It's pretty clear that I view empirical science as a mental aberration. Objectively speaking, any belief that we can turn ideas into fact is warped, and that is exactly what the scientific method of empirical science claims. Facts are facts and concepts are concepts, and concepts can never, ever become facts. The notion that science is self-correcting, that its made-up facts are altered in the light of new facts is just plain balderdash. Empirical science, by its very nature being rooted in a strictly mathematical process, a process in which things that can't be fit into the terms of an equation don't exist, eliminates the very things we need to form concepts about, the nature of the force that produces the motions in our existence.
Because force and motion are dynamic things and therefore not subject to reduction to terms that can be used in equations, they are ignored. The motion in the solar system becomes the result of historical motion, the absurd, nonempirical swirling mass of gas, the motion in the universe become the absurd nonempirical big bang and the motion of falling objects simply becomes nothing, a property like color and hardness. Any system of knowledge that fails to address the most important features of reality, the current mechanical nature of the forces that cause motion, is not a system of science, a system that deals with reality, but rather a system of belief, a religious system in which beliefs are established by consensus and then enforced by a system of rewards and punishments, an accurate statement of the way empirical science operates.
But criticism of methodology, and the resulting hodgepodge of inconsistent theories and beliefs empiricism produces, does not really go to the essence of the basic problem we face as the unique life that evolved on this planet. For starters, we don't have the foggiest idea how that evolution occurred. We have not taken the time to sit down and explain what life is, let alone come up with a consistent explanation of how it evolved from its most basic form to what we are now. We produce a theory of evolution based on an outlandish notion, the idea that one species can evolve into another species before we even know about genetic inheritance or the nature of the gene, and then we adopt species evolution as a religious belief against the lack of all evidence. We know that we had an opportunity to adopt an evolutionary system based on the inheritance of acquired characteristics that would explain much of what we see in the real world, but because the species evolutionary religionists are in control, later acquired knowledge is incapable of altering established dogma.
It wouldn't be so bad that we don't have a definition for life, and that we don't have any evidence for species evolution, but we can't even connect what we know about life with how it starts. We therefore, in our total ignorance, say that life probably came from an encounter with a meteor, or a chance bolt of lightning passing through some primeval soup. Lacking any explanation for life, and being steeped in the empirical stupidity that the universe is operated on the basis of laws that can be discovered by the use of mathematics, we either ignore that laws and mathematics have to be created, or we claim that the fact that we can use mathematics to discover the laws of the universe prove there is a design, a design, in our empirical arrogance, that we can also discern.
And in doing all of this, we have left the most important aspect of our existence out of the equation, denied, in fact, that it exists. We are animate matter that has to move from one place on this planet to another if we want to get the sustenance we need to keep our subsystems operating, if we want to eat to stay alive. We couldn't move from one place to another unless we had evolved a system that allowed us to avoid the pitfalls of reality, that could prevent us from falling off cliffs or running into rocks or becoming the food of other animate matter roaming the planet. If we want to move safely within the environment, then we have to have a way to be warned about the dangers of that environment. We have to have some evolutionary system that allows us to perceive reality, store our experience with that reality, then compare that experience with the reality in which we find ourselves.
In short, we have to have some sort of explanation for how it is that we can see what we can see and how it is that we can know we are seeing what we can see. We have to have some sort of explanation for us being able to recognize the universe and recognize that we are a part of the universe, a picture of ourselves seeing ourselves existing in reality.
Do we have such an explanation? No. Are we even close? Empirical science isn't. Does empirical science claim that it knows? Sure. It claims it knows everything when it knows absolutely nothing but labels and terms. We experience things and our neurons light up, and when we experience the same thing, the same neurons light up, and when we decide to go to the store to buy some bread, well, the "I" that makes the decision, that's just a property of the neuronic Christmas tree, with all the lights blinking on and off in endless recognition of reality.
Why is it important that we not only know that we have a mind, but that we know how that mind works? Because if we are attempting to understand the nature of physical reality and we don't know we have a mind, and we don't know how that mind works, then we are not going to be able to come up with a procedure that would allow us to learn the nature of physical reality. If we don't know how we work, then how can we be expected to come up with an explanation of how nature works?
But empirical science isn't interested in the how of anything, it is only interested in using the basic operation of the mind, its evolutionary ability to compare reality with experience, to create categories in which to place the things empirical science finds in reality, the actual and made up facts which forms the alter of its beliefs. Just as we don't have a definition for life, we don't have a definition for what we should be doing in the field of science. Loosely stated, empirical science attempts to discover the laws underlying nature. Laws, of course, are made-up concepts, in the old days, created by God, today simply existing, and thus, all of the concepts in the world can be inconsistent one with the other and empirical science will merrily go about its business. However, the purpose of science is to come up with a consistent picture of reality, not a bunch of inconsistent pictures of a bunch of different realities, and therefore, the business of empirical science must be something other than discovering the true nature of reality.
The only purpose we have as animate matter, a purpose derived from our difference from all other matter, is sentience, our ability to create a picture of reality that doesn't exist in reality and then go out and alter that reality. Why do we want to do this? Simply because the only way we can extend our range of survivability in reality is if we can change that reality to accommodate our existence. If we can do nothing but live in caves, then we will be limited to the number of caves we can find. If we can build pictures in our mind of houses, and then go out and change reality so that those houses come into existence, we are no longer limited to location, we can move wherever we wish.
We therefore want to have as consistent a picture of reality as we possibly can so that we can alter that reality to our benefit. The real purpose of science is to produce as consistent a picture of reality as possible so that we can engineer changes in that reality to our benefit. However, empirical science focuses not on those things that we need to know in order to obtain as clear a picture of reality as possible so that we can benefit from the results of that picture, the mechanical nature of the current forces that produce the motions in our existence, but rather spends its time blathering on about the origin of the universe, the end of the universe, the nature of unseen particles, all of the things, in fact, which any respectable religion spends its time explaining.
There are things we can know and there are things we can never know. The things we can know deal with physical reality, the nature of force and motion and the things we can never know deal with the origins of things, not necessarily ourselves, but the universe and the matter that occupies it. If we spend our time attempting to produce a consistent picture of the physical reality that we can know, then we will be able to engineer that reality. If we spend our time making up laws and facts about things we can never know, then we will fail to engineer an appropriate reality for our survival and we will not survive.
Empirical science claims to have produced the theories that underlie our technology, a claim similar to saying its idiotic explanation of light as a water wave produced the light bulbs that turn our nights into days, or its asinine explanation for electricity as a moving charge is responsible for the electric motors that are at the basis of our civilization. Engineering is currently a product of trial and error and more often than not, the ill-considered theories of empirical science lead the engineers down the wrong path.
The refusal of empirical science to address the current mechanical nature of force and motion has resulted in a technology that is so distorted that we will never be able to get off this planet, we will never be able to extend our uniqueness into the universe, we, the life that formed on this particular planet will never survive, but will die with the planet.
This means that the business of empirical science is not to uncover the nature of reality, but rather to protect its reputation and income in the face of its continued failure to deliver even on its most basic task, the task of providing the changeable concepts we need for our engineers to experiment to change physical reality to our benefit. The cumulative ignorance of life, of evolution, of the nature of knowledge has produced a danger that is unthinkable, the danger of our extinction, not as a result of some hypothetical natural catastrophe, but simply as the result of our own abysmal ignorance.
When the religion of empirical science was being founded, it was fighting the existing religion of the Western biblical tradition. As a result, it had to distinguish itself from the basic stories of that tradition, the first being that God created the Earth and the second being the flood story. The reason that species evolution was chosen over the competing characteristic, or trait evolution was the time frame needed for species evolution. Characteristic evolution could fit into biblical time frames while species evolution clearly couldn't. Thus, when experts such as Lord Kelvin scientifically determined that the Earth was well outside the biblical time frame, but his millions of years were too short for the now established belief in species evolution, he was sanctioned until the discovery of radiation could be used to claim the billions of years needed for the Earth to exist. The billions of years dogma, then, a product of empirical reaction to biblical teaching, allows empirical science to get around all sorts of problems that come up with its ignorance, the primary one being, well, we have forever to figure it out, so don't blame us if we haven't got it down just right yet.
The reaction to the flood myth was even more absurd, and dangerous. When evidence of a massive, worldwide flood began to emerge in the 19th century, it couldn't be evidence for a flood because that would tend to confirm the opposing religion. Thus, the ice age was manufactured to explain the clear evidence for the flood. With an ice age blocking history, we were left with civilization emerging from caves and forests in fairly recent times.
The problem with this interpretation is it failed to explain the massive megaliths that dotted the entire planet and it failed to explain the incredible increase in the water content of the planet, water that covers cities and buries old shorelines around the globe. Instead of using the sediment that receding flood waters would deposit to explain what happened to the traces of a prior, global civilization responsible for the megaliths, it used them to justify the billions year old dogma of species evolution. Instead of using the megaliths themselves as a basis for analyzing the global civilization of which we are but the remnants, empirical science claimed they were constructed by the primitives emerging from the forests and caves. Instead of marveling at the existing genetically domesticated plants and animals that we are only now beginning to understand, empirical science claimed primitive man accomplished the feat in a matter of years.
The fact is, we were a global civilization, and we were destroyed by a flood, waters that did not come from the Earth, but from either Mars or the moon, an empirical impossibility so long as gravity is considered a nondynamic property of matter rather than a dynamic property of what matter is doing, cooling. The time frame in which the Earth, and by projection, the rest of the galaxy, exists is more in the nature of Kelvin's tens of millions of years rather than the ridiculous billions built into empirical dogma to justify species evolution,
We are not alone in the universe, but empirical dogma, reputation and income require that the stars be so distant that no one could ever arrive on Earth to dispute the religious dogma that hide behind the term empirical science. The fact is, plenty arrive and when they do, they are probably plenty amused at what they find, a backward group of unfortunate victims of interplanetary natural catastrophes who have cobbled together a religion in the name of reality to protect themselves from their ultimate fate, a fate that is clearly visible from the surface of the Earth simply by looking up at the moon, a fate in which the Earth cools off while its inhabitants fight increasingly for diminishing resources and eventually go extinct, just another unique life form that no longer exists in the universe.
It doesn't have to end that way. We have a lot of young people who claim to want to make a difference. We have learned production, and we have learned how to distribute wealth.
Will we learn how to obtain a consistent picture of reality so that we can make a difference?
More on this question next column.
Peter Bros is the author of the 9 volume Copernican Series and is President of The Far Museum of Dallas, an actual history museum, which will house its collection of 50,000 rare Eastern Mediterranean manuscripts and artifacts together with actual history displays and tours in a full-sized replica of the Egyptian Temple at Dendera to be built in the Dallas Ft. Worth area. Email:peterbros@therealskeptic.com