question. The proper application of these “keys” to the endless multiplicity of the faces of the cosmos is dependent on what may indeed be called an art, in the sense that it presupposes a certain spiritual realization or at least a mastery of certain “conceptual dimensions.”
As for modern science, not only is it restricted, in its study of nature, to only one of its planes of existence (whence its “horizontal” dispersion contrary to the contemplative spirit); it also dissects as far as possible the contents of nature, as if the more to emphasize the “autonomous materiality” of things; and this fragmentation —both theoretical and technological—of reality is radically opposed to the nature of art; for art is nothing without fullness in unity, without rhythm, without proportion.
In other words, modern science is ugly, with an ugliness that has finished by taking possession of the very notion of “reality” and by arrogating to itself the prestige of the “objective” judgement of things, whence the irony of modern men with regard to whatever, in the traditional sciences, may reveal an aspect of artless beauty.
(Sophia Perennis/Trsp Publications, 2004) was Lord Northbourne’s first published book (originally in 1940). In it, he introduced to the world the term “organic farming” in his call for a sane look at the dangers of industrial/scientific agriculture.
Lord Northbourne examines the relationship between religion and modern science:
I am going to try to outline a situation chiefly marked by an unprecedented intellectual confusion arising out of the fact that the astonishingly rapid advance of modern science has caused many beliefs, axioms and assumptions of very long standing to be seriously questioned. The origins and nature of the universe and the situation of man in it have become matters of doubt and of speculation; such indeed are the very questions to which religion and science appear to give different answers. Now these are not questions of interest only to a few philosophers and theologians, they are of immense and immediate practical importance, simply because everyone, even if he hardly ever thinks at all, acts in accordance with some assumption or other concerning the basic realities of his situation. That assumption dictates the tendency, and therefore the ultimate effect, of all that he does, and if it is false his best endeavors are bound to go astray; and this applies with every bit as much force to the collectivity as to the individual. But in these days, in which there is no established traditional order, no unquestioned hierarchy of the intelligence or of anything else, all fundamental decisions are thrown back on to the judgement of the individual, and few indeed are those who are equipped to stand the strain.
Seyyed Hossein Nasr shows how man has lost the ability to know himself from within and has turned outwards in search of knowledge of himself, thereby substituting real knowledge for an encyclopedia of “facts”:
Modern man, having rebelled against heaven, created a science based not on the light of the intellect but on the powers of human reason sifting the data of the senses. But the success of this science was so great in its own domain that soon all the other sciences began to ape it, leading to the crass positivism of the past century which has caused philosophy as perennially understood to become confused with logical analysis, mental acrobatics or even mere information theory, and the classical fields of the humanities to become converted into quantified social sciences which make even the intuitions of literature about the nature of man inaccessible to many students and seekers today. A number of scientists are in fact among those most critical of the pseudo-humanities being taught in many universities in an atmosphere of a psychological and mental inferiority complex vis-à-vis the sciences of nature and mathematics, a “humanities” which tries desperately to become “scientific,” only to fall into a state of superficiality, not to say triviality. The decadence of the humanities in modern times is caused by the loss of the knowledge that man has always had directly of himself and also of his Self, and by reliance upon an externalized, indirect knowledge which modern man seeks to gain of himself from the outside, a literally “superficial” knowledge that is from the rim and is devoid of an awareness of the axis of the wheel and the spokes which stand always before man and connect him like a ray of light to the supernal sun.
The Theory of Evolution is the one of the “sacred cows” of modern science. Despite a lack of supporting evidence this theory is a triumph of modern scientific brainwashing. It is everywhere reported as if it were a proven fact and anyone who challenges it is ridiculed. Osman Bakar details challenges to evolutionary theory, from the scientific to the metaphysical:
More than a century after Darwin’s publication of The Origin of Species, opposition to the theory of evolution still continues and in fact has been more widespread in the past several years. What is the nature of this opposition? There are many evolutionists who would like us to believe that whatever opposition there has been has come solely from the non-scientific quarters, especially those who have their religious views and interests at stake. That such belief actually prevailed in the minds of most people for quite a long period of time, and is still widely held, is due mainly to the evolutionists’ vast and well-established propaganda machine which ensures that no potential scientific opposition be given the opportunity to gain a foothold in the scientific establishment.
Whatever justifications evolutionists may wish to advance, the fact is that today there are many scientists who oppose the theory of evolution on purely scientific grounds and in turn argue for the need of a positive alternative, namely a non-mechanistic explanation of the origin of life.
The general disagreement among scientists on this very question continues until this very day. Only very recently, this internal controversy within the evolutionary ranks became a near battle when some 150 prominent evolutionists gathered at Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History to thrash out various conflicting hypotheses about the nature of evolution. After four days of heated discussions (closed to all but a few outside observers), the evolutionists remained convinced that evolution is a fact. In reality, this was an affirmation of faith rather than of fact because, as The New York Times reported it, the assembled scientists were unable either to specify the mechanisms of evolution or to agree on “how anyone could establish with some certainty that it happened one way and not another.” One of the participants, Niles Eldridge, a paleontologist from the American Museum of Natural History in New York, declared: “The pattern we were told to find for the last 120 years does not exist.”
Gai Eaton shows how the unquestioning acceptance of evolutionary theory has become the cornerstone of the “religion of progress”:
Evolutionary theory, as it is commonly understood by nonspecialists, has penetrated very deeply into the substratum of human thought. It shapes opinion and distorts judgement in almost every sphere, all the more effectively because it has become a kind of unconscious and therefore unquestioned bias. People readily assume that each generation is likely to be a little wiser (and possibly even a little better) than the preceding one; this assumption is inherent in the idea of progress as it is commonly understood. If that were so, then the beliefs and ideas of earlier generations might reasonably be dismissed as obsolete. Religion would be no more than a vestige of primitive thought, and Christ might be considered, at best, as a man ahead of his time, a signpost on the evolutionary path.…
Wendell Berry exhorts us to cast off the ignorance that leads us to replace our timeless cultural traditions with the scientistic world-view that is heralding our destruction:
I am not of course proposing an end to science and other intellectual disciplines, but rather a change of standards and goals. The standards of our behavior must be derived, not from the capability of technology, but from the nature of places and communities. We must shift the priority from production to local adaptation, from innovation to familiarity, from power to elegance, from costliness to thrift. We must learn to think about propriety in scale and design, as determined by human and ecological health. By such changes we might again make our work an answer to despair
By almost any standard, it seems to me, the reclassification of the world from creature to machine must involve at least a perilous reduction of moral complexity. So must the shift in our attitude toward the creation from reverence to understanding. So must the shift in our perceived relationship to nature from that of steward to that of absolute owner, manager, and engineer. So even must our permutation of “holy” to “holistic.”
It seems clear that humans cannot significantly reduce or mitigate the dangers inherent in their use of life by accumulating more information or better theories or by achieving greater predictability or more caution in their scientific and industrial work. To treat life as less than a miracle is to give up on it.
Wolfgang Smith tells us that it is not facts themselves which are of primary importance but the interpretation of those facts; and interpretation is determined by the philosophy of the interpreter. In this article he questions the philosophy behind scientistic interpretation:
Nothing strikes the contemporary mind as more certain and authoritative than the findings of physics, astronomy, chemistry, and, of late, molecular biology. These are the “hard” sciences of the present age, which, by empirical means, of a scope and accuracy that stagger the imagination, have put us in touch with fundamental realities that could not even have been conceived in bygone days. Moreover, this group of sciences has been in a sense “visibly validated,” for all to see, by the technological miracles which now surround us on all sides; how, then, can one doubt—much less deny—their findings? In truth, one cannot; quantum particles and fields, galaxies and quasars, molecules and the genetic code—all these are undeniable facts, which must henceforth be reckoned with.
We must remember, however, that facts and their interpretation are not the same thing. And since, subjectively, facts are invariably associated with an interpretation of some kind, it comes about that science as a rule presents us with two disparate factors: with positive findings, on the one hand, plus an underlying philosophy in terms of which the formulation and disclosure of these discoveries are framed. In its actuality science is never the kind of purely empirical enterprise it is generally reputed to be, which is to say that ontological as well as epistemological presuppositions do inevitably play an essential role. What is more, these various philosophical articles of belief are rarely if ever examined or subjected to critical scrutiny by the scientific community. They are the foundational ideas one absorbs, as if by osmosis, in the course of one’s scientific education; they pertain, one might almost say, to the scientific unconscious. And when it happens that one or the other of these ingrained philosophical dogmas does emerge into the light of day as a subject of discourse, the typical response on the part of scientists is to point immediately, by way of validation, to the success of the scientific enterprise: “It works!” one is told in effect. And yet in reality no philosophical belief has ever been validated by an empirical finding; the fact is that verification as well as falsification through empirical means apply to scientific as opposed to philosophical propositions.
Huston Smith defines Scientism for us and delineates the difference between it and Science:
Only four letters, “tism,” separate scientism from science, but that small slip twixt the cup and the lip is the cause of all our current problems relating to worldview and the human spirit. Science is on balance good, whereas nothing good can be said for scientism.
Everything depends on definitions here, for this chapter will fall apart if the distinction between science and scientism is allowed to slip from view. To get those definitions right requires cutting through the swarm of thoughts, images, sentiments, and vested interests that circle the word science today to arrive at the only definition of the word that I take to be incontrovertible—namely, that science is what has changed our world. Accompanied by technology (its spin off), modern science is what divides modern from traditional societies and civilizations. Its content is the body of facts about the natural world that the scientific method has brought to light, the crux of that method being the controlled experiment with its capacity to winnow true from false hypotheses about the empirical world.
Scientism adds to science two corollaries: first, that the scientific method is, if not the only reliable method of getting at truth, then at least the most reliable method; and second, that the things science deals with—material entities—are the most fundamental things that exist. These two corollaries are seldom voiced, for once they are brought to attention it is not difficult to see that they are arbitrary. Unsupported by facts, they are at best philosophical assumptions and at worst merely opinions.
Huston Smith alerts us to the fact that scientism, far from encouraging healthy debate, uses its influence in the scientific institutions to ensure that dissenting voices are not heard. This leaves many people wondering what then has become of the objectivity that is supposed to be the cornerstone of all true science.
Giuseppe Sermonti offers us an alternative view to that of the evolutionists regarding the origins of life:
The origin of life, the settlement of its biochemical composition or of its genetic structure, the formation of the various taxa are by an increasing number of scientists thought to have occurred very early or very quickly. In other words their historical process is deferredto the primordial stage and is excluded from recordable time. A stationary, balanced, cyclic situation exists thereafter, in which all historical features are lost. This emerging view opposes the evolutionary view according to which Life as a general phenomenon is a progressive process; it is continuously innovated and developed, and its structure is the result of a cumulative trend.
Some aspects of the living world will be discussed in this respect, leading to the eventual conclusion that a stationary (steady state) view accounts better for the observed facts than an evolutionary (historical) view. The problem of origins is outside the domain of our understanding from the scientific point of view.
Since the beginning, Life has had an essentially constant genetic-biochemical structure. Its morphological variability is moreover under the control of physico-mathematical constants also invariant in time. In both regards—the complexity present from the beginning and the geometrical rules present (as Wisdom) outside time—Life is not historical.
Historical (evolutionary) processes in the realm of Life are likely confined to some so-called orthogenetic phenomena, the nature of which is still elusive, aside from some degenerative phenomena, more easily to be figured in connection with the law of entropy.
Michael Robert Negus, a scientist himself, proposes a more traditional interpretation of the fossil record, one that accords with spiritual realities and is not mired in a purely materialistic approach:
The Theory of Evolution is a biological paradigm proposed by western civilization that is contra-traditional and tends towards atheism. It is impossible that such a proposal could have arisen in a civilization that was centered upon the Spirit and guarded by Tradition. Evidence for the theory is derived from fossil remains, the gathering and accumulation of which is laborious, involving considerable excavation, bringing to light things which have, in the natural course of events been buried. The difficulty of obtaining such information may be counted as a blessing, since it is not only concerned with what is residual and accidental, but unlike the study of living things, does not readily open the mind to the transcendent.
In his essay “The Act of Creation: Bridging Transcendence and Immanence,” William Dembski argues that creativity is a gift from a transcendent source, and gives plenty of examples to show the imprecise nature of neurophysiology’s and neuropsychology’s understanding of creativity:
…The act of creating poetry is a divine gift, one that derives from an otherworldly source and is not ultimately reducible to this world. This conception of human creativity as a divine gift pervaded the ancient world, and was also evident among the Hebrews.
The idea that creative activity is a divine gift has largely been lost these days. To ask a cognitive scientist, for instance, what made Mozart a creative genius is unlikely to issue in an appeal to God. If the cognitive scientist embraces neuropsychology, he may suggest that Mozart was blessed with a particularly fortunate collocation of neurons. If he prefers an information processing model of mentality, he may attribute Mozart’s genius to some particularly effective computational modules. If he is taken with Skinner’s behaviorism, he may attribute Mozart’s genius to some particularly effective reinforcement schedules (perhaps imposed early in his life by his father Leopold). And no doubt, in all of these explanations the cognitive scientist will invoke Mozart’s natural genetic endowment. In place of a divine afflatus, the modern cognitive scientist explains human creativity purely in terms of natural processes.
Who’s right, the ancients or the moderns? My own view is that the ancients got it right. An act of creation is always a divine gift and cannot be reduced to purely naturalistic categories.
Dembski also shows how the use of language by neuroscientists can obscure the fact that their explanations and reasoning are often woefully lacking. He demonstrates that brain science can never yield the real key to creativity and that we need to look to the Divine to truly understand creativity.
E. F. Schumacher gives us a timely warning in the Epilogue:
In the excitement over the unfolding of his scientific and technical powers, modern man has built a system of production that ravishes nature and a type of society that mutilates man. If only there were more and more wealth, everything else, it is thought, would fall into place. Money is considered to be all-powerful; if it could not actually buy non-material values, such as justice, harmony, beauty, or even health, it could circumvent the need for them or compensate for their loss. The development of production and the acquisition of wealth have thus become the highest goals of the modern world in relation to which all other goals, no matter how much lip service may still be paid to them, have come to take second place. The highest goals require no justification; all secondary goals have finally to justify themselves in terms of the service their attainment renders to the attainment of the highest.
This is the philosophy of materialism, and it is this philosophy or metaphysic which is now being challenged by events. There has never been a time, in any society in any part of the world, without its sages and teachers to challenge materialism and plead for a different order of priorities. The languages have differed, the symbols have varied, yet the message has always been the same: “Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and all these things [the material things which you also need] shall be added unto you.” They shall be added, we are told, here on earth where we need them, not simply in an after-life beyond our imagination. Today, however, this message reaches us not solely from the sages and saints but from the actual course of physical events. It speaks to us in the language of terrorism, genocide, breakdown, pollution, exhaustion. We live, it seems, in a unique period of convergence. It is becoming apparent that there is not only a promise but also a threat in those astonishing words about the kingdom of God—the threat that “unless you seek first the kingdom, these other things, which you also need, will cease to be available to you.”
