Does our grasp on science, technology and logic describe everything in the world, or are there things that are still beyond our understanding, and maybe even beyond our awareness?
I
am an engineer by training. At one point, I was a very good engineer
and science and technology was a world I felt fully at home in.
I regularly came top in my end of year exams at University and
graduated with a First. There was no problem I could not find
some way to solve, eventually. The world was technical and I
was its heir apparent.
Omnipotent? Perhaps not, but omni-potential
was a concept that I could really wallow in.
And then I went on a course run by a very
strange character, a sort of Zen-mystic prima-donna, and though
I initially categorised him in the low place I reserved for all
those people who preached a message which had no foundation in
provable scientific fact, I was out of the office for seven days
and felt I might as well go with the flow just for the hell of
it.
The outcome of that simple decision turned
my world inside out. With like minded colleagues, I experienced
first hand effects and events that defied rational explanation.
We repeated things ourselves, and though we worked hard to disprove
them, or find alternative explanations, we were frankly at a
loss to do so. And I began to realise for the first time that
the scientific and rational basis that formed the boundaries
of my world was actually only a model that described a small
part of it. Instead of using science and technology as a ladder
to extend my thinking I had encouraged it to become a cage which
imprisoned it.
Looking back on it I find it difficult to
credit how I could have been so naïve. It is fairly obvious
that scientific discovery abounds continually as we identify
new phenomena and develop new models to describe them, or as
we refine existing models to better reflect a deeper understanding
of what were previously seen to be anomalies. Perhaps my 'engineering'
mindset just thought of such things as 'range extensions' and
'enhancements'.
What our ancestors used to see as 'magical',
were not things that were outside reality, but simply outside
of their limited ability to explain reality. Why should I fool
myself into believing that such discovery has now stopped when
all our recent experience points in exactly the opposite direction?
My scientific models are trapped within my
paradigms and experience of the world, which in turn are limited
by my five very physical senses. Simply because I am not equipped
(whether by design or by evolution) with the ability to identify
or recognise certain phenomena does not necessarily mean that
those phenomena do not exist. Does the fly that lands on my VDU
screen see it as anything more than a vertical table?
The universe (at least the part of it that
we know about) has been in existence for 15 Billion years. We
have only been really cognitive of aspects beyond volume, mass
and time for the last hundred. And even then, our detail knowledge
is limited to a small planet orbiting one star amongst 10 Billion
stars that comprise a galaxy amongst 10 Billion galaxies. In
our small part of the universe, matter came together to form
molecules, which came together to form amino acids, which came
together to form the basis for simple life, and single cell organisms,
which came together to form more complex symbiotic arrangements
that eventually evolved into higher primates - the basis for
you and me. This has been without doubt an amazing sequence.
Am I confident in all the vastness of time and space that such
complex sequences are only feasible for the physical phenomena
that I have emerged from? Or could it be that, as fantastic as
'life' is, it has still only evolved to the point where I am
equipped to see solely where I came from? Dust!
My own particular decision on this matter,
subsequently reinforced by my experiences in wrestling with the
next two questions, was to accept that the spiritual realm was
a real possibility, and that we are even less well equipped to
disprove its existence than we are to demonstrate it beyond doubt.
© Tesseract Management Systems Ltd 2003
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