In a letter to Kepler, Galileo wrote: “Here at Padua is the principal professor of philosophy, whom I have repeatedly and urgently requested to look at the moon and the planets through my glass, which he pertinaciously refuses to do.”

When he looked through his telescope, Galileo affirmed that Copernicus was right – we are not at the centre of a Cosmos that revolves around us, but instead, we are revolving around the Sun. Many in the Church and in Universities were reluctant to hear this because it opposed the established belief system and power structure.

This has striking parallels today. For example, many scientists are unwilling to look at the evidence for consciousness beyond the brain because they have an unshakeable belief that consciousness is generated in the brain. It is often the authority of science and the fear for their reputation that prevents them from expanding their worldview. The Church was worried that the infallibility of Scripture was at stake. Today, the infallibility of scientific materialism is at stake.

The world today is dominated by science and by its underlying assumptions, which are seldom articulated even though they generate not only a methodology but also a worldview or philosophy. While scientific methodology is a set of evolving rules socially negotiated among scientists, this scientific worldview is a quasi-religious set of assumptions about the world, an ideology generally known as ‘scientism.’ We fully support scientific methodology, but we are critical of scientism – those assumptions that underpin the current scientific worldview.

The emphasis is on a purely material interpretation of reality, and the direction of explanation is exclusively from material to immaterial or the visible to the invisible – hence the generally accepted proposition that the physical brain gives rise to consciousness. Importantly, science has been given an implied mandate by society to provide humanity with an ‘official’ story about the universe and ourselves, because it is believed that only science as it exists now can decide what is true and what is possible.

The current story is one of an accidental and random universe operating on the principle of natural selection and without any inherent meaning and purpose. It is important to realize that this mainstream narrative is not necessarily the truth but extrapolates partial findings into a future hope. This, we believe, has a demoralising effect on society and does not reflect our deepest insights into the nature of human life. It can only be maintained at the expense of ignoring a lot of other scientific evidence that cannot be integrated into this mainstream narrative.

This has far-reaching implications. When combined with its claim to offer the only legitimate knowledge and mode of knowing, science exerts an unbalanced influence in schools and universities and on society in general. Its core assumptions (considered to be “facts” by many scientists) influence us more than we might imagine.

This philosophical materialism with its associated concept of a purposeless universe and the inherent meaninglessness of life is correlated with economic materialism and an emphasis on consumerism and the exploitation of people and natural resources. This translates into the idea that consumption and economic growth are the route to happiness and well-being. Many leading thinkers are now questioning this association between consumption and well-being, with a renewed emphasis on quality of life rather than quantity of possessions, on being prioritised over having. Indeed, the ultimate human experience is one that unifies love, knowledge, and bliss.

Science and technology have given us much to be grateful for, and will continue to do so. That said, in its present form the scientistic world view derived from science is both limited and limiting. It is limited because much scientific work is based on a set of assumptions that have been superseded by science itself. And it is limiting because society has adopted these same assumptions based on the authority of science. In other words, an outmoded philosophy of science is holding back both science and society.

However, it is possible to imagine an extended kind of science – a science that is based on an expanded set of assumptions that go beyond the restrictions of the materialist worldview. This would be a science that does not have a dogmatically limited definition of physical reality and that is therefore open to investigating anomalies – such as aspects of consciousness and the ‘paranormal’ – that science is currently unable or unwilling to accommodate. In effect, it would be an ‘expanded science,’ because it would extend beyond a simplistic view of the physical and the material.

Within an expanded science, existing ‘hard’ science would still be valid in the contexts where it was generated. Many areas of research could still be profitably undertaken within existing materialist assumptions. But if science could be based on such an expanded set of assumptions, and if they came to form the dominant philosophy of science, then that would open up new avenues and new possibilities. In other words, expanding science and its scope would transform our worldview. And since it is our worldview that underpins virtually everything we think, say, and do, a new expanded science could lead to significant advances in all aspects of our lives, including our most important social institutions – such as education, health, law, and government.

It is for all these reasons that we have set up the Galileo Commission as a project of the Scientific and Medical Network. The Network has been working at the interface between science, spirituality, and consciousness since the 1970s and has an open membership dedicated to exploring and expanding our horizons in these fields. Our major annual conferences include Mystics and Scientists in April and Beyond the Brain coming up in November.

The remit of the Galileo Commission is to open public discourse and to finding ways to expand science so that it is no longer limited by an outmoded view of matter and physical reality, and so that it can accommodate and explore important human experiences and questions that science, in its present form, is unable to accommodate. These include:

• Consciousness ‘beyond the brain,’ such as telepathy, precognition, and near-death experiences
• Altered states of consciousness, such as the ability to perceive non-physical (“spiritual”) aspects of the world and human beings
• The possibility of inherent purpose in the universe

The first stage of the Commission’s work is to produce a report to be launched in the autumn of 2018 that will draw on the great variety of work that has already been done and will make practical recommendations on a way forward which will provide a comprehensive list of resources. Beyond the report, we envisage two main strands of work: a training for scientists who wish to know what expanded science is, why it is needed, and how to do it in practice; and second, demonstrations of expanded science in action.

We anticipate that expanding science will involve some new basic assumptions (an expanded ontology), additional ways of knowing and new rules of evidence (an expanded epistemology), as well as new methodologies that will flow from these.

We also wish to make clear that this is not a project that tries to promote any existing belief system – such as Intelligent Design – or an anti-evolutionist agenda, religious creeds, or esoteric systems. We do this in the very spirit of science: as an open and open-ended inquiry that refuses to be limited by any set of assumptions – conscious or unconscious – that have been invariably brandished by scions of scientific progress like Roger and Francis Bacon as “idols” that prevent progress. We wish to expose those idols not in order to replace them by others, but by extending inquiry into yet unknown realms.