The Science Delusion

This last week has been for me a real revelation as I began to read Rubert Sheldrake’s The Science Delusion.

Having long been confused and not a little bit frustrated by the ongoing arguments about whether religious people can really talk meaningfully about science, I’ve found a scientist who has helped me to realise that the problem is not in the science or in the religious belief. Instead it’s right in front of our faces.

Rupert Sheldrake

Sheldrake is a biologist and eminent scientist who studied at Cambridge University, majoring in Biochemistry. Awarded the Frank Knox fellowship at Harvard, he is also a student of the history and philosophy of science.

In this book Sheldrake outlines his belief that, “the sciences [have] lost much of their vigour, vitality and curiousity. Dogmatic ideology, fear-based conformity and institutional inertia are inhibiting scientific creativity”.

The book is a challenge to that dogmatism which he feels is stopping human advancement in the sciences and stifling “free enquiry” and “imagination”.

The Scientific Creed

Sheldrake outlines the problem as being summed up in “the scientific creed”. This consists of ten “core beliefs that most scientists take for granted”. Here they are, in a shortened form derived from his introduction:

1. Everything is essentially mechanical.
2. All matter is unconscious.
3. The total amount of matter and energy is always the same, excepting the Big Bang.
4. The laws of nature are fixed.
5. Nature is purposeless, and evolution has no goal or direction.
6. All biological inheritance is material.
7. Minds are inside heads and are nothing more but the activities of brains.
8. Memories are stored as material traces in brains and are wiped out at death.
9. Unexplained phenomena like telepathy are illusory.
10. Mechanistic medicine is the only kind that really works.

Sheldrake goes on to turn each of these beliefs into a question and then spends a chapter on each question using current scientific evidence to answer them. He mixes in a good dose of scientific history and philosophy to help you grasp the fallacy of each of these beliefs in the light of modern research.

Making It Readable

Sheldrake’s book is readable and non-technical wherever he can make it. It also lacks the pomposity that other writers, such as Dawkins, seem to work into their books.

Sheldrake presents a clear series of questions and uses history, philosophy and scientific evidence to answer them. The end result is a devastating critique of mainstream assumptions about the nature of reality.

Why is this such a boon? Well, it frees us from the myths that so many people are locked into.

Mythbusting

For me, the best thing about this book is that is demolishes the case of both the Intelligent Design advocate and the Neo-Darwinian in one swoop.

Although you need to read it for yourself, the book essentially points out that the mechanistic assumptions outlined above are untenable… and this means that the debate over such matters as to whether evolution denies the Genesis account largely melt away. (Unless, of course, you simply wish to perpetuate them for non-scientific reasons.)

More than this, however, Sheldrake destroyed my reliance on the kind of inaccurate and misleading language that is used in relation to science. Terms such as “genetic program” are revealed for what they are: illusory and misleading constructs which creep into scientific thinking to support beliefs and assumptions that are contradicted by the evidence.

All in all, I found myself compelled and attracted by Sheldrake’s determination to clear the dogma of science out of the way and make room for some seriously positive leaps forward in human understanding. A nice side-effect was that I found my own faith in God is no longer in contradiction with my faith in science.

Highly recommended.