In Aristotle's list of sciences, there
are three value sciences: ethics, politics and poetics.
In the 2500 years since, little further progress had been
made in the development of value sciences before Thales.
The need has never been greater. The 500
year old World-Machine is clearly breaking down. The
cities are unlivable; energy shortages and rising food
prices portend the world-wide breakdown predicted in the
book THE LIMITS OF GROWTH; the imbalances between have
and have-not peoples and nations make Armageddon (WW III)
inevitable. The eleven theorems of value sciences solve
these problems in principle.
The method of all sciences is the same:
make theories and test them. Thales does for value
problems what Galileo did for explanatory problems; he
provides a way of analyzing them, to get at the various
components of a problem in a workable and testable way.
Value science and empirical religion are
largely independent, except for two things: Knowledge of
reincarnation and immortality changes our perspective on
ecological problems and makes a steady-state system
imperative. The other thing is that knowledge of the
Great Way provides an over-arching perspective on war,
struggle, energetic vitality of societies and the central
goals of the humanist governors.