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Short
Answer: Yes and No.
Long Answer:
The 'scientific age' dates back 2500
years to when the founding Fathers of Science sought an
alternative explanation for the workings of the universe
and resolved to drop the mystical from the equation of
intelligent inquiry - that mighty supernatural beings were
the behind-the-scenes prime movers of all things,
responsible in some inexplicable way for the existence and
order of life. From Thales of Miletus onward the Wise men
of new science believed they could and should figure it
all out with eyes and fingers, but heads emptied of mythic
management and tales of Chaos and Creation so widely
accepted @ BCE 500.
The
long journey of scientific understanding continues, though
after 2500 years of eyes and fingers and apparently open
minds, the scientific age faces some serious problems.
Thales' heirs have followed a butterfly wing to Chaos
Theory and admit that life seems miraculously organised
into its structures; and that Nature, contrary to all
expectation is unpredictable. In fact predictability is
the exception, not the norm, and the probability of life
existing as it does is like delivering a pile of bricks to
a village outside of Paris and expecting the palace of
Versailles to rise unaided from the raw materials.
Identifying with any precision how
Chaos is structured into its magnificent variety is a
problem, because the Organising Principles remain a
mystery, invisible, unknown.
And in the Quantum World unknowable.
Worse
even, there is a serious shortfall in cosmic calculation,
because 99% of the visible universe is in fact invisible
in the form of Cold Dark Matter.
Scientific
Scrutiny & Quantum Conundrum
Thanks
to the age of science we are in fact less certain of what
exists and what does not. Nonetheless we are still
encouraged to favour theories denying the existence of
super consciousnesses at work.
Such
beliefs are dismissed as 'primitive', a tendency by the
peoples of the pre-scientific age to personify nature.
When faced with the elements, the primitive human could
only imagine a cosmic being behind it, whereas with the
aid of scientific scrutiny, we now can be assured there is
not. This belief in nature spirits is often linked with an
animist conception of the world, that nature has
consciousness and spirit guardians, trace beliefs from a
stage of human evolution when the human mind could not
discriminate between the dream lands of sleep and waking
hours. Others claim that the brains of these ancestors
were not quite so well connected as now and what ancient
people thought were the Gods speaking to them was nothing
more than the other part of their brain conversing and
offering suggestions.
The
mantra of the scientific age is: 'everything is science'.
Science will reveal the ultimate truth of reality, given
enough provision for research, of course.
But don't hold your breath. There are
some now who think this quest is confounded to
meaninglessness by quantum conundrum. Meanwhile the
journey continues among grand master Aristotle's heirs:
'truth enough can be found in statistics'. And this may
well be so. Among
the recent fruits of experiment is the discovery plants
respond to stimuli in various unexpected ways...
They have consciousness.
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