Fingerprints of God_ The Search for the Science of Spirituality - Barbara Bradley Hagerty [126]
Some of them have patiently guided me through my own quest to understand the nature of God and my instinct that something does indeed exist beyond the reach of our physical senses. I have come to think of them fondly as “my” scientists: they are brave and passionate in their conviction that the materialist assumptions of modern science are not as sturdy as they look.
These scientists repeatedly invoked Thomas Kuhn’s name. Kuhn, a historian of science at MIT, changed the world with his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.3 Aside from popularizing the phrase “paradigm shift,” he presented a new model for scientific progress. He argued that science proceeds not by steady accumulation of knowledge but (as one writer put it) by “a series of peaceful interludes punctuated by intellectually violent revolutions.”4 Those revolutions are “tradition-shattering complements to the tradition bound activity of normal science.”5
Kuhn argued that scientists are not the skeptical, freethinking, and objective investigators they fancy themselves. Rather, they tend to assimilate what they have been taught and work on solving problems within an accepted framework. Normal science, Kuhn observed,“often suppresses fundamental novelties because they are necessarily subversive of its basic commitments.”6 If some iconoclastic scientists produce results that challenge the prevailing consensus, the research is often dismissed as simply wrong—not as legitimate findings that point to a different sort of paradigm. Eventually, though, the pressure builds to the breaking point and, overnight, the old paradigm collapses and is replaced by a new one.
For example, Ptolemy’s theory that the sun revolves around the earth was overthrown by Copernicus’s evidence that the planets orbit the sun.When Newton’s theories of motion and gravitation could not explain the motion of light, his paradigm gave way to Einstein’s theory of relativity. Darwin’s theory of natural selection threw out the paradigm of man made in God’s image with one scoop of dust. Generally, for this shift to happen, the old scientists have to die off before a revolutionary who has no stake in the system—say, a twenty-six-year-old patent examiner named Albert Einstein—comes along and throws all the cards up in the air. He sweeps away the old paradigm, ushering in a new one. A revolution occurs.
Of course, most mainstream scientists believe we are nowhere close to a Kuhnian-style revolution when it comes to spirituality. They point out that a true revolution requires more than merely trotting out unexplained phenomena and arguing that current explanations should be scrapped. A paradigm shift requires that the new idea make predictions and explain the world in a better way. You can point out that your mother prayed for you and subsequently your fever abated. But before we discard the aspirin, we need a hypothesis about how prayer works and a prediction of what it will cure. For example: reciting the Twenty-third Psalm cures fevers, while the Sermon on the Mount suppresses coughing. Skeptics say that today’s “revolutionaries” do not have a theory of “God,” much less hard evidence to back it up.
Researchers like neurologist Mario Beauregard at the University of Montreal believe that they are developing such a theory, and that mainstream scientists remain stuck in the “normal science” mode of ignoring the evidence or dismissing it.
“Thomas Kuhn talked of paradigm revolution, and I think we’re in the middle of one right now,” Beauregard offered.“There are too many data coming from parapsychology, transpersonal psychology, now spiritual neuroscience, quantum physics, and various lines of evidence, all pointing to major failures