Unfolding the Enfolded...

Rupert Sheldrake asserts that a mechanistic worldview is still the official philosophy dominating science, medicine, and agriculture.

The image of science that most people have is at least fifty years out of date and often a hundred years out of date.

The first feature of the mechanistic world view is that it's based on the machine as its central image: the world as a machine; animals and plants as machines; human bodies as machines....

This mechanistic universe is inanimate and purposeless. Inanimate literally means 'soulless.'

The God of the world machine was conceived of as a designing intelligence, engineer, and mathematician--a clear case of picturing God in the image of man.

Protestant theologians in particular have tended to take it for granted that animals, plants, and the world as a whole are machines and have then tried to fit God into this mechanical picture as the great machine maker.

This is essentially what the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century put in place, and it is still the basis of scientific ideology.

Excepts from pages 18-21 of Natural Grace

In his latest book, Psychoenergetic Science, physicist William Tiller complains about the narrow mindedness expressed by some scientists when it comes to solid research involving  physics and consciousness:

 In spite of the unwillingness to look at such data, many of the establishment scientists are willing to `spout off' with very derogatory opinions concerning such data - without ever having seriously looked at it. Such behavior is called scientism which is corruption of the science craft. [Tiller, p. 36]

Adam Leonard surveys the evolution of worldviews, noting the similarities arrived at independently among a number of researchers and philosophers. Using the schema of spiral dynamics,

By combining the research findings, a developmental holarchy emerges that unfolds into ever-increasing levels of inclusion from traditional-mythic to rational-achievist to pluralistic-communitarian to integral-existential. [Leonard, pp. 75-76, ]

Leonard goes on to describe each of these worldviews. Traditional-mythic is

traditional and conservative, emphasizing order, consistency, and convention. [It's] core values echo themes of meaning, direction, and purpose in life. [Its] value structure views the world from an absolutistic, polarized, black and white perspective. Honoring and submitting to authority, [it] allows the conventional system to define good/bad, right/wrong. [p. 76]