Science, Religion, and the Dao

Wired Magazine issue 16.07 has an interesting article on the Petabyte Age by editor-in-chief Chris Anderson.

Teased by the cover copy “The End of Science” and titled The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete, the fascinating article explores the fact that posing hypotheses and testing them as a method of exploring the world has been supplanted by simply harnessing the enormous power of supercomputers to crush gigantic quantities of data and answer whatever questions we may have. I liked Anderson’s presentation (the magazine’s creative graphics, use of pull-outs and overall smart tone makes it one of my favorites) and I found the piece thought provoking, but I couldn’t help feeling there was another way of accessing what makes the world go around.

That same feeling filled my high school years at the Dalton School in New York City and my undergraduate years at Yale; post-graduate work at the University of California and veterinary school at Cornell only made the conviction stronger. Some folks interpret these sentiments as evidence I was too weak-minded to understand the scientific method. Others took my sentiments as evidence of religious faith. I can’t speak to the first notion, as a fool who knows he is one isn’t, but the second misses the point that my discomfort has a very rational basis, namely that the wonderful instrument we call the reasoning side of the human brain will never be able to grasp the broad strokes of the universe—even brilliantly augmented by powerful tools to increase the depth and range of our vision and interpret the results through artificial intelligence—because in the end we cannot see from any vantage point but our own. What’s worse, religion of the Judeo-Christian stripe has very nearly destroyed the planet by using science and technology to express dominion over it. Despite our blinding hubris we are nothing but one more in a long line of soon-to-be-extinct species, and history is littered with the casualties of our countless misunderstandings of the way things work.

What was once disquiet has now grown to grave concern, but I find a ray of hope in the Daoist arts of meditation and tai chi. Daoism is an ancient art not limited to accepting only those phenomena that can be recognized by the rational brain. Daoist practices yield a world rife with subtle forces not yet recognized by science. In much the way science did not recognize x-rays or atomic forces a century ago, we will in time come to discover what Daoists—who do not put the bit of reason into the tender mouth of intuition—already know, which is that much information about the world and our place in it is available by turning the ray gun of the mind inward rather than outward. The mental and physical Daoist arts of meditation and tai chi cohere to create a sense of belonging and power. I am grateful to have spent the better part of the last 30 years using them to discover a beautiful, natural balance between intuition and logic that does not obviate or render useless the tools of technology or the rigors of science, but lends a sensitive and responsible framework to them.