Excerpt from Dreams

Margins of Society (p. 125)

From chapter "Trusting Nature"

It is true that where we have evidence for what we believe, we have less need of faith. And so I would challenge scientists to show their reasons for believing that the mythology of science—based as it is from its genesis to its current endgame on increasing power and control— is not destructive of life on this planet. Where is the evidence? We can talk till the end of the world about the importance of science in helping us understand global warming (and believe me, we will talk about the importance of science in helping us understand global warming until the very end of the world, and we will talk and talk and talk, and do anything to distract us from actually stopping this culture before it causes the end of the world), but carbon dioxide emissions continue to rise, and without science and the scientific, materialist, instrumentalist, mechanistic perspective, there’d be no industrial civilization heating up the globe. It’s ridiculous to sing the praises of science for helping to understand or even (almost undoubtedly unsuccessfully) helping to solve a problem that either would not exist or would not be so severe were it not for science and the scientific mind-set in the first place. This applies not only to global warming, but to any of the other myriad problems caused by science and the scientific, materialist, instrumentalist, mechanistic perspective.

Sam Harris (neuroscientist, author of essays such as “Mother Nature is Not Our Friend” and “In Defense of Torture”, co-founder of Project Reason) says, “People who harbor strong convictions without evidence belong at the margins of our societies, not in our halls of power.” Yet that is precisely where the firm believers in the mythology of science reside, this mythology based on the ridiculous conceit that the world is mechanistic, or dead, this mythology based on the equally ridiculous conceit that only humans are really sentient, this mythology based on nonhuman others not existing for their own sakes, this mythology based on torturing the planet into compliance, this mythology based on the notion that “we will find better and better ways to exploit our resources and maintain our way of living while still protecting our forests and oceans and the rest of our environment,” this notion for which there is no evidence whatsoever, this notion for which there is an entire world of evidence to the contrary.