The Spirit in Human Evolution - Waldorf Research Institute

At the risk of oversimplifying, we can say that since the Renaissance there have
been basically two options. We can adopt a scientific view, which essentially means seeing
things from a materialistic standpoint that recognizes only the logic of mechanical causes
and sees the possibility of order but not meaning in the universe. The alternatives to the
scientific view are many and varied but most share a belief in some kind of supernatural
intention that gives the whole its meaning.
The modern scientific approach builds on two basic principles: the validation
of theory by the repeatability of experiment; the simplification or reduction to basic
principles of the application of measurement and thus quantification to phenomena.
For the scientific view the question of meaning is strictly confined to the rational
relationship of scientific facts to each other. The non-scientific approach is traditionally
based on personal intuition, faith and revelation. These two perspectives are essentially
irreconcilable although I suspect that most people, including many scientists, would
wish that they were not. We live therefore with the paradox in that it appears to be a
human need to want to see meaning in the world while our rationalist thinking inclines
us to take a scientific view, which says, “There isn’t any!” At any rate, it informs us that
science is not equipped to answer this question.
Science can be seen as producing a conception of the world that is at odds with the
way we experience it and even sometimes seems to wish to displace human experience.
Because the scientific approach has the upper hand in our culture, it is easy to dismiss
the alternatives. Science in many ways seems to claim implicitly its preeminence by
virtue of possessing the only real form of knowledge available to us. It is almost as if
science were above the cultural concerns of the times and forgets that it too is a part of
culture and thus contributes to our overall sense of meaning along with art, aesthetics,
philosophy, religion, ethics and individual human experience. At the end of a book
devoted to understanding the relationship between science, art and the human world,
Professor Anthony O’Hear of the University of Bradford, highlighted this point:
One of the most insidious features of the scientific spirit is its tendency to suggest
not simply that its knowledge has a unique standing and that anything that is
really knowledge must stem from science, but that all true knowledge must
conform to its ideal methodology of presenting its findings in terms of explicit
theories and their deductive consequences.
But science itself is a human practice, one practice among others. Examination
of its theories and methods does not support the view that scientific knowledge
is specially privileged or free from unprovable and mythological elements. 7
Many scientists would, of course, refute my implication that science is a
worldview (or has an implicit worldview) let alone, a belief system. Yet it is a way of
seeing the world that in practice is selective since it places limits on what can be known.
Its methodology is perhaps the best one available to us at present and its achievements
are undeniable, but it cannot claim to be the only source of objective truth, unless we
pragmatically reduce truth to what we know that works at present. The worldview
underpinning the modern scientific approach is mechanistic and materialistic and is
therefore devoid of meaning. Its supporters would say, of course it is, because modern
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7
O’Hear, A., 1988, The Element of Fire, Science, Art and the Human World, Routledge.
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