The world appears to have lost a capacity to judge truth from falsehood, and even scientists– once the defenders of objective truth and critical thinking– have become increasingly a community of defenders of “consensus”.
While a virulent homogenization of thought contaminates scientific thinking on the one hand, “statistical probability theories” abound which defend notions like “multi-verses”, “randomness as the cause of order” and the denial of any objective truth. Could it be that this confusion in science that permeates all dominant standard models within biology, physics, chemistry and even psychology has something to do with the severing of classical artistic composition, purpose, or beauty from scientific thinking?
In ‘Science Unshackled: Restoring Causality in a World of Chaos‘, Matthew Ehret explores these questions with a look towards the philosophical clashes that took place in ancient Athens between the followers of Plato vs the devotees of Aristotle. The two opposing traditions flowing continuously from this clash (sloppy labelled together as “western scientific thought”) are traced across two millennia to our present age.
Where one current posits a living universe of creativity, law and design moving towards ever increasing states of perfectibility, and even assisted in this process by humankind, the other current of thought posits a universe shaped by death, decay and entropy, moving to ever increasing states of disorder, homogeneity. The political expressions of either system will be explored throughout these chapters as well.