Principles, Logic, and Blunders

Principles, Logic, and Blunders: Man Expressing his Astonishment

The previous part of this article can be read here.

When scientists claim they have proven the non-existence of free will, they commit a blatant fallacy, which only they cannot see. What they do is pretend to prove what they have already assumed, even before the smallest first step of any demonstration.

They say: ‘See how our studies and experiments prove that the human being is totally controlled by the play of his neurons, cells, and atoms: how the smallest thought in your mind is already pre-determined by the history of your neurons in the brain and the flashes they send to the rest of their neuronal fellows in the brain.’

But they forget that the principle of their very science demands this, namely that everything in the universe, everything that can be thought of as existing, must be thought of as pre-determined. This is the principle with which they start any research. And since it is an accepted principle, the scientist must necessarily be blind to anything contradicting this principle.

Thus, they commit the famous petitio principii, the logical error of presuming in the premise the conclusion that must be demonstrated. Their fallacy has the same form as the following one: ‘All men are mortal. Therefore, necessarily, Socrates is mortal.’

Once you have assumed that all men are mortal, and you already know that Socrates is a man, your conclusion was presumed true in the premise. You do not prove anything. Yes, you could prove something if you did not yet know that Socrates was a man.

But the science of nature demands that everything on Earth, in the heavens or in the black holes of previous eons (universes existing before the Big Bang, according to Roger Penrose), thus without any exception, is a passive entity reacting mechanically (i.e., completely passively) to external causes. Thus, nothing escaping this state of absolute lack of spontaneity can exist for this science.

And now, the latter and its representatives, the scientists, come in front of us, with the air of having revealed something new to us: ‘See how brilliant we are in proving that human beings lack any spontaneity!’

Dear science and dear scientists, you have not proven anything because you declared from the beginning that you do not want, and even cannot, see and accept anything in the universe that has the most insignificant trace of spontaneity!

This is simply your way of functioning, which is immensely fruitful in many respects. But approaching other aspects of Being with the same principles is a complete catastrophe and even a crime. 

What could be such other aspects of Being? To answer this question, we must add another principle of science that we have not discussed until now, although it was present somehow. Science must necessarily have a materialistic view, i.e., it must reduce the whole of existence to matter and nothing else. It must again, ab initio, deny any spiritual existence because it cannot cope with it. 

The materialistic character of science is based on its approach founded on measurement. Things must be completely passive and inert so that we can measure them. They must be unchangeable if we want to describe them mathematically. If they constantly change, we cannot establish any clear-cut view of them and cannot predict their evolution.

Thus, even though things might have a spiritual feature, science must completely ignore it because in that case it can no longer cope with them. Acknowledging a spiritual feature inside of things means accepting an unknown factor whose presence could always lead to unexpected results and confuse any measurement and, thus, any prediction.

Ultimately, accepting the existence of spirit within matter equals destroying science as an activity that predicts the future totally necessary evolution of things.

Thus science – i.e., modern science – made up its mind from the very beginning concerning the world: the world is only material. ‘Spirit’ is an illusory by-product of matter devoid of any existence by itself. Therefore, everything called ‘spiritual’ is an expression of human ignorance. 

Now, again, science forgets that its claim is only a principle (read, a product of rational imagination), that is to say, a statement which is not at all provable but which allows one to order, research, and make predictions about a wide area of existence.

According to this precept, science proceeds like a person who wants to take into account only the red things around him, deciding to ignore any other colors and differently-colored things. Its principle is a selective principle (and scientists do tend very easily to forget this character of their principles). 

But does spirit exist? Do we have to acknowledge such spiritual features of reality? How can we answer these questions? We can in the same way in which science answers the question of how it knows that matter exists: through the awareness of what our experience shows us. 

Science takes for granted that material things exist because we immediately see ‘material,’ i.e., rigid and consistent bodies and things around us everywhere. But this is only half of what we see immediately. This half of our experience is our external experience.

But we also have an internal experience of which we are as immediately aware as of the external one. Now, the question is how this inner experience must be thought of and assessed. 

Based on the principles of (natural) science, this inner experience should not be there. What is in my mind has no consistency, no rigidity, no impenetrability, no length, no volume, no color, and no shape. It’s entirely different from what I see outside. However, I can be as aware of inner contents as I am of external things (of course, not always, but in most cases). 

I am absolutely aware of my feelings, thoughts, sensations, memories, desires, needs, and so forth. They are given to me as immediately and as convincingly as any external thing around me. My common experience is based both on perceiving the external things around me and the internal contents I am aware of constantly. 

The previous part of this article can be read here.

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