Dirty Science - How Unscientific Methods Are Blocking Our Cultural Advancement

Chapter 1

 

 

The Politics of Physicalism

 

 

 

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,

Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

— William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act I, Scene V

 

This book needs to be written. This story needs to be told. It is a story of corruption and abuse of power, of scientific ridicule and academic prejudice, of how the people we have trusted to give us accurate knowledge have betrayed that trust and blocked large segments of knowledge from our view. When we wake up and recognize it, this corruption will be seen to be as serious as the corruption in the Catholic Church that precipitated the Protestant Reformation or the corruption in the French government that brought on the Revolution. This corruption has not compromised too much the accuracy of scientists working in their fields of expertise, but its effect on the culture at large has been profound and crippling. Science has brought us up out of the Dark Ages, and now the scientific establishment has brought our culture back down into something like another Dark Ages. This scientific establishment has become something like an authoritarian priesthood with a rigid belief in a purely physical universe, a belief that was not determined by scientific methods but is defended and enforced with primitive, unscientific methods of social domination and manipulation such as ridicule and ostracism. Heretics are no longer burned at the stake. They are simply ridiculed out of existence. It is almost as effective and doesn’t violate any health laws.

These extreme social pressures dominate not only the scientific community but also the entire academic community. It may be extreme to compare our times with the Dark Ages, but the comparison is certainly accurate for the academic community, where the domination of universally held fixed beliefs restricts scientific inquiry and destroys academic freedom.

We are already deep into something like another Dark Ages. Somebody should have warned us that this was happening. Somebody should have written this book a long time ago. But I don’t see this book anywhere. It is as if everybody was functioning in some kind of trance state.

This book needs to be written by somebody with the very highest scientific or academic credentials. Unfortunately, all of those people are caught up in the problem. They have been indoctrinated into the belief system. They would be shunned and ostracized and lose their whole social existence if they were to write such a book as this.

So it is left to those of us with lesser credentials to write this book and solve the problem. I have taken it upon myself to write this book because I am aware of the problem and I am not controlled by the scientific establishment. But I can’t fix the problem by myself. I need your support. Ninety percent of Americans believe in God or a spiritual reality, and ninety percent of Americans have had a psychic experience. Have you been ridiculed by members of the scientific establishment because of your psychic experiences or spiritual beliefs? Have you lost your job or status within the academic community because of your interest or belief in non-physical phenomena? Do you feel that the scientific establishment is an obstacle to our exploration of the spiritual? I am hoping you will give this project your active support.

You don’t have to be an expert in science to recognize the unscientific methods. They are easy to identify. When we learn to spot these methods, the scientists who use them will lose their credibility. They won’t be believed or be taken seriously any more. We don’t have to make any scientists change. It’s as easy as that.

 

First of all, I think I need to say plainly and clearly that I have great respect for science itself. Science has so greatly increased the scope and accuracy of our cultural knowledge that I have no words powerful enough to describe it. Because of its success in giving us accurate knowledge, science has rightfully earned the very highest status in our culture.

But the high status of science has created a problem. Science has tapped into a human psychological need for “authorities,” people who know all the answers. Scientists have acquired an aura of omniscience, of infallibility, of authority. They have become an unnamed “Them,” whose opinion is “Truth,” such that anybody who disagrees with them can be dismissed as mentally incompetent. Their opinions are believed and taken seriously, whether those opinions were arrived at via the scientific method or not. It is the scientific method that has given us our accurate cultural knowledge, not just the opinions of scientists. But because of their status as “authorities,” scientists get away with using unscientific methods such as ridicule, authoritarian pronouncements, and power politics to put down, dismiss, and block the study of subjects beyond their ken, especially the psychic and the spiritual:

 

A Ph.D. scientist doing research on communications with spirit entities is shunned by his colleagues, who point at their heads to indicate that he is crazy.

(If they were doing science, they would ask to see his evidence, instead of behaving like eighth graders.)

A graduate student is advised not to write a paper on parapsychology, because it could be career-ending.

(This is creepy, like something out of a Kafka novel. Unknown people could be ending this student’s career, for unknown reasons. Whatever happened to academic freedom?)

The editor who published a peer-reviewed paper on “intelligent design” was ridiculed as a “Bible thumper.”

(“Scientific ridicule” has become a familiar expression. But ridicule is not scientific.)

In 1988, the National Academy of Sciences issued a report that concluded: “The committee finds no scientific justification from research conducted over a period of 130 years for the existence of parapsychological phenomena” (Druckman and Swets, 1988, page 22).

Actually the committee DID NOT LOOK AT the research of 130 years. The report contained only 5 references to the peer-reviewed Journal of Parapsychology, which dates back to 1937, and no references either to the peer-reviewed British journal, which dates back to 1882, or to the peer-reviewed European journal. It does not even mention the name “J.B. Rhine,” let alone refute his findings and the people who replicated them throughout the world. The scope of the study clearly did not support its sweeping conclusion.

This shoddy and obviously biased study, led by two known zealots against parapsychology, is in huge contrast to the very impressive scientific credentials of the members and leaders of the National Academy of Sciences. Their conclusion is now forever recorded in the annals of folly.

But the NAME of the National Academy of Sciences has given it credibility. People haven’t bothered to look at the study, which in turn didn’t look at the scientific evidence. All they have needed to know is that the National Academy of Sciences said this. That gives it “authority” and makes it “Truth.”

These are only a few examples of dirty science. You may have examples in your own life of scientists ridiculing you, questioning your sanity, or assuming that their mentality is so much greater than yours that they can say, “You didn’t see what you saw.”

I am not saying that science itself is dirty. But when scientists, in the name of “science,” backed by the high status of science, their own high scientific credentials, and prestigious names such as Harvard and Princeton and the National Academy of Sciences, use these unscientific methods, the name of science has been dirtied. So, even though this is not science, I feel justified in calling it “dirty science.”

 

What do I mean by “scientific establishment?” Is this some kind of conspiracy theory? No, it isn’t. I have a precise definition.

Scientists studying physical phenomena with the physical senses — the physicists, chemists, biologists, astronomers, and so on — have established themselves. They have become the scientific establishment.

In fact, they have been so successful in studying the physical reality that they have asserted that the only way to do science is to explore the physical reality with the physical senses, and they have taken this one step further, to decree that the only reality is the physical reality: The spiritual does not exist, psychic abilities are impossible, and the mind is nothing but the physical brain, which must be studied with the physical senses. But, in fact, these other aspects of reality do exist, and there are other modes of perception besides the physical senses with which to perceive them and make scientific observations.

The idea that there is no reality beyond the physical has come to dominate not only the scientific establishment, but also the academic community as well, at least in the United States. I used to call it “the physical hypothesis,” but it is much more than a hypothesis. It has become an axiom of scientific orthodoxy, accepted at our major educational institutions as such an absolute inviolable truth, that so dominates all other thought, including scientific evidence, that people who express an interest in such subjects as precognition, telepathy, clairvoyance, remote viewing, psychokinesis, energy medicine, spirit entities, the power of prayer, reincarnation, levitation, or intelligent design are automatically dismissed as mentally incompetent, shunned by their colleagues, and denied publication, funding, and employment.

The foregoing may sound extreme, but I...