The Science Delusion: Ten Dogmas That Keep Us Asleep

Rupert Sheldrake’s Challenge to the Orthodoxy of Materialism

In January 2013, Rupert Sheldrake stepped onto the stage at TEDx Whitechapel in London and gave an 18-minute talk that would become one of the most watched — and most censored — presentations in the history of TED. The talk was called “The Science Delusion,” after his 2012 book of the same name (published in the US as Science Set Free: 10 Paths to New Discovery).

Within weeks, TED removed the talk from its official YouTube channel. Their anonymous “scientific advisors” deemed it unfit for distribution without a warning label. It was relegated to a corner of the TED blog, stamped with cautionary framing. The official statement said his claims “lack evidence” and that his list of scientific dogmas was not “a fair description of scientific assumptions.”

At the time of removal, the video had accumulated a modest 35,000 views. By January 2025, clones and re-uploads of the “banned” talk had been watched over 8.5 million times. The Streisand effect in full bloom.

But the real question is not whether TED should have censored the talk. The real question is whether Sheldrake is right. Are there dogmas at the heart of modern science — beliefs so deeply embedded that they function not as hypotheses but as articles of faith? And if so, what happens when you question them?

The Core Argument

Sheldrake’s thesis is elegantly simple. Modern science operates under a philosophy called materialism (or physicalism) — the belief that all reality is material, that consciousness is a byproduct of brain activity, that nature is purposeless, and that everything can be explained by the interactions of matter and energy governed by fixed laws.

This philosophy is not itself a scientific finding. It is an assumption — a metaphysical framework adopted in the 17th century that has since hardened into what Sheldrake calls “the default worldview of most educated people.” Scientists do not test materialism. They assume it, and then conduct their research within its boundaries. Findings that fit the framework are accepted. Findings that challenge it are dismissed, ignored, or explained away.

Sheldrake identifies ten specific assumptions of materialism and converts each one into a question. His argument is that when you examine these assumptions as hypotheses rather than accepting them as axioms, every single one of them becomes questionable. And the questions they open are not trivial — they point toward entirely new avenues of scientific inquiry.

The Ten Dogmas

1. Is Nature Mechanical?

The materialist dogma: the universe is a machine, living organisms are complex machines, and all natural phenomena can be explained by mechanical interactions of material parts.

Sheldrake’s question: What if organisms are not machines but living, self-organizing systems with their own inherent purposes and drives? Machines are assembled from the outside according to a design. Living things grow from within according to an internal organizing principle. No one builds a baby from parts on an assembly line. A fertilized egg develops into a human being through a process that is nothing like manufacturing.

The machine metaphor has been extraordinarily productive. It has given us molecular biology, genetic engineering, and modern medicine. But Sheldrake argues that it has also blinded us to aspects of nature that do not fit the machine model — consciousness, purpose, self-organization, and creativity.

2. Is the Total Amount of Matter and Energy Always the Same?

The materialist dogma: the conservation of matter and energy is absolute and universal.

Sheldrake’s question: The Big Bang theory posits that all matter and energy came into existence out of nothing — a radical violation of conservation laws that is accepted without blinking. Dark energy, which constitutes about 68% of the universe’s total energy content, appears to be increasing as the universe expands. If matter and energy were not conserved at the beginning of the universe and may not be conserved now, why do we treat conservation as an absolute law rather than an approximation that holds under ordinary conditions?

3. Are the Laws of Nature Fixed?

The materialist dogma: the laws of nature are eternal and immutable, the same today as they were at the Big Bang and will be at the end of time.

Sheldrake’s question: How do we know this? We have been measuring physical constants for a few hundred years. The universe is 13.8 billion years old. Extrapolating from a few centuries to all of eternity is an extraordinary leap of faith, not an empirical observation.

This is the dogma that Sheldrake attacks most concretely, with specific examples from metrology — the science of measurement. The gravitational constant G, supposedly one of the most fundamental numbers in physics, shows remarkable variation between measurements. In 1998, the US National Institute of Standards and Technology published values of G measured on different days that ranged from 6.64 to 6.73 — a spread of nearly 1.3%.

When G was measured continuously for seven months using two independent methods, researchers found a clear daily rhythm in the values, with peaks occurring 23.93 hours apart — matching the length of the sidereal day (the rotation period of the Earth relative to the stars, not the sun). There is also preliminary evidence of an annual variation.

The speed of light tells a similar story. Between 1928 and 1945, measured values of c dropped by about 20 km/s. In 1948, they rose again. The values recorded across this period were: 1926: 299,798 km/s; 1928: 299,778; 1932-35: 299,774; 1947: 299,792. That is a range of 24 km/s in a constant that is supposed to be immutable.

In 1972, the problem was resolved — not by better measurements, but by definition. The meter was redefined in terms of the speed of light, creating a circular definition that makes future variation invisible by construction. If the speed of light changes, the meter changes with it, and no one can tell.

Sheldrake discussed these variations with the head of metrology at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington, England. The metrologist’s response was revealing: “The speed couldn’t have actually dropped. It’s a constant!” When Sheldrake asked what the measured drop meant, the answer was essentially that the instruments must have been wrong — all of them, in all countries, for two decades, all in the same direction.

4. Is Matter Unconscious?

The materialist dogma: matter has no inner life, no experience, no consciousness. Consciousness is an emergent property of complex arrangements of matter — specifically, brains.

Sheldrake’s question: This dogma creates what philosopher David Chalmers calls “the hard problem of consciousness.” If matter is inherently unconscious, how does consciousness emerge from it? No one has ever explained this. It is simply assumed that it happens, somehow, when neurons reach a certain level of complexity. But there is no theory, no mechanism, and no experimental evidence for this transition. It is an article of faith.

An alternative view — panpsychism — holds that consciousness is a fundamental property of matter, present in some form at every level of organization. This is not a New Age fantasy. It is a position taken seriously by a growing number of philosophers and physicists, including Chalmers himself, as well as neuroscientist Giulio Tononi, whose Integrated Information Theory implies a form of panpsychism.

5. Is Nature Purposeless?

The materialist dogma: evolution has no purpose, no direction, and no goal. It is a blind process of random mutation and natural selection. There is no teleology in nature.

Sheldrake’s question: Every living organism behaves as though it has purposes. A plant grows toward light. A bird builds a nest. A cell repairs its DNA. We call these “apparent” purposes and explain them mechanistically. But the denial of purpose in nature is not a scientific conclusion — it is a philosophical commitment made before the evidence is examined.

6. Is All Biological Inheritance Material?

The materialist dogma: heredity is entirely genetic. Everything inherited is encoded in DNA.

Sheldrake’s question: Epigenetics has already demonstrated that environmental influences can modify gene expression in ways that are inherited across generations without changes to the DNA sequence. Morphic resonance proposes an even more radical form of non-genetic inheritance — a memory transmitted through fields rather than molecules.

7. Are Memories Stored as Material Traces?

The materialist dogma: memories are stored in the brain as physical traces — changes in synaptic connections, protein modifications, or other material structures.

Sheldrake’s question: Despite decades of searching, no one has ever found a specific memory stored in a specific location in the brain. Karl Lashley spent thirty years surgically removing portions of rat brains trying to locate the engram — the physical trace of a memory. He could not find it. Rats with massive portions of their cortex removed still retained memories. Lashley’s famous conclusion: “I sometimes feel, in reviewing the evidence on the localization of the memory trace, that the necessary conclusion is that learning is just not possible.”

Sheldrake suggests that memories are not stored in the brain at all. The brain is a tuning system, like a television set. It does not contain the programs — it receives them. Memories are stored in morphic fields, and the brain accesses them through morphic resonance with its own past states.

8. Are Minds Confined to Brains?

The materialist dogma: the mind is the brain. Consciousness is produced by neural activity and does not extend beyond the skull.

Sheldrake’s question: This is the dogma his extended mind research directly challenges. The sense of being stared at, telephone telepathy, and animal telepathy all suggest that minds are not confined to brains but extend outward through attention and intention.

9. Are Psychic Phenomena Illusory?

The materialist dogma: telepathy, precognition, and other psychic phenomena do not exist. Reports of such phenomena are due to fraud, self-deception, or statistical illusion.

Sheldrake’s question: The evidence for telepathy, gathered over more than a century of research, is statistically robust. The telephone telepathy experiments alone show results with p-values of 4 x 10^-16 — levels of significance that would be considered overwhelming proof in any other field of science. The reason these results are dismissed is not that they fail to meet scientific standards. It is that they contradict the materialist worldview, and the worldview is treated as more authoritative than the data.

10. Is Mechanistic Medicine the Only Kind That Really Works?

The materialist dogma: only treatments that operate through known physical and chemical mechanisms are legitimate. Alternative and complementary therapies that show positive results must be producing placebo effects.

Sheldrake’s question: The placebo effect itself is a profound demonstration of the power of mind over matter. Rather than dismissing it as a nuisance variable, what if we studied it as the primary mechanism of healing? What if the therapeutic effects of acupuncture, meditation, energy healing, and other non-mechanistic practices reflect genuine aspects of how consciousness interacts with biology?

The Deeper Pattern

What connects all ten dogmas is a single philosophical commitment: the belief that reality is fundamentally material, that consciousness is derivative, and that purpose and meaning are human projections onto a meaningless universe.

Sheldrake is not arguing that science should abandon empiricism, experimentation, or the quest for natural explanations. He is arguing the opposite: that science should be more empirical, more experimental, and more open to wherever the evidence leads — even if it leads beyond the boundaries of materialism.

The science delusion, as Sheldrake defines it, is not the practice of science. It is the belief that science has already answered the fundamental questions. That consciousness is “nothing but” neural activity. That matter is “nothing but” atoms. That life is “nothing but” chemistry. That these reductive equations are settled, and what remains is merely to fill in the details.

This belief, Sheldrake argues, is not just wrong — it is anti-scientific. The spirit of science is inquiry, not certainty. Dogma is the enemy of discovery. And the ten dogmas of materialism have become the invisible bars of a cage that most scientists do not even know they are inside.

The Reaction

The response to The Science Delusion was predictable and polarized. Mainstream scientists dismissed it. Prominent skeptics attacked it. The TED ban amplified it. And hundreds of thousands of readers found in it something they had been looking for: permission to take seriously the aspects of their experience that materialism had told them did not exist.

The book did not create the crisis in materialist science. It named it. The hard problem of consciousness remains unsolved. The placebo effect remains unexplained. The measurement problem in quantum mechanics remains unresolved. Dark matter and dark energy — which together constitute about 95% of the universe — remain undetected and unexplained. The origin of life remains a mystery. The origin of consciousness remains a mystery.

Materialism has been extraordinarily productive in generating technology and in mapping the physical structure of the universe. But it has failed at the questions that matter most: What is consciousness? Why is there something rather than nothing? What is the nature of the self? What is the meaning of life?

These are not soft questions. They are the hardest questions there are. And Sheldrake’s point is that we will never answer them as long as we begin by assuming that the answer must be material.

The cage is made of assumptions. The door has always been open.

What assumption are you living inside that you have never thought to question?