Arguing Science. Michael Shermer

more and more that there was something wrong, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. No one else seemed to think there was anything wrong. Then a friend who was studying literature lent me a book on German philosophy containing an essay on the writings of Goethe, the poet and botanist.¹

      I discovered that Goethe, at the beginning of the 19th century, had a vision of a different kind of science—a holistic science that integrated direct experience and understanding. It didn’t involve breaking everything down into pieces and denying the evidence of one’s senses. This discovery—the idea that there could be a different kind of natural science—filled me with great excitement. So invigorated was I by this prospect that I wanted to find out why science had become so mechanistic. I was fortunate to get a fellowship at Harvard, where I spent a year studying the history and philosophy of science. Thomas Kuhn’s book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions² had recently come out, and it had a big influence on me, gave me a new perspective. It made me realize that the mechanistic theory of life was what Kuhn called a “paradigm”—a collectively held model of reality, a belief system. He showed that periods of revolutionary change involved the replacement of old scientific paradigms by new ones. If science had changed radically in the past, then perhaps it could change again in the future. I was very excited by that.

      When I got back to Cambridge [England], I did a Ph.D. on how plants develop, particularly working on the hormones within plants. I went on with my research on plant development and became a research fellow of Clare College in Cambridge and also a research fellow of the Royal Society, which gave me tremendous freedom, for which I’m very grateful.

      James Barham: Spirituality, mysticism, and Christianity have played a prominent role in your life. From your writings, one gets the sense that you are on a pilgrimage or quest. Could you elaborate on this aspect of your life? Was there a point in your life where you experienced what might be called a “religious conversion” (or perhaps several)?

      Rupert Sheldrake: When I received a grant in 1968 from the Royal Society to go and study tropical plants in Malaysia, at the University of Malaya, I traveled through India on the way there. I found India a very exciting place to be, and as I traveled through that country I encountered gurus and ashrams and temples, which opened my eyes to a range of phenomena I was completely unfamiliar with.

      When I got back to England I got interested in exploring consciousness, and I had various psychedelic experiences, which convinced me that the mind was vastly greater than anything I’d been told about in my scientific education. Then I got interested in transcendental meditation because I wanted to be able to explore consciousness without drugs. I was increasingly intrigued by India, by yoga, and by meditation, and in 1974 I had a chance to go and work in India as principal plant physiologist at the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) in Hyderabad.

      I was thrilled by the idea of immersing myself in this exotic and fascinating culture. While I was in India, I visited temples and ashrams and I attended discourses by gurus and holy men. I also took up Sufism, and had a Sufi teacher in Hyderabad, who was the grandfather of a friend of mine. He gave me a Sufi mantra, a wazifa, which for about a year I practiced in a Sufi form of meditation. But I didn’t want to become a Sufi because in India to become a Sufi, you have to be a Muslim first and foremost, and that would have been too much of a stretch.

      Then, an original idea crossed my mind: What about the Christian tradition? I hadn’t given it a thought. I spoke to a Hindu guru, and he said, “All paths lead to God. You come from a Christian family so you should follow a Christian path.”

      The more I thought about it, the more sense it made, and I began to pray with the Lord’s Prayer, and I started going to church at the Anglican Church, St. John’s, Secunderabad. After a while I was confirmed, at the age of 34, by an Indian bishop in the Church of South India (an ecumenical church formed by the coming together of Anglicans and Methodists). I felt very happy to be reconnected with the Christian tradition.

      I still felt a huge tension between the Hindu wisdom, which I felt was so deep, and the Christian tradition that seemed a bit shallow on the spirituality side. I then discovered a wonderful teacher, Father Bede Griffiths, who had a Christian ashram in South India. He was an English Benedictine monk who had lived there for 25 years when I met him. His ashram combined many aspects of Indian culture with Christian tradition. I wrote my first book, A New Science of Life, in his ashram.

      When I got back to England, after a long period in India, I had a wonderful time rediscovering the English tradition. I rediscovered sacred places—England is full of them, great cathedrals and churches—and I started going to my local parish church in Newark-on-Trent and to cathedrals, where there is marvelous singing. Instead of just seeing it as an aesthetic experience as I had done before, I now felt part of it and was very, very moved by it and felt privileged to be part of this tradition. So, since then it’s been my practice to go to church on Sundays whenever I can. I see the creeds first and foremost as statements of belief in God’s threefold nature. The doctrine of the Holy Trinity makes great sense to me. No doubt I differ from some people in my interpretation of the details. But probably even the most unbending literalists do not accept every part of it without some qualifications. For example, in the Apostle’s Creed when it says of Jesus Christ that “he sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty,” is he really sitting? And are God the Father and Jesus located in a particular place, a celestial throne-room? And does God the Father have right and left hands?

      James Barham: To what extent do you think the maverick path you ended up taking was forced on you by the empirical data themselves, and to what extent was it contingent on your being exposed to alternative ways of thinking in India and elsewhere? In other words, do you think you would have become the Rupert Sheldrake of today without the experience of living and working in [at least two] radically different cultural environments?

      Rupert Sheldrake: When I was 17, in the gap between leaving school and going to study at Cambridge, I worked as a temporary lab technician in a pharmaceutical laboratory because I wanted to get some research experience. What I didn’t know when I took the job was that it was a vivisection facility. Working there made me ask some deep questions about animals, animal suffering, scientific objectivity, and mechanistic attitudes to nature, which were put into practice on a daily basis in this laboratory, which was a kind of death camp for animals.

      By the time I was studying biology as an undergraduate at Cambridge, I was already very doubtful about the reductionist and mechanist approach, which is why I welcomed the opportunity to study the history and philosophy of science at Harvard—to get a bigger perspective.

      After Harvard, when I returned to Cambridge [England] in 1964 and was doing research on plant development, I became convinced the molecular and reductionist approach would never enable us to understand the development of form. I became interested in the morphogenetic field concept, first put forward in the 1920s.³ Although I traveled in India and lived in Malaysia, it was reading books on theoretical biology and philosophy—especially the philosophy of Henri Bergson in his book Matter and Memory⁴—that led to my developing the hypothesis of morphic resonance. This was in 1973, while I was still in Cambridge, before I went to live and work in India in agricultural research. I continued to develop these ideas, and India was a good place to do this. After all, in Hindu philosophy the idea of a kind of memory in nature is commonplace, as it is in Buddhist philosophy.

      My idea of an inherent memory in nature through morphic resonance did not seem weird to most of my Indian colleagues and friends. India provided a friendly environment for writing my first book, A New Science of Life.⁵ But the basic ideas came from Western science and Western philosophy.

      James Barham: In your new book, Science Set Free⁶, you speak of the “intellectual phase-locking”—that is, the “group think” or “herd mentality”—that clearly plagues mainstream science today. We were wondering whether this was mainly due to the hubris that comes from the unprecedented social prestige scientists now enjoy, or whether it might not be more a matter of the metaphysical commitment to materialism that has been deeply ingrained in the scientific community for the past 400 years.

      In other words, is the intellectual