Expanding the Scope of Science
ORIGINS
David Lorimer introduces the Galileo Commission Report
REMIT
The Galileo Commission was founded in 2017 with a view to expanding the worldview of science beyond its limiting materialistic assumptions, which are seldom explicitly examined. A central and widely held assumption is that the brain generates consciousness and is therefore extinguished at death.
Following widespread consultation in 2018 with 90 advisers representing 30 universities worldwide, we have published the Galileo Commission Report, written by Prof Dr Harald Walach and entitled Beyond a Materialist Worldview – Towards an Expanded Science. The report has been widely endorsed as a groundbreaking document, so we encourage you to support our movement by joining the Galileo Commission either as a Professional Affiliate or a Friend. There is also a Summary Report and a Layman’s Report, and a brief summary of the argument is available in a number of languages. We encourage you to read and support Dr Athena Potari’s Call for a Renaissance of the Spirit in the Humanities and to read our edited book Spiritual Awakenings, which documents the transformative experiences of 57 scientists and academics.
A Call for a Renaissance of the Spirit in the Humanities
The “Call for a Renaissance of the Spirit in the Humanities”, written by Dr Athena D. Potari, is a pioneering project aiming to raise awareness regarding how the prevailing paradigm of materialism affects the ways in which knowledge is approached within the context of the Humanities. In line with the Galileo Report, which discusses the importance of liberating the positive sciences from the limitations of the paradigm of scientific materialism, this Call aims at making the case for the Humanities as well. The Call explores how recent developments in scientific studies on consciousness, and the ensuing understanding that consciousness is primary and unified, can inform our understanding of what it means to be “human” with correspondingly appropriate epistemologies, as well as how we approach key areas of human activity, including ethics, politics and the environment.What people say…
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Featured podcast
Spiritual Awakenings – Marjorie Wollacott & David Lorimer (Eds)
Scholars share the experience of their own spiritual awakening and journey, including encountering challenges to their credibility in academia, if they shared these experiences. Their comments about transformation in values, beliefs, and approaches toward life are very moving, expressing a deep inner wisdom and connection, not only with humanity, but with the earth and cosmos.
Recent News
The End of Quantum Reality: A Conversation with Wolfgang Smith – Samuel Sotillos
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.
The absurdity of mind as machine – David Bentley Hart
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.
Why not scientism? – Moti Mizrahi
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.
Imaginal Inspirations with Bernard Carr
Bernard Carr is Emeritus Professor of Mathematics and Astronomy at Queen Mary University of London. For his PhD he studied the first second of the universe with Stephen Hawking at Cambridge University and Caltech... He also has a long-standing interest in the relationship between science and religion and views psychical research as forming a bridge between them. He is President of the Scientific and Medical Network and a former President of the Society for Psychical Research.
Making sense of the sacred – Alex Gomez-Marin
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.
Postmaterialism, Anyone? – Brian Martin
Conventional scientific theories can’t explain telepathy and precognition. Nor can they provide a convincing explanation for consciousness. The usual scientific assumption is that the material world is all there is. To explain anomalous evidence, should this assumption be superseded by a model in which consciousness is independent of matter?
