scientific worldview Concepts

Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity

by Paul Kingsnorth · 23 Sep 2025 · 388pp · 110,920 words

revolt against what surpasses it, now seeks to impose its laws over the rest of life’.[6] In the wake of the modern revolutions, the scientific worldview is now so all-encompassing as to be virtually invisible to us. ‘Never before’, writes Sheldrake in The Science Delusion, ‘has any system of ideas

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, I would argue, an ideology posing as a method. What is the ideology? It is the pursuit of what Francis Bacon called ‘human empire’. The scientific worldview is leading us rapidly towards the total remaking of both humanity and non-human nature in the image of the (post-) modern self. Science built

The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity's Search for Meaning

by Jeremy Lent · 22 May 2017 · 789pp · 207,744 words

shared set of ideas about the cosmos. What was it that led one tradition to create the “Greek miracle,” laying the foundation for the modern scientific worldview, while another became known for its spiritual investigation into humanity's place in the cosmos? As we explore this question, we'll identify some surprising

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the term ‘mind’ rather than soul since the word ‘soul’ is ambiguous and is often applied to something corporeal.”38 With the rise of the scientific worldview in modern times, the notion of “soul” has been segregated into purely theological territory, while the idea of “mind” has become ubiquitous, reinforcing the same

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of Li When Needham recognized what the Neo-Confucians meant by the relationship between li and qi, he immediately saw its congruity with the modern scientific worldview. Several decades earlier, Einstein had transformed physics with his famous equation, E = mc2, which states that the energy of a body is equal to its

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that the celestial machine is to be likened not to a divine organism but to a clockwork.” The metaphor became so entrenched in the burgeoning scientific worldview that it began to lose its metaphoric character and be used as if it were reality. It was Descartes who transformed the NATURE AS MACHINE

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unacknowledged) of much thinking about science that qualifies today as mainstream. It is a testament to the power of this framework that it generated the scientific worldview underlying much of our global civilization; but it is equally important to recognize that this narrative is based on unverifiable assumptions about the nature of

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and, 282–84 as paradigm shift, 372 scientific cognition and, 332–33, 343, 349–51 sources in Greek thought, 331 uniqueness of, 325–26, 330 scientific worldview, 237, 279, 332, 378 and Christianity, 284, 335, 347–49 Christian Rationalism and, 343 universal validity, belief in, 354–55 See also reductionism; scientific cognition

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exploitation, relation with, 292, 300–315 Scientific Revolution and, 325–26, 330–33 technological innovation in, 376–77 See also Christianity; metaphors, root; Scientific Revolution; scientific worldview “Western Inscription” (Zhang Zai), 269, 288–89, 441 Western tradition Christianity and, 233–38, 279–84, 287 Greek civilization and, 303–304, 336–37, 340

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; Greek civilization and thought; hunter-gatherers; Indian civilization and thought; Islamic civilization and thought; Mesopotamian civilization and thought; Neo-Confucianism; Proto-Indo-European (PIE) culture; scientific worldview; systems thinking; Western civilization and thought World War II, aftermath of, 15, 315, 385, 389, 398, 399 writing invention of, 128 wu-wei, 188–89

The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values

by Sam Harris · 5 Oct 2010 · 412pp · 115,266 words

in the matter. Zero-sum conflicts have a way of becoming explicit. Here is our situation: if the basic claims of religion are true, the scientific worldview is so blinkered and susceptible to supernatural modification as to be rendered nearly ridiculous; if the basic claims of religion are false, most people are

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—and, thus, unscientific in principle. Very few of us seem willing to admit that such simple, moral truths increasingly fall within the scope of our scientific worldview. Greene articulates the prevailing skepticism quite well: Moral judgment is, for the most part, driven not by moral reasoning, but by moral intuitions of an

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? Does the general ignorance about the special theory of relativity or the pervasive disinclination of Americans to accept the scientific consensus on evolution put our scientific worldview, even slightly, in question?17 Greene notes that it is often difficult to get people to agree about moral truth, or to even get an

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of them.” And yet, judging from the way that journals like Nature have treated Collins, one can only conclude that there is nothing in the scientific worldview, or in the intellectual rigor and self-criticism that gave rise to it, that casts these convictions in an unfavorable light. Prior to his appointment

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’s statement was obnoxious, one cannot say that his views are utterly irrational or that, by merely giving voice to them, he has repudiated the scientific worldview and declared himself immune to its further discoveries. Such a distinction would have to be reserved for Watson’s successor at the Human Genome Project

Braiding Sweetgrass

by Robin Wall Kimmerer

that we need for our transformation to people of corn, but more wisdom. While science could be a source of and repository for knowledge, the scientific worldview is all too often an enemy of ecological compassion. It is important in thinking about this lens to separate two ideas that are too often

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synonymous in the mind of the public: the practice of science and the scientific worldview that it feeds. Science is the process of revealing the world through rational inquiry. The practice of doing real science brings the questioner into an

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being or another system so unlike our own is often humbling and, for many scientists, is a deeply spiritual pursuit. Contrasting with this is the scientific worldview, in which a culture uses the process of interpreting science in a cultural context that uses science and technology to reinforce reductionist, materialist economic and

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political agendas. I maintain that the destructive lens of the people made of wood is not science itself, but the lens of the scientific worldview, the illusion of dominance and control, the separation of knowledge from responsibility. I dream of a world guided by a lens of stories rooted in

The Transhumanist Reader

by Max More and Natasha Vita-More · 4 Mar 2013 · 798pp · 240,182 words

the first to admit that this is a mythology and not a scientific theory. I believe it is a mythology compatible with rationality and the scientific worldview. Modern science says that reality, at a fundamental level, is much weirder than our simple, intuitive models, and lets us glimpse at vague and veiled

The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis

by Jeremy Rifkin · 31 Dec 2009 · 879pp · 233,093 words

often are the rules. By eliminating the redundancy of oral language and making precise measurement and description possible, print laid the foundation for the modern scientific worldview. Phenomena could be rigorously examined, observed, and described, and experiments could be made repeatable with exacting standards and protocols, something that was far more difficult

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probing of nature. Alan MacFarlane and Gerry Martin, in their book Glass: A World History, observe that glass inventions were pivotal in advancing the rational, scientific worldview that catapulted Western Europe into the Modern era and the Industrial Age. But while glass products helped deepen self-consciousness, extend the central nervous system

The Evolution of God

by Robert Wright · 8 Jun 2009

of the board as chief executive. This kind of god is often described as more modern than pagan, Baal-like gods, more compatible with a scientific worldview. After all, looking for mechanistic laws of nature wouldn’t make much sense if, as the pagans of Elijah’s day believed, nature was animated

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, a frequently interventionist god—a god that deployed plagues, storms, and bolts of fire to keep humanity on track—didn’t coexist easily with a scientific worldview. That worldview wouldn’t mature for nearly two millennia after Philo, but its animating spirit, and its aspiration to universal explanation, had emerged centuries earlier

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conceive the source of that order; especially if you stress to them that the source of the moral order isn’t necessarily inconsistent with a scientific worldview—it needn’t be some kind of gratuitously interventionist anthropomorphic God or some mystical “force” that trumps the laws of the universe; maybe the laws

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complete otherwise fallible knowledge.” 15 This points to a problem for modern theology: as divinity is defined more abstractly to fit more comfortably into a scientific worldview, God becomes harder for people to relate to. In the mid-twentieth century, when Paul Tillich defined God as “the ground of being,” some fellow

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of consciousness move us closer to what mystics call “ultimate reality”—or even toward something worthy of the name “divine”—is hardly excluded by a scientific worldview. But defenders of religion would be ill advised to stake its validity on the claim, as Otto suggested in The Idea of the Holy, that

Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade That Reinvented Philosophy

by Wolfram Eilenberger · 14 Sep 2020

ways of giving structure, form, and sense to the world we live in. Kant’s fundamental world-creating categories essentially take their cues from the scientific worldview of Newtonian physics. That was the world whose “conditions of possibility” had initially to be grasped and described. Cassirer takes his epistemological impulse for opening

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society by adhering to a strictly scientific view of the world. This certainly did not correspond to Wittgenstein’s approach, since he saw the purely scientific worldview as yet another wrong track that his era had placed itself upon, and one that was, in its supposedly value-free and enlightened clarity, based

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, the conceptual form of myth as an early way of approaching the world is shaped by categories and assumptions fundamentally different from those of the scientific worldview. Of course, Heidegger nods, precisely such “primitive phenomena” can help reveal existing distortions of Dasein’s self-interpretation. On the other hand, concentrating only on

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or politics. In Vienna, a Festschrift in honor of Moritz Schlick was being drawn up under the guidance of Friedrich Waismann with the title The Scientific Worldview: The Vienna Circle. If at all possible, Wittgenstein was to contribute something. Waismann made the request carefully. Not a good idea: “Precisely because Schlick is

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cabin, 123 and Kepler’s ellipses, 183, 241–42 natural selection, 14–15 and Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, 158–59 See also Enlightenment era and ideals; scientific worldview nautical metaphors, 295 Nazism, 11, 323, 363 near-death experiences, 118–19 neo-Kantian philosophy, 10, 57, 186, 325–26 Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 335 Neurath

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–27, 225 emigration to Palestine, 195, 223 and grant paid to Benjamin, 346–47 Schön, Erich, 143 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 275 Schultz, Franz, 194, 195, 209 scientific worldview and Cassirer’s Individual and the Cosmos, 242–50 and Heidegger’s phenomenology, 178 and influence of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, 171–72 and Kepler’s

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thinking, 136–37 and physics, 14, 108, 110, 279 and Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, 158, 159 See also Enlightenment era and ideals; natural laws and science Scientific Worldview: The Vienna Circle, The, 352–53 Sein questions, 52. See also Dasein “Self-Assertion of the German University, The” (Heidegger), 363 senses and sensory experience

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impact on Enlightenment ideals, 15 and Jaspers’s Psychology of Worldviews, 119 “worlding” environment, 86 worldview philosophy (Weltanschauungsphilosophie), 48, 49–51, 309. See also empiricism; scientific worldview Zeug (equipment), 231–34 Zum Kater Hiddigeigei (Tomcat Hiddigeigei café), 198–99 ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ ABOUT THE AUTHOR Wolfram Eilenberger is an internationally bestselling author and philosopher

The Half-Life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date

by Samuel Arbesman · 31 Aug 2012 · 284pp · 79,265 words

weigh the evidence for and against a new discovery or theory and then make our decision, especially if it requires a wholesale overhaul of our scientific worldview. Too often we are dragged, spouting alternative theories and contradictory data, to the new theoretical viewpoint. This can be very good. Having more than a

How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

by Michael Pollan · 30 Apr 2018 · 547pp · 148,732 words

hold there’s a mystery here we can’t understand.” Griffiths has clearly traveled a long way from the strict behaviorism that once informed his scientific worldview; the experience of alternate states of consciousness, both his own and those of his volunteers, has opened him to possibilities about which few scientists will