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Sometimes debates between atheists and Christians can become rather tedious. The question of whether or not God exists seems to be endlessly fascinating to some. However, once you clock there's no possibility of proving either way, the argument seems rather pointless.
One argument is science is materialist and doesn't allow for a spiritual dimension to life. This assertion, often accepted by both sides, has always seemed dubious to me.
Science like all human activity is an act of imagination. In an earlier post I explained how all our experiences are subjective. Science helps us agree about what we perceive. Its bedrock is replicable experiments. We can take our local experiences and if they are replicable elsewhere we can add them to a resource of objective observations. It is that they are replicable that makes them objective.
So, when we say science is materialist, what do we mean? Do we mean we have found a means to accumulate tried and tested observations, hypotheses, theories about the universe? A method that is extremely successful. Or do we mean that in some sense science reflects the universe as it really is? It is worth asking whether the success of science, as a materialist approach, reflects the universe as it is.
Whilst the universe may be material, the means by which we wrestle with our observations and interpret them is through the imagination. This is the same means by which we write novels and compose symphonies.
Think of Kerkule, who discovered the benzene ring after dreaming of the Ouroboros, the serpent holding its tail in its mouth. Or the many interpretations of quantum mechanics. The first is an example of a feat of imagination leading to a convergent solution on the specific structure of a specific molecule (although we can't see atoms and so any structure is in some sense imaginary). The second is an example of a divergent system, where speculations about its meaning are unlikely to lead to consensus.
I'm not denying the effectiveness of scientific method. I am asking us to be careful when we assume a materialist approach reflects all we can know of the universe.
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