Deprogramming from the Cult of Scientism

I have often counted my lucky stars that I was not born into a family of old-tyme religious literalists. Then I would be struggling with the same debilitating emotional issues that so many of my friends must deal with. I would contantly be wrestling with absurd questions like: If I eat the wrong food on the wrong day, will I burn in hell for eternity? If I rack up a little overtime on the Sabbath will I burn in hell for eternity? If I don't hate the designated spawns of Satan... you get the idea.

Then there's the notion that even if I don't sin, there's always original sin. Adam and Eve blew it for everyone. With the dogma of original sin it's basically "Damned if you do and damned if you don't." There's no getting around it, like Lou Costello said long ago, "I'm a baaaaaad boy..." All self-esteem is tainted with the sin of pride and no good deed goes unpunished.

As it happens, I was raised by a bunch of scientific materialists, so the painful process of rejecting such irrational programming every waking hour is not my fate. Or is it? One of the tenets of scientific materialism is that science has pretty much figured out that nothing, certainly not consciousness, exists beyond the physical universe. So, once your physical body ceases to be, then, no matter what you do, it's oblivion forever (Damned if you do and damned if you don't). So this is the question I wrestle with all the time, "Has science really determined that nothing exists beyond the physical universe?" Is that really true or just a dogmatic assertion of the cult I'm trying to deprogram myself from? I've been looking into it and here's what I've come up with.

Scientific materialists are stuck in a 17th-century idea that the cosmos is a dead machine where nothing exists beyond the mechanics of the physical universe. They believe, any sense that we exist independent of the processes of this organism we call a body is merely a quirky byproduct of said organism. They claim that since the soul can’t be verified through repeatable experiments it probably doesn’t exist. But, like all fundamentalist precepts, their suppositions are based on glaring assumptions.

The existence of electromagnetic force couldn’t be verified in the laboratories of the Middle Ages but surely it must have existed nonetheless or the universe would be so much cosmic dust drifting in clouds around the galaxy. Radioactivity no doubt existed before the Curie’s experiments and so, clearly, does spirit, though, to a scientific materialist, it has yet to be distilled into anything more substantive than alchoholic beverages. Reality soldiers on somehow, irrespective of our ability to grasp it.

We are indebted to scientists like Einstein who believed that “Imagination is more important than knowledge”. If he hadn’t, the whole idea of Quantum Mechanics might have been dismissed as so much intellectual claptrap and I’d be writing with a ball point instead of an iBook. Scientism claims that our inability to reproduce spirit in the lab is evidence of its nonexistence. I believe it is proof of a lack of imagination (and courage). But rest assured, not all researchers are content to ask the wrong questions or draw a paycheck lobbying for authoritative mind sets. Much intriguing data is being amassed.

Anyone who claims that we even know much about the physical universe needs to be better read. It is currently estimated that seventy percent of the mass of the universe is made of dark matter, and twenty percent is dark energy. Bottom line: by all scientific accounts, we’re pretty much in the dark. Here’s what we know. We’ve observed about five percent of the universe. The rest is simply highly contested theory. In order to account for the existence of pulsars and other dichotomies between quantum theory and the general theory of relativity, physicists have invented String Theory which postulates eight additional dimensions to the three we can detect with our five senses. Can you imagine? Me neither. Who knows?

One thing is certain. We’re groping in the fog. But that’s a good thing. To know enough to realize how much of a fog we’re in is an important step. And, of course, groping is always good, since the greatest treasure found will always be the search itself. To be curious, alive, engaged. Like Joshua Heschel says, we should always pray for wonder.

This is one reason I like to think of science as a spiritual practice, because it stimulates wonder. For every byte of information confirmed, ten more big questions emerge— questions like: Why is the outer fringes of the big bang accelerating out into space and not slowing down? Why is it that the early Big Bang expanded with the exacting perfection required to produce intelligent life in the universe? Prompting Stephan Hawking to comment, “The odds against a universe like ours emerging out of something like the Big Bang are enormous. I think there are clearly religious implications.” Who says there’s only seven wonders? Wonder is all there is.

When an SM (scientific materialist) says “You can’t prove there’s a soul.” My response is, “You can’t prove there isn’t a soul.” One thing’s for sure. We don’t just die and then disappear forever. How do I know? Because we’re here right now. We have just as much chance of existing in one form or another after we die as we did before we were born, And given an infinity of chances between now and the Big Crunch, the odds strongly suggest we will exist again.

To deny this probability is to invent a cosmic force (God?) which is charged with the duty of making sure no soul ever gets any “do-overs”. So by attesting that death is the void forever, the materialists are unwittingly advocating a post life entity that can be kept in a metaphysical coma so to speak, in stasis ad infinitum, A post physical entity, by the way, that pretty much fits the definition of a soul (albeit unconscious forever). Not to mention they are strongly inferring an invisible intelligence determined to keep this soul unconscious forever— as ludicrous a notion as any crackpot theology I’ve ever heard.

More likely the soul is similar to “the real world,” the physical universe sketched out by Quantum Physics. Like subatomic particles we are probably popping in and out of physical existence all the time. Where do we go when we’re not here? If we are like the physicists’ depiction of the subatomic particle “in stasis” — we dwell everywhere. Like the mystic said to the hot dog vendor, "Make me one with everything." Of course, we already are— except these second-hand minds we've got to work with are too small to see it. Too small to see that there is no death, only change. (More later... the image, by the way, is William Blake's depiction of Newton.)