The Bifurcation of Reality, or, Are We Totally Forked?

This Sunday, 13 July 2025, we'll look at an extreme aspect of reality: The Scole Experiment (1993-1998), which shattered boundaries between science and spirit, offering compelling evidence—through film, voices, and materializations—that consciousness may survive death. If authentic, its implications are profound: reality isn’t just material, but participatory and multidimensional, inviting us to rethink the limits of mind, matter, and meaning.
Recommended viewing: YouTube: The Afterlife Experiment 1' 28".

Free as always, our Zoom Meeting opens at 9:45 AM (EDT) https://us02web.zoom.us/j/263786418https://us02web.zoom.us/j/263786418

Please read the following: What we are about and why!

"When you come to a fork in the road, take it," poignantly describes the paradox - and root cause - behind humanity's greatest challenges today: science vs. religion's untenable conflicting interpretations of reality.
Ever stop to wonder how we ended up with two conflicting descriptions of how the universe (uni = one!) operates—one from science and the other from religion—even though both claim to describe a world governed by natural laws? Perhaps not, because we’ve become too accustomed to treating science and religion as separate domains, each engaged on different days, in different places, and for different purposes. But in truth, each is simply a distinct method of exploring reality: science through systematic observation and experiment, and religion through direct, often spontaneous, experience. Far from being enemies, they reveal different aspects of the same reality, and each is incomplete without the other.

This division isn’t just an intellectual curiosity—it’s a crisis. The bifurcation of reality influences every facet of modern life and worsens our global condition. Science, powerful and precise, often dismisses meaning, morality, and lived experience. Religion, in turn, can deny well-supported facts, clinging to outdated beliefs to avoid admitting error. Both, at times, defend their blind spots to save face. But at what cost? What we urgently need is a unifying vision that honors both perspectives. Without it, our understanding of ourselves and the world remains fragmented, and our collective response to urgent challenges is needlessly impaired.

Many of today’s social and environmental crises arise from overreliance on science alone—an approach rich in method but barren of meaning, and all too easily co-opted by greed, domination, and control. Without the balancing insight of moral and spiritual values—long carried by religion—we lack the ethical compass and deeper sense of purpose needed to heal the damage and guide genuine progress. Partial worldviews yield partial solutions, like treating symptoms while ignoring the underlying disease. True healing requires clarity and wisdom from both domains—an integrated worldview.

The most pressing task of our time, then, is to reconcile these two hopelessly partial and dogmatic worldviews. Why? Because unifying the scientific and spiritual perspectives can restore the insight and motivation necessary to awaken a deeper sense of responsibility, purpose, and shared future—something neither field can offer alone. As long as science and religion continue to assert conflicting models of reality—one reducing existence to matter and mechanism, the other insisting on invisible truths grounded in subjective experience—humanity remains culturally divided, inwardly fragmented, and unprepared to mount the moral, intellectual, and imaginative effort needed to heal ourselves, our societies, and the planet.

So what’s the solution? First, we must bring an end to science's refusal to recognize consciousness (mind, soul) as a legitimate and interactive part of the universe. This resistance is less about logic and more a reaction to religious superstitions that once explained natural phenomena through divine intervention. Yet science is philosophically bound to investigate causes, and it can do so without becoming superstitious or doctrinaire. In fact, one legitimate branch of science—parapsychology—has methodically investigated consciousness and its interaction with matter for nearly a century, yielding a consistent body of data. While its mechanisms remain unknown, the emerging picture across science, religion, and parapsychology is converging into a single 'enchanted' description of reality as it is, not as some might have it be.
Parapsychology provides the vital bridge between science and religion, yet it is routinely dismissed as pseudoscience—largely due to science's deep-seated discomfort with anything that echoes religious belief. Ironically, parapsychology stands on more empirical ground than many traditional doctrines. Religion, too, has recently embraced evidence of survival beyond death—such as near-death experiences—as validation of core beliefs about the soul. But the embrace often ends when that evidence challenges dogma. We are, in essence, like a family with two feuding parents, caught in a conflict that demands reconciliation.

Who then could possibly mediate this truce? Philosophy. As the foundation of all thought, philosophy supplies the assumptions, logic, and values that shape how we interpret reality. Many scientists acknowledge that the missing puzzle piece, before they'll sign up to new ideas, is a coherent cosmology—a framework explaining how everything fits together. Fortunately, such a framework exists. In 1929, Alfred North Whitehead, a brilliant physicist, mathematician, and philosopher, published his "philosophy of organism," a groundbreaking metaphysical system that has remained robust and viable under scrutiny. This 'process philosophy' offers powerful insights into the unification of science, religion, and parapsychology. It addresses and resolves the mind-body problem, the problem of God's condoning of evil, and even anomalous phenomena like spontaneous healing, telepathy, and psychokinesis, as logical errors resulting from incorrect assumptions about reality. But we’ll leave those for another day.
This brings us to The Metaphysical Church of Science, which exists to promote this holistic view of reality—grounded in facts, experiences, and the wisdom of diverse traditions. "Metaphysical" refers to the philosophical foundations of logic and being; "Church" speaks to a shared space for spiritual inquiry; and "Science" honors the study of nature in all its dimensions, physical and beyond.
So, if you consider yourself spiritual but not religious, if you value facts and reason over belief and dogma, and feel deeply concerned about the state of the world—then join and help us introduce and explore this new sense of reality, for the common good.

Your thoughts and reflections are very welcome!