Scientism

The ideology that science tells us everything there is to know concerning truth and reality. Only theoretical scientific claims are thought to be meaningful. It is the belief that ‘science’ has no (or few) limits and can successfully be applied to almost all aspects of life, and provides an explanation for everything. It is essentially a religion where its followers (Scientists) worship science its rituals, and its results, and it’s quite easy to see how this belief system can lead its adherents to be dismissive of any other truth claims. It is unrelated to true science where observations can be tested, measured, and duplicated because there are no ways to validate the claims and far-fetched theories of scientism. Scientism has generally had a close relationship with atheism, as atheism and scientism ideologically support each other. Followers of scientism do not believe in God and therefore use atheism as the base of their religion, and atheists use pseudoscience to support their claims, as well as evidence against God and the Bible. Strict scientism as a worldview is self-refuting since the scientism cannot be proven to be true through science.

Since Scientists have an agenda to use “science” to support their denial of God, their techniques usually rely on pseudoscience. For example, the claim to know that God exists, despite the fact that it is technically scientifically impossible to disprove anything (i.e. negative proofs are impossible). Despite this, they continue to deny the existence of God without any real scientific proof. Worshipers of Scientism also believe that science should replace traditional morality, so that they can do whatever they want as long as it is dictated by “science”. (Conservapedia)

C.S. Lewis was skeptical and highly critical of scientism as an ideology which in his view was confused with science and which tried to reduce everything that we can learn scientifically to materialistic blind undirected causes. He argued that scientism has the dehumanizing impact on ethics, politics, faith, reason, and science itself.

In his review of “Enlightenment Now,” philosopher John Gray called Pinker “an evangelist for science – or, to be more exact, an ideology of scientism.” Scientism, according to historian T.J. Jackson Lears, is the “faith” that “science has discovered (or is about to discover) all the important truths about human life.” Or, as one leading proponent of scientism—the late Stephen Hawking—put it: “The scientific account is complete. Theology is unnecessary.”

The problem is that, as Gray writes, “science cannot dictate human values.” He points out what Pinker obscures, ignores, and tries to explain away: a great deal of evil has been committed by those claiming to act in accordance with the dictates of science.

Scientism has given us “Marxism-Leninism, Nazism,” and what historian Thomas Leonard called the “illiberal reformers” of early 20th century America most responsible for eugenics. “Science” wasn’t enough to prevent one of the darkest moments in American history: the Tuskegee Experiment, in which 400 Black men with syphilis were purposely left untreated to study the effects of the disease. (Source)

Scientism is in essence a gnostic culture applied onto realms of science hence scientism can be often debunked by pointing to the gnostic traits. As such it also exhibits many characteristics of moral relativism. For example, moral relativism doesn’t follow its own rules, the rules it judges everyone else by. Neither does scientism. Gnostic works are marked by manipulative vagueness, word-spinning and tedium, so is scientism. On top of that, it usurps the right to be labeled as “modern,” yet it is in many respects expressing merely modernized pagan beliefs under the fig leaf of “science,” it is often meticulous in detail and yet bristling with contradictions and tendentious arguments, boldly imaginative and yet often already outdated.

A common trait that weaves its way through every topic of “Scientism” is corporate profits. Any time something is being pushed with aggressive demands of “SCIENCE!” that also happens to enrich wealthy corporations, it’s probably based on fraud, not real science. Perpetrators of fraudulent scientism include Paul Offit, Dr. David Gorski, Monsanto pal Bill Nye, discredited biotech shill and former Forbes.com writer Jon Entine and too many others to even name.

In this HealthRangerReport.com podcast below, Mike Adams explains the truth about the Cult of Scientism, sometimes called the “Church of Scientific Mysticism.” This cult currently dominates the “official” dogma concerning vaccines, GMOs, fluoride, cancer, diabetes, pharmaceuticals, biosludge and more.

Bill Nye and Scientism

In his 2016 article “Why I Choose to Challenge Climate Change Deniers,” Mr. Bill Nye (the Scientism Guy) is found to issue a firm challenge to all those who do not accept his CO₂-based religion by claiming that “The science of global warming is long settled, and one may wonder why the United States, nominally the most technologically advanced country in the world, is not the world leader in addressing the threats.”

This is so true that when the Australian government recently decided to shift their funding from studying climate change to preparing to address the threats assumed to originate from it, the very scientists who claimed that the science of global warming is settled started howling that this was not so and that their words have been misunderstood. They argued that climate is a very complex phenomenon (true) and that much work is needed to understand it in order to be able to provide any future global temperature evolution scenarios. This incidence can best be remembered as the return of the boomerang.

Maybe Mr. Nye should discuss things with these Australian scientists. He may have yet other revelations: That climate science is young and everything except settled, that we understand little of it, and that the predictions made by the climate models are akin to computer-assisted divinations.

First of all, we know that the relatively rapid increase in atmospheric CO₂ over the last thirty years has not produced any large and significant global warming, just a meager ~0.2°C. This compares favorably with the ~1°C increase in the temperature anomaly registered since the past 150 years, indicating an absence of acceleration in temperature rise. In fact, in nearly 19 years, a plateau has been observed, which has been acknowledged even by the IPCC (the so-called hiatus). Therefore, one is left to wonder what the words “enormous effect” mean in this particular case.

By now, the proper scientific conclusion regarding the greenhouse effect role of the rising atmospheric CO₂ is clear: It plays a very minor role on the measurable “planetary” temperature, if any. For readers — and Mr. Nye — who may not be familiar with this latest experimental result, we suggest reading a recent article, “What we know about CO₂ and global atmospheric temperatures?” on Breitbart News.

For all objective readers, and even Mr. Nye himself, we wish to remind everyone of the independent investigation led by Mr. Anthony Watts and many serious scientists who reached the conclusion that the greenhouse effect produced by CO₂ molecules is, of course, real but that the “science-is-easy” type of experiment produced by Mr. Nye in Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project has been found to be a product of “video fakery.” That experiment “could never work” as advertised. So much for Bill, the science guy, who simply confuses “scientism” — i.e. a belief — with experimental sciences. The only question left for everyone is when will Bill Nye or Al Gore stop pedaling their brand of Hollywood special effects?

Let us now have a look at the inter-planetary science argument put forth by Mr. Nye. Haven’t we been told repeatedly by the popular media, and in this case again by Mr. Nye himself, that if we do not stop releasing CO₂ into the atmosphere, planet Earth may soon be doomed and became another Venus, an over-heated, barren, rocky, lifeless planet?

To get a clear understanding that the last point is utter nonsense, we only need to read the recent exchange between Professor Freeman Dyson of Princeton’s Institute of Advanced Study and his colleague Professor Will Happer:

Thank you [Will] for this very clear account of the reason why Earth and Venus are different. This is something that every school-child should learn.

Another interesting fact is that if we put a sunshade shielding Venus from sunlight, it would only take 500 years for the surface of Venus to be cool and the atmosphere to condense into a carbon dioxide ocean. It is the lack of water rather than the high temperature that makes Venus permanently unfriendly to life.

We can also add that the popular and erroneous over-use of Venus as a doomed Earth is highlighted by the fact that, like Venus, the atmosphere of Mars is also significantly enriched in CO₂ (about 95 percent by volume). However, because of its relatively farther orbital position from the Sun, the average temperature of Mars is only about minus 60 degrees Celsius (or minus 80 degrees Fahrenheit). For comparison, the atmosphere of Venus contains about 97 percent CO₂ by volume while the Earth’s atmosphere comprises a mere 0.04 percent.

So what did Professor Will Happer say about the effects of CO₂ on planet Earth and Venus? Again, we will quote him in full in order for any interested readers to follow the precise scientific arguments and reasoning on why equating Earth to Venus is such a wrong analogy:

For most of the past 550 million years of the Phanerozoic, when multicellular life left a good fossil record, the earth’s CO₂ levels were much higher than now, four times, even ten times. Yet life flourished on land and in the oceans.

During the Phanerozoic, the Earth never came close to the conditions of Venus. I would hope that [any scientist] realizes the radius of Venus’s orbit is only 72% of the radius of Earth’s orbit. Since the solar flux scales inversely as the square of the radius, Venus receives about twice as much solar flux, 2637 W/m² than the Earth’s 1367  W/m². According to the IPCC, doubling CO₂ concentrations in the atmosphere, would be the equivalent of about 15 W/m² additional solar flux, nearly 100 times less than the addition Venus gets from being closer to the Sun.

In addition, the surface pressure on Venus is about 90 times that of the Earth, and there is plenty of convection so there is intense compressional heating of the surface air, not unlike the heating during the compression stroke of a Diesel engine. It is the much larger solar flux, convection and high surface pressure that make the surface of Venus so hot.

Little solar flux reaches the surface of Venus and most solar heating occurs above 50 km, in the sulfuric-acid clouds, and above, where the pressures and temperatures are about the same as those above the Earth’s surface. Venus actually absorbs a smaller fraction of sunlight than Earth, and scatters more from its clouds. That is one of the reasons that Venus is such a lovely morning or evening “star.”

But none of these nerdy details about Earth/Venus differences matter since the Earth has already experimented with much more CO₂ than now, and the biosphere loved it. Burning all the economically available fossil fuel is unlikely to increase the current atmospheric CO₂ levels by even a factor of 2. This is much less than the levels that the Earth has already tested. And a doubled level of CO₂ would get us away from the near-famine levels for plants that have prevailed for the past tens of millions of years.

We can only agree with Professors Dyson and Happer upon our own independent research by reporting that our garden plants tell us every morning that they want more CO₂, not less. All the other C3 and C4 types of plants in the world are saying the same thing: “We want more, We want more, We want more CO₂!” The increased greening of the Earth during the past 30 years is a testimony to the desperate need of plants for their very basic foodstuff.

CO₂ is vital for plants survival as well as for humans and animals. We should never forget that more than 70 percent of the oxygen present in the atmosphere — and without which we could never live — originates from phytoplanktons “eating” CO₂ and releasing oxygen. This biological truism rings particularly relevant when considering the climatological fact that the role of atmospheric CO₂ in all matters related to the weather and climate on our planetary home is minimal at best.

The software engineer, William A. Wilson, recently noted that:

If science was unprepared for the influx of careerists, it was even less prepared for the blossoming of the Cult of Science. The Cult is related to the phenomenon described as “scientism”…

Some of the Cult’s leaders like to play dress-up as scientists — Bill Nye and Neil deGrasse Tyson are two particularly prominent examples — but hardly any of them have contributed any research results of note. Rather, Cult leadership trends heavily in the direction of educators, popularizers, and journalists.

Indeed, for far too long now, Science has been driven by popular scientism and official science — these are not Science. Popular personalities like Mr. Bill Nye have had all the attention of the microphones, loudspeakers, and print media, and he has dangerously misled the whole generation of unsuspected readers and younger minds. As scientists, it is our duty to denounce such an attitude, to stop scientism and to warn everyone that personalities like Mr. Nye are plainly anti-science and, therefore, will harm us all.

Scientist Essay on ‘Scientism’

Here’s a long, rewarding 2012 essay about scientism from The New Atlantis by Austin L. Hughes, the Carolina Distinguished Professor of the Biological Sciences at the University of South Carolina. Excerpts:

When I decided on a scientific career, one of the things that appealed to me about science was the modesty of its practitioners. The typical scientist seemed to be a person who knew one small corner of the natural world and knew it very well, better than most other human beings living and better even than most who had ever lived. But outside of their circumscribed areas of expertise, scientists would hesitate to express an authoritative opinion. This attitude was attractive precisely because it stood in sharp contrast to the arrogance of the philosophers of the positivist tradition, who claimed for science and its practitioners a broad authority with which many practicing scientists themselves were uncomfortable.

The temptation to overreach, however, seems increasingly indulged today in discussions about science. Both in the work of professional philosophers and in popular writings by natural scientists, it is frequently claimed that natural science does or soon will constitute the entire domain of truth. And this attitude is becoming more widespread among scientists themselves. All too many of my contemporaries in science have accepted without question the hype that suggests that an advanced degree in some area of natural science confers the ability to pontificate wisely on any and all subjects.

Of course, from the very beginning of the modern scientific enterprise, there have been scientists and philosophers who have been so impressed with the ability of the natural sciences to advance knowledge that they have asserted that these sciences are the only valid way of seeking knowledge in any field. A forthright expression of this viewpoint has been made by the chemist Peter Atkins, who in his 1995 essay “Science as Truth” asserts the “universal competence” of science. This position has been called scientism — a term that was originally intended to be pejorative but has been claimed as a badge of honor by some of its most vocal proponents. In their 2007 book Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized, for example, philosophers James Ladyman, Don Ross, and David Spurrett go so far as to entitle a chapter “In Defense of Scientism.”

More:

Modern science is often described as having emerged from philosophy; many of the early modern scientists were engaged in what they called “natural philosophy.” Later, philosophy came to be seen as an activity distinct from but integral to natural science, with each addressing separate but complementary questions — supporting, correcting, and supplying knowledge to one another. But the status of philosophy has fallen quite a bit in recent times. Central to scientism is the grabbing of nearly the entire territory of what were once considered questions that properly belong to philosophy. Scientism takes science to be not only better than philosophy at answering such questions, but the only means of answering them. For most of those who dabble in scientism, this shift is unacknowledged, and may not even be recognized. But for others, it is explicit. Atkins, for example, is scathing in his dismissal of the entire field: “I consider it to be a defensible proposition that no philosopher has helped to elucidate nature; philosophy is but the refinement of hindrance.”

Is scientism defensible? Is it really true that natural science provides a satisfying and reasonably complete account of everything we see, experience, and seek to understand — of every phenomenon in the universe? And is it true that science is more capable, even singularly capable, of answering the questions that once were addressed by philosophy? This subject is too large to tackle all at once. But by looking briefly at the modern understandings of science and philosophy on which scientism rests, and examining a few case studies of the attempt to supplant philosophy entirely with science, we might get a sense of how the reach of scientism exceeds its grasp.

Read the whole thing.  It’s a very, very rich and lucid commentary on the issues involved in the discussion, from a scientist himself. Hughes says that scientists and others who fall into scientism do so because they make “philosophical errors,” and tend to think that anything scientists say must be “scientific” because they were said by scientists. It’s also the case that in popular culture, many things can be said to be “scientific” if they appear to conform to a scientific theory. Hughes, who is an evolutionary biologist, writes about the dangers of scientism:

Advocates of scientism today claim the sole mantle of rationality, frequently equating science with reason itself. Yet it seems the very antithesis of reason to insist that science can do what it cannot, or even that it has done what it demonstrably has not. As a scientist, I would never deny that scientific discoveries can have important implications for metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics, and that everyone interested in these topics needs to be scientifically literate. But the claim that science and science alone can answer longstanding questions in these fields gives rise to countless problems.

In contrast to reason, a defining characteristic of superstition is the stubborn insistence that something — a fetish, an amulet, a pack of Tarot cards — has powers which no evidence supports. From this perspective, scientism appears to have as much in common with superstition as it does with properly conducted scientific research. Scientism claims that science has already resolved questions that are inherently beyond its ability to answer.

The Truth about Science

Many Christians today hold science in awe. Many seem to have more respect for what scientists tell us than what God tells us in the Bible. How did this situation arise and how justifiable is such an attitude? In order to answer these questions we need to look at the nature and history of science and at the trustworthiness of scientists and reporters of science. Firstly it is worth noting Douglas Jones’ comment:

“Nothing can take the puff out of the scientific chest more than a study of its history. Perhaps that’s why it’s so rare to find science departments requiring courses in the history of science. The history of science provides great strength to the inductive inference that, at any point in its history, that day’s science will almost certainly be deemed false, if not laughable, within a century (often in much less time).” [ Jones Douglas. A Rating System for Science, Credenda Agenda Vol 9 no 1. ]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAXmzVwKSTg

For many centuries science was a mixture of philosophy, mathematics and observation largely practiced for interest and enjoyment. Where hypotheses were put forward to explain observations they were accepted largely on their appeal to reason and aesthetics, rather than on their ability to stand experimental testing. Aristotle’s physics was thus able to reign supreme for close to two thousand years. When Roger Bacon, who is widely regarded as the “Father of Modern Science” proposed the “scientific method” he faced opposition and even imprisonment from the established Catholic Church, which accepted philosophy as the way to truth. But Bacon pointed out that nature carries “the stamp of the Creator Himself”, whereas our reason carries “the stamp of our own image”, and that “we will have it that all things are as we in our folly think they should be”. He therefore stressed the importance of experiment, observation and exact measurement. (source)

Francis Bacon received his education at Trinity College, Cambridge, and went on to practice law. During his lifetime, Bacon achieved high-ranking political positions. He became Solicitor-General in 1607, Attorney-General in 1613, Lord Keeper of the Seal in 1617 and, finally Lord Chancellor in 1618, after which he fell victim to the charges of corruption. Francis Bacon was, in a sense, a breath of fresh air for philosophy and a pioneer for a new system which discarded two major schools of thought at that time.

1. Firstly, he regarded the rationalists as flawed because they believed that language, the meaning and content of words, were the path to knowledge. In “Sir Francis Bacon,” Jeremy Harwood quotes Bacon’s description of the rationalist who were, he claimed: “spiders which make cobwebs out of their own substance.”
2. Secondly, he had no approving words for Aristotelians, who, he believed, “ran around like ants to amass raw data.” The trouble was, they had no meaningful way of interpreting that information.

He encouraged proving a hypothesis through the means of experiment, but he also advocated not being afraid to disprove such a hypothesis. A negative result could be as useful as a positive one. Jeremy Harwood in “Sir Francis Bacon” explains: “If a definition is correct, it cannot contain any negative instances. Therefore, a negative result is the only way of knowing for certain that an assumption is false.” “He believed that science,” says Harwood, “if properly understood, offered humanity its best possibility of understanding the natural world and, by so doing, becoming master of it.”

Disagree with him on some things as you may, Bacon was the ultimate Philosopher of Science, always maintaining that truth could not be reached through mere argument, and that only his new, revolutionary scientific method could advance scientific knowledge and truth. (Source)

In the video above, Dr. Phillip Stott breaks down Bacon’s scientific method as:

As Albert Einstein said: “What can be measured is science, everything else is speculation.” Dr. Stott also points out how the Greek philosophers who studied science and astronomy and many other things took measurements, but did not experiment and test their conclusions. Once Bacon’s scientific method was introduced during the Renaissance period, many philosophies that were previous believed had to be abandoned because they could be tested and proven right or wrong.

Tyco Brahe had spent most of his life building mechanisms to measure the movement of the sun, moon, and stars and recorded the most precise measurements of anyone up to well beyond his own years. Johannes Kepler, his assistant, dedicated his life to studying these measurements and looking for patterns in those observations and measurements. Eventually he found the pattern in those measurements and deduced that the planets orbit the sun with an elliptical orbit. When he discovered it, he rejoiced, “Isn’t it wonderful that God made such a wonderful planet!” Kepler is famous for his statement, “The privilege of a scientist is to think God’s thoughts.”

Dr. Stott explains how science was only possible in the beginning in the Judaeo-Christian societies that believed in an orderly, single Creator of all things. Those societies that believed in multiple gods, or no God, did not accept science until it was shown to work and advance understanding, technologies, etc. based on the scientific work of Christian scientists such as Euler, Maxwell, and Newton, and others. He explains:

Science and Christianity have an intertwined history. Even atheist historians of science find themselves having to admit that it was only under the Christian worldview that one could expect nature to behave in a way that would make science a reasonable pursuit. In spite of the fact that some steps towards a beginning in science had been taken by other cultures, it was only in the Christian culture of Europe, and in particular that of Reformation Europe, that science came to fruition.

The great pioneers of science, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, Euler, Maxwell, Faraday, Kelvin and many others professed Christianity and accepted the Bible as God’s revelation to mankind. Many spent much time studying the Scriptures. Newton claimed the most important aspect of his work was in showing the greatness of God. Maxwell noted that his great pioneering work in field theory was inspired by the Scriptural revelation of the way God himself is and works.

But during the twentieth century science was taken over to a very large extent by secular humanists. Such a world-view actually has no rational basis for expecting science to succeed. Yet secular humanists have cultivated the idea that science is essentially an atheistic domain which is at loggerheads with Christianity.

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