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And then I would share with them the good news.You need be divided no more, I would say. The world you perceive—replete with its colors, the fragrance of flowers and the songs of birds—is not after all a res cogitans: you can henceforth hug your child, knowing for certain that it is real! In a word, you can be human once again. And as if that were not enough: you can, once again, tread the ancient and hallowed paths of your fathers, confident they will lead you to a blessed end.

This is why, among devout philosophical physicalists, such wild extremes as eliminativist reductionism and the materialist version of panpsychism are ever more in vogue. The mental, it turns out, is no more reconcilable to the modern picture of material nature than it was in Descartes’s day. And that should make us consider whether we ought to revise our governing paradigm once more.

Rather than conceive of scientism in ways that could be weaponised, then, we should think about it along the lines I have proposed above. Epistemological scientism is the view that scientific knowledge is superior to non-scientific knowledge either because scientific knowledge is the only form of knowledge we have, and so non-scientific knowledge is not really knowledge at all, or because scientific knowledge is better than non-scientific knowledge.

The clash between science and religion has generated more heat than light, and yet our search for meaning in life is relentless, and a sense of the sacred remains a universal part of the human experience.

All revolutions (good or bad), are driven by a different way of thinking to some status quo. I believe that if we want to be well, we must ditch the materialist paradigm in all our sciences, and embrace the truth about ourselves. We cannot continue to pretend we are something we are not, and disregard what is important to us. We do not really know what we are, but we do know that we need to grow, and we need to feel that our life means something. We also know that these needs are real. If we do not open our mind to reality, we will continue to suffer, and possibly lead to our own extinction.

But a mind is always present, either out in the world organizing the dream, or in the mind of the theorist imagining how mindless stuff evolved into a world. One view takes mind out of the world and imagines how the world can create itself from nothing and then, on its own power, organize itself to the limit of mathematical order. The other approach put mind in the world and realizes that the world itself reflects the imagination — and power — of the mind. One view imagines the impossible occurred; the other view knows the impossible is occurring.

Join Tasha Simms as she speaks with Bernard Beitman, M.D., the first psychiatrist since Carl Jung to systematize the study of coincidences. A graduate of Yale Medical School, he did his psychiatric residency at Stanford University. The former chair of psychiatry of the University of Missouri-Columbia medical school for 17 years, he writes a blog for Psychology Today on coincidence and is the coauthor of the award-winning book Learning Psychotherapy. The founder of The Coincidence Project, he lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.