Science and New Age Spirituality: Mind over Matter in the Academy?

"... whether in the body, or out of the body, I cannot tell: ...." II Corinthians 12:3

Alien abductions at Harvard; Fourier transforms in the defense of levitation and homeopathy at Stanford; psychic espionage at Menlo Park; acupuncture meridians and dangers of mercurial dentistry at the Karolinska Institutet--must these be allowed entry into real science? Did Oxford's A. J. Ayer really report a Near Death Experience (and if so, to what were his words referring?)? Are the divinity school theologians the last remaining skeptics aside from James Randi? Is the New Age now going beyond weak suggestions of intelligent design in the cosmos to abrogation of the classic modern separation of empirical quantity and spiritual quality? New Age proposals for a science transcending positivistic limits will be analyzed with regard to their contemporary cultural function. Such proposals, it will be argued, stake something very scarce these days, an optimistic claim on eventually getting to truth about vital issues. New Age calls for a science transformed and transformative look forward to a future regaining of what is virtually lost today given the Infobahn, competing constituencies, and pessimistic connoisseurs of conspiracy: a dominant consensus on getting to truth about science, events, public policy, and worldview, in effect offering a way through and out of the current confusion and troubles (whether ecometeorological, medical, interpersonal, or sociopolitical). Specifics about this healing way are couched in a postmodern idiom mixing targets and genres to obtain a religioscientific mythical pastiche surprisingly telling when taken as cultural diagnosis and frustratingly elusive when called upon to deliver unambiguously curative results. Academic resources for the matter include the important works of C. Albanese, J. Dean and D. Hess, along with T. Engelhardt, R. Fuller, C. Gordon, P. Heelas, B. Nordenström, M. O'Hara, and M. Woodhouse--not to mention numerous treatises on Atlantis, Phoenicians in Brazil, underground UFO bases, magic bullet demystifications, the real facts about the death of Secretary of Defense James Forrestal, the suppression of Nikola Tesla, and the unrepression of Wilhelm Reich. On request, Prof. Stroup will recount the story of his induction into Phi Beta Kappa at Washington University, on which occasion the speaker (invited by chemists) was Immanuel Velikovsky.

Panel Discussants

Yuri Balashov, Center for the Study of Science & Technology; Space Physics & Astronomy

John W. Lewis, MD, JD

Bill Martin, Sociology