Materialism and heresy

I’ve had a few interesting conversations lately about materialism and doubts about scientific orthodoxy. One of the problems that quickly comes up is that anything that’s considered scientific has to be well within the materialistic paradigm. Not surprisingly, experiments conducted within a materialistic framework confirm materialism.

In one of my meandering conversations about this topic, someone mentioned feeling a deep sadness, that something was off while walking through a certain neighborhood of Amsterdam. Looking it up later, that person learned it was the main Jewish neighborhood of the city. Something of the trauma of most of the residents being deported and murdered less than a century ago lingers on.

There’s a thing called the stone tape theory, which posits that horrific events somehow leave a lasting impact on their surroundings. Can you ever really set up a double-blind setting and ask participants about the energy they feel from a place? I doubt it, but there’s something thought-provoking here.

Something similar happens in the case of organ transplants—recipients get memories and emotions that couldn’t possibly be linked with the organs they received under the current scientifically orthodox understanding of the body.

There’s also the research by Ian Stevenson of cases with children possessing plausible past-life memories. There’s certainly no silver bullet proving rebirth, but there is enough, in my opinion, to question whether scientific materialism as currently defined can adequately explain the world.

The person who’s made the most headway in questioning scientific materialism is, undoubtedly, Rupert Sheldrake. This interview gives a nice overview of his work. What’s chilling is that Sheldrake says he only published his initial findings because he was young and single; had he already been married with kids and a mortgage, he never would have taken the risk of publishing something “heretical”. He goes on to outline how the scientific establishment works more to enforce orthodoxy rather than test new ideas.

What can’t be ignored in all of this is that non-materialists are magnates for charlatans. The average tarot card reader, astrologist, or fortune teller is just a scammer. People like James Randi made a career of demolishing these types and then claiming he’d proven scientific materialism as a philosophy.