December 8, 2023: Dr. Mona Sobhani, a neuroscientist, posted on Linkedin: “Things Science Can’t Explain Need a Place to Go...”  Dr. Sobhan is the author of Proof of Spiritual Phenomena (Park Street Press, 2022).  Things science can’t explain already have a place to go – science.  The history of science – writ large* – has been a process of pursuing the unexplained and explaining it, tentatively, corrigibly, skeptically with the understanding that all facts escape the evidence. 

*Writ large – That is, I do not understand “science” as Western, monolithic, and characterized by a single “scientific method.”  It draws critically on all the reasoning strategies of the world’s cultures but most importantly for people like Dr. Sobhani, it includes the social sciences.  A great deal of the resistance to science and materialism is rooted in individual experiences.  We do not have to deny the reality of those experiences to the people who describe them to bring them under the umbrella of the social sciences.  We also have to understand that individual experience is a very poor guide to what the world is and how the world works.  Relying on individual experience as a proof methodology gives us revelation as a proof for the existence of God.  As individuals, we do not feel the earth’s many movements through space and time; E pur si muove!  We know that it moves based on the collective intersubjective testing of ideas, theories, and experiments by scientists – writ large – that takes place in the space of the unfolding of histories and cultures. Denying critical, realistic, sophisticated materialism opens the door to the existence of transcendental and supernatural (including spiritual) realms of reality.  There are no such realms.  Their existence is supported only if we leave out social science when we reference science.  From the forest where trees fall and nobody hears them.

 

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