In the rush to combat the crazies who think that personal feelings and wholesale subjectivity should rule the day, the empiricists are pushing back...and for good reason. But the allegiance to objective measurement ad infinitum can be its own brand of fundamentalism.

Consider a phenomenon like electricity, for example. Electricity existed before we had the mechanism to detect it. In other words, it was real before science gave it the stamp of verification.

If you think that there are not forces governing this vast universe that are beyond the reach of our five senses and the current instrumentation we have to extend said senses, I don’t know what to say...other than that strikes me as an egregious act of hubris.

Let’s be honest: contemporary neuroscience is just catching up to confirm what ancient sages meditating in caves “knew” eons ago. Some of what we call “woo woo” is just that which we haven’t been able to prove yet.

(That said, some “woo woo” is still legitimate horseshit. But let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater.)

Moral of the story: sometimes science can just be its own cult of measurement.