mercoledì 22 giugno 2016

PREFA ----- The Science Delusion: Feeling the Spirit of Enquiry by Rupert Sheldrake

Prologue   Science, Religion and PowerRead more at location 237
Note: PRO@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ Edit
Since the late nineteenth century, science has dominated and transformed the earth. It has touched everyone’s lives through technology and modern medicine. Its intellectual prestige is almost unchallenged.Read more at location 239
Note: DOMINIO Edit
Although most of its power comes from its practical applications, it also has a strong intellectual appeal. It offers new ways of understanding the world,Read more at location 241
Note: PRATICA E TEORIA Edit
The scientific priesthoodRead more at location 243
Note: TOTOLO. I NUOVI PRETI Edit
Francis Bacon (1561–1626),Read more at location 244
Note: BACON Edit
there was nothing sinister about acquiring power over nature.Read more at location 245
claiming that knowledge of nature was God-given, not inspired by the devil. Science was a return to the innocence of the first man, Adam, in the Garden of Eden before the Fall.Read more at location 247
Note: LA CONOSCENZA INNOCENTE Edit
He equated man’s knowledge of nature with Adam’s naming of the animals.Read more at location 249
Note: NOMINAZIONE Edit
This was literally man’s knowledge, because Eve was not created untilRead more at location 251
Note: SENZA EVA Edit
The key to this new power over nature was organised institutional research. In New Atlantis (1624), Bacon described a techno cratic Utopia in which a scientific priesthood made decisions for the goodRead more at location 255
Note: TECNOCRAZIA Edit
The general purpose of this foundation was ‘the knowledge of causes and secret motions of things;Read more at location 259
Note: LA CAUSA Edit
a direct inspiration for the founding of the Royal Society in London in 1660, and for many other national academies of science.Read more at location 263
Note: ROYAL Edit
In England in Bacon’s time (and still today) the Church of England was linked to the state as the Established Church. Bacon envisaged that the scientific priesthood would also be linked to the state through state patronage,Read more at location 268
Note: LO STATO Edit
There is no separation of science and state.Read more at location 271
Scientists play the role of an established priesthood, influencing government policies on the arts of warfare,Read more at location 271
‘Knowledge is power.’Read more at location 273
Note: LO SLOGAN Edit
But the success of scientists in eliciting funding from governments varied from country to country.Read more at location 274
Note: FINAMZIAMENTI Edit
until the latter half of the nineteenth century, most research was privately funded or carried out by wealthy amateurs like Charles Darwin.Read more at location 276
Note: IL PRIVATO NELL 800 Edit
In France, Louis Pasteur (1822–95) was an influential proponent of science as a truth-finding religion, with laboratories like temples through which mankind would be elevated to its highest potential:Read more at location 277
Note: DON PASTEUR Edit
after the Second World War expanded enormously under government patronage, as well as through corporate investment.Read more at location 284
Note: DOPO LA SECONDA GUERRA Edit
But governments and corporations do not usually pay scientists to do research because they want innocent knowledge, like that of Adam before the Fall.Read more at location 288
Note: RICERCA INNOCENTE? Edit
Most funding is a response to Bacon’s persuasive slogan ‘knowledge is power’.Read more at location 290
Truth can be determined only by the judgement of experts . . . Everything is decided by very small groups of men, in fact, by single experts whose results are carefully checked, however, by a few others. The people have nothing to say but simply to acceptRead more at location 293
Note: VERITÀ ELITARIA Edit
Bacon’s vision of a scientific priesthood has now been realised on a global scale.Read more at location 298
Note: CLASSE DEI SACERDOTI Edit
The fantasy of omniscienceRead more at location 299
Note: TITOLO Edit
scientists aspire to a total godlike knowledge.Read more at location 301
Note: ASPIRAZIONE Edit
Pierre-Simon Laplace imagined a scientific mind capable of knowing and predicting everything:Read more at location 301
Note: TUTTO PREVEDIBILE Edit
Thomas Henry Huxley, who did so much to propagate Darwin’s theory of evolution, extended mechanical determinism to cover the entire evolutionary process:Read more at location 308
Note: DETERMINISMO Edit
When the belief in determinism was applied to the activity of the human brain, it resulted in a denial of free will,Read more at location 315
Note: FREE WILL Edit
Yet this conviction rested not on scientific evidence, but simply on the assumption that everything was fully determined by mathematical laws.Read more at location 316
Note: DOGMA Edit
Even today, many scientists assume that free will is an illusion.Read more at location 318
Note: OGGI Edit
For example, in 2010, the British brain scientist Patrick Haggard asserted, ‘As a neuroscientist, you’ve got to be a determinist.Read more at location 319
Note: HAGGARD Edit
Under identical circumstances, you couldn’t have done otherwise. There’s no “I” which can say, “I want to do otherwise.”Read more at location 321
However, Haggard does not let his scientific beliefs interfere with his personal life: ‘I keep my scientific and personal lives pretty separate. I still seem to decide what films I go to see,Read more at location 322
Note: SCHIZOFRENIA DELLO NEUROSCIENZIATO Edit
Indeterminism and chanceRead more at location 325
Note: TITOLO Edit
In 1927, with the recognition of the uncertainty principle in quantum physics, it became clear that indeterminism was an essential feature of the physical world,Read more at location 326
Note: 1927. INCERTEZZA Edit
Quantum theory deals in statistical probabilities, not certainties.Read more at location 330
Note: QUANTI Edit
Does quantum indeterminism affect the question of free will? Not if indeterminism is purely random. Choices made at random are no freer than if they are fully determined.Read more at location 331
Note: FREE WILL E RANDOM Edit
In neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory randomness plays a central role through the chance mutations of genes, which are quantum events.Read more at location 333
Note: MUTAZIONE E QUANTI Edit
With different chance events, evolution would happen differently. T. H. Huxley was wrong in believing that the course of evolution was predictable.Read more at location 334
Note: L ERRORE DI HUXLEY Edit
not just quantum processes but almost all natural phenomena are probabilistic, including the turbulent flow of liquids, the breaking of waves on the seashore, and the weather:Read more at location 337
Note: CAOS Edit
Weather forecasters still get it wrong in spite of having powerful computers and a continuous stream of data from satellites. This is not because they are bad scientists but because weather is intrinsically unpredictable in detail.Read more at location 339
Note: PREVISIONI DEL TEMPO Edit
‘chaos theory’,Read more at location 342
Even the orbits of the planets around the sun, long considered the centrepiece of mechanistic science, turn out to be chaotic over long time scales.Read more at location 344
Note: ORBITA DEI PIANETI Edit
The belief in determinism, strongly held by many nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century scientists, turned out to be a delusion.Read more at location 346
Note: DETERMINISMO CONFUTATO Edit
The sciences have not come to an end by abandoning the belief in determinism.Read more at location 348
Note: LA SVIENZA CONTINUA Edit
Further fantasies of omniscienceRead more at location 350
Note: TITOLO. L ILLUSIONE CONTINUA Edit
astronomer Simon Newcomb wrote, ‘We are probably nearing the limit of all we can know about astronomy.’ In 1894, Albert Michelson, later to win the Nobel Prize for Physics, declared, ‘The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these are now so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remoteRead more at location 351
Note: FINE DELLA SCIENZA Edit
‘There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement.’Read more at location 357
These convictions were shattered in the twentieth century through quantum physics, relativity theory,Read more at location 358
Note: CONFUTAZIONE Edit
Nevertheless, by the end of the twentieth century, the fantasy of omniscience was back again, this time fuelled by theRead more at location 361
Note: RIFLUSSO Edit
In 1997, John Horgan, a senior science writer at Scientific American, published a book called The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age.Read more at location 363
Note: HORGAN Edit
one must accept the possibility – even the probability – that the great era of scientific discovery is over.Read more at location 366
he took it for granted that the tenets of conventional science are true.Read more at location 371
Note: I FONDAMENTI Edit
Science and ChristianityRead more at location 373
Note: TITOLO Edit
The founders of mechanistic science in the seventeenth century, including Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei, René Descartes, Francis Bacon, Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton, were all practising Christians.Read more at location 374
Note: IL MECCANICISMO È CRISTIANO Edit
Boyle, a wealthy aristocrat, was exceptionally devout, and spent large amounts of his own money to promote missionary activity in India. Newton devoted much time and energy to biblical scholarship, with a particular interest in the dating of prophecies.Read more at location 376
Seventeenth-century science created a vision of the universe as a machine intelligently designed and started off by God.Read more at location 380
Note: L OROLOGIO DIVINO Edit
This mechanistic philosophy was revolutionary precisely because it rejected the animistic view of nature taken for granted in medieval Europe,Read more at location 382
Note: CONTRO L ANIMISMO Edit
Until the seventeenth century, university scholars and Christian theologians taught that the universe was alive, pervaded by the Spirit of God, the divine breath of life.Read more at location 383
Note: UN UNIVERSO VIVO Edit
No one could explain how minds related to the machinery of human bodies, but René Descartes speculated that they interacted in the pineal gland,Read more at location 388
Note: AMENTE CORPO Edit
After some initial conflicts, most notably the trial of Galileo by the Roman Inquisition in 1633, science and Christianity were increasingly confined to separate realms by mutual consent.Read more at location 390
Note: REGNI DIVISI Edit
at least until the rise of militant atheism at the end of the eighteenth century.Read more at location 393
Note: ATEISMO MILITANTE Edit
Even in the late twentieth century Stephen Jay Gould still defended this arrangement as a ‘sound position of general consensus’. He called it the doctrine of Non-overlapping Magisteria.Read more at location 395
Note: CONSENSO GOULD Edit
However, from around the time of the French Revolution (1789–99), militant materialists rejected this principle of dual magisteria, dismissing it as intellectually dishonest, or seeing it as a refuge for the feeble-minded.Read more at location 399
Note: ATEISMO Edit
Atheist beliefsRead more at location 404
Note: TITOLO Edit
The materialist philosophy achieved its dominance within institutional science in the second half of the nineteenth century,Read more at location 404
Note: 1850 Edit
take the doctrines of materialism to be established scientific facts, not just assumptions.Read more at location 406
Note: FATTI E ASSUNTI Edit
materialism led to the cheerless worldview expressed by the philosopher Bertrand Russell:   That man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving;Read more at location 408
Note: RUSSELL Edit
How many scientists believe in these ‘truths’? Some accept them without question. But many scientists have philosophies or religious faiths that make this ‘scientific worldview’ seem limited, at best a half-truth.Read more at location 417
Note: L ATTACCO DA FIORI Edit
In addition, within science itself, evolutionary cosmology, quantum physics and consciousness studies make the standard dogmas of science look old-fashioned.Read more at location 418
Note: L ATTACCO DA DENTRO Edit
The evangelists of science and technology have succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of the missionaries of Christianity.Read more at location 423
Note: EVANGELIZZAZIONE Edit
However, religious beliefs and the pursuit of a scientific career can interact in surprising ways. As an Indian scientist wrote in the scientific journal Nature in 2009,   [In India] science is neither the ultimate form of knowledge nor a victim of scepticism . . . My observations as a research scientist of more than 30 year’s standing suggest that most scientists in India conspicuously evoke the mysterious powers of godsRead more at location 426
Note: SCIENZA IN INDIA Edit
the doctrines of materialism are the rules of the game during working hours. Few professional scientists challenge them openly,Read more at location 433
Note: ORARIO D UFFICIO Edit
And in deference to the prestige of science, most educated people are prepared to go along with the orthodox creed in public,Read more at location 434
Note: DEFERENZA Edit
However, some scientists and intellectuals are deeply committed atheists, and the materialist philosophy is central to their belief system. A minority become missionaries, filled with evangelical zeal.Read more at location 436
Note: MILITANTI Edit
Sam Harris’s The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (2004), Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell (2006), Christopher Hitchens’s God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (2007) and Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion (2006), which by 2010 had sold two million copies in English,Read more at location 439
Note: BIBBIA Edit
Mechanistic science in itself gives no reason to suppose that there is any point in life, or purpose in humanity, or that progress is inevitable. Instead it asserts that the universe is ultimately purposeless, and so is human life.Read more at location 448
Note: SENZA SCOPO Edit
secular humanism arose within a Judaeo-Christian culture and inherited from Christianity a belief in the unique importance of human life, together with a faith in future salvation. Secular humanism is in many ways a Christian heresy, in which man has replaced God.Read more at location 450
Note: UMANESIMO: ATEISMO OTTIMISTA Edit
faith in progressRead more at location 453
Note: FEDE Edit
Instead of redemption by God, humans themselves will bring about human salvation through science, reason and social reform.Read more at location 454
Note: UN UOMO CHE SI SALVA Edit
Dogmas, beliefs and free enquiryRead more at location 457
Note: TITOLO Edit
It is not anti-scientific to question established beliefs, but central to science itself.Read more at location 458
Note: DISCUTERE I DOGMA Edit
Ideally, science is a process, not a position or a belief system. Innovative science happens when scientists feel free to ask new questions and build new theories.Read more at location 459
Note: PROCESSO Edit
In his influential book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), the historian of science Thomas Kuhn argued that in periods of ‘normal’ science, most scientists share a model of reality and a way of asking questions that he called a paradigm.Read more at location 461
Note: ACCEYTAZIONE SUPINA Edit
Kuhn helped focus attention on the social aspect of science and reminded us that science is a collective activity.Read more at location 467
Note: SOCIOLOGIA DELLA SCIENZA Edit
Bruno Latour’s Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society (1987) is one of the most influential studies in this tradition. Latour observed that scientists routinely make a distinction between knowledge and beliefs. Scientists within their professional group know about the phenomena covered by their field of science, while those outside the network have only distorted beliefs.Read more at location 472
Note: CNOSCENZA E CREDENZA Edit
millions of people have been converted to this ‘scientific’ view, even though they know very little about science itself.Read more at location 485
Note: SCIENTISTI SENZA SCIENZA Edit
Gervais is an entertainer, not a scientist or an original thinker, but he borrows the authority of science to support his atheism:Read more at location 489
Note: L INTRATTENITOR ATEO Edit
Gervais’s idealised view of science is hopelessly naïve in the context of the history and sociology of science. It portrays scientists as open-minded seekers of truth,Read more at location 495
Note: CARICATURA DELLA SCIENZA Edit