Modernist views of science focus on its universal character. To call something science is to say we can understand the situation objectively, that experiments are repeatable, that any theories hold everywhere and always. But does such a science apply to all situations? What is being ignored when we apply such thinking to the human and social world? Are there other views of science?
The science of the ancients in both the East and West placed, through observation and direct experience, a much greater focus on interconnection, flow and change, and on the importance of context, history and detail. But the ‘modern’ conception that Newton’s mechanical worldview applied to everything everywhere led to a disenchantment of science, and the acceptance of a view that the world, by and large can be understood and controlled as if it were a machine.
But is this really so? During the course Spirit, Science And Consciousness, we will take a firm look at the nature of science, and at the limits of mechanical scientific thinking. We’ll explore the ‘new’ post-modern views of science exemplified by evolutionary and complexity theory. We’ll see how science, if we ‘re-enchant’ it, if we re-introduce detailed empiricism, the imaginal, the issue of values, the relationship between the inner and outer experience, draws science and spirituality together again.
The re-enchantment of science would sit well with many of our greatest scientists – including Einstein, Newton himself, Roger Penrose and Ilya Prigogine and would have seemed natural to Carl Jung and Teilhard de Chardin and Goethe. We will look at their ideas. And we will also spend some time in undertaking our own empirical investigations, in experiencing the enchantment of the world in which we live.
Jean Boulton, PhD, MBA is Visiting Fellow at Cranfield School of Management and also with the Department of Social and Policy Science at the University of Bath. She has a PhD in quantum physics from the University of Cambridge and a first degree in physics from the University of Oxford. She has a particular interest in complexity theory and has been teaching and writing on this subject, and its applications for human and natural systems, for several years. Recent research centres on the nature of science and its relationship with the imaginal, the numinous and the uniqueness of individual experience. She is drawn to Buddhist philosophy. Jean is currently co-authoring ‘Embracing Complexity’ with Professor Peter Allen, to be published by Oxford University Press in 2012.
Jean teaches on Spirit, Science And Consciousness: Living With The Paradoxes which starts Monday February 13, 2012
