(ThyBlackMan.com) Reality is what we see, hear, taste and touch. And Science, the formal observation, recording and interpretation of what we experience, is all that we can know. Seems obvious, doesn’t it? Yes, but things were not always so. Today, though, after hundreds of years of living under the dogma called Reason, or Rationality, it seems obvious as the air we breathe.
Therefore, UFOS, spirituality, ghosts, mindreading and all other sorts of paranormal activity cannot be real. Again, all of that would seems to go without saying. However, though the layman seems quite confident in the logical, orderly nature of the world, things are not this tidy at all. For example, note the following.
Light has been shown to be both a particle and a wave. However, particles and waves are two contradictory concepts. The bedrock solidity of Euclidean Geometry has been brought into question because other geometries, like
Reimannian Geometry, contradict the laws of Euclidean Geometry and yet are, within themselves, logically consistent. And it has been proven that any logical system, that is any system of reason based on a set of axioms, has to have some propositions that we believe to be true that cannot be proved based solely on its axioms. This means that no system of thought, ranging from arithmetic, to the human mind to the entire system of Science and Logic itself, can be proven valid.
The way Science, and the history of Science is taught, all of this is relegated to footnotes, if mentioned at all. However, the history of how Science was actually constructed, as opposed to a systematic listing of the finished propositions of Science, reveals the following.
Rene Descartes’ X and Y coordinate system which is the basis of calculus, the measuring tool of the sciences, was revealed to him one night in a dream. Isaac Newton practiced what today can only be called sorcery. He spent more time on alchemy than Chemistry and more time studying the ancient Egyptian and Hebrew texts than on “scientific” work. Norbert Weiner, the Father of Cybernetics, the study of communication in biological and communication systems, solved his most famous problem by examining the details of a dream of one of his subordinates. And Alan Turing, the Father of the Computer, launched his ground-breaking study by trying to determine if the spirit lives on after death and if the living can connect with departed spirits.
To put things in perspective, we have to go back to the beginning. Pythagoras, who had spent years studying in Egypt brought back this central idea to Greece, “numbers are things and things are numbers.” This is the germ of rationalism. It means that every observable thing can be measured with numbers and the manipulation of numbers leads to detailed understanding of things. However, the discovery of irrational numbers (implying the existence of irrational, or inexplicable phenomena) a century or so after his death, led to the disbanding of the Pythagorean school. However, Plato continued to develop the idea of pure rationalism even though its mathematical basis had been removed.
None can doubt that Science has enabled the West to create fantastic machines for transport, war and communication, and that with them the West has conquered the material world. But what we are disputing, in fact showing, is that we are not dealing with any ultimate, logical truths, but with a hodge-podge of catch-as-catch can “rationalizations” culled not from some substrata of inherent logic but from the very stuff, like dreams and mysticism, that science is said to repudiate.
