Solving For eXistence: Part 3

The Facts Behind ‘The Science’

We’ve been discovering just how demonstrably real subjective reality is, even though science doesn’t know how to verify it. There’s a reason for that...

These days, we forget that science is merely one branch of human inquiry; it is not the only branch. Science is the materialist branch of the tree. When we point to ‘the science’ or subscribe to scientism, we miss this point and act as if our assumptions are backed by cold, hard, verifiable, reproducible fact. This acts like a shortcut, convincing us of certainty that isn’t actually certain. And by missing this critical distinction, we misinterpret what’s going on with reality. We see everything in terms of how it must reduce down to physicalism even though there are real, actual things that we know of right now that don’t conform to physicality. This puts the science-only crowd at odds with the reality we experience. It’s essentially ‘flat Earth’ for the educated.

I want to be clear that it’s right and proper for the discipline of science to be concerned solely with materiality. That’s what science is for. But scientists themselves and laypeople in general have been trained to think of science as the only way things can be known, and that’s causing major problems for our advancement. It’s not accurate. As it turns out, there are at least a few things science isn’t able to know. And those things need to be studied anyway.

A particularly clear example of this presented itself years ago in an online debate between an atheist and a creationist. (As of this writing, the entire exchange is still available here.)

At one point, the creationist makes the argument that scientists have never been able to replicate RNA in the laboratory. The atheist is pleased to announce that the creationist’s information is out of date, as a laboratory had in fact replicated RNA back in 2009. At which point the atheist proudly proclaims, “No intelligent mechanism needed.”

Wait...what?
What exactly does he think the researchers were, if not an intelligent mechanism? Or does he think the experiment conducted itself?

Every science experiment is an instance of intelligent design. It has to be thought up, designed, funded, planned, provisioned, conducted and assessed. There are components that must be set up; lab space that must be scheduled and prepped; ingredients that must be procured, then prepared, then applied in specific amounts at specified times for precise durations. The experiment requires specific conditions that must be managed and met, such as careful climate control, atmospheric composition, proper lighting and UV levels, and so on; catalysts have to be introduced in the right ways at the right times; and all of this has to be powered at consistent levels.

This is just a very general overview, but there are literally hundreds of design and application parameters that have to be very carefully mapped and controlled. Science at the experimentation level is ONLY intelligent design. It is literally nothing else.

Since science experiments are always and only examples of intelligent design, they serve to show us what nature can be made to do under guidance. What science experiments cannot show us is what nature does when left to its own devices. Only direct observation of nature over time can do that. And who has billions of years to watch and wait? At its root, science experimentation is a shortcut to approximate what scientists think might have happened in the real world over the course of deep time. We still don’t actually know whether nature produced RNA on its own or not. What the RNA experiment shows us is how it would happen under guidance.

The exuberant atheist in the debate overlooked this fact. And I suspect many, perhaps most scientists do this same thing. They see the results of experiments and jump to the unsupported conclusion that the experiments accurately reveal what nature did on its own. That conclusion is premature.

This is scientism in action. It didn’t occur to the atheist that scientific experiments are exercises in intelligent design. Nor did he recognize that all scientific experiments are supporting evidence for intelligent design. In fact, that’s the precise opposite of what the atheist believed. The online dialogue is a glaring example of what happens when we turn science into a belief system: it convinces people of unsupported conclusions. Scientism provides a false sense of certainty and leads us to believe inaccurate or unproven things.

What science does is show us how things can be done; it does not necessarily show us how things did get done. This is why science can only be one branch on the tree of human inquiry. It can’t give us the entire picture. We’ve reached a point where it’s time to stop obsessing over this one branch and start looking at the whole tree.

Ya just can’t get there from here
When it comes to the hard problem of consciousness, for instance, we need to step back into a larger view and realize it’s not a problem for the physical sciences. Wrong branch. Our question belongs elsewhere, and we have yet to identify where. It might not even be a branch we currently know of.

So far in this series, we’ve been looking at thought and consciousness from a different perspective and coming to realize that however real it is, it doesn’t conform to physicalism. And yet, it’s proven to have a direct impact upon physicality. This implies not simply that consciousness/thought exists as a noun instead of a verb, but also that physicality is subject to non-physical/pre-physical elements.

With this being the case, we’re pushed to reconsider our intuitive model of existence. We’re used to interpreting existence as the material universe and all the physics of that paradigm. But if physicality is only one domain within a larger system, then our model can’t get us where we want to go. And no amount of insistence will change that. We’re going to have to expand our inquiry to include non-physical/pre-physical things.

It took science centuries before it reached this point of nuance and subtlety, but now we’re here and we have to get beyond the assumptions and preconceived ideas we’ve inherited about the world. Existence is more expansive than the physical sciences can account for. There are forces at work behind the scenes that we’re finally coming into contact with but have no way to measure. Dismissing them as figments of our imagination is both negligent and irresponsible. It leaves us at a non-trivial disadvantage, blind to the mechanisms that fundamentally shape our experience.

Next, we’ll reverse-engineer all of this to see if it leads to an explanation for Existence (capital ‘E’).

Go to Part 4 >