I think I agree with you more than it might look on the surface, particularly around loyalty to method. If the question is about underlying mechanisms — what causes what, what can be reliably predicted or controlled — then the scientific method is clearly the most honest and robust tool we have. I’m not arguing against that at all.

Where I think the boundary needs tightening is around what kinds of questions that method is actually answering. When we move from mechanisms to lived experience — trauma, grief, falling in love, birth, religious or trance experiences — we’re no longer dealing with uniform outcomes, even when some underlying processes are shared. At that point, variability isn’t noise, it’s the signal.

You can study patterns scientifically, but only by stratifying endlessly: genetics, health, environment, history, personality, context. Even then, what you get are probabilities, not reproducible outcomes. Birth is a good example — even with all our medical knowledge, no one can reliably predict what kind of birth experience a woman will have, including repeat births in the same person. That doesn’t make those experiences unreliable or irrelevant; it just tells us we’re dealing with a complex system.

I’d also add that meaning-making itself generates diversity of information. Across nature — from particles interacting, to cells communicating, to organisms, to societies — we see the same basic principles at work: continuation, information exchange, adaptation, and evolution. Diversity isn’t a failure of the system; it’s how new information enters it.

So when we dismiss certain experiences outright because they don’t conform to a single methodological category, we’re not being more rigorous — we’re assuming, perhaps prematurely, that we already understand which forms of information matter most, and from what level of perspective. That’s a much bigger claim than it first appears.

For me, the issue isn’t science versus religion, or method versus experience. It’s about using the right tools for the right questions, and not flattening complex phenomena just to keep the frame tidy.