The Failure of Scientism

The culture of science has moved very far from its basis.

Like any other specialized group, scientific communities have outlier members who represent extreme values.

One personality defect of most scientists (by virtue of their approach) is that they can’t easily live with uncertainty.

A legitimate science “purist” is driven to accept complete uncertainty on many things (and likely will be a form of agnostic), while someone who abides by scientism believes in an almost religious power within the scientific method.

Thus, the only way a legitimately scientific mind can assert that something is, in fact, reality, is to set up all experiments while believing the following:

  1. There is a high possibility of failure.
  2. *All* possibilities are simply correlation (i.e., A, then B), and there is no causation (i.e., A causes B) without further evidence.
  3. The scientific community as a whole is as at-risk of collective bias as any individual person.

Further, a scientist will disclose absolutely every reason why their experiment might be invalid.

The Culture

The above-stated storytelling is rigorous and requires a certain level of humility that goes against how human nature is naturally inclined.

In particular, it obstructs the ability to craft a mythological framework for anything beyond what can be possibly known.

Historically, this was perfectly fine, since most scientists were Protestant Reformers. However, ever since the postmodern movement, the scientists shifted from agnosis (literally, “no knowledge” of God) to atheism (literally, “no god”).

And, since then, they have adopted many myths that are all impossible to prove without making sweeping mathematical conjectures:

  • The universe and all its matter was formed when a single thing exploded into many things on its own.
  • Over trillions of years, gravity slowly pulled matter together, which slowly became the spherical stars and planets we see today.
  • During that time, advanced stars have created all the denser matter, which propagated by exploding and landing on planets.
  • Somehow, the Earth was an unlikely formation of the exact conditions to sustain life.
  • Somehow, a meteor or electricity created life.
  • Through the death of the unfit, life slowly became more complex over millions of years.
  • Eventually, we have come to exist, with the evolutionary benefits of religion and existential thought.

When confronted with the unknowability of their claims, they typically indicate that it’s not precisely known, but that the experts are certain of it and should be trusted.

If we dig deeper, the community’s break from the religious community has generated several philosophical values that are not scientific:

  1. Common-sense experiences have zero legitimate authority.
  2. Measuring things mathematically is more important than measuring the quality of things.
  3. Nature itself is mechanical, so holistic and unknowable elements have no relevance to the information that is knowable.
  4. We are wasting our time with “why” questions, and our best answers come from “how” questions.

For this reason, most scientists are more accountants than seekers of certainty within the unknown.

The logical outcome of a few centuries of these dominating conclusions are several assertions that fundamentally can’t be proven without some degree of trust in the community’s opinions:

  1. Presuming enough technology, all things can be proven directly with the scientific method.
  2. The universe came spontaneously from pre-existing materials, which have always existed.
  3. Archaeological and geological records indicate the world is millions of years old.
  4. Humanity came into existence through millions of years of beneficial mutations, with less fit organisms dying off.
  5. Social progress only comes through secular developments, typically through advancements of the State’s power.

False Correlation

One heavy assertion by scientism is that science’s narratives are driven purely by statistical reality. Or, in other words, enough correlation demonstrates causation.

However, this simply can’t be true in any universal capacity:

  • The more ice cream sales there are, the higher the murder rate goes up.
  • M. Night Shyamalan movie box office sales correspond to newspaper sales.
  • The murder rate moves proportionally to using Internet Explorer.
  • The warmer someone eats their breakfast, the higher the chance they’ll have Alzheimer’s Disease.
  • Mexican lemon imports are directly tied to highway deaths.
  • Internet piracy scales with global temperature.
  • More Nicolas Cage movies connects to more pool drownings.

There are certainly other factors at work to demarcate truths that disregard statistical correlation, and statistical correlation without causation often means the two elements have another element contained within them. Most of the above, for example, can be simply explained by population density.

The Culture’s Blindness

Contrary to their desires, scientists are human, with all the implications that provides.

Given the scarcity we all face, scientists require money to perform their studies, which means they’re always distracted wtih a secondary purpose by their financiers.

While scientific data will never be manipulated by any self-respecting scientist, the agenda of an investor has a profound impact on how well-financed the results will be to prevent a statistical fluke, and ultimately how far the data and findings will travel.

Most scientists, in the desire for the accumulation of knowledge, will often disregard the agenda for a scientific study. This opacity generates a few motivational elements that drive the entire community:

  1. Scientists want a reputation, which means getting more scientific papers published. This means that anything which leans into the community’s bias is favored.
  2. More published scientific papers also motivates scientists to do new work instead of checking old work, which creates what is now known in the community as a “reproducibility crisis”.
  3. Sound scientific data is frequently mixed in with fraudulent data that was doctored to advance an agenda. Nobody can tell the difference.
  4. Scientific papers with significant findings are given a positive reputation through peer-review, but they are only reliable or valid when they’re peer-replicable. This is boring and labor-intensive, but it’s absolutely necessary. Unfortunately, replication is rarely fashionable.

The bias of scientific peer-reviewed papers shows through their selection process:

  1. If the paper is controversial, but advances a political opinion that’s at least somewhat fashionable, it gets published and becomes popular.
  2. If the paper legitimately reinforces existing information, it gets published, but usually won’t be news to anyone.
  3. However, if it’s random information, inconclusive, or vague, it rarely gets published or receives very little attention.
  4. Since scientists often have a bias toward trusted people in the community, the name of a scientific paper’s author has a dramatic effect on the popularity of the paper.

Unfortunately, most of the scientific community has come to trust one another beyond anything sensible for the discipline. The very essence of science-based thinking is to sow dissent by distrusting preconceived notions (and therefore The Establishment with it), with the scientific results proving empirically who is legitimately correct.

In practice, the development of the known scientific realities we now have doesn’t arise from an entire community’s relentless pursuit of truth, but arises with the same trend-based power struggle and influence that arises with any other human endeavor.

Addressing Motives

A study’s validity can first be derived from understanding why scientists performed it. The group who acquired the data determines how it could have been distorted:

  1. If the study was financed by a corporation, its conclusion will invariably lean toward the corporation’s interests, and antagonistic conclusions regarding a purpose will be defunded or buried.
  2. If the study was financed by a government, it runs the risk of being politically slanted, and will often be performed without enough resources for thorough results.
  3. If the study was independent, it will likely be *extremely* underfunded or highly biased toward an agenda, depending on who funded it and why.

However, the information about why they conduct the study is often not clearly stated, and must be inferred from other contextual elements.

Addressing Fandom

Scientism possesses a unique religious doctrine that prohibits accepting that it is, itself, a religion. In that sense, the culture behaves like a cult.

Many atheist scientists have hijacked this ideology to imply that science is a self-contained domain, but it’s a vastly connected discipline with basically everything that can be known.

Addressing Limits

Science itself can never answer many domains, and there are valid philosophical assertions that oppose scientism:

  1. Common-sense experiences prove correlation, and therefore have authority toward their results. This means causation can only serve to make the information more efficient to solve a problem.
  2. Meaning is derived through our interpretation of the quality of things, so measuring things mathematically must serve that end.
  3. Nature itself is holistic, so mechanical observation of nature is most effective at fixing things, but not in accurately studying how it works.
  4. All “how” questions are subordinate to “why” questions, meaning all science is subordinate to the philosophies that drive the purpose for science in the first place.

To save time on learning for the sake of certainty, it’s vitally important to hammer out your metaphysics before diving into science:

  • If there is no god, then the sciences have an indefinite role in exploring the farthest reaches of understanding, and therefore have an effectively infinite utility proportional to our understanding.
  • If there *is* a god, then the sciences can only exist as far as we can tangibly know things, which creates a hard limit based on our present technology.

Providing Alternatives

The irony of what we know in context to the unknown is that we acquire so many known elements that we can start assuming there’s no more need to accept the unknown within our body of known understanding.

The scientific community needs to hear alternative narratives of the same facts proven by science:

  1. Not all things are necessarily provable, no matter how far humanity advances.
  2. Humanity came into existence through another being’s creation, irrespective of how much time it took.
  3. Archaeological, geological, and anthropological records indicate a worldwide flood has happened some thousands of years ago.
  4. The universe came spontaneously from a pre-existing being, which has always existed.
  5. Social progress comes through adherence to virtue, mostly through appropriately implemented religion.

After all, we can’t rule it out until we can test it.