The Biology of Belief - Bruce H. Lipton [83]
When Mickey falls asleep, the robotic broom fills and then overfills the cistern, flooding the lab. Upon awakening, Mickey tries to stop the broom. But his knowledge is so limited, he fails and the situation gets even worse. The water takes over, until the sorcerer, who does have the knowledge to quiet the broom, returns and restores balance. Here’s how Mickey’s predicament is described in the movie: “This piece is a legend about a sorcerer who had an apprentice. He was a bright young lad, very anxious to learn the business. As a matter of fact, he was a little too bright because he had started practicing some of the boss’s magic tricks before learning how to control them.” Today’s very bright scientists are “Mickey Mousing around” with our genes and our environment without understanding how interconnected everything on this planet is—a course of action bound to have tragic results.
How did we get to this point? There was a time when it was necessary for scientists to split from Spirit, or at least the corruption of Spirit by the Church. This powerful institution was in the business of suppressing scientific discovery when it was at odds with Church dogma. It was Nicolaus Copernicus, a savvy politician as well as a gifted astronomer, who launched the Spirit/Science split when he released to the public his profound manuscript De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres). The 1543 manuscript boldly declared that the sun, not the Earth, was the center of the “Heavenly Spheres.” This is obvious today, but in Copernicus’ time it was heresy because his new cosmology was at odds with an “infallible” Church, which had declared the Earth to be the center of God’s firmament. Copernicus believed that the Inquisition would destroy both him and his heretical beliefs, so he prudently waited until he was on his deathbed to publish his work. His concern for his safety was fully justified. Fifty-seven years later Giordano Bruno, a Dominican monk who had the temerity to speak out and defend Copernicus’ cosmology, was burned at the stake for this heresy. Copernicus outsmarted the Church—it is hard to torture an intellectual when he is in his grave. Unable to kill the messenger, the Church eventually had to deal with Copernicus’s message.
A century later French mathematician and philosopher René Descartes insisted on using scientific methodology to examine the validity of all previously accepted “truths.” The invisible forces of the spiritual world clearly didn’t lend themselves to such analysis. In the post-Reformation era, scientists were encouraged to pursue their studies of the natural world and spiritual “truths” were relegated to the realms of religion and metaphysics. Spirit and other metaphysical concepts were devalued as “unscientific” because their truths could not be assessed by the analytic methods of science. The important “stuff” about life and the Universe became the domain of rational scientists.
If the Spirit/Science split needed any more reinforcement, it got it in 1859 when Darwin’s theory of evolution made an instant splash. Darwin’s theory spread across the globe like today’s Internet rumors. It was readily accepted because its principles dovetailed with people’s experiences in breeding pets, farm animals, and plants. Darwinism attributed the origins of humanity to the happenstance of hereditary variations, which meant that there was no need to invoke divine intervention in our lives or our science. Modern scientists were no less awed by the Universe than the cleric/ scientists who preceded them, but with Darwin’s theory in hand they no longer saw a need to invoke the Hand of God as a grand “designer” of nature’s complex order. Preeminent Darwinist Ernst Mayr wrote: “When we ask how this perfection is brought about, we seem to find only arbitrariness, planlessness, randomness, and accident … ” (Mayr