I'm a pragmatist, and I think that opening an eye to the sacred is darned useful. The following is part of an article I wrote, addressed to an audience of fellow pagans, (and mostly intended for for the other geeks in that audience)....I'm not anti-science. I'm a geek. I think science is neat. It's just that I no longer think the ultimate test of a concept is how well it lets us predict the physical world.
Prediction is not to be sneezed at, of course. If I enter a room that previously held only you and your cat, I'm likely to think of it as being occupied by three entities: you, me, and the cat. There is no logical necessity to divide up the atoms in the room that way: I might instead perceive one eight-legs, one four-arms, one three-heads, and three separate torsos. But if there is also a bowl of cat food in the room I'm more likely to predict what will happen if I remember that four of the legs are furry and attached to a single torso. This perception is so useful that our eyes and brains are specially adapted to picking out the cat, and each other, and each others' smiles and frowns. We've gotten pretty good at not tripping over the cat, and not too bad at drying each other's tears and helping each other laugh.
Science works in part by slowing down our instinctive recognition of patterns, so that the patterns themselves can be frozen into recipes that will work for anyone. The artificial patterns so created are more awkward than the instincts they came from; but they enable us to work in areas where our instincts work poorly, spanning billions of years and galaxies of stars. To do the work of science, we must sometimes lay aside our instincts for a while. If we obeyed the ideology of scientism, though, we'd suppress our instincts entirely (or pretend to).
Consider the classical Elements: Air, Fire, Water, Earth. They're not useful in predicting the weather. They are the weather. The ideology of science would tell us that because analyzing the movement of air and water between the sun and the earth into finer and finer partitions helps us predict storms better, it is therefore the right way of looking at weather, the only way. It's certainly one right way, a clever extension of the common sense that tells us to come in out of the rain.
But what about the other sense, the one that tells us to dance in the rain, that the rain is sacred, that we need her, that water falling from the sky is a miracle? What of the correspondences we make between rain and ocean and dream and daring and intuition? They certainly don't follow the approved procedure for scientific hypotheses. In the jargon, they cannot be falsified: there is no test we can make to disprove the hypothesis that dreams and the ocean are connected, or that the rain is sacred.
To an ideologist of science, that's the end: if something's not a scientific truth it's not worth talking about. For me that was the end, too, for long decades (though I was occasionally wistful). Finally it occurred to me that the reason we pay attention to science is that it's useful: the weather report helps us live our lives more conveniently. The sense of the sacredness of rain and soil and wind and fire is useful too: it helps us want to live. From a purely pragmatic point of view we're justified in paying at least as much attention to the sacred as to the weather report!
The above doesn't prove the truth of the statement "the rain is a sacred thing"; it simply argues that we shouldn't throw it out as meaningless, any more that we would throw out a statement like "the earth revolves around the sun." What tells me that rain is sacred is not argument but the experience of Rain; what the argument does is persuade my worried rational gatekeeper to turn a blind eye and let ecstasy slip through the gates.
Or a gate. The pragmatic argument doesn't quite comfort me when I think of spirit, when I think of the Earth or a deity as a conscious, aware being. Science isn't in the habit of considering our planet to be conscious.
Science isn't in the habit of considering people to be conscious, either. In principle, so the story goes, if we knew enough about the physical world we could predict everything, including the electrical impulses in my brain that caused my fingers to press the keys to write these very words. The strange thing about this story is that there is no particular reason for there to be any consciousness accompanying the key presses. The physics would work just as well if I were an automaton. Consciousness is an unexpected, unpredicted bonus.
If you moved into a new house, and everything was just as you expected it, except for the elephant in the bathroom, you might change the way you think about houses and elephants. You'd probably be more inclined to accept the possibility of elephants living in the mall, or in the Empire State Building.
Just so with consciousness. Since science doesn't predict consciousness in you and me, the fact that it doesn't predict consciousness in the Earth either is not very startling. We need other ways of knowing to tell us that answer.
Slashdot Mirror
Prediction is not to be sneezed at, of course. If I enter a room that previously held only you and your cat, I'm likely to think of it as being occupied by three entities: you, me, and the cat. There is no logical necessity to divide up the atoms in the room that way: I might instead perceive one eight-legs, one four-arms, one three-heads, and three separate torsos. But if there is also a bowl of cat food in the room I'm more likely to predict what will happen if I remember that four of the legs are furry and attached to a single torso. This perception is so useful that our eyes and brains are specially adapted to picking out the cat, and each other, and each others' smiles and frowns. We've gotten pretty good at not tripping over the cat, and not too bad at drying each other's tears and helping each other laugh.
Science works in part by slowing down our instinctive recognition of patterns, so that the patterns themselves can be frozen into recipes that will work for anyone. The artificial patterns so created are more awkward than the instincts they came from; but they enable us to work in areas where our instincts work poorly, spanning billions of years and galaxies of stars. To do the work of science, we must sometimes lay aside our instincts for a while. If we obeyed the ideology of scientism, though, we'd suppress our instincts entirely (or pretend to).
Consider the classical Elements: Air, Fire, Water, Earth. They're not useful in predicting the weather. They are the weather. The ideology of science would tell us that because analyzing the movement of air and water between the sun and the earth into finer and finer partitions helps us predict storms better, it is therefore the right way of looking at weather, the only way. It's certainly one right way, a clever extension of the common sense that tells us to come in out of the rain.
But what about the other sense, the one that tells us to dance in the rain, that the rain is sacred, that we need her, that water falling from the sky is a miracle? What of the correspondences we make between rain and ocean and dream and daring and intuition? They certainly don't follow the approved procedure for scientific hypotheses. In the jargon, they cannot be falsified: there is no test we can make to disprove the hypothesis that dreams and the ocean are connected, or that the rain is sacred.
To an ideologist of science, that's the end: if something's not a scientific truth it's not worth talking about. For me that was the end, too, for long decades (though I was occasionally wistful). Finally it occurred to me that the reason we pay attention to science is that it's useful: the weather report helps us live our lives more conveniently. The sense of the sacredness of rain and soil and wind and fire is useful too: it helps us want to live. From a purely pragmatic point of view we're justified in paying at least as much attention to the sacred as to the weather report!
The above doesn't prove the truth of the statement "the rain is a sacred thing"; it simply argues that we shouldn't throw it out as meaningless, any more that we would throw out a statement like "the earth revolves around the sun." What tells me that rain is sacred is not argument but the experience of Rain; what the argument does is persuade my worried rational gatekeeper to turn a blind eye and let ecstasy slip through the gates.
Or a gate. The pragmatic argument doesn't quite comfort me when I think of spirit, when I think of the Earth or a deity as a conscious, aware being. Science isn't in the habit of considering our planet to be conscious.
Science isn't in the habit of considering people to be conscious, either. In principle, so the story goes, if we knew enough about the physical world we could predict everything, including the electrical impulses in my brain that caused my fingers to press the keys to write these very words. The strange thing about this story is that there is no particular reason for there to be any consciousness accompanying the key presses. The physics would work just as well if I were an automaton. Consciousness is an unexpected, unpredicted bonus.
If you moved into a new house, and everything was just as you expected it, except for the elephant in the bathroom, you might change the way you think about houses and elephants. You'd probably be more inclined to accept the possibility of elephants living in the mall, or in the Empire State Building.
Just so with consciousness. Since science doesn't predict consciousness in you and me, the fact that it doesn't predict consciousness in the Earth either is not very startling. We need other ways of knowing to tell us that answer.