Submitted by Harold Kildow, Jul 4, 2007 11:36

Religion and myth are not the only paradigmatic way of viewing or interpreting reality. Modern science, wildly successful as it has been, is for all that success still just another way of viewing the world. It has been successful as measured along utilitarian lines precisely because it has narrowed what it considers. Science is a methodology masquerading as a metaphysics, according to which only that which is measurable is real. This narrowing of focus has yielded huge benefits in knowledge of how things work, but has brought with it an equally huge detriment in the form of the intellectual arrogance that assigns all non-scientific truth to the dustbin of the ignorant pre-modern past; indeed, it denies the possiblity of any non-scientific truth. This is the reigning paradigm of our time, which has not only scientists but also journalists pronouncing in various ways, following Carl Sagan, that "the universe is all that is and all that ever was." How do we know? Because it is all we can measure. And that is all we need to know.

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