The most profound perceptions of the interior realm of religious values occur in mystical mental states that involve the direct apprehension of Being Itself or of some essential aspect of Nature or divinity. Frequently, disincarnate beings (spirits) are the bearers of these insights. Such experiences are part of a continuum of non-ordinary states of consciousness that include telepathy and the various other forms of ESP. The hallmark of a mystical experience is its numinosity, the understanding that the information received is a Truth that is gained from some realm beyond our mundane awareness.
Mystical experiences are at the root of all religious traditions and have, so far, resisted the advance of the scientific method because of their inherently irrational, subjective and idiosyncratic nature. However, there is no essential conflict between science and mysticism because they are two sides of the same coin – both address the ultimate nature of reality. Problems arise when either one trespasses on the other’s territory, as when certain Christians make statements about the age of the Earth that contradict geologic findings, or when certain scientists claim that science proves there is no God.
Galileo (1564-1642) is considered the originator of the scientific method, which involves four essential elements: observation, hypothesis, experiment, and verification by independent observers. In other words, first examine a phenomenon; next formulate an hypothesis to explain it; then test the hypothesis by performing an experiment or gathering additional evidence; and finally, inform others of what you observed so that they can confirm your results. In a classic experiment, Galileo tested the prevailing belief that heavy objects fall faster than light ones by simultaneously dropping differing weights from a high place and observing their fall. The results were obvious to independent observers. I will never forget the deep impression my first experiment in high school chemistry made on me when I used electricity to break down water into oxygen and hydrogen, and then burned the hydrogen to make water again. It was a very convincing demonstration of the atomic theory. Eventually I came to believe in neutrinos.
An important corollary to the scientific method is Occam’s razor, the philosophical principle named for its progenitor William of Occam (1285-?1349), which states that the simplest explanation is to be preferred. Do not make a theory unnecessarily complex. (I would caution all you channelers and psychics to keep Occam’s razor in mind when you evaluate the information you receive.) For a scientific theory to be useful it must be falsifiable, i.e. disprovable. If one were to advance the speculation based on channeled information that sentient gas-bag beings float in the Jovian atmosphere, it would not be a valid scientific theory because there is no observational evidence and it is not falsifiable with current technology. In the final analysis, all scientific theories are tentative, in the sense that nothing can be indisputably proven for all time. New understandings may cause our present theories to be seen as special cases of much broader theories, as when the theories of relativity and quantum mechanics extended classical physics into the cosmic and subatomic realms.
The publication of Isaac Newton’s Principia in 1687 marked the next major turning point in the development of science (after Galileo) by placing physics on a firm mathematical foundation. Henceforth, mathematics would be the basic language of science because it replaced the vague ideas of earlier times with quantitative and precise relations based on empirical observations of the material world. The web of mathematical relationships that has been created over the past three centuries to describe physical behavior has culminated in quantum mechanics, the mathematical description of the subatomic realm............
