Antithesis "Science"

The first scientists in the eighteenth century sought to explain nature and explore its laws without denying their belief in God. They studied planetary orbits and measured gravity.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, science made such tremendous progress that God and the "supernatural" simply became obsolete.

Medical discoveries about hygiene, pathogens, and medicines, countless technological achievements and inventions, and a new mechanized agriculture and technology in the home and transportation made our modern lives, with all their conveniences and comforts, possible.

From the perspective of an eighteenth-century citizen, every individual in the Western world today has access to immense wealth and luxury. Almost everyone can afford a two-week flight to the Dominican Republic for a beach vacation without having to consider the resources required.

But this science and its applied technology have also brought us all the problems we are struggling with today: climate change, overpopulation, the finite nature of resources and raw materials, social upheaval, fear of downward mobility and insecurity, migration and refugee flows, and much more.

Science at its limit?

That's a heretical idea, but science ends where scientific criteria end. What are the scientific criteria?

Experiments must be repeatable.
The properties of the objects must be measurable.
The accuracy of the measurements must be extremely high (there are specific standards for this); chance and measurement errors must be ruled out.
Computer model calculations must be verifiable through measurements.

But now we are faced with the fact that in physics the limits of measurement accuracy have already been reached since Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, matter can no longer be grasped below the smallest particles, and in cosmology it has been established that the known matter and energy in the universe comprises just 5% to a maximum of 15%. The rest is dark energy and dark matter, which we know absolutely nothing about and which defies measurement.

The latest hypotheses, such as string theory, posit the existence of coiled dimensions so tightly coiled that they are smaller than one quadrillionth of an electron's diameter (10 to the power of minus 35 mm for engineers).

While this can be calculated with computers, it can never be verified, since even a single electron can only be measured indirectly (e.g., bubble trails on the detector in a particle accelerator).

To formulate and defend such hypotheses requires more faith in science and mathematics than the Church dogma of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary.

In the social sciences, it has already been established that many well-documented studies cannot be replicated because the documentation was inadequate, and the results are completely different when the study is repeated. Here, too, the limits of science are becoming increasingly apparent.

Has science become unethical?

When science becomes too dependent on research funding, it only pursues research that generates revenue.

This research has made individuals incredibly wealthy, and these individuals, with their global corporations, now believe they can dominate the world. The environment has often been neglected in the process.

Only recently have countermeasures been taken, but resistance from lobbyists is strong.

If science truly drives the saving of the planet, it will have rectified its fall from grace in the face of capitalism and will serve the well-being of all living beings on the planet.

However, this will only work in the long term if science acknowledges the existence of intangible phenomena that it cannot research using traditional methods, and instead develops new approaches for exploring them.

Is capitalism to blame?

Capitalism began with the promise of increasing prosperity. If the rich are rich enough, there will be enough left for the poor, some liberal thinkers reasoned toward the end of the twentieth century. This was well-intentioned, but good intentions often have the opposite effect.

Thus, fewer and fewer people became richer and richer, and the gap between rich and poor widened.

This cannot be good.

But without capitalism, we would all have far less. In communism, everyone had nothing except the party leadership, and they had the soldiers to keep the people quiet. That cannot be a solution either.

A solution that is good for all people must take into account that human beings are not just matter. Only when a balance is found between materialism and spirituality will there be a solution.

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