Science, specifically materialist science, seems to believe that because the mediums of matter and its related measurable effects like force and wave can be detected by device and body, that they are the sole paths to truth.
Seems to be the consensus.
They are free to believe that of course but ignoring the entire non-material medium of mental perception seems flawed to my mind.
It's not so much ignoring it as refuting it without sufficient reason. It's static science v dynamic science, really.
Things are always changing though and now we have folks and groups like Sheldrake and Science & Nonduality popping up.
Well Sheldrake's been around for at least fifty years ... and Lovelock's Gaia Hypothesis is still out there. Iain McGilchrist (noted neuroscientist) offered that the contemporary materialist prejudice:
"... that consciousness depends on matter I think this comes from the sort of cheery reassuring notion that matter is solid and obvious and clear and at least we understand that, so let's start from that and try and see how on earth we can get consciousness out of it. But as you know, matter is just not that simple, in fact the closer you look at matter the more it becomes even essence, and as problematic as consciousness itself. Indeed it is almost impossible or, according to most physicists, absolutely impossible to separate consciousness and matter."
(
Dr Iain McGilchrist, "Matter and Consciousness")
While Sheldrake is more antagonistic ...
D'you think so? I find him characteristically British ... polite, if to the point.
Organized religion it seems to me still stands by its ancient scriptural teachings with little change but sometimes I wonder if it seems so simply because there is now little, if any, reporting of its events beyond the political and social aspects related to it.
I would say that's the case.
There seems to be an assumption that ancient scriptural 'truths' are necessarily out-dated, which clearly they are not – the Ancients said triangles have three sides, squares have four, circles are round – that order of truth hasn't changed.
The Beatitudes are as relevant today as they were then. Are they 'true' or 'fact'? There's a debate.
The Golden Rule was established millennia ago. God is God, and God today is the God of Abraham, Moses and Jesus, but our definitions and understanding at the intellectual level has evolved and changed over the millennia, but then that calls for intellectual effort.
Another assumption is that theology has stood still for two thousand years. Again, clearly that's not the case, but as you point out, scholarly theology tends to stay within scholarly circles, while populist – often sensationalist – theologies can become best sellers, even though, in general, they offer one-sided arguments and opinions that play up to their readership, who but into it without any critical investigation.
There are good populists out there, Bart Ehrman springs to mind, but again his view is not the only logical viewpoint, nor is it always reasonable, but he says what people like to hear, so no need to think it through.
I could list the good theologians who are not so populist, but who are offering radical ways to look at the nature of incarnation, and so on ... but they follow proper scholastic method, a bit like a mathematician proving a theorem, and so their books are somewhat dry until you get your head into the space. David Bentley Hart, obviously, but Jordan Daniel Wood is offering a 6th century argument, of Maximus the Confessor, that posits all creation as an incarnation ... while Hart argues for a kind of Vedic monism, or a monism informed by Christian-Vedic dialogue.
When I skip gpt and jump directly into search engines, reporting of miracles yearly is still seen... The empirical scientistic will of course automatically dismiss them for the most part. Just like the presence of a reference in the science texts many of them read is taken as automatic proof of validity, the association with religion is automatically taken as proof of invalidity. Truth is subjective because of its many forms.
And there, I think, is the nub of it. Regardless of religion – 'miracles' do happen, and saying 'it doesn't fir our model yet, but it will' is as much a declaration of faith as 'God did it'
People can't get their head round 'forms of truth' – so the obvious no-brainer is the empirical method of the natural sciences, which becomes the
de facto benchmark for all.
For me at least, the truth is, in a eternally changing uncertain universe with a partly predictable but unknowable and uncertain future, anything can become truth. What it is, is important but for creatures with unique and emotional mind-bodies like ours, what it means for us, the perceiving individual, is more important.
Whole-hearted agreement.
