Rupert Sheldrake is a philosopher who happens to be a biologist. In his philosophical capacity he is trying to rescue science – the business of inquiry on the basis of axioms and avoidance of self-contradiction- from dogmatic materialism. Since the loudest voices in science today, such as Richard Dawkins, are uniformly dogmatic materialists, it takes someone of high resolve, great erudition and considerable poise to issue challenges to the prevailing dogmatic orthodoxy. In the two youtube videos presented below, Sheldrake examines the basis of the scientific conformity which, he claims, is crushing real science. I invite you to watch them.
The ten dogmas of modern materialist science are as follows:
1. nature is mechanical or machine-like (the machine metaphor), we are machines too
2. total amount of matter and the energy of the universe are constant
3. the laws of nature are fixed, so are the constants (cosmic Napoleonic code)
4. matter is unconscious
5. nature is purposeless
6. biological inheritance is exclusively material
7. memories are stored as material traces inside the brain
8. the mind is inside the head, mental activity is brain activity
9. psychic phenomena are therefore illusory
10. mechanistic medicine is the only kind that really works.
Sheldrake goes through a number of them in the lectures, showing them for the most part to be untested postulates, dogmas, beliefs, axioms, and not the facts we take them to be. His lectures are a highly condensed history of the philosophy of science from Plato forward.
They are time very well spent