Pagan Science

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Comment by Bayou Mage on November 9, 2009 at 12:28pm

Thank you, Jack. I had missed David's comments before now. It does seem strange how he painted us all with the same brush when, in fact, as you say only one person tried to impose the view that science is "patriarchal" and it didn't gain any purchase with anyone else as far as I can tell, and certainly none with me.

This is to David: The fact that you say there is no competition or hierarchy in the sciences proves to me that you have never worked in the sciences. I used to be a laboratory researcher in experimental evolutionary psychology, and I can assure competition and hierarchy are very present in the sciences. "Publish or perish" was no joke. Different labs were always trying to one-up each other. We students struggled to be the brightest stars shining in our respective labs. This sense of competition was healthy, fostering more rapid growth in the sciences. Yes there was also cooperation, though certainly not always. Scientists with competing ideas do not always get along; but more often than not each agrees to abide by the larger concensus of the scientific community, arrived at by testing competing ideas, and very often I witnessed researchers thanking other researchers for proving them wrong on long-defended ideas, because they would rather know the truth whomever it comes from than to defend a falsehood that they had come to believe in. This may not always be the case, but was more often the way things worked than in society in general where diametrically opposing sides play by their own rules and rarely agree to settle differences according to objective and agreed upon criteria.

As for hierarchy, well there were many types of hierarchies, but yes as Jack said there was certainly a hierarchy within each lab and on each experiment. The lead researcher (professor or whatever) for the lab had obviously more authority than anyone else, followed by the lead researcher on any given experiment, and even the professors would defer to a large degree to the one leading the experiment and whose idea the experiment had been. Assistants were lower on the hierarchy, though their contributions were not invaluable and at times proved insightful and critical. Or consider the hierarchy of hypotheses and theories: Evolution is a theoretical framework having predictive power regarding the nature, structure, and development of living beings on Earth, and no one reasonably questions this theory. Bearing mind "theory" in the sciences does not mean a guess, it means a framework that incorporates different data into a larger pattern in order to better understand it; heliocentric astronomy is also a theory, because the data of astronomical observations of our solar system are all united into a common understanding and there is not (and we can safely say never will be) any theory that better explains the data, and likewise for the theory of evolution. These "theories" are so well established we may call them facts because it would be a disservice to the human quest for knowledge to question that which has become virtually beyond question, though the door remains open for future revision (however when a theory has become so well established, scientists no longer feel any pressure to wait for an opposing side to generate some contrary data when this may or may not ever occur; in other words, the onus becomes on those who question the theory to provide data to undermine it, and the proponents of the theory are under no obligation to pretend the issue is in doubt in the meantime). Theories are hierarchically superior to hypotheses, which are predictions based on theories. Because one researcher may derive the wrong prediction from the data, defeating a particular hypothesis very rarely undermines the theory itself, particularly in well established theories which have massed so many accurate predictions that the misunderstanding of the theory by a single researcher or team of researchers cannot be held as evidence against. For example, previous evolutionary researcher sometimes endorsed the idea of "group selection", whereby the behavior of an individual it was believed could harm the individual for the purpose of helping the group better survive (some people speculated, for example, that homosexuality was a form of group population control). We know now, through the works of some researchers (and through its popularization by Richard Dawkins) that evolution does not act on the group, or even on the individual, it acts only on the level of individual genes, each gene trying to procreate itself at the expense of any competing genes. Thus any behavior contributing to the group must also contribute to the reproduction of the genes influencing that behavior, or the genes for this behavior would not be reproduced and would die out. There are no "suicidal lemurs", for example, in fact it turned out Disney had intentionally driven lemurs off a cliff and filmed them doing it so they could claim it was "lemur suicide" where some lemurs supposedly killed themselves when resources became scarce to help others survive. Such an idea is preposterous because the genes for that suicidal behavior would not be reproduced, at least not as often as the genes for those who chose not to commit suicide to be self-sacrificing, and thus very quickly that trait would be selected against.

So yes hierarchies do exist in the sciences.

Comment by jackofnotrades on November 9, 2009 at 11:14am

"WOW, you people are way off base."

If you read through the whole thread, you will see that the matriarchy-vs-patriarchy argument was put forward by exactly one person, and found little support. IMO Bayou Mage already put forth a voice of reason on that sidebar. Thanks so much for generalizing your blame to all of us, btw.

"in science there is no competitive nature. no hierarchy of power."

Oh? And what of competition for grants, competition between theories and schools of thought? Competition is a pervasive and necessary part of life (see Gary Cziko's Without Miracles for more information about how this applies beyond Darwinian evolution), and science would serve us poorly without it.

Hierarchies certainly exist in science, too. There are social/institutional hierarchies; students are in a sense subordinate to professors, research assistants are subordinate to the researcher running the project. We place species into large hierarchical arrangements (that we can taxonomies). Vision (and likely other sensory information) is processed in hierarchical stages.

Comment by Posie Mare on November 8, 2009 at 10:33am

"you people are way off base. in science there is no competitive nature. no hierarchy of power."
...
I wasn't sure if you meant that competition and hierarchies don't exist at all or that they don't exist between genders. Competition and hierarchies certainly do exist in academic settings. Whether this is gender-based (on a microscopic level) depends on particular lab, organization, university and P.I

"civic, political and military authority and science dont mix."
Maybe not, but they often must be consdered in some way whether it be in regard to funding, regulations or policy.

Comment by David Lang on November 4, 2009 at 4:58pm

WOW, you people are way off base. in science there is no competitive nature. no hierarchy of power. science is exploration, discovery, theory, there have more notable male scientist. eg. einstien,hawkings, planck, bohr, but that in no way implies women have no place in science. civic, political and military authority and science dont mix. the military will exploit science. the one advantage we have over every species is that while animals are required to adapt to there environment. humans make there environment adapt to them. in most species the female is the one that does all the work.

Comment by MoJo on November 3, 2009 at 8:49pm

I'm intrigued by the concept of this group.

Comment by Bayou Mage on October 31, 2009 at 2:31pm

Sorry, Ellen, I have to disagree with you. Matriarchy, by definition, would be a society wherein the female of the species holds most of the civic, political, and military authority and maintains these through force and the threat of force. Substitute the word female for male in that definition and you have the definition of patriarchy, therefore matriarchy, and its reverse side, would have to be the same thing except with women in charge instead of men. And as the saying goes, "Repeat the same experiment, obtain the same results". Indeed it is one of the very definitions of madness to repeat an experiment expecting the results to be different each time. Now, if you mean to say a society in which there is no superior gender, then that would be an egalitarian society, neither patriarchal nor matriarchal. Marija Gimbutas, often wrongly cited as an advocate of the existence of ancient matriarchal societies, in fact coined her own term, "gylanic", to define a species of relatively egalitarian societies that predated the rise of patriarchy. In the term "gylanic", the "gy" represent females, the "an" represent males, and "l" represents their unity. I must say Ellen you seem to see the world wholly in terms of "us v. them", which is not feminism, it's bigotry plan and simple, no different than any "patriarchal" male who views the world in terms of males v. females, as if the two genders could possibly be healthy in an adversarial relationship to one another. You bemoan patriarchy as being about "competition" while you claim matriarchy would be about "cooperation", but the simple reality is that both are valid. If you don't believe there is competition in the world with or without us, try watching Discovery Channel some time and see how rough most species have it. The one advantage we have as a species, above all other advantages, and only in theory, is that we could choose as a species to all be on the same side and worth together. Then competition could be viewed as a healthy party of cooperation, with each of us inspiring the others to strive to better ourselves and thereby contribute more to the whole. Will we ever achieve this? Perhaps so, but only when we stop seeing ourselves as being on different sides, "males and females", "black and white", "Christian and Muslim", etc... I think, Ellen, that that kind of inflammatory language accusing every corner of humanity with the blanket accusation of "patriarchy" is not helpful to the problem, and if you are not a part of the solution, it follows that you must be a part of the problem. I live peacefully with my brothers and sisters on this planet, wishing them all the best and doing nothing to interfere with their ambitions as long as they do not interfere with mine, and even then I prefer to walk away when it is simply not important enough to fight over, as it rarely is. I am no chauvinist or feminist, I am a humanist, in that I think we are all humans and need to grow up as a species or the Earth and the universe will shake us off its back like fleas.

I came here to discuss Pagan science. It is valid perhaps to question whether patriarchal influence may still exist in the sciences. It is interesting to note that science, in general, is about the study of matter in one way or another, in fact at one time science only acknowledged the existence of matter. Matter is from the Latin root word for mother. Therefore science is, in principle, the study of the Great Mother, and has ended up quite well in opposition to the religions of the vengeful and jealous Father. Science may not always live up to this great calling, but it can hardly be doubted that the sciences have shot the patriarchal religions full of holes, has undermined any rational basis for xenophobia or bigotry of any type, and has exposed humanity to the sheer scale of creation and of our tiny little corner of it. That we do not always use that knowledge wisely is without a doubt. Nor need it be doubted that researchers may bring their own biases and prejudice into their research, which is why science converges upon answers from data accumulated by a variety of researchers and sources and not upon the prophetic say so of this scientist or that, at least in most instances, though at times it can be especially difficult to challenge the ideas of famous names like Newton, Einstein, Darwin & Wallace, etc... There are many fine feminist scholars, as you say, both males and females who have tried to highlight gender issues in the sciences, and their work has in fact made a difference in countless ways. The very fact that the female desire for sex is no longer treated as a form of hysteria is testament to the advance of the sciences, and within the sciences sexism is rarer than it is in general for society. In fact bigotry of any kind is rare in the sciences, and most of the issues highlighted by feminist researchers in this day and age deal with more implicit forms of bigotry that are virtually invisible until someone points them out, and are in most cases quickly and agreeably corrected by other researchers.

I have spent a great deal of time studying the relationship between science and religion, especially ancient religions like Paganism, Vodou, Hinduism, and Buddhism. I think even domains of science like Neurology and Psychology have revealed spirituality to be an underlying facet of human existence, and spiritual experience to represent a dimension of consciousness not generally accessible. Psychology has brought us the concept of archetypes via Jung and his contemporaries and successors, while neurotheology, a small subdiscipline, has studied the brain during alleged spiritual experiences and found the activity of the brain to be decidedly different in these states than in any other state of consciousness. Less mainstream scientific domains as Parapsychology, especially in its intersection with Quantum Physics, strongly suggests that humans are in fact active participants in creating the universe that we experience, and that even so called "magic" has a perfectly rational basis. The findings of Parapsychology, where they have been able to achieve some reliable results, have tended to confirm age old beliefs: That people who believe in psychic powers are more likely to be psychic (or perhaps it is the reverse?), that psychic powers can work for or against the user (i.e. magic can work correctly, not work at all, or can even backfire on the user), that males and females have some measurable differences in terms of the types of psychic abilities they are most likely to possess, and that the combination of a masculine and feminine couple using their abilities towards the same goal produces stronger results than either one by itself, especially when these couples are emotionally bonded (I should add no tests have been done on homosexual couples and we cannot therefore know how these would perform). Anthropology can be very much credited with exposing us to surviving traces of ancient beliefs still being practiced, granting us insight into the early religion of humanity. Archaeology has unearthed so many ruined and solved so many ancient puzzles that we can now marvel at once lost secrets of Egypt, Greece, the Aztecs, the Toltecs, the Mayans, and many other ancient civilizations. I think in so many ways science has contributed to Paganism, and I think Paganism has and will continue to contribute to the sciences as well. These are the sorts of issues I would like to discuss here, not the war of the sexes.

Comment by Ellen Bergstrom on October 31, 2009 at 1:49pm

There is definitely something wrong with going along with the current patriarchial thinking in the scientific community. I know it is hard to think outside the "current box" of science which is very sexist even today, but give it try. In fact as was said, ignorance is ignorance even if the patriarchy continues...in order to open your mind I suggest studying the many feminist scholars out there, which include pagan feminist, before you continue to embarrass yourself. It continues to amaze that chrisitanity and sexism remain as "virtues" even in the pagan community. Also there are many men who no longer subscribe to the competitive, war like nature of the world as it is now. They too call themselves feminist as well as pagans. For your information, matriarchy is not the "female" equivalent of "patriarchy." Patriarchy is about competition and aggression while matriarchy is about coopertation. Example: Patriarchy will kill both men and women and children while matriarchy will nurture all of them. In order to understand the differences, read the literature of the many feminist, as well as feminist-pagan scholars. Can we not leave all the patriarchial arrogance, violence, competition to the christians to chew on. Why bring it into a pagan community.

Comment by Arreahnna McCabe on October 31, 2009 at 1:11pm

Yea! I have been of this mind for years. It is so hard to articulate my faith. I think that the closest that I can say is that the facts of science show how the Gods put it all together, like analyzing a cake to find out that it is made with flour, eggs, etc.

Comment by Christopher Nickell on June 11, 2009 at 10:53pm

If someone were to call my ideas about it chauvenist or sexist, they'd simply be incorrect lol. So, let them judge me all they want; ignorance is ignorance, even if it's disguised as being "liberal."

Comment by David Lang on June 11, 2009 at 7:51pm

christopher i think that if you take the time to notice it usually women who talk about goddesses and matriarcal society. and men just shut about it or risk being called sexist or chauvenist

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