My Dad has always had a habit for precision.   It didn't rain last night, he would say.  It rained 1.34 inches last night.   I suppose that goes back to his days as a science major in college as well as his inherent honesty.   So, it that spirit, I should mention that we live 122.34 miles from Sedona, Arizona.   We've spent many pleasant vacations at Sedona, known around the world for its deep red mesas and mountains fringed in vibrant green under skies of the deepest blue.  But it also attracts a New Age element.   They offer the credulous or the curious guided tours to vortex sites and also seminars on Yoga, Sufism, Zen, witchcraft, astrology, the Bermuda Triangle, ESP, flying saucers, pyramidology, Kirlian photograph, astral projection, and psychic surgery.   "It may be that there are kernels of truth in a few of these doctrines, but their widespread acceptance betokens a lack of intellectual rigor, an absence of skepticism, and need to replace experiments with desires," Carl Sagan wrote in The Dragons of Eden.  "They are mystical and occult doctrines, devised in such a way that they are not subject to disproof and characteristically impervious to rational discussion."

      It's true that such beliefs imply intellectual carelessness and an absence of toughmindness.  But my skepticism is a double-edged sword.  And so it's first to the glowingly optimistic view of science that I along with many New Agers express deep-seated reservations.   The advent of science eroded man's fear of the unknown.  As religious dogmas fade, the result often is not the absence of dogmas but the emergence of new dogmas.   An especially pernicious dogma is that of scientism.  It is pernicious because its epistemology is rooted solidly in rationality while its ethics are relativistic or power-based.

      The aim of natural science was to resolve itself into mechanics.  Lord Kelvin insisted that nothing was understandable until a mechanical model could be built of it.   When it was established that the atoms of a living cell didn't differ from the atoms in non-living atoms, scientists deduced that life itself was purely mechanical-- a clockwork universe.   Thus, Beethoven was nothing more than a musical robot and that our mind is nothing more than anatomy and physiology.   However, a century of research in such disparate areas of genetics and quantum physics as cast doubt on this kind of reductionism, and I see such assertions less as facts than as presuppositions. 

      I'm also alarmed at what I see as an arrogant and naïve vision by a technocratic caste, perhaps best characterized by H.G. Wells' Shape of Things to Come.  He envisioned that out of the military apocalypse freemasonry of engineers and technicians would emerge to reorder the world.  Since Copernicus wrote On the Revolution of Heavenly Bodies five hundred years ago, humanity's best minds have been fired by the notion that the mysteries of the universe can be unlocked by careful theories supported by close observation using reason and testing.   Galileo, Kepler, and Newton ushered in the Age of Reason and the Industrial Age, a world of hair spray and hydrogen bombs, TV channel changers and sex changers.   The mantra of this age of relatativism, materialism, and positivism is that if it can be done, it must be done, despite whatever values those actions may contradict.    We see this especially in the medical profession, with speculation and experimentation in such areas as sex selection, cloning, eugenics, and end-of-life choices. We also see it in the military with its creation of chemical, viruses, and fission that could one day allow roaches to inherit the earth.  Quo vadis ("Where are you going?") from John 16:5 seems to be an appropriate question to present to the scientific establishment when questions of ethics are in play.   Here are questions that I would ask in trying to evaluate whether or not we should pursue a specific line of scientific research:      

1.  Can we spell out clearly the purpose of that scientific research?

2.  Who is to shoulder the responsibility if that scientific discovery should prove harmful?   

3.  In what way are scientists accountable to the public?

4.  Is that scientific research moral both in terms of means and ends?

5.  What is the impact of that scientific research or discovery on our physical, emotional, and spiritual well being?

And the professors, doctors, and generals, despite their degrees and acumen, have no more standing than you and I have to deliberate on such critical issues.

    Society is in a great divide between the machinists and the mystics.   Both sides are finding it more difficult to talk to each other, and both sides deserve mutual and self-skepticism.   I think the mystics are correct to question science's alleged objectivity, the desanctification of nature, and the falsehood that the scientific method is the only path to truth.   The mechanists are correct in applying rigor and rationality to their search for knowledge.   The mystics correctly embrace realms of reality that are outside of the laboratory-- mystery, ambiguity, transcendent experience, and illogic contradiction.   The mechanists correctly embrace the common Aristotelian language of words, mathematics, and logic, which, whatever their imperfections, are the most reliable and only way of separating truth from falsehood in the natural world and the only sure path of giving people a hope of life free from disease and death.  The answer to unethical science is not less science but better science and better accountability.

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