Rethinking Science, Reclaiming Wisdom
At the heart of the human predicament lies an uneasy—and often unexamined—relationship with science. We’ve come to treat science not just as a tool, but as a worldview. Once a method for exploring nature, it now acts as the West’s cultural compass, filling the space once occupied by religion. In a world that feels increasingly unstable, we turn to science for certainty. But that certainty is often an illusion.
Alongside the mainstream embrace of science as the engine of progress, a steady undercurrent of mistrust has grown—about climate change and particularly around health and medicine. For decades, some have linked childhood vaccinations to the rise in conditions like autism, allergies, and other chronic illnesses whose origins remain poorly understood. Though these claims have been widely discredited by the scientific community, the persistence of such concerns reveals something deeper: a growing discomfort with the distance between official science and lived experience.
That unease intensified during the COVID-19 pandemic. Public health mandates—masking, lockdowns, vaccination requirements—were rolled out in the name of science, but to many they felt imposed rather than explained. Science, in that context, no longer appeared as a guide to understanding the world but as an instrument of state authority. What had once been voluntary public health measures became lines in the sand, turning scientific consensus into cultural battlefields.
This reaction wasn’t just about facts; it was about how people experience power, control, and uncertainty. For those who already felt alienated from elite institutions, the pandemic reinforced a sense that scientific authority was distant, technocratic, and unaccountable. The result was not just resistance to one vaccine or another, but a broader skepticism toward the institutions that claim to speak in the name of science.
This mistrust isn’t new. The 20th century left deep scars: nuclear weapons, chemical warfare, and the industrial scale of human destruction made it harder to see science as an unalloyed good. The promise of progress was tainted by its cost. And while surveys show that most Americans still express confidence in scientists, that trust is increasingly fragile—and increasingly political. The divide is not just about facts; it’s about how science fits into our stories of meaning, power, and purpose.
The problem isn’t science itself—it’s how we’ve misunderstood its purpose.
From Natural Philosophy to Science
The term “science“ did not come into general use until the 19th century, gradually replacing the older term “natural philosophy.” This shift reflected profound changes not only in language, but in the nature and organization of knowledge itself.
From ancient Greece through the Enlightenment, what we now call science was inseparable from questions of meaning—a way of exploring the world that joined physical inquiry with philosophical and spiritual understanding. It included not just the study of stars or stones, but their place in a cosmos believed to have order and purpose. Figures like Aristotle, Galileo, and Newton pursued knowledge in ways that were inseparable from metaphysics, theology, and ethics. They saw no hard line between how the world works and why it matters.
The word “science” comes from the Latin scientia, meaning knowledge. But today, it’s come to mean something much narrower—empirical, testable analysis of the natural world. This shift wasn’t driven by scientists, but by the growing demands of an industrializing world shaped by coal, steam, and iron.
The early 19th-century rise of fossil fuels and industrialization created an urgent need to organize knowledge into useful, specialized domains—physics, chemistry, biology—disciplines that could feed the machine of progress. Scientific societies and journals emerged to validate and disseminate results; methods were formalized, and knowledge became a profession. As factories replaced fields and engines outpaced animals, culture tilted hard toward what could be measured, predicted, and harnessed—redefining science not as a path to wisdom, but as a tool of extraction and control.
Natural philosophy didn’t vanish—it fractured. Its empirical side evolved into modern science, while its reflective core scattered across philosophy, theology, and epistemology. What had once been a unified effort to understand the world and our place in it was fragmented—like knowledge itself—into disciplines, siloed and professionalized. The rise of science brought precision and power, but also a narrowing of vision. In trading breadth for specialization, we gained control—but we may have lost a certain kind of wisdom.
The Intent of Science
The purpose of science is not simply to explain the world, but to understand it—to participate in its mystery with curiosity, humility, and care. It seeks the patterns behind the appearances, the underlying principles that shape the visible and the invisible alike.
In doing so, science gives us tools—technologies, medicines, methods—but those are byproducts, not the heart of the enterprise.
At its best, science is a disciplined form of wonder, a way of deepening our relationship with Nature rather than reducing it to what can be measured or manipulated. It advances not just knowledge, but the possibility of wisdom—when we remember that understanding grows not only from breaking things down, but from seeing how they are woven together.
Unfortunately, we’ve elevated the analytical and mechanical while sidelining the intuitive and holistic. We’ve embraced explanation over understanding, data over meaning. We’ve adopted a worldview that sees reality as material, measurable, and controllable—a shift that has driven both ecological damage and human disconnection.
Reductionism
Reductionism lies at the core of modern thinking. It’s driven by the urge to break the world down into manageable parts—ideally just one critical part—so that problems can be fixed and utility maximized. It’s a framework shaped by action, not reflection: man against a hostile universe, with dissenters seen as distractions or threats.
The broader view gets brushed off as weakness or a luxury—something for people who don’t grasp what “really needs to get done.” It’s a mindset that prizes control over understanding, quick answers over deep thinking. Simplicity is treated as a virtue; complexity, a nuisance. Just keep it simple, and everything will fall into place.
For reductionists, certainty is sacred. Changing your mind or showing inconsistency isn’t just frowned upon—it’s a failure. They believe every problem has a fix, every question a right answer.
This isn’t about a handful of people—it’s the prevailing mindset of modernity.
This was a major force behind the public reaction to Covid measures. Faced with a new and poorly understood disease, science had to do what it always does: start with past knowledge and adapt as new information emerged. That meant trying things—masking, testing, isolation, lockdowns, vaccines—and adjusting course along the way. But the public, conditioned to expect quick fixes and clear answers, wanted certainty. Instead, they got shifting guidance and evolving strategies. To reductionist thinking, that looked like weakness, not progress. Changing your mind—an essential part of science—was seen as dishonest. So scientists, under pressure, projected confidence they didn’t always have, rather than being transparent about uncertainty. The result: confusion, frustration, and eventually, a collapse in trust.
A similar dynamic plays out with climate change. It’s a complex, slow-moving crisis with no single cause or clear-cut solution—exactly the kind of problem that reductionist thinking struggles to grasp. The public wants certainty, timelines, and fixes that fit into policy cycles or election campaigns. But climate science, like all science, is a process—one that refines its understanding over time. As models shift and predictions evolve, what should be seen as intellectual honesty is often read as inconsistency or alarmism. Under pressure, scientists and policymakers feel compelled to simplify or overstate, trading nuance for urgency. The result is public fatigue with changing models, polarized debate, and corrected projections—because we expected the science to be a crystal ball rather than a compass.
Humans have a bad habit of believing that if something isn’t entirely true, then it must be completely false—more reductionism.
Reductionism has helped humans survive by narrowing attention to what gets results. But it’s also given rise to a growing list of threats to that very survival. Iain McGilchrist uses the example of a bird: while pecking at seeds, it’s also scanning for predators. It balances focus with awareness. Humans, on the other hand, have mostly ditched that balance—choosing instead to double down on focus, then rely on technology to clean up the mess it creates.
Truth or Consequences
Progress is the defining story of modernity. We’ve come to believe that technology, markets, and science will always make life better. And for a time, they did. But progress that hides its costs isn’t progress—it’s harm dressed up as hope. We’ve outsourced the damage to nature, future generations, and the forgotten edges of society, then act surprised when it circles back.
The evidence is all around us. Forests cleared for production. Soil turned toxic for yield. Systems built for speed and scale, not for balance. We’ve traded depth for distraction, and wonder why trust and well-being unravel. Our most powerful tools—AI, synthetic biology—move faster than our ability to question where they’re taking us.
This isn’t forward motion. It’s drift without direction. Real progress begins with the courage to stop and ask what we’re actually advancing toward.
That requires more than breaking the world into parts. It asks for attention, patience, and imagination. Science, when distorted by profit or pride, becomes a tool for control rather than clarity. Its power lies in revision, not certainty—but we’ve come to treat it as dogma, not inquiry.
If there’s a path forward, it won’t come from doubling down. It will come from changing our relationship to knowledge itself. Not as a machine for answers, but as a companion to intuition, myth, ethics, and humility. We need science not to dominate the world, but to learn how to live in it.
And that shift must extend to energy and Nature too—not as resources to be extracted, but as relationships to be restored.
Seeing the Whole, Not Just the Parts
There’s no shortage of blame to go around. On one side, progress is seen as inevitable—a straight line toward utopia, if only we solve a few remaining problems. On the other, our history is cast as a slow-motion disaster, a tale of arrogance and self-destruction. Both views are steeped in reductionism. They collapse complexity into a single story: triumph or failure.
Growth appears to be evolution’s engine, and population its currency. Species rise and fall, civilizations come and go. That’s not optimism or despair—it’s just what the evidence shows. Whether there’s a deeper meaning behind it all is an open question, but not one we need to answer to live wisely.
Rather than blame ourselves or idolize our cleverness, it might be more useful to pay attention. To acknowledge that we’ve come far, but not necessarily grown up. What works in youth—speed, expansion, certainty—becomes a liability with age. The same is true for civilizations.
Maturity means seeing the whole picture, not just the parts. It means recognizing that the world is not a machine with discrete problems and clear fixes, but a web of relationships we barely understand. Progress isn’t about doing more—it’s about seeing more. And that starts with accepting that we’re a complicated species living in a complicated world. It’s time to act like it.
Who Are We?
Erwin Schrödinger saw what we’ve mostly forgotten: knowledge in isolation has little worth. Seventy years later, deep specialization has made it uncommon for anyone to connect science and philosophy. But if we brought the two back into conversation—especially around the science of mind—we might create a deeper synthesis, where each informs the other and brings us closer to understanding who we really are.
The way we’ve become damages the planet and distorts our inner lives. If all beliefs are just mechanical outcomes of a blind system, then even reductionism collapses under its own logic. What’s needed is not an adjustment in perspective but a shift in worldview. The universe isn’t made of isolated things but of relationships and processes. “Things” are secondary—temporary markers in a deeper, dynamic web of connections. Seeing them as primary blinds us to the true nature of reality.
We’ve come to idolize explanation: the apple falls because of gravity. But ask what gravity is, and the limits of explanation become clear. Understanding is broader. It resides in context, metaphor, and felt experience. Explanation is a subset of understanding. Humans have become very good at “what” but not so much at “how” and “why.” Explanation breaks things down; understanding weaves them together.
It’s hard to imagine any human problem or situation whose outcome isn’t fundamentally a question of psychology.
Science is human. It’s driven by curiosity, intuition, and accident as much as method. Its history is full of missteps, half-truths, and lucky guesses. And yet it’s often packaged as a pristine engine of progress. It’s critical to learning how to live in the world but, like us, it’s complicated. Learning to accept our difficult relationship with science is the first step toward change.
Modern physics reminds us that everything is connected. Even the act of observation alters what’s being observed. This isn’t just theory—it’s a reflection of our place in the web of life. We affect what we study because we’re part of it. That’s as true for ecosystems and societies as it is for particles. Humans, nature, and the planet are bound together in ways we’re only beginning to understand.
The core issue humanity faces is a deep misunderstanding of reality itself. We have progressively devalued the intuitive and holistic part of thought in favor of the more analytical—one focused on control, on bending the world to our will. In its essence, it’s a predatory way of thinking.
The result has been widespread harm—physical, psychological, moral, and spiritual—to both ourselves and the natural world. If we are to survive, we must begin to transform not just our actions, but the way we see ourselves and the world around us.
We won’t survive without science, but science on its own won’t be enough. As Thinley Norbu pointed out, ordinary logic works with the parts—but life isn’t made of parts, it’s a whole. Knowledge can guide us, but it cannot change us. That takes reflection, humility, and an openness to transformation. Philosophy and spirituality are not in conflict with science—they are what give it meaning and purpose. They help us ask the harder question—not what we can do, but what we should.
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Nothing I’ve written here is original. I’ve simply drawn connections between the insights of others, and credited them where due. I’m deeply humbled by the contributions of thinkers like Iain McGilchrist, David Bohm, and Daniel Schmachtenberger, among many others, whose work continues to shape how I understand the world.
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The obvious conclusion, Art, from all your investigations, is that, as a globalized civilization, we’re already into the early stages of collapse. That is, the remaining fossil fuels may sustain economic stagnation for a few more years. But then the costs (of all kinds) will mount and cutbacks, either voluntary or forced, will not be optional.
Powerful nations and classes will fight over the remaining resources, but any winners won’t win for long. Population and consumption decline will be inevitable, the major questions being “how far”, “how fast”, and by “what means”?
“Resilience” will mean learning to adapt with less apocalyptic scenarios and finding ways to preserve some things of enduring value for future generations. I think that Dougald Hine in “At Work in the Ruins” is groping in this direction. And Peter Turchin certainly gets the big picture of rise and decline, except for the “biophysical” aspects that you and other “peak oil” experts understand all too well.
I’m an applied mathematician and science generalist who is well aware of the ideological failures of economists and many others in the social sciences. I would only add the caution that “holistic” thinking can lead into denialism and escapism unless well-grounded in an understanding of the chaotic dynamics of collapse.
Thanks for your thoughts, Dick.
A systems–or holistic–view brings complexity to the forefront. That’s its strength—and why many avoid it. It dismantles the seductive simplicity of technological or “manageable” solutions.
Collapse isn’t always dramatic. It often just means a loss of complexity. And what we call chaos isn’t the absence of order—it’s usually the emergence of new, more complex or nonlinear forms of order.
All the best,
Art
Thank you for a thought provoking article. However I think you are too hard on “science”, not least in blaming “science” for the covid reactionary mess that is still impacting everything from school attendance and performance, long term sick leave and hospital waiting lists (and the list goes on). Covid responses were primarily driven by emotion and political choices as well as very clear feedback from health care professionals that hospitals could not cope with the expected number of sick people. In the first 6 months or even 18 months there was very little “science” in this “response” and most politicians were driven by a morbid fear of the optics of people dying in the street or hospital waiting rooms. They did not care that people were dying in pain alone in care home beds, nor that relatives could not see their families or potentially relieve some of their suffering. Some countries took different approaches such as Sweden and there is now a study that compares all four Scandinavian countries – see below. Bottom line is that Sweden did not do so badly in the three covid years compared to the others who had high numbers of excess deaths in the last year. It faired much better on other societal and economic ways coming out of covid too. This is data that can be used “scientifically” to learn from human reactions and decisions related to the epidemic and prepare a more nuanced and holistic framework of responses for next time. I doubt it will though due to the likely political fall-out and implications that death will happen no matter what anyone does.
https://academic.oup.com/eurpub/article/34/4/737/7675929
Shona,
I think you misunderstood what I wrote: I didn’t blame science for the Covid response at all. I pointed out that it was discovery in progress. What I criticized what failure to acknowledge what was known and unknown.
I used Covid as an example of a much larger predicament. I suggest that you broaden your perspective beyond the details that you are comfortable with and like to debate.
All the best,
Art
Hmmm I think you have misunderstood me too. I responded to your article – which I liked very much – because you need to be careful when choosing examples to make a case for something. At the very least you should expect to be challenged on those examples. My point was that actual “science” had very little to do with the covid response so better examples could have been used to explain as you put it “the predicament”.
I still disagree with you, Shona, and I don’t NEED to do anything because you say so. I’m a scientist and it’s my post.
Are you a scientist?
Much to think about in this article.
I think of reductionism in economics where we start out with the individual and work up to a theory of how the economy works after making non sensical assumptons. We end up with very competant “economists” with mathematical powers that few can match who build complex models. But unfortunately these are not wise men tuned into humanity and the world, just locked into a mathematical world that often fails to predict reality.
As you point out, we need some kind of revolution in our thinking.
Best
Ed
Edward,
Neoclassical economics failed because it treats the economy as a closed, self-correcting system, ignoring energy, debt, and the physical limits of the planet. It assumes rational agents and infinite substitution, but in the real world, economies run on energy, accumulate unsustainable debt, and degrade ecosystems. This disconnect has left us blind to the risks now converging.
All the best,
Art
Yes, sad but true. And we don’t know the cost yet or are aware that there is one.
Best,
Ed
A beautifully put together essay – many thanks Art
I appreciate your comments, Nick.
All the best,
Art
Thanks Art,
Much to ponder in this article
“reflection, humility, and an openness to transformation. Philosophy and spirituality are not in conflict with science—they are what give it meaning and purpose. They help us ask the harder question—not what we can do, but what we should.”
I impressed that these few words are so meaningful and worthy of careful contemplation. They direct our thoughts towards the ways to do this. Reading and imagination have been and continue to be good for me.
Conrad
Conrad,
Thanks for your comments and thoughts.
In the 21st century, saying that science and philosophy are not truly separate already puts me on delicate ground. Bringing spirituality into the mix makes things even trickier for many readers. And yet, those willing to move beyond the superficial level of these topics almost always arrive at the same question: what can actually be done to change things?
As I’ve tried to make clear in this and many previous posts, I believe the starting point is our species’ capacity for psychological transformation.
Psychology and spirituality are the inward-facing mirror to science and philosophy.
I referenced Thinley Norbu at the end of this post but held back from including the full quote, worried it might push some too far. But here it is:
“We must see that everything is connected—ordinary logic is about the parts. Behavior cannot be changed without the psychological shift that results from spiritual practice.”
From personal experience, I have no doubt this is true.
All the best,
Art
Excellent rethink Art, getting it together. Thanks. I like your tribute to these deep thinkers. It is very worthwhile to keep coming back to. I will try to make your article available to to people I know. Science as a branch of philosophy sounds right. There is a philosopher in Australia who has been building a picture. I guess he is going in the same direction. https://substack.com/@humbleknowledge Time is moving very swiftly though.
Philip,
Thanks for the comments and for the link to Ryan Young.
I opened his latest post and saw a reference to Laplace’s Demon—causal determinism—which immediately caught my attention. It’s an idea I return to often. A generation after Laplace, it was central to Tolstoy’s worldview. Determinism began to unravel with the arrival of quantum mechanics and chaos theory. But the work of de Broglie and David Bohm on hidden variables—and more recent developments around the “quantum potential” or pilot-wave theory—suggest that wave-particle behavior might still be fully causal, just not local.
That’s a shift back toward classical determinism but with an important twist. The universe is fundamentally ordered and causal, but that this causality operates in a deeper, more interconnected way than classical physics ever imagined.
I’m not bringing all this up to get lost in the science, but to point out how deeply science and philosophy are intertwined. Few questions are more philosophically rich than that of free will. I fall squarely in the natural philosophy camp. I’m not a mathematician—I leave the number crunching to those better equipped—but in some ways, that frees me to think more clearly about the bigger picture.
All the best,
Art
Brilliant!
Thank you!
Thanks, Rolf.
All the best,
Art
Hats off to you, Art! You have a gift for cutting through the noise and exposing the larger context, and you demonstrate it with your excellent discussion of this extremely important topic. To my mind, this is one of your most important posts. Thanks for pulling it all together.
Thanks for those comments, Frank.
I put off writing this post for months—it felt too daunting to tackle. But eventually, I decided it was time to take the leap.
All the best,
Art
Great post Art!
Thanks, Tim.
All the best,
Art
Thanks you very much for that one! That essay was really inspiring. “Science is a disciplined form of wonder”…wow i really liked that. It reminds me exactly why I decided to study physics in the first place. To nourish my curiosity about the wonders of nature. Many (include me) have probably forgotten this along the way.
Samuel,
I appreciate your comments.
“So here we stand, looking wistfully into the void and nostalgically back into time, for knowledge has put us outside our house. Perhaps in the end we can rediscover the reality of our home with a greater sense of wonder and a more mature appreciation.”
–N.J. Berrill
All the best,
Art
Very good thoughts, Art, and probably no more apt summary of the overall state of miscommunication and mistrust during the COVID times.
The modern mind sees only material things. Until we realize that ideas have a least an equal square of consequence as matter, we will continue to flounder, in thrall to materialist determinism. But…you never can tell which way the wind will blow.
Pete,
I’d take it a step further and suggest that matter itself is just a hypothesis. We don’t truly understand what matter is—any more than we understand consciousness. The assumption that matter is primary and consciousness emerges from it is just that: an assumption. It may well be the other way around. Or more likely, they’re two aspects of the same underlying reality.
Einstein gave us an elegant equation linking energy and matter, but it breaks down at the quantum level. Fields—light included—aren’t continuous, and they’re not evenly spread across the universe. So the picture doesn’t hold.
Most of us can’t even answer the simplest question: who am I? Without that, what can we really claim to know? That’s why I’ve always thought of science not as certainty, but as a disciplined form of wonder.
All the best,
Art
A much-needed and appreciated essay.
Thank you!
Thanks, David.
All the best,
Art
Art, bless you for this mind-ful and heart-felt meditation on the state we are in (“we” = Modern Techno-Industrial (MTI) [aka modern] cultures) I shall share it widely.
And, yes, do purse John Macmurray. In 1933 he published “Interpreting the Universe”. It is a direct challenge to the the foundational assertions of 1st Enlightenment science, namely that reality is lifeless and objective and that therefore, at least in principle, we can come to know it with certainty. He explores what today we would characterize as a meta-perspective — the view that writ large the cosmos is such that it must be (and is) interpreted in order to be known. He then explores the major ways it has been interpreted to date by humans, mostly by exploring the quite different sets of metaphors of the imagination of different types of cultures. Today we would call his different “types of cultures” as different “forms of civilization.” This is a category that is a level of generality higher than either ‘culture’ or ‘civilizations’.
Of course, he was ignored.
In his Gifford Lectures in the early 1950s he tackles what he sees as the fundament errors of modern cultures regarding our common understanding of persons. The books are The Self as Agent and Persons in Relation.
Again, thank you for all your work.
Thanks, Ruben.
Certainty is a human concept that appears not to be among the organizing principles of the universe. Expanding an observation by Ilya Prigogine, Iain McGilchrist noted that
“Science is a matter of probability and certitude a matter of ignorance.”
All the best,
Art
“Though these claims have been widely discredited by the scientific community, the persistence of such concerns reveals something deeper: a growing discomfort with the distance between official science and lived experience.”
You mean the same ‘scientific community’ which has lied to us about almost everything else? LOL
I trust ‘science’ when they’re talking about the African dung beetle but on any issue where there is even the slightest political angle attached to it, I now assume they’re lying and ignore them. Climate and medical science are especially corrupt and honestly, why should I waste my time on institutions which have squandered their credibility in the same way legacy media has?
Glenn,
I’m speaking as a scientist, researcher, and student of history when I say these claims are bullshit. Are you a scientist? I doubt it. Do you debate with your cardiologist or neurologist on surgical techniques on the way to the OR? No.
You are a prime example of someone who read a few things on the internet, watched a few YouTube videos and now feels competent to tell the world what’s true and untrue.
You’re free to believe what you want, but I’m not going to spend time engaging with arrogant and ignorant views.
Life’s too short for this level of stupidity.
Science is the handmaiden of technology and some of us are starting to realize where technology has brought us.
As scientists we are driven by an unbound curiosity and there are no brakes to stop feeding that curiosity. There are also no brakes (wisdom) to stop doing everything (building more technology) that is physically possible (as science has discovered). Technology in turn creates more instruments for science to make more discoveries. It’s an endless cycle, almost like an armaments race.
Evolution has made us what we are. Searching for meaning and craving the latest technological gadget are part of our psychology. I’m not betting on our becoming wise enough to voluntary stop scientific research and ponder in earnest what we are doing and where it might lead us. In the meantime, energy, the most important thing/process/concept in the universe and which also is beyond our understanding, will continue to power our scientific instruments and technology until there no longer is enough net energy to do so.
Ray,
I’d modify your comment somewhat by saying that craving the latest technological gadget is a futile response to searching for meaning. I don’t think the obsession for “stuff” is part of human psychology; it’s just part of the meaning crisis.
“We are trying more and more to get the “being” needs met within the “having” mode. So it’s like eating junk food. We’re not starving calorically, but we’re starving nutritionally. We’re not getting the needs met.”
John Vervaeke
It’s also a relatively recent aspect of human behavior. This is from one of my recent posts:
Humans weren’t always like this. For most of the last 300,000 years, groups had two leaders: the chief and the shaman. John Vervaeke calls shamanism the world’s oldest profession. Civilization changed the titles, but the role of guiding people through uncertainty has only faded in the brief period since the carbon pulse began two centuries ago.
https://www.artberman.com/blog/the-space-between-collapse-and-a-future-worth-living-finding-our-way-back/
All the best,
Art
That science has become a religion is evident by the phraze “Follow the Science” We are in a modern version of the dark ages.
John,
The so-called conflict between science and religion isn’t a clash of opposites—it’s a confusion about what either one actually is. Scientific materialism didn’t eliminate the idea of a higher order; it just renamed it. That’s not progress. It’s substitution.
Calling reality “energy” or “matter” instead of “God” doesn’t change the fact that we’re still pointing at the same mystery. We’ve just swapped symbols and convinced ourselves we’ve explained something. That’s the real error. The materialist thinks he’s escaped metaphysics, but he’s just practicing a different version of it—without realizing it.
All the best,
Art
Thank you Art. This is very good. While reading, I was reminded of an essay by the British philosopher John Macmurray. Writing in the 1930’s, Macmurray reminded his readers that science can tell us how to do things, but it cannot tell us what is worth doing.
Thanks, John.
“I do, therefore I am.” I’ll revisit Macmurray on your nudge. I agree that science can’t tell us what to do, but scientists can–at least those who understand that philosophy and science are about the same thing–who am I?
All the best,
Art
Nice!
I like the way Wendell Berry put it: “The energy crisis is not a crisis of technology but of morality… The issue is restraint… Can we forbear to do anything that we are able to do?” — Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America
Jan,
There’s truth in what Berry wrote but limits and restraint but evolution appears to have a growth imperative.
“The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.”
—J.B.S. Haldane
All the best,
Art
Excellent essay, thank you!
Thanks, Josh.
All the best,
Art