SCIENCE AND THE PARANORMAL

Posted by anthonynorth on November 14, 2007
Click Diary of a Writer. Meet me, up close and personal.

We are all aware of science and what it means to the modern world, but how many really know the central reasons behind science, its overall methodology, or how it came about? In this post, I’ll attempt to offer a glimmer of light.

But in doing so, I want to highlight something else. Namely, science, today, is arriving at concepts that seem to invalidate the very processes of science itself. The discipline remains uneasy with this – perhaps because it would open up ‘truths’ about the paranormal.

EARLY IDEAS

The first awareness of science in a modern, western sense came from the ancient Greeks. Imbued with a curiosity about the world separate from the machinations of gods, a methodolgy was finally devised by Aristotle in the 4th century BC. To him, we should understand the world by a process of experience and observation separate to the old accepted ways of belief.

Europe was to lose touch with Classical knowledge, with Christianity rising as the only, belief-based, system. Science proper was carried on by the Islamic world. However, the 11th century Reconquest of Spain caused a rediscovery of Classical texts as western minds began to study the libraries left behind as Islam retreated.

Such alternative knowledge to the Bible put pressure on Christian intellectuals. Hence, when it was realised that Aristotelian cosmology agreed with the Bible on certain factors - a stationary Earth at the centre of the universe, for instance - some theologians attempted to place Classical knowledge within a Christian system.

Such intellectualism came to a head with St Thomas Aquinas, who theorised that there were two ways to understand God’s Creation. We can work with revealed or natural theology. The former was our belief in God; the latter became the first official acceptance that man’s mind could work alongside God to understand the world.

PHILOSOPHY

This attempt to allow a degree of science into the Medieval world was to prove a can of worms. For once an idea is out, it is hard to put back or hold at bay. Hence, by the 13th century the monk, Roger Bacon, began to argue that science could best understand the world through experimentation.

By the early 14th century, the need to use man’s mind to understand the world was fighting for acceptance. Principal to the process was William of Occam, arguing for less secular power in the hands of the Church.

He even dared to moot such ideas as democracy. But of most importance to science was his invention of ‘Occam’s Razor’. Stated simply, he argued that the simplest form of statement is superior to endless hypotheses. It was the beginning of reductionism, where a simple answer becomes more sensible than the more complex.

Read more...