The Harried Mystic

The crowning achievement of the scientific method is the doctrine of falsifiability: “The supreme triumph of reason is to cast doubt upon its own validity,” Miguel De Unamuno.

The goal is to formulate an hypothesis and then do everything possible to find at least one instance where it fails. If only this same logic were systematically applied to everything we think. Imagine it: All is hypothesis. All of science, therefore, is a grand koan asking: What is it that I know and how do I know it?

Proportionately speaking, we utter more statements of opinion than inquire in ways that invite exploration. We need science to keep us from flying off willy-nilly into realms of abject fantasy. So, one might ask, how can belief ever be reconciled with the virtues of science? Easily, really.

It is in forming a powerful hypothesis, informed by all available experience and with an ample measure of creatively anticipate possibilities, that belief has a place. Then we subject it to a rigorous test to keep from the sin of narcissus: falling in love with our own reflection.

Can there truly be a marriage of spirituality and science? Absolutely. Absent that marriage, science is cold and irrelevant. Witness the history of science and the moments of discovery. They were flights of imagination tempered with discipline resulting in a tearing of the time-line in our understanding of how things work.

It took a Copernicus to envision a heliocentric solar system, a Kekule following the lead of his  “waking dream on a London bus” of atoms grouping themselves, Einstein’s life-long fascination with light and how one can travel on  it,  and the discovery of transcendental numbers ( requiring only that one look more deeply in-between the numbers we took to be the final story).

It is pure nonsense to say that science, religion and spirituality are incompatible. On the contrary, the one feeds the other when both are mature. If motivated by arrogance or fear, neither does any good whatsoever, and, in fact, can do a great deal of harm.

As much as from sacred scripture, science, logic, and mathematics are replete with Koans in the form of paradoxes and befuddling challenges that require an authentic metanoia: a shift not merely in what we know, but how we know it.

Posing one for this evening’s meditation:

American logician John Myhill wrote: ” No non-poetic account of reality can be complete.”

How do I account for reality completely?

© Brother Anton and The Harried Mystic, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited.