Unproven Hypotheses and Non
Sequiturs
apodictic: logic (of a proposition); necessarily true or logically certain.
non sequitur: an inference or statement that does not follow logically from the premises or anything previously said.
Now that we have outlined a few discernment skills for evaluating New Age assumptions and technologies, we can also apply these tools to hypotheses advanced by New Age thinkers and practitioners. Unlike techniques and beliefs that turn out, under scrutiny, to be bogus, however, we are looking now at theories that are illogical, that are by their very nature impossible to verify, and that have failed so far to win acceptance by mainstream science.
Hypotheses are just that: hypotheses. They are not apodictic but are a kind of philosophical non sequitur. Thus, to hitch one's moral beliefs and worldview philosophy to such unproven theories can be at best misleading, and at worst fatal.
This New Age science-mysticism link needs careful examination.
Remember the Heisenberg "uncertainty principle"? This is the principle which says that our knowledge of subatomic particles is limited by the very fact that observation at that level affects the phenomenon being observed. From this,
Page 228
New Age physicist Fritjof Capra concludes that quantum theory "thus reveals the basic oneness of the universe . . . . The human observer constitutes the final link in the chain of the observational processes."1
The Heisenberg principle is accordingly cited as evidence for the monistic unity of experimenter and experiment and — by extension — all of reality.2
Capra, Marilyn Ferguson, Gary Zukav (author of The Dancing Wu Li Masters), and other New Age headliners adduce that when physical reality is broken down to its most elemental parts, there are no parts; all is One. Separate individualized entities are ultimately illusions of our own creation.
Whatever scientific evidence there is for the unity of the physical universe could fit the biblical view of God as a transcendent Creator just as well as the Eastern mystical view of a "seamless web of divinity at the heart of the universe," say Mark Albrecht and Brooks Alexander in their analysis of "The Sellout of Science."3 Neither science itself nor any scientific evidence can ever settle the question.
The New Age interpretation is an overextrapolation, forcing a legitimate scientific principle to an unjustified metaphysical conclusion.4
In that connection, it is enlightening to recall that in Capra's visionary experience in which he "saw" the atoms of his body "participating in the cosmic dance of energy," he said he "knew that this was the Dance of Shiva, the Lord of Dancers worshipped by the Hindus."5
This is the type of conclusion that should be questioned: "Dr. Capra, how did you know that? Would you have drawn the same conclusion if you had not been familiar with the Bhagavad Gita, which describes Shiva's dance?"
As Albrecht and Alexander astutely point out, Capra was not proposing a theory, or reasoning from premise to conclusion; he was announcing a revelation.6
Or, consider the concept of synchronicity, popularized by psychiatrist Carl Jung and cited by New Age exponents as an evidence of interconnectedness — that everything is related as an indivisible whole. Jung used the term to describe the occurrence of two events in close proximity of time which appear to have no causal relationship yet nevertheless seem
Page 229
related. A simple example: You are thinking about someone you haven't heard from in years and just then he phones you. "Must be mental telepathy," you exclaim to the friend, only partly in jest.
The synchronicity principle allegedly receives strong "scientific" support from a theorem first proposed in 1964 by J.S. Bell in Switzerland. This derived from experiments which showed that if paired and identically charged particles fly apart and the polarity of one is changed by an experimenter, the polarity of the other particle changes instantaneously, as though each particle "knows" what the other is doing."7
But this is a far cry from the mystic's monistic vision. "All is related" does not require or even imply that "We are all One."
"The theoretical electrical effect of an electron on another particle anywhere else in the universe does not indicate that the particles are a singular unity. Here the New Age leap from physics to metaphysics assumes [that] monistic unity necessarily follows from intricate interconnectedness. The biblicist could argue the opposite: the interconnectedness evidences God's creation of wide variety exhibiting harmony and interrelated patterns."8
Tim Stafford, a perceptive staff writer for Christianity Today magazine, conducted numerous interviews for an article on the relationship between science and religion. "The physicists I talked to work daily with quantum physics, yet all thought that 'Zen physics' was sheer bunk," Stafford reported. "Scientists are cautious about drawing conclusions that reach beyond their data."9
Yet New Age practitioners are peddling a host of occult elixirs and psychotechnologies based on scientific non sequiturs. In their comprehensive Wellness Workbook, Regina Sara Ryan and John W. Travis, M.D., piggyback on Jung's synchronicity and Bell's theorem to "prove" ESP, psychokinesis, remote viewing, and psychic healing:
If, despite their distance, or lack of apparent logical relationship, event A is connected to event B at the subatomic level — is it too difficult to make the leap in saying that ESP,
Page 230
psychokinesis, distant viewing and psychic healing are merely everyday manifestations of an underlying connectedness? . . .
If you accept this relatedness you are immediately presented with alternatives that may significantly affect your life and health. In his popular book, Occult Medicine Can Save Your Life, neurosurgeon Norman Shealy, M.D., documents numerous cases in which psychic healing methods succeeded in both diagnosis and treatment where traditional medical practice had failed.
Irving Oyle, D.O., in his book, The Healing Mind, describes methods of helping his patients achieve an altered state of consciousness. In this state they "talk" with their "inner guides" to aid in diagnosing and treating a health-related problem.
At Quimby College in Alamogordo, New Mexico, a group of psychologists train students in moving their hands through the "aura," or energy field, that surrounds a patient's body. Called aura-balancing, this technique has provided new insights, increased energy, and even healing to those who have experienced it.10
Call this occultic but not scientific!
As quantum theorist Alastair Rae of Birmingham University in England has observed, quantum physics has made it easier for some people to believe in such claims "only on the basis that if quantum physics conflicts with everyday logic, then why shouldn't other things that conflict with everyday logic also be real? That is hardly a scientific reason for belief in the occult."11
New Age thinking also co-opts such scientific theories as dissipative structures, entropy, syntropy, and evolution for its monistic worldview.
Marilyn Ferguson claims that Belgian physical chemist Ilya Prigogine, who won a Nobel prize in chemistry for his theory of dissipative structures, may have found "the missing link between living systems and the apparently lifeless universe in which they arose."12
In essence, Prigogine's hypothesis is that the natural law of entropy (the Second Law of Thermodynamics), which states that all systems inherently run down or tend toward disorganization, is counteracted by another law. This higher law, called syntropy, accounts for the evolution of higher, more intricate levels of organization and design.
Page 231
Prigogine claims there is a natural organizing force behind the universe bringing assorted parts into increasingly complex relationships. This occurs by the dissipation of energy, which creates the potential for sudden reordering.
The continuous movement of energy through the system results in fluctuations; if they are minor, the system damps them and they do not alter its structural integrity. But if the fluctuations reach a critical size, they "perturb" the system. They increase the number of novel interactions within it. They shake it up. The elements of the old pattern come into contact with each other in new ways and make new connections. The parts reorganize into a new whole. The system escapes into a higher order . . . Life "eats" entropy. It has the potential to create new forms by allowing a shake-up of old forms.13
From Prigogine's flowing mathematical formulations, Prigogine, Ferguson, Ken Wilber (author of Up from Eden), and others extrapolate a leap from the scientific model to a ladder of social evolution that applies to the transformation of society. This is the "paradigm shift" New Agers are so wont to describe in which cultures are the culmination of dissipative structures, the apex of "human physics."
M. Scott Peck also picks up on this social evolution model and applies it to the spiritual evolution of humankind.14 Spiritual development is in a process of ascension, he says, just like physical evolution.
Ferguson takes it even further. In altered states of consciousness, she postulates, brain wave fluctuations may reach a critical level "large enough to provoke the shift into a higher level of organization . . . They set off ripples throughout the system, creating sudden new connections. Thus, old patterns are likeliest to change when maximally perturbed or shaken — activated in states of consciousness in which there is sufficient energy flow."15
Ergo, Prigogine's theory is stretched to account for the effects of the New Age psychotechnologies.
The bogus "Hundredth Monkey" theory that we considered in the chapter on harmonic convergence, and the idea behind harmonic convergence itself, are based on the notion that modern science has verified the process of "wholemaking, the characteristic of nature to put things together in
Page 232
an ever-more synergistic, meaningful pattern," as Ferguson has described it.16 In New Age parlance, social evolution has a ratchet. When enough meditators in a given area concentrate, there will be a threshold breakthrough — the "Maharishi effect" — ushering in peace and prosperity: a paradigm shift. When enough people — a "critical mass" — believe in or do something, it will become true or a reality for everyone: a paradigm shift.
The idea behind the Werner Erhard Hunger Project was that if 100,000 persons really believed world hunger could be ended by the close of the century, that "thought form" would catalyze the needed technical, political, and economic changes to make it happen.17
Such non sequiturs permeate much of New Age thinking. This is mystical thought masquerading as science. Bad science at that.
In the Whole Earth Review, a New Age publication, writer Maureen O'Hara fires off a blistering broadside at New Age's apparent infatuation with science. She considers the attachment shallow and "easily swayed by the tricks of the pseudoscience trade such as theorizing wildly in scientific-sounding language, sprinkling speculative discussion with isolated fragments of real data regardless of relevance, confusing analogy with homology, breaking conventional rules of evidence at will, and extrapolating from one level of reality into others wherein different principles operate."18 The New Age variety of social evolution assumes that human nature is innately good — the precise opposite of the view held by the Judeo-Christian Scriptures. The Prigogine hypothesis, when applied to belief in inherent and ever-ascending social improvement, is also contradicted by the record of history.
India is a good case in point. One would think that a land dominated for thousands of years by a holistic worldview (the same worldview that New Agers now say science has verified) would have long ago synergistically eliminated hunger, violence, overpopulation, and the institutionalized racism of its caste system. This has not happened, of course.
New Age theorists would have us believe their unproven hypotheses and non sequiturs are the underpinning for a mystical vision of deliverance. But these theories seem to
Page 233
thrive best "in cultures that are in a perpetual state of disarray, where misery is rampant and corruption rife," observes Robert Burrows. "The problem is human perversity, not human perception. The pivotal issue is holiness, not holism; the only antidote is God's redemptive and re-creative grace in Christ."19
Paradigm shifts, if they occur, do not change human nature; they only change values and perceptions. There is no essential connection between social evolution and biological evolution. Neither a holistic worldview nor mystic enlightenment can erase the stubborn stain of individual and corporate sin and bring personal salvation.
Chapter 27 || Table of Contents
1. Fritjof Capra, Tao of Physics (Berkeley, Calif.: Shambhala, 1975), 57.
2. Michael Wiebe, "Science and the New Age," Rivendell Times, 1 September 1987.
3. Mark Albrecht and Brooks Alexander, "The Sellout of Science," Spiritual Counterfeits Project Journal (August 1978): 26.
4. Wiebe, "Science and the New Age."
5. Capra, Tao of Physics, 11.
6. Albrecht and Alexander, "The Sellout of Science," 26.
7. Cited in Marilyn Ferguson, The Aquarian Conspiracy, Personal and Social Transformation in the 1980s (Los Angeles: J.P. Tarcher, 1980), 171.
8. Wiebe, "Science and the New Age."
9. Tim Stafford, "Cease-fire in the Laboratory," Christianity Today, 3 April 1987, 19.
10. Regina Sara Ryan and John W. Travis, Wellness Workbook (Berkeley, Calif.: Ten Speed Press, 1981), 209–10.
11. Quoted in Robert G. Cowen, "Debunking, Again, the Belief in ESP and the Occult," Christian Science Monitor, 7 July 1987.
12. Ferguson, The Aquarian Conspiracy, 163.
13. Ibid., 164–65.
14. M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1978), 263–67.
15. Ferguson, The Aquarian Conspiracy, 169.
16. Ibid., 156.
17. Ryan and Travis, Wellness Workbook, 150.
18. Maureen O'Hara, "Of Myths and Monkeys: A Critical Look at Critical Mass," Nexus (Fall 1986): 4, reprinted from The Whole Earth Review (Fall 1986).
19. Karen Hoyt et all., New Age Rage (Old Tappan, N.J.: Revell, 1987), 35.
