Unpicking the Rational Revolution

The world - the universe, life, indeed - are all explainable. The rational human being, raised on the thinking of Plato, Newton and Darwin, has no room in their worldview for ghosts, astrology, spiritualism, alchemy, palmistry, hermeticism, gnosticism, occultism, channelling aliens - or indeed for organised religion. All is matter or energy. There is no such thing as the 'paranormal', the 'supernatural' or the 'metaphysical'. These outdated forms of thinking were merely the products of irrational minds that sought answers to questions which science has now successfully answered.

Mysticism, in all its forms, is bunk.

Our rational, scientific worldview - the one in which we've been raised - tells us that all natural phenomena can be reduced to mathematical formulae, These, we believe, can successfully predict the motion of the stars and planets, the properties of DNA, the workings of the mind, the innermost secrets of the electron, and the forces at work within the expanding universe.

Not entirely.

For the past 90 or so years, science has been pulling back from assertions such as "we just have a couple more formulae to crack, and then we'll know literally everything." From its inability to pinpoint the seat of consciousness or identify dark energy and dark matter (and how they interact with gravity), what happened before Big Bang, how the Universe will end - the world of science is less and less confident that It Knows It All. And will quantum physics ever become intuitively understandable? Given that our intuition has been shaped by classical physics for centuries, how long will it take humanity to absorb the weirdness of quantum mechanics - the Wave Function of the Universe, for example, into the way we see the everyday world around us?

And now we are seemingly faced with unidentified aerial phenomena, witnessed by credible observers and recorded across multiple sensor platforms - craft performing feats that science cannot even begin to explain. Acceleration from stationary to hypersonic speed in two seconds. Plunging from space, through the atmosphere, into the ocean. Doing this with no visible means of lift (no wings or rotor blades), nor visible means of propulsion (no flames, no vapour trail, no wake). Science dogmatically digs in against such claims, offering increasingly weak rebuttals.

Our faith in science begins to waver - and at a highly dangerous time, what with anti-vaxxers talking rubbish about the Covid-19 vaccines that are already successfully combating the virus.

Classical science works well enough at our human scale, but fails to cohere at the subatomic (10^-27m) or at the galactic (10²⁷m) scales. Quantum mechanics and Einsteinian space-time relativity fail to gel. Our knowledge starts to fray at both ends, without a unifying theory to bind them. And here, the magick steps back in to fill the void. The world of the metaphysical - that which is above, or beyond, physics. In earlier days this would have been packaged as the occult - hidden knowledge - secret mysteries that only the Initiated can learn and pass on down the ages. All this begins to be just as valid - though at the metaphysical level, couched in arcane language that works differently to the language of science.

Cognitive bias, however, should always be at the forefront of one's mind when cutting a new path through the undergrowth of mysticism. And, it must never be forgotten that it was the scientific method that brought us the comforts of modern life, including healthcare and electricity.

It does seem more and more likely that we are being visited by beings from different worlds. We know not whether these worlds are planets circling other stars in our galaxy, or other dimensions, or from other times. We do not know whether these craft are probes or whether they contain living beings. Science is wholly unable to explain the phenomenon of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena. 

Of the 145 cases investigated by the US Navy, only one could be successfully debunked as something familiar.

Whatever is out there, watching us, has evidently mastered physics at a level that we cannot even begin to imagine. In the meanwhile, the notion of channelling these entities using telepathy makes as much sense as dismissing the phenomena as weather balloons.

Our own personal routes to Understanding, to Purpose are individual. Seek your own way. Like the excited electron making its way through a molecule. It doesn't just follow one route - it follows all the possible paths - and then recalculates the most efficient one and says: "that's the one I have taken," as it if has worked this out backward in time. This is quantum superposition, and it stands as a good analogy for our own paths to God.

This time last year:
Ride to Roztocze

This time two years ago:
Poznań and Wrocław - two boomtowns

This time eight years ago:
Scaling the highest peak in Wales

This time nine years ago:
Beaches of the north coast of the Llyn Peninsula

This time ten years ago: 
The Accursed Soldiers - a short story

This time 11 years ago:
Driving impressions of the Toyota Yaris
[11 years on - still rock-solid]

This time 13 years ago:
Poland's dry summer

This time 14 years ago:
The UK's wettest summer ever