On The Myths Of Scientism

I was delighted to learn, via Hans Schantz’s Podcast: Sir Francis Bacon – Father of Scientism?, of the paper “The New Universal Church” by the late French mathematician Alexander Grothendieck.

The Church Grothendieck identifies is scientism, which is indeed universal among elites the world over. As a religion, scientism has its own founding myths (used in the old and not new meaning of the word). Grothendieck counts six and steps through each. My favorites, for I think two are the same, explain how we devolved into an expertocracy as our form of government.

Myth 1: Only scientific knowledge is true or real knowledge; that is, only knowledge which can be expressed quantitatively, or formalized, or repeated at will under laboratory conditions, can be the content of true knowledge. “True” or “real” knowledge, sometimes called “objective” knowledge, may be defined as universal knowledge, which holds at all times, places, and for all people, independently of societies and particular forms of culture.

Call this myth Purposeful Blindness. Science agrees to look into Nature so far and no farther. It leaves origins veiled, and forbids its practitioners from peeking under those veils. It bars the Voice of God, and instead creates gods to take his place.

Take questions like Where do “laws” come from? Thou shalt not ask! There is one obvious answer. It is eschewed. Scientists are only allowed to offer Blind-eye theories, like multiverses, worlds in which unseen gods pick laws and “constants” from sets of these things, while scientists pretend this is sufficient, ignoring how all this can happen or how the sets come into and stay in existence. All science says zip-a-dee-doo-dah about why anything at all exists rather than Nothing.

Mathematicians cannot prove their axioms under laboratory conditions; neither can logicians so explain logic. Evolutionists cannot so explain why the reason and rationality necessary to science (and to explain “evolution”) ought to be trusted. All these require leaps of faith: indeed, all knowledge rests on faith at base.

Myth 2: Whatever can be expressed in quantitative terms, or can be repeated under laboratory conditions, is an object of scientific knowledge and ipso facto valid and acceptable. In other words, truth (with its traditional value content) is identical with knowledge, that is, with scientific knowledge.

Call this myth Quantifying the Unquantifiable. How beautiful is today’s post art on a scale of -42 to 132.7? In increments of the square root of pi/2. You cannot even define beauty without great effort, none of it scientific, let alone quantify it uniquely and definitively. Yet you must apply numbers to it to turn it into science. Which happens and which produces vast over-certainty.

The other option, and the one demanded by logic, is to deny beauty exists. And this happens by scientists who understand logical consistently, even though in that way lays madness. “We are nothing but collections of blind atoms!” Which, of course, is not provable by any experiment. It, too, is a matter of faith. And faith cannot be quantified, which fact alone invalidates the myth.

Myth 3: The “mechanistic” or “formalistic” or “analytic” view of nature: Science’s dream. Atoms and molecules and their combinations can be completely described in terms of the mathematical laws of particle physics; cellular life in terms of molecules; higher organisms in terms of their constituent cells; thought and mind (including all types of psychic experience) in terms of neuron circuits; human or animal societies, and human cultures, in terms of their constituent members.

Call this myth The Machine. This one ultimately leads to embarrassments like major scientists running around spouting, “I’m an illusion! I’m an illusion! I have no free will! And neither do you!” Well, who are we to doubt them?

We’ve already many times discussed how things are in the world are obviously, and provably, not sums of their parts. Life especially is not a machine, however useful this metaphor is in building machines. This is related to the first myth, because there is no way for the Great Machine which this myth envisions to have created itself. Which, of course, it must have, otherwise there is no Great Machine.

Myth 4: The role of the expert. Knowledge, both for its development and its dissemination through teaching must be split into many fragments or special fields: first the broad fields such as mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, sociology, psychology, etc., which are then subdivided ad libitum as science advances. Only the opinion of the experts in a given field has any bearing on any question in this field. It several fields are involved, only the collective opinion of experts in these fields is to be considered.

His name is good, but I like myth of the Expert better. Beyond his accurate deductions, another theorem of the myth is that only Experts get to decide who is or can become an Expert. Hence credentialism. This, paradoxically, is felt most keenly in those areas in which science knows least. Like medicine. What life exists, or why we exist, are not questions science can answer. People’s often appalling fear of losing their own life is why they eagerly embrace the scientism of Experts in medicine (doctors), and insist through all manner of legal and extra-legal enforcements that this particular Expert should be accorded the widest latitude and powers of restriction. Hence the covid panic. And, of course, much more like that panic.

Nobody much cares about turnip Experts, though they exist. If a turnip non-Expert proposes a new way of growing turnips bug-free, many will listen and even try the suggestion. Nobody will prevent them. Nobody will propose legislation to prohibit the practice of turnip lore without a license. Unless this new method encroaches on the turf (good pun!) of other Experts devoted to “the environment”, which itself is scarcely well defined. Then the aggrieved Experts will pounce.

Myth 5: Science and the technology derived from science, and they alone, will solve mankind’s problems. This applies equally to purely human problems, notably to psychological, moral, social, and political problems.

Call this myth Salvific Toys. If only the Miracle Ear lived up to its name, boy, would life be perfect. Or the Miracle Knee, or Heart, or a phone that downloads twice as fast, or we got off planet, or all the slick new electronic distractions were free, Free, FREE! Then we’d have figured out the Meaning Of Life, and live it.

There are no toys, no pills, coming to save you. No, not on this planet and not on the next. Even the goofy idea of uploading the state of your neurons to the “Cloud”, and constructing an impossible complex algorithm that steps through successive states to simulate “you” won’t save you. Because then you have to worry about power outages and lightning and hurricanes and meteors and data corruption and you’d have to hope beyond hope the robots you’ve left in charge of tending to the generators don’t become bored with their duty, or wear out. Even if the mystical Cloud worked, you have merely translated your problem, not solved it.

Science cannot help you understand why you are here. It seems, to quote pop culture, you are not just hear to swim and eat and make baby humans, and that’s it. There’s something more. Science does not know what it is.

Myth 6: The experts alone are qualified to make decisions, as only the experts “know”.

All religions have their priesthoods, as does scientism. This one belongs with the Myth of the Expert.

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