All Posts Tagged With: "Among"

Generally speaking, the way to truth in the Middle Ages was by reference to an authority. There was a neat Aristotelian chain of authority from the local parish priest up to the pope and the councils. Later, during the Enlightenment, issues tended to be decided on the basis of whether they were reasonable or not. Finally, in the modern age, a hypothesis has to be proven scientifically in order to be judged acceptable. This attitude got a firmer grip on Western consciousness when logical positivism ruled.

Where I see some serious hypocrisy is in the attitude of many scientists–although I hasten to add that I certainly don’t mean all of them–who seem to imply that, unless and until a proposition has been conclusively proven true by empirical methods, it simply cannot be true. How many times in the history of science do we find that a radical new idea has been rejected out of hand by the scientific community when first proposed. Often the individual launching the hypothesis has been marginalized as well. Then the hypocrisy comes in when proof does emerge and the naysayers act as if they hadn’t really dismissed it totally but were only waiting for proof.

I’m talking about radical reductionist science, which is called that because it means to reduce everything to what can be proven only by empirical methods. What the practitioners of such a philosophy don’t seem to realize is that their presupposition cannot be established on its own terms. That is, it cannot be proven empirically that truth can only be arrived at by empirical means. (Anybody want to bring in Gödel’s Theorem at this point?)

I once spent a delightful evening with the father of Nobel Prize-winning novelist Gabriel García Márquez in Cartagena, Colombia. Critics had remarked on the skillful way in which material reality and the paranormal were woven into the text of One Hundred Years of Solitude, but during that evening with the author’s father I came into contact with the roots of that style. GGM’s father kept up a long stream of stories from the folklore of the Caribbean coast, seamlessly weaving what I knew to be historical fact and what most of us call paranormal events together. In that family’s world there is no line between the empirically verifiable and the paranormal.

I believe it was William James who said that we always need to deal with the ghost in the machine.