Theos-Talk Archives (May 1996 Message tl01279)

At 10:56 AM 5/23/96 -0400, you wrote:

>In the long run science will always destroy its own worn-out hypotheses and
>theories, replacing them with new ones, but in the meanwhile scientists can
>behave
>pretty like believers in a church, excluding those who wander too far from the
>dominant hypotheses.

Alexis comments: I certainly didn't mean to infer or imply that Akademe
isn't a "Snake Pit", anyone even peripherally involved in it knows that it
is. But still, sciences, both "hard" and "soft" do tend to test their
hypotheses from time to time and replace the outmoded. Sure the majority try
to keep people from wandering too far from the dominant paradigm but that
has never actually kept individuals from doing so. In science, the dominant
but non-innovative majority is not so much concerned with "heresy" as they
are with maintenance of the value of their own published work. In religion,
the power structure is concerned with power, control, and profit (their
own), and that makes them infinitely more ferocious in protecting those
prerogatives. In order to be a "belief system" which is what religion is, a
thing must be primarily "faith" oriented. Science, while it may occasionally
back-slide is primarily knowledge oriented, and religions have absolutely
nothing to do with knowledge.
>
>
>There are also flaws in the scientific method, having to do with the exclusion
>of the higher senses of man. But that's another story..

Alexis comments: As you know I am a very active practitioner of various
paranormal facilities, but I must say this: Science MUST exclude what you
call "the higher senses of man" and the reason why is at the state of the
art today these senses are neither provable nor disprovable because they are
not amenable to test procedures and most important of all to the reliable
repetition of such tests and their results. In time, we shall see how things
develop.
>
>Martin
>
>
Best wishes

alexis