Our job is not to interpret them and give them a place in our social lives - rather our job is just to explain their causes and try to predict the future course of events. Science now tells us that in truth objects and events like this have no significance whatsoever. The bright light shooting across the sky - is it a good or a bad omen? Everything had to have a human significance.
Since our ancestral apes rose up on their hind legs we have been trying to grasp the significance of things for us. What science does to the significance of things is truly bizarre. To a scientist, by contrast, it is just a living organism capable of both respiration and photosynthesis with a specific place in the botanical taxonomy.ĭoes the scientist tell us what a tree really is, or does he just give us one possible way of looking at a tree? Must we say that the tree is not really holy or really beautiful - because these concepts are too subjective - and that the only truly objective concept of the tree is the scientific one? To a lumberjack it is timber, and to the logging company it is a source of profit. To a child who has a tree house, the tree is a place to play and perhaps also a place of refuge. What is a tree? To the Druids (a primitive society found in Northern Europe some 2,000 years ago) certain trees were sacred - they were dwelling places of gods.
It is assumed to be 100% objective - not shaped in the least by our perceptions of it. It gives us a distorted picture of what reality is.įor science, reality is supposed to be made up of objects and events that are entirely independent of the observer.
Arguably, it conceals as much as it illuminates. The scientific worldview which so dominates our contemporary consciousness is not as innocent as it may at first seem.
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