The scientific "revolution" was meant to challenge vain traditions and empty faith, particularly a faith in religious superstition. But today, Enlightenment ideas like "reason" and "science" have flipped into their opposites. Science and technology have become so pervasive and distorted that they've turned into a new type of theology.
- Ian Bogost [altered]
Why create a society based on science and technology where no-one knows anything about science nor technology?
- The Greek
People say "science" in the same way they say "modern", as if handling words made of the finest porcelain. Dazzled by the technological novelties of our time, like a toddler presented with a shiny object, the world has been made to accept the imperatives of the Scientific Age. Firstly, to venerate Science as the only valid means of inquiry into the natural world. Secondly, to insist on the creation of new technological products. Thirdly, to surrender to this ideology without ever considering its consequences or contradictions. And the reward for their undiscerning, dewy-eyed loyalty? An assortment of the finest comforts that Industry has to offer: cars, smartphones, air conditioning, planes, indoor toilets, video games, the Internet, and whatever other conveniences that technocrats and scientists see fit to produce.
No reasonable person will deny that science and technology have brought benefits, even if some of them turn out to be somewhat ambiguous in the long term. But the idea of a relentless forward-march towards Progress, guided by the aides of Science & Technology, has become one of modernity's sacred cows. The conventional notion is that whilst Tradition, much like Religion, is an artifact of the past that survived only due to nostalgia and irrationality, Progress is what will take us into the Future, a place liberated from the fetters of dogma. There, man will finally cast aside old superstitions in pursuit of true enlightenment and happiness. So pervasive is this idea that it's become almost invisible, like the air pollution city dwellers become accustomed to. But if there was really any truth to such an idea of Progress, then it would first entail an understanding of history and its lessons; one cannot postulate about a future utopia whilst being ignorant of the past. But for whatever reason, Western science has remained stubbornly resistant to some of the antiquity's most important lessons. This can be seen in a field like health care, where the full weight of governments is thrown behind a pharmaceutical industry that disregards the field of non-allopathic medicine, and in chemistry, where well-documented concepts such as Greek Fire are still debated or ignored. Never mind ancient applications of electricity, as explored by the likes of Nikola Tesla or J J Thompson, which remain buried under their more mundane contributions.
The overall attitude of the scientific establishment towards the past ranges from wide-eyed ignorance to open contempt. Reasons for this include the enduring legacy of the Enlightenment, the chokehold of evolutionary theory on human origins, and the tenacious attachment to the notion of Progress. But this "Progress" is nothing more than one of modernity's dogmas - in other words, a thing which is not thought of as dogmatic. For example, it's considered dogmatic for religions to preach the perfection of humanity in the afterlife, but it's not thought dogmatic to assume the perfection of man in this world under the guiding influence of science and rationalism, even though the idea of Progress is as poorly elaborated as that of the afterlife.
Within Western philosophy, one can detect a line of thought that runs all the way from 17th century intellectuals to current-day academics. It claims to utilize science as a means to not only seek new knowledge, but also to nullify religion, whilst professing to be everything religion is not: rational, curious, unbiased and objective. René Descartes, Nicolaus Copernicus and Galileo were some of its seminal figures, whose writings helped usher in the Scientific Revolution alongside the Enlightenment. Science, as posited by these writers, is escorted on one side by "empiricism", which provides its intellectual underpinnings, and by "technology" on the other, as its field of application. The triumph of this outlook was more or less complete by the 20th century, and is now championed by academia and humanists as the most reliable pathway to Truth, or at least as the best way to understand objective reality. But alas, if one wishes to expel religion from a civilization, one can only do it by means of another system of equally restrictive doctrines, which would have to assume all the same psychological characteristics as a religion - the same sanctity, prejudice and prohibition of thought.
When we speak of "science", we must distinguish its procedures, like the scientific method, from the institutions of science. The latter can hardly be called "science" at all, being a collection of disciplines like "physics" and "biology" that are built on very specific assumptions about the natural world and how it should be explored. It would be impossible to separate the practices of these institutionalized fields from the ideology behind them. This ideology can be referred to by the term "Scientism", where the suffix
"-ism" is used to signify a pre-packaged belief system.
Since the Enlightenment, the prevailing worldview of Western intelligentsia has been built on the premises of this "Scientism". One of its central tenets is the assumption that modern science makes full provision for any inquiry into the natural world, and needn't be answerable to anything outside of itself. This relatively new ideology stands at odds with the historical view that a larger framework of philosophy or supernatural awareness was required to succeed in such endeavors. By its very nature, modern science is unable to fathom any realities outside of the physical world, and thus "Science", a method of inquiry, became "Scientism", an ideology, in that it refused to acknowledge the limits of its own competence. Instead, it championed "empiricism" as its bedrock, as if by magic the notion of empiricism could be proven empirically. According to empiricists, nothing other than direct observation is trustworthy, but the only argument consistent with such a claim is circular: "I observe that observation is accurate, therefore it is accurate ". A logical fallacy if there ever was one.
Prior to the 19th century, "science" just meant "knowledge" or "learning", as determined by its Latin etymology. A more accurate understanding of science can be found as far back as the time of Aristotle, in the field of "natural philosophy". The term remained in common use well into the 1800s, as seen in books like Isaac Newton's "Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy" (1687) and William Thompson's "Treatise on Natural Philosophy" (1867). In Ancient Greece and Rome, different terms existed to designate those who pursued understanding of the natural world. The Physicus was one who sought to understand not only the material composition of things, but their true nature, as indicated in the book "Physicus" by Antisthenes, and the names of people like Strato Physicus, who were devoted to the field. The modern term of "physics" has little to do with understanding the nature of things. Today's "physics" merely concerns itself with matter and its principles of change, such as differences in velocity, weight and density; a far cry from unearthing information on the "nature" of objects.
Beyond just the issue of nomenclature, there also exists anomalies within the scientific fields themselves. Granted, disciplines like chemistry and biology have been applicable within industries like medicine and engineering, hence the term "applied science", but if one moves away from the "applied" realm and examines them instead as "natural science", removed from their industrial utility, the orthodoxy of these fields starts to raise questions. For example, within health care and medicine, very little is said about the notion of the biological vacuum, as elaborated by Viktor Schauberger in the mid-20th century. Though much of his research was concerned with the properties of water, one of the implications of his findings was that all living things are reliant upon an internal vacuum condition for their sustenance, that is, negative pressure within the body. To underscore this concept, we can look at what happens when human skin is punctured: when wounds are obtained on the surface of the skin, blood flows out - but not immediately. Between the moment of injury and the bleeding, there's a pause of a second or two where nothing appears to happen, and only afterwards does blood flow out. If the fluids in the body were primarily flowing under positive pressure, such as blood pressure, then blood would gush out of a wound immediately, much like a punctured tire or balloon expels air instantly. But since the pressure within the body is less than that of the surrounding atmosphere, the differential first has to equalize after the wound occurs, which cancels out the internal vacuum condition in that area of the body. Only after the pressure difference has balanced out does blood flow out. All biological lifeforms can be shown to operate under such an inwardly contractive force - a force which is intimately tied to the functions of all living things. Yet contemporary academia, the field of medicine, and the broader discipline of biology have failed to acknowledge this reality in sufficient measure, as if such a condition would not have far-reaching effects on mankind's understanding. Would such a critical oversight even be possible unless the religious dogma of Scientism didn't have such an iron grip on the minds of its adherents, even as the most obvious of truths stare them in the face?
Scientism is one of the primary columns that holds up the temple of Modernity, so it's not surprising how aggressively it must be defended. But ultimately, it has nothing to do with science, nor its progenitor of natural philosophy. It's an autonomous worldview, having gone so far as to become the pseudo-religion of the modern world. However, none of this is to say that one should be blind to the benefits of new technologies. This article was typed on a computer, whose advantages over a typewriter are considerable. But even though Scientism has bestowed us with an array of conveniences and revealed much information about the natural world, it has also supplanted a previous knowledge which outreached it: that which concerned the realm of the non-physical. The problem was never that the physical world had nothing to say about the non-physical, but that academia in its haste to usher in the Enlightenment did not care to listen to such notions, and still doesn't. Rather than learn from ancient texts and indigenous cultures about the supernatural, the adherents of Scientism are more interested in contriving theories about it. They are possessed by a love of hearing their own voices babbling about reality, rather than listening to those who evidently know better. The situation would be laughable were it not so lamentable. All that remains is to wait for the dawn of a New Enlightenment to puncture the pretensions of the old one, however bleak such a prospect currently seems.
Greekspeek for thought
Ever since the early 20th century, all we've had is "scientism", which is a fraudulent invention. Centuries ago, those who are now being called "scientists" were not so.
They were called "natural philosophers", being either vitalists or materialists, which has little to do with today's "science".
Why is science so full of theories? People are getting into a lot of student debt to learn "theories". Shouldn't a theory be followed by an "experiment" and a "conclusion"?
So why won't the scientists complete their job?
Would you like me to take you out for some "theoretical" lunch?
The theory of evolution is a statistician's nightmare.
It's full of "ifs " and "maybies ". No wonder it's just a theory.
It's full of statements like, "What IF a certain chemical emerged that created a genetic change..." or "IF this change came about, THEN bla bla ". And the odds are always something like one out of a trillion.
So in aggregate the chances are 1 trillion times 1 trillion? These guys are idiots. And why are they always using terms like "design" and "create"? I wonder where they got that from? Didn't the ancient Pharaohs used to tell the Egyptian people that they evolved out of slime from the Nile, and that the Pharaoh "created" them from that?
Saying that the universe came from an explosion in space is like saying that Webster's dictionary came from an explosion in a printing factory.
You're not going to find any fossils of giraffes. Isn't that strange?
Do you really think those animals are that old?
Why aren't these things talked about?
Today's scientists are just doing grunt work.
That's why it's so easy to debunk their stuff.
Scientists only discuss dead things. If you detach a cell from its host, it instantly starts to die. Everyone knows that. So what do scientists do? They extract tissue and blood from a living host in order to examine it in their labs. Is that what you want to call "biology"?
The heart pumps blood? Really? So what pumps the heart?
What do medical students work with in order to get their hands-on experience? Corpses. They cut open and examine dead people.
That means the "medical field" is comprised of millions of morticians running around claiming that they're qualified to treat living patients.
What allows you to stand up and walk across the room?
Scientists will only go so far so as to describe your body like a hydraulic-electric machine, but they can't define how life is being imbued into it.
The medical industry worships death. It’s like saying, “We want to study goats, so we’re gonna blow them up”, or “We want to study fish, so we’re going to remove them from their natural habitat and dissect them”. Isn’t that what they do with humans? Dissect them?
All of your medicine is based on the study of the chemical decomposition of cadavers. What does that have to do with the health of living humans? Once you remove physical tissue from the host being, it’s no longer regeneratative and goes into chemical decomposition. That’s why all their drugs are based on chemicals, instead of holistic approaches to health.
The reason why people are living longer is due to improved sanitation, not the direct intervention of the medical community.
