A Critique of Science, Assisted by the English poet, Auden – Peter Morrell – HOMÉOPATHE INTERNATIONAL

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A
CRITIQUE OF SCIENCE.

A Critique of Science

Assisted by the English poet, Auden

This
rough-hewn sketch offers a summary of the main problems with science, both
as a body of knowledge and as an institution revered in the modern world.
It aims to highlight those deficient areas that have attracted the
greatest criticism from various quarters, most notably from social
scientists, historians and philosophers.

Averaging

“The average of the average man

Becomes the dread Leviathan,

Our million individual deeds,

Omissions, vanities and creeds,

Put through the statistician’s hoop,

The gross behaviour of a group

.” [New Year
Letter, 1940, 234]

So simply in this brief passage, Auden seems to
question some of the implicit assumptions that underpin the scientific
world view, such as averages and statistics and whether such an averaging
and quantifying approach to phenomena has indeed become some dreaded and
unstoppable Leviathan that does not produce what it claims.

Fragmentalism

A predominating obsession to break the world into parts
and give them all names; the names and the parts then become imbued with an
assumed reality which they do not in fact possess in the raw of
Nature. This is a wholly un-phenomenological approach to knowledge.

“For truly, What we have not named

Or beheld as a symbol

Escapes our notice.” [Auden, 840]

The world is not composed of things, it just is in all
its rich suchness and complexity… The world is not composed of things,
but is a coherent whole:

“The seamless continuum

Of supple and coherent stuff,

Whose form is truth, whose content love,

Its pluralist interstices

The homes of happiness and peace.”

[Auden,
240]

Originating as a dispute with the Church, and in its
mission to denounce ‘irrational’ and received religious beliefs, though
science promised to “cut the brambles of men’s errors down”
[Auden, Collected poems, 301] and “smoke these honeyed insects
from their hives,” [Auden, 301] yet, it has not achieved this
aim. It has actually multiplied the conceptual errors, sanctioned certain
brambles as truth and created a new hive. It has become a new religion, a
new establishment, a new bastion, a new hegemony, a new dictator of free
minds; in short, a new belief system has displaced the old, but are they
not both still belief systems?

Justly, “one must be passive to conceive the
truth,” [Auden, 308] and yet science is neither passive nor
humble, but increasingly arrogant and cocksure. Though subtle, “the
shadows cast by language upon truth,” [Auden, 308] are
considerable and grave because language and giving ‘things’ names distorts
what we see. The scientist does tend to be more “trusting some map
in his own head,” [Auden, The History of Science, 1955, 609] than
trusting of the real world. Though “truth was their model as they
strove to build,” [Auden, 610] all too often does it tend to be
built from models in their heads rather than from truly empirical work. On
closer inspection, the apparent truths of science often turn out to be
merely “the elegant euphemisms of algebra.” [Auden, 809]

We should preferably seek to understand it through
reflection and observation, NOT via the wholly deceptive and simplistic
path of fragmentalism. And from the outset we can see that science often
prefers to apprehend its own theories, its own version of the world,
rather than Nature as it really is in its manifold diversity and
complexity. For, as Auden said:

“And love’s best glasses reach

No fields but are his own.”

W H Auden, November 1931

[“Five Songs” II –Collected Poems (ed.
Mendelson)]

We could take this to mean that we often see very
little beyond what we want to see, beyond the field of our own
preconceptions.

Models are approximations

“All we ever know is our models, but never the reality that may or
may not exist behind the models and casts its shadow upon us who are
embedded inside it. We imagine and intuit, then point the finger and wait
to see which suspect for truth turns and runs. Our models may get closer
and closer, but we will never reach direct perception of reality’s
thing-in-itself

.” [George Zebrowski, quoted by Bearden, p.2]]

Reductionism

Science is pervaded by a deep obsession with
mechanistic pathways and causal ideas probably insufficiently complex to
generate truly useful and insightful knowledge about anything really. It
arguably contains many generalisations and a quite rampant
oversimplification of the world into models that may barely fit the
observed phenomena… at times scientists seem to love their models more
than the real world itself, especially if the real world fails to fit
their neat models.

“An algebraic formula,

An abstract model of events

Derived from past experiments.”

[Auden, New Year Letter, 1940, 201]

To be regarded as “fully successful a
scientific theory must provide us with a literally true description of
what the world is like.” [Zynda] The “acceptance of a
scientific theory involves the belief that it is empirically
adequate,” [Zynda] which basically means it must be in accord
with all the observations of the matter concerned, not just some of them
or some of them some of the time. A scientific theory “is “empirically
adequate” if it gets things right about the observable phenomena in
nature.” [Zynda] What counts as “observable” “is
what could be observed by a suitably placed being with sensory abilities
similar to those characteristic of human beings…” [Zynda]

This attitude is called, “Sola Experientia: any
claim to knowledge, any support for opinion, must come from experience;
experience trumps all” [van Fraassen, 120] “The empirical
sciences do live by the rule of Sola Experientia: nothing trumps
experience. The bottom line is agreement from experimental and
observational fact.” [Van Fraassen, 152]

van Fraassen.

Science is dominated by a pervasive materialism…
a materialism that insists as a dogma that only molecules and forces make
up our universe… this alleged reality is a tacit assumption that
pervades science from the top to the bottom… from its core to its
boundaries… and scientists passionately believe this as their first
commandment… only visibles, tangibles and measuarables can exist within
this paradigm… there is no room for any prohibited ‘intangibles,’ which
are ceaselessly denied to exist and of course condemned, parodied and
lampooned as deviant mumbo-jumbo akin to the worst excesses of devotional
religion: “the woozier species of religion.” [Auden, 214]
Yet, on closer inspection, many of their own unwarranted assumptions are
also abstractions and intangible concepts that cannot be seen or felt, but
which are used as convenient ‘glue’ to knit together their hard data… it
is happy to accept its own intangibles as real and valid, for example
mathematics, but not anybody else’s…

“And all our intuitions mock

The formal logic of the clock,

All real perception it would seem,

Has shifting contours like a dream,”

[Auden, New Year Letter, 1940, 210]

This materialism even audaciously seeks to explain
feelings and thoughts in terms of molecular movements and organic
structural changes within the organism, and would happily reduce artistic
creativity and musical ability, for example, to genetic mechanisms and
enzyme controlled reactions in cells. Is this a valid and insightful
concern of science? Or rather is it one huge deceit, and an example of
science pushing its nose into places where it has no business? This
materialism tacitly assumed to be all there is to life, takes on the role
of a belief dictator that subtly twists beliefs [brainwashing?] and
denounces on reflex any ‘irrational’ beliefs a scientist may be prone to
have. These ‘irrationals’ in the lives of scientists [a fertile field for
research] have to be concealed and they become ‘closet beliefs’ that
scientists would not admit to having on pain of death.

Invalid universalism

Science has become imperialistic and arrogates the
alleged sanctity of its method and paradigm over all other areas of human
experience, and this is an unjustifiably bombastic approach. It ever seeks
to extend its method [pokes its nose] even into biology, ecology, living
things, human behaviour and society, psychology and economics, art and
literature, which are blatantly less amenable to its approach, where its
crass ideas and perversely simplistic cogitations are mostly inapplicable,
often highly misleading and always unwelcome.

Science has tended to become a dictator, an
imperialistic tyrant. Scientists should know that:

“History counsels patience:

Tyrants come, like plagues, but none

Can rule the roost for ever.”

[Auden,
Loneliness, 1971, 866]

And truly science has become a tyrant in the field of
knowledge:

“And what dictators do,

The elderly rubbish they talk

To an apathetic grave…”

[Auden, Sept 1939]

Deceptively un-objective

It does not do what it says it does and scientists
themselves say and do other than what they pretend… this knowledge is
not generated in an unbiased fashion as claimed… it can be observed that
this body of knowledge is much more theory-driven than it claims to be. It
has lost, almost completely lost its original, genuine, fresh and
open-minded empirical stance to the world. It is no longer humbly beholden
to Nature, instead it is more arrogantly and pompously beholden to its own
theories of how the world is, to its own paradigm. It says certain things
cannot happen because they contradict its theories of how it thinks life
is; patently, therefore, it has become too big for its boots.

Incomplete knowledge

Its knowledge is incomplete, as it insists on joining
up the dots all the time… it is excessively riddled with assumptions…
mostly these are unwarranted but they give the impression that science
knows much more than it really does… it ‘bigs up’ the whole subject and
allows it to pretend that its knowledge is growing more and more complete
each day… advancing ceaselessly along predictable lines… it claims to
be inductive and empirical, but much of its advancing knowledge is
obtained by biased investigation of already established theories… thus
it is much more theory-driven than people imagine. All scientists are
guilty of this, but most especially American scientists where
exaggeration, assumption-mania and excessive ego-identification with their
work seem to have become national traits.

It deviantises anything new until it accepts it
and then it becomes crystallised into a new dogma… so it crabs along,
oscillating between conformity and deviance, never sure of what it should
say or think about something… it is by instinct deeply conservative and
fearful of change, new ideas or innovation: “the stubborn
dogmatism and resistance to change exhibited by the scientific community.”
[Jedi Girl]

“An important scientific innovation rarely makes
its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents: it rarely
happens that Saul becomes Paul. What does happen is that its opponents
gradually die out, and that the growing generation is familiarized with
the ideas from the beginning

.” [Planck in Bearden]

Max Planck.

“The scientific community is well known to have
always been highly resistant to novel ideas and innovations

.”
[Bearden, 27]

“One of the real problems of present science —
its historical and continuing resistance to “out-of-the-box”
thinking and to research that overcomes conventional strictures

.”
[Bearden, 22]

“Science’s resistance to change is so well known
to historians of science that it is rather universally accepted

,”
[Bearden, 24]

“A new scientific truth does not triumph by
convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because
its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is
familiar with it

” [Planck]

It generally despises change on reflex, even though
claims to embrace change; the bigger the change, the more is the
resistance science engenders against it. It is therefore full of a great
tension between what is accepted as true and what is new and challenging:

“Yet movement is heretical,

Since over its ironic rocks

No route is truly orthodox

.” [Auden, New Year
Letter, 1940, 223]

Are scientists geeks

Well, they certainly lack the fine-tuned social skills
and a broad understanding of being human… they think they are neutral,
dispassionate and judgement-free when in fact they are passionate, biased
and judgemental as well as being skewed in their perception of the world
in favour of a wholly molecular paradigm that is incapable of grasping the
realm of human experience. They are not so good at reading “the
rites, the social codes,” [Auden, 871] and thus tend to be “social
retards,” [Auden, 867] and “immune, they believe, to all
superstitions.” [Auden, 863] Science believes itself to be “a
named and settled landscape,” [Auden, 832] which is how they like
to conceive of the world: a settled matter mostly known “and the
Earth Can still astonish,” [Auden, 778] no longer really applies
to them.

Immorality?

It would be a big and naive mistake to run away with
the notion that science is only practised in the comparatively moral
surroundings of laboratories and university academic faculties, or that
science is an intrinsically honourable pursuit. Nothing could be further
from the truth. For example, the corporatisation and commercialisation of
science and medicine means it cannot be regarded as truly neutral…it is
biased and has become so inertia-bound and so solidly embedded in its own
world view that it is virtually inconceivable that science would let
itself be seen to seek an invalidation of its own ideas and methods…so
much big money now stands behind science that it can never truly present
itself as genuinely unprejudiced any more…it has a vested interest in
its own survival and continuation…especially the continuation just as it
is of its own paradigm, weltenschauung. This inevitably means that all
‘truths’ it generates are ‘tainted’ and to some extent politically and
commercially conditioned and thus it cannot be reliably regarded as
genuinely objective.

Relative Knowledge

Science is most reluctant to accept that the knowledge
it generates is relative only to human beings…it fervently denies that
its knowledge is simply human knowledge, made by and applicable only to
humans…it vehemently denies this specifically human dimension to
scientific knowledge and is equally dismissive of the needs humans have to
be irrational and to have love, romance, art, beliefs, religion, and
emotions in their lives… science instinctively denies all irrational
elements in life and seeks to denounce and expunge the irrational from
human life altogether, rather than pragmatically accepting that this is
how people have been, are and always will be, and represents one very
valid aspect of human needs.

Science pretends that its knowledge is emotion-free,
unbiased and objective, when in truth it is human knowledge, generated by
humans, for humans, not the detached and neutral and universally
applicable truth as often pretended. Likewise, mouse knowledge is uniquely
applicable in a mouse world, daffodil knowledge in the world of daffodils
and elephant knowledge in a world of elephants. Much knowledge is thus
basically and demonstrably socially conditioned and species-specific,
rather than universally applicable, which is the claim science makes.

By insisting on quantifying life experience
through measuring and counting things, so it rarely sees the value of
description… if something cannot be quantified then it becomes invisible
to science.

Leonardo.

Its obsession with averages and averaging, and
its universalising tendency, these combine to anonymise and thus
subordinate every unique individual thing or experience into just another
case… this subordinates and thus offends individuality, the one-off
event and the uniqueness of each person. This renders science nihilistic
and life ultimately meaningless. Such an averaging approach denies any
special significance to Newton, Mozart, Beethoven, Rembrandt or Leonardo
as the great men and contributors to human culture they truly were.

Rembrandt.

Due to its obsessive engagement with materialism,
it firmly denies any possibility of a loving God, the soul, a moral
universe, values or karma and thus conceptually undercuts any possibility
of validating such meaning-conferring dimensions to human existence. It
therefore denies any enduring meaning to life beyond the tangible and
visible facts of everyday existence and the matter-of-fact tedium of
molecules. This renders science opposed to all the arts and renders it
fundamentally nihilistic in its view of a human being. A person in this
paradigm becomes a meaningless aggregation of molecules intrinsically no
different from a mountain or a blade of grass. That is conceptually a
measure of how ‘far out’ science has become from the real world of
ordinary people living their lives. It outlaws all hope of an afterlife or
of spiritual values. It therefore endorses what Dostoyevsky said, that
without God even infanticide is acceptable and nothing we do can carry any
ultimately moral dimension. Such a mindset would then contend that Mother
Teresa and Charles Manson, for example, are equally deserving of respect
or contempt.

Mother Teresa.

Dostoyevsky.

Regarding physiology…it is a kind of fraud! it
supplies so-called explanations that are deficient as they explain
nothing… there is no subtlety, no holism, no complexity, no vitalism and
it pretends that fairly simplistic molecular interactions can explain
everything in organisms… common sense would tell anyone that even the
merest insect is way too complex for molecules alone to explain it… and
yet so-called scientists believe all this dross just as if it were pure
gold! That is what Kent called the insanity of science… more truthfully
a ‘religion of science’ a belief system, not a true science at all.

Science is a bit of a fraud especially in physiology as
it fails to provide real answers and only supplies false answers… half
answers and deceits… betrayals of our intelligence… even though these
ridiculous assertions about molecules are clearly deficient to any deep
thinking person, yet the deceit is kept going within science and the
blanket assumption is maintained that chemicals, and only chemicals, are
amply sufficient to explain it all… well, they just aren’t.

Numerous questions that science cannot answer and which
it lays always at the same boring old door of—chemistry, molecules,
virus, bacteria, germs, genes, DNA none of which supply TRUE answers…
therefore, the increasingly widespread assumption is that molecules can
explain everything. Well, hey big surprise, they can’t.

How can two legs know how to grow in the embryo at the
same rate and when to stop growing? or five fingers, or five toes? or two
arms? this cannot be explained through chemistry and genes alone and to
believe so is just an unwarranted assumption that is being spread about
indiscriminately, arrogantly and unjustifiably, rather than the deeper
more fundamental questions being asked, as they should be. This assumption
needs to be examined more carefully and reflected upon more deeply.

Likewise, how can a plant not be aware of the beautiful
symmetry of its leaves and branches, and the pattern of its growth? and
which is so faithfully reproduced in each member of its species? How can a
flower never know its own colour or fragrance? or even never know the bees
that come along to pollinate it? is it really possible that the flower is
unaware of and indifferent to those bees? yet this is what science would
have us believe… that the plant cannot know and the flower cannot know
these things, that it is blind and indifferent to its own life and being.
How can plants and animals, moving in their daily and seasonal rhythms,
not know things about day and night, light and darkness, summer and
winter? how can their behaviour and activity be so subtly regulated by
these rhythms and they not perceive them for themselves?

In the kidney tubule, how do the different molecules
know where to go at different points? diffusion alone is simply not good
enough to explain the overall and subtle complexity of the events.
Likewise in the digestive system, how do the stomach valves know when and
for how long to open to let food in or out? how does the gut wall know
when to squeeze the food along and at what speed? how does the stomach
know when to and how to vomit? how can the contents of the gut dictate
which foods are absorbed and which are not? it is a very complex soup of
chemicals. How does the colon wall know how to absorb just the water?
chemistry alone, blind and random molecular movements is just not complex
enough to explain these vital phenomena. and in a just died person all the
chemicals are exactly the same as in a living person, but they have all
suddenly stopped moving… why and how is that? It is surely much more
sensible to accept that the chemicals are being moved about in a smoothly
coordinated fashion by another force, in different and organised ways by
another invisible agency… but science resolutely will ever deny this…

Any one molecule cannot know any other molecule in this
paradigm and therefore smoothly ordered and regular interactions, as occur
in all living systems, are utterly impossible in chemical systems unless
they are directed by some “molecule mover.” Molecules cannot
regulate their own activity and behaviour and so if they observably act in
that manner –and they do– then they must be regulated by another agency.
These points better explain the basic observations made in living systems
and are therefore conceptually superior to a solely molecular paradigm.

“Conventional medicine is an application of
scientific determinism. Complementary medicine is holistic and the two
types of medicine demand different proofs. Conventional medicine is
mechanistic…and also materialistic, “asserting an indifferently
self-identical substrate (such as cells) behind empirical fact

”
(Collingwood) Conventional medicine classifies diseases, characterised
by bodily or mental mechanisms, to be treated by specific physical or
mental means, bodies and minds representing the two realms of the universe
(Descartes’ res extensae and res cogitantes)” [Ledermann]

Robin George Collingwood
(1889 – 1943)

“Complementary medicine affirms the integrated
whole of the body, mind and spirit. Osteopathy and chiropractic are
biological-holistic, beneficial results reveal a restored normality of the
disturbed functions of the whole body, but patients also experience the
manual treatment in a personal manner. Complementary medicine accepts the
reality of the patient who is not eliminated in favour of clinical
objectivity.. Chinese medicine and homeopathy are biologically and
spiritually holistic which means they stress the ethical freedom of man
without interpreting it in religious terms. This dimension distinguishes
man from animals which do not have responsibilities, accepted by the human
conscience

.” [Ledermann]

“Homoeopathic medicine also uses substances which
are so highly diluted that no particle of the original substance has been
left.”

[Ledermann] …“in terms of chemical laws which
operate with the assumption of molecules. But the assumption does not rule
out the efficacy of the method which has been proved successful by the
mentioned control experiment, provided that the assessment allowed for the
above-mentioned characteristics of homoeopathy.” [Ledermann]

“The science of chemistry does not reveal that the
universe consists of molecules (or atoms which are combined in molecules).
What the universe consists of is unknowable (Kant), particles are
conceptual means that our restricted minds employ to gain scientific
knowledge of some aspects of the universe

.” [Ledermann]

Ledermann takes a view like Kant that we can only see
the truth of our models, which blind us to any deeper reality that
underpins the perceived sensory world. In this view, certainly, chemistry
truly is just a theory, a lens, a way of seeing, and is not the whole
truth.

Sources

W H Auden, Collected Poems, edited by Mendelson,
London: Faber, 1994

Tom Bearden, Energy from the Vacuum, Concepts &
Principles

http://www.cheniere.org/books/efv/toc.htm

R.G.Collingwood, SPECULUM MENTIS or The Map of
Knowledge, Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1924

Jedi Girl, Cool Books Chaos: Making a New Science by
James Gleick ISBN 0140092501

http://www.jedigirl.com/www/cool_books/chaos/chaos-james_gleick.html

Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, translated by
Norman Kemp Smith, Macmillan & Co, 1929

E K Ledermann, Proving Efficacy of Conventional and
Complementary Medicine 24 April 2001,

http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/eletters/322/7279/168#13313

Max Planck, Scientific Autobiography, 1949

B Van Fraassen, The The Empirical Stance, Yale
University Press, 2002