Michael Patterson
Member
To answer you question, 'why does science need to be wrong?' - technically it doesn't, but humans might need it to be. For example, I would contend Galileo needed to believe that God created a material world and gave it consistent rules for him to develop his laws of motion. He felt through studying physics he was studying the mind of God. Had he believed the world to be a dream would he have taken such interest in it? Would he have instead been like the Yogis and looked for the dreamer?
Galileo was not different from many thinkers who accepted a reality that was divinely created. He clashed with the dogma of his Church. What we forget about this period was the development of the lens to the level of creating a revolutionary exposure to the telescopic and microscopic. It was the lens that transformed science, not some disconnected intellectual insight. Hence Galileo, and others, anticipated that the lens would let them peer into the handiwork of God. The materialists looked, and saw no evidence of God, and hastily concluded no God existed.
The Christian dogma that Galileo got into strife with did not assume the world was only dogma. It assumed its dogma interpreted the world accurately. It is not that the world is a dream, but that the experience of the world is a dream. Getting down to 'conscious' reality was the business of mysticism (Hermetic, Kabbalistic, Yogic etc). It is also what 'science' sought to do. But the early theories of the science examining the material world in the absence of any serious spiritual element, led to theories that had no spirit. Christianity had dissed the animistic traditions so well, and replaced them with truly awful theology, it was no wonder than new devotees of science discarded any idea of spirit. If the rule of empirical experimentation prevailed there was no evidence of spirit. The fact that it has taken materialistic science 500 odd years to rediscover the prospect of spirit via quantum, complexity, chaos and other theories is not evidence of progressive scientific evolution, but of reality finally being acknowledged.
Many scientists are religious or spiritual, but they have long been obliged to study science as if materialism is the only valid position. Richard Dawkins famously asserted that if you had a religious belief you could not do good science. That POV among materialists isn't popular these days. But there was a time, not so long ago, that such tripe could be uttered with bold confidence.
Galileo believed in his faith. He objected to his Church's dogma, which stood against the evidence of the science he was practicing. Other opponents to the same dogma were more extreme, and they were not confined to house arrest. They were tortured and killed. They didn't think reality was a dream either. But I take your point.
HP Blavatsky made a point of insisting that reality was objectively real. She was aware of the misinterpretations of Buddhist and Hindu teachings that mistook the idea of illusion to mean that 'reality' was the illusion. In fact it was the perception and experience of what was asserted to be reality that was illusory. A very different kettle of fish.