EXPANDED RATIONALISM

In my book The Afterlife and the True Nature of Reality there is a chapter entitled "Cracks in the Foundation of Our Understanding of Reality." Included in the content of that chapter are some criticisms of certain scientific theories. Some people have mistakenly construed these criticisms as suggesting that I am anti-science. But the truth is that I am absolutely not anti-science; I am, at heart, a rationalist. I have a deep love and admiration for mathematics, and a great respect for logic. The formal definition of a rationalist is "a person who bases their opinions and actions on reason and knowledge rather than on religious belief or emotional response" and, while that definition does indeed apply to me, perhaps a more accurate description of my personal approach to learning is that I am (if I may be permitted to invent my own term) an "expanded rationalist" by which I mean that I evaluate information using reason and knowledge but I temper my application of reason and knowledge with intuition and expanded awareness. I do this because I believe there is more to reality and existence than that allowed by a materialist view, and science is still, by and large, a materialist-based philosophy. Science observes, measures, and deduces, but we all know that there is much more to reality and existence than that which is observable and measurable; indeed, some of the most interesting and important phenomena of reality are neither observable nor measurable – things such as love, consciousness, imagination … just to name a few. So my position is not that science is "wrong" but rather that it needs to be expanded so that it can encompass and address phenomena which exist outside of the Materium. Science is shackled by a materialist worldview that is both limited and limiting, as discussed below.

Science can be seen as a limited field of awareness which is able to model a selected part of reality. That selected part of reality is the material part, the part composed of "matter" and energy. Science is able to model that portion of reality with sufficient accuracy to permit applications of the model to give rise to practical technologies. The fact that these technologies "work" (at least within the selected portion of reality being studied) causes people to accept science as being valid and to trust in its credibility. But we must realize that science is not an understanding, or a knowing, of reality; it is merely a practical modeling of reality (and only of a limited part reality).

As an analogy, consider the following: A person can study the game of chess – its rules, its moves, its pieces – and he/she can then program a computer to play chess. The computer might even be able to play chess expertly, depending upon how accurately the programmer can simulate the game-play using sophisticated algorithms. But the computer doesn't understand the game of chess, it doesn't know it – it can only apply the principles of the game to get results. But that is not the complete experience of the game of chess, in fact it leaves out the best parts of the game – the fun, the drama, the emotions, the gestalt. The game of chess is much more than its rules, its moves, and its pieces. But an intellectual, reductionist, algorithmic modeling of the game – no matter how successful it is at winning the game – will always leave out the most important experiential aspects of the game, because those aspects are not observable and measurable and thus do not lend themselves to being modeled.

Science is not wrong, but it is myopic, and its tunnel-vision/short-sighted view is due to its determined insistence to limit itself to a materialist paradigm, to only those phenomena which it can observe and measure. Such material-based phenomena certainly exist, but they are not the only phenomena, and they are likely not even the most important phenomena.