THE PROBLEM WITH SCIENCE

This is something that has been bouncing around my head for a while now. As a person who's grown more spiritually, I feel that using science as the sole basis for one's knowledge seems narrow, and I've been trying to put my finger on exactly what it is that science lacks, so I am going to attempt to do that here. But first, I have to introduce some terms.

We generally interact with our world through mental structures or constructs. How we identify and interact with people, places, things, and ideas are through amorphous concepts of what the thing is. For example, I'm sitting here drinking a cup of milk from a cup. The only way I know what I'm actually interacting with is through the idea of what a cup actually is and what it is supposed to do. I know the cup is supposed to hold a liquid so that I may consume it. The cup is green and round. It is a plastic. It is a product of society.

Unfortunately, by adding all these "tags" to the cup (it's use, it's shape, it's color), it prevents me from actually interacting with the cup as it actually is. I'm not actually interacting, in my mind, with the cup itself, only with the idea of the cup. I am interacting with the mental construct of what the cup is and means to me.

Science has taken this "interacting with structures" idea and turned it into an art form. Science doesn't study things. It studies ideas of things. Again, for example, let's say I was a scientist studying frogs in the amazon. I would study that frog and I would learn all sorts of information about the frog: mating habits, diet, predators, etc. I could tell you its taxonomy (scientific classification system). However, I never actually get at the heart of what the frog is. I'm not studying the frog; I'm studying the idea of the frog. The very fact that science has developed a classification system for every living thing, then works as if this classification system is somehow naturally arising or the best way to work is evidence of what I mean.

If I want to know more about a person, I would interact with him or her as they actually are, setting aside what I think I know about that person, about men or women, about people, or about living things at all. Once you start interacting with that person as something other than what it actually is, you've created for yourself a block, a barrier, a structure that you now have to work through to interact with that person, and you now no longer interacting with them as they actually are; you are interacting with what you think they are.

The scientist isn't dealing with the frog as it is. It is dealing with the frog as a species in the subset of the genus of... This is not to say this isn't a useful construct with which to deal with the world. Our minds aren't entirely capable of dealing with everything on an individual level, but if we are to say our entire basis of knowledge about things is through the self-created structures, then we are interacting with nothing but ideas. We never interact with the substance itself that actually exists!

Science cannot deal with substance. It is not structured to deal with substance. It can only deal with ideas of substance, and that can be useful for navigating certain things. It helps break things down into smaller, more manageable parts, but the first thing you have to understand as you break them down is that the way you choose to break them down is entirely a structure and a product of your own way of thinking, NOT a naturally arising way to look at things. Science could have chosen to organize its taxonomy completely different, and our understanding of the world would have come out to be radically different.

Deciding that we could understand the world solely through breaking it down into its component parts is like believing we could understand a person by breaking down and studying each of his or her organs, and breaking down their personality into component parts, and breaking down their experiences into component parts, and categorizing all these things. Think about it: you would gain an understanding of the idea of what that person is, but you would never truly KNOW or UNDERSTAND that person until you've interacted with them, and worked with them on their level.

I think that's what I've been trying to put my finger on. I was questioning our "understanding" of evolution once, and I was told "Understanding of the components of a system give rise to understanding of the system as a whole". I don't believe that's necessarily true, and I think it takes interaction with a system as a whole, on it's own terms, to truly understand it.

P.S. I am not a creationist. I just think our current understanding of how evolution actually occurred (if it occurred as it did) is oversimplified, given the magnitude of what actually transpired.

ADDENDUM: There is another thing I wanted to quickly touch upon as well, regarding science. Science rests upon the idea that there are subjects and objects that can be separated from one another. It is based on the idea that you can study something without involved yourself in the existence of the thing your studying. This is a false dualism. There can be no object without a subject. There is nothing to study if there is no person studying it. Certain larger things, the idea that you can remove the subject is more plausible, and more useful, but when it comes to studying behavior of anything (which a large portion of science is), the only way we can interact with the behavior of something is through the way we see things. This ties into what I said earlier about interacting through structures. The structures that exist only exist in the minds of the subject doing the observing. The object does not exist the same way to everyone, and the only way the object can be observed is through the mind of the subject. The object and the subject are one, and the idea that you can separate the subject from the object is false.