INTRODUCTION
America lumbers under the great burden of dogma, yoked to a plow heavier than it can bear. The dogma is such: that all things can be, or one day may be, explained with science. It may be surprising to some to hear this outlook called a dogma—for all who live comfortably in dogma recognize it not as what it is, but as Truth.1 Of course, "all men by nature desire to know,"2 and I speak in the hope that you, dear reader, assent to this, but I offer another reason to care: if we do not learn the true empathy which is gained in throwing off dogma, we will never learn to really love one another (or ourselves), and America's division will never heal.
EXOTERIC SCIENTIST THOUGHT
The first thing to do is to refine our understanding of Scientism. In its most obvious layer, it is a fundamental epistemology: statements (hypotheses) are proven as True through a process called science. This process now has the form of a very specific structure where experiments following certain standards are undertaken, from which “papers” are structured in a certain way, with “abstracts,” “methods,” and “results.” They are written in a certain way, either under or as a professor (a position denoting one as having enough understanding of the dogma to teach it). They are verified in a certain way, where other experts of the dogma ensure that one’s paper hews close enough to orthodoxy to be a possible crenulation in its tower. It is then published in an accepted arbiter and enters the record. It is a mildly arcane system, but its machinations do not need to be known to the public. To them, the people who determine Truth are “scientists,” and they perform “science.”
Scientism in this exoteric form provides a hierarchical structure of Truth for its adherents. There is a community of scientists which organize themselves into several different organizations. These organizations have different specialties and sometimes different goals, but they usually do not disagree as much as any two given Christian sects. NASA is about as trustworthy as CNSA, which is about as trustworthy as the WHO or Stanford or any other Scientist organization. When one organization speaks, its statements become True for mainstream Scientists.
Occasionally, these organizations do disagree. They never disagree greatly, and individuals who do so greatly are branded heretics, or “cranks,” and disregarded. One of the beautiful and convincing flourishes of science is that continuing the process can confirm or reject a statement made. So, for instance, if one group claims to have made a superconductor which works at high temperatures, another group or two can attempt to replicate their process and find their error. For lay Scientists, a controversial matter can simply be considered unresolved until a majority opinion forms among the organizations.
The hierarchical nature of Scientism is fairly obvious, and one might count it as a separate layer from the first one discussed, where Truth is simply created. This layer is the communication of Truth to the masses. Many Scientists (and this is more common among the laity) do not recognize this as a separate phenomenon, or recognize it only in limited capacity. A key component of Scientist thought is that Truth is observed directly in material phenomena. Any observer, then, may theoretically be an equally valid source of Truth. This means that a picture from NASA showing the Earth almost has the character of first-hand experience for the lay Scientist. If they had the resources, they could have come to the same picture.
“Science communicators,” like Bill Nye or Neil deGrasse Tyson are not, under this conception, middlemen in the hierarchy. They are instead something like translators who speak the language of deep science and render it accessible to the layperson. They are intermediaries between fundamental equals. This is, of course, not true. Lay Scientists frequently defer to organizational Science in practice, accepting concepts such as atoms despite never having come across a situation where they are necessary to explain the phenomena. Their personal experience of continuous matter is superseded by a theory which is compatible but unnecessary, because someone higher in the hierarchy has told them that it is True.
This is one of the schisms which is a necessary consequence of not understanding one’s position properly. That hierarchy is inherent to Science does not necessarily pose a problem for its functioning, but by its common elision, many Scientists are led to cognitive dissonance. They might think both that organizational Scientists are right because those Scientists are observers with equal validity and that they themselves are wrong because the organizational Scientists have arcane knowledge which privileges them as observers. This position is less common among more thoughtful Scientists because their epistemology does not even allegedly stem from equality.
The exact epistemology of thoughtful Scientists is a matter which has received much writing and debate. A common form nowadays is “falsifiability.” A succinct depiction of this mode is such: the simplest theory which accounts for all relevant evidence is True, until new evidence which disconfirms it is presented. An example of this movement in action can be seen in the movement from Newtonian to relativistic physics. The observation that the speed of light was never measured differently was problematic for the wave conception of light, as a body moving through the light medium would register the speed of light differently under Newtonian physics. Lorentz saved this within the Newtonian system by hypothesizing that lengths may contract by movement through the light medium. Einstein thought that this was now an overly complex theory, accounting for things which had no evidence except theoretical requirements (the light medium) and sought a theory which could comprehend both Newtonian physics and the constancy of the speed of light in a way which relied on as few suppositions as possible. The result was special relativity, which, as the velocity of bodies approached 0, collapsed into Newtonian physics. Its ability to comprehend both of these observations in one elegant system of equations led to its widespread adoption. Newtonian physics had been falsified, in a sense, and replaced with a new system which explained its appearances and comprehended new evidence.
This process of falsifiability corresponds to the creation layer of Science as is understood by thoughtful Scientists, whereas unthoughtful Scientists see it as mere observation. The communication layer is recognized by thoughtful Scientists as an important part of the structure of the Scientist system, to communicate the state of the art to the masses, but it is ignored by unthoughtful Scientists. These are both frequently recognized as characteristics of the Scientist system, and one or both of them are considered by almost all to comprise its entirety.
ESOTERIC SCIENTIST THOUGHT
There is another layer of Scientist thought, however. Inescapably, humanity cognizes through relating symbols. We connect the compound symbol of “two plus two” with the symbol of “four,” with the type of relation being equality, itself denoted by the symbol of “equals.” We use for this a certain system of symbols which we symbolize by the name “math.” These systems are undefinable. As no symbol is perfectly reducible to another, neither can a symbol be represented by a combination of other symbols. No exhaustive list of symbols exists which describes the system denoted by “math.” Because they are undefinable, each person builds their own conception of the system. I term this conception an aesthetic. It is entirely possible to make something entirely illogical which looks like math, which may even appear to be valid math, because it suits one’s aesthetic of math.3
Just as there is an aesthetic of math, there is an aesthetic of Science. This hidden, vital layer of Scientist thought is the key to understanding what Scientism really means to its adherents. To a Scientist, the Scientist aesthetic is legitimizing. There is an obvious sense of an aesthetic to Science: beakers, lab coats, rockets, atoms, fossils, and so on. Even the structure of a paper is part of the aesthetic. None of these things are the process of science, though they may be involved, but they do imply the process.
To make it clear: to a Scientist, there is an aesthetic to Truth. If one dresses their claim sufficiently in this aesthetic, a Scientist will be4 likely to believe in it. If a claim falls too far outside of this aesthetic, a Scientist will be likely to disbelieve it. This aesthetic is the primary, instinctual method of evaluation of a claim. Something at the edges of the aesthetic may receive further investigation to determine if it makes sense or not, but this is a much rarer mode of evaluation. This can lead to belief in claims which are not a genuine part of the Scientist canon among mainstream (particularly lay) Scientists, such as the multiverse, because they carry the aesthetic of Science.
It is important to recognize the role that aesthetics play in dispersing Truth among ideologies to account for their beliefs. Most people do not investigate claims for themselves. This is not necessarily a problem—most people are not and will never be a philosopher. They find an aesthetic to trust and work backwards from there. Aesthetics are the immanent person’s sole verification of knowledge.
SHADOW SCIENTISTS
Scientism has its own system of heresies. They are called by practitioners: “pseudoscience.” Pseudoscience is a pejorative term for a belief which does not fall under the aesthetic Scientist canon. It is most aptly applied to non-mainstream Scientists, such as parapsychologists and certain flat-earthers, but it is frequently applied to many who do not rely on Scientist precepts for validity, such as Chinese medicine practitioners.5
I want to call these heretics “Shadow Scientists,” as in a Jungian shadow. The shadow is the part of the soul which is actively repressed by the ego, as Shadow Scientists are repressed by mainstream Scientists. They commonly define themselves in opposition to mainstream Scientism once they are rejected by it and come to greatly distrust organizational Scientism. This poses a problem for unthoughtful Scientists when they attempt to communicate with Shadow Scientists. A Shadow Scientist may well be better-educated and more philosophically grounded than a Scientist, but the Scientist, seeing the rejection of their hierarchy (without necessarily a rejection of their aesthetic), assumes that the Shadow Scientist lacks understanding of mainstream Scientism, for there could be no other reason to hold another belief. This leads to the common and disappointing phenomenon of Scientists attempting to disprove Shadow Scientists using the words or evidence of organizational Scientism, such as showing a picture from the ISS to a flat earther to attempt to prove the globular Earth. This approach will inherently never work, because the Shadow Scientist has already rejected organizational Scientism as an unerring source of Truth.
Shadow Scientists, such as parapsychologists, still dress their claims in the aesthetics of Scientism. Papers on parapsychology often fulfill all of the aesthetic criteria of Scientism. They have well-controlled experiments with the same statistical analyses demonstrating improbability of random chance, sorted into abstracts and methods and conclusions. One may ask, then, why are Shadow Scientists not taken seriously by mainstream Scientists?
There are two types of Shadow Scientists. One is those whose field of research and set of hypotheses are not actually in conflict with mainstream Scientist thought; their claims have not been falsified. An example of such a Shadow Scientist is Rupert Sheldrake, whose theory of morphic resonance has received much criticism, most of it knee-jerk. Let us call them the “outsider type.” This type is rejected on an aesthetic basis. They are of the “Woo” or somesuch, and are considered too far outside of the scope of Scientist aesthetics to possibly be working in the same system. What symbols fall into an aesthetic is ultimately personal, though greatly mediated by culture, so there can be great difficulty in changing someone’s mind on aesthetic judgements. It is not impossible to expand one’s aesthetic. This process is a very regular occurrence in education, such as the inclusion of letters into math.
The other type is genuinely anti-Science. Let us call them the “anti-Science type.” Of course, they are still Scientists themselves, but they have failed to understand science, only operating in aesthetics. These are those who hold on to falsified claims, at least under the Scientist system. It would be a mistake to dismiss this type as being less intelligent than a common mainstream Scientist, despite their existence in self-error. Many unthoughtful mainstream Scientists also exist in self-error. These types are universally unthoughtful, though. Their issue is that they either believe in an unthoughtful science communicator or have rejected the hierarchy but have not yet understood the principles of science well enough to properly analyze their claims themselves. Because they are still Scientists, they can be reasoned with within the Scientist system, so long as one is not dependent on organizational Science to do so. This may bring them into the mainstream; it may even cause them to become thoughtful Scientists.
Both of these types disagree in general very little with mainstream Scientists. They usually only disagree in restricted subjects and assent with the mainstream in most of the rest of the canon. Shadow Scientists are prone to developing more than one heterodox belief, since once organizational Scientism is rejected once, it becomes much easier to reject it again. Despite this inclination to further heterodoxy, the absolute difference between Shadow Scientists and mainstream Scientists is very small, though it is perceived as quite large, in the typical fashion of people who disagree slightly.
Despite their frequent and bloody conflicts, mainstream Scientists have found little success in stamping out the Shadow Scientists. Inquisitorial organizations such as CSI (formerly CSICOP) and communicators such as Carl Sagan dedicate a great amount of their energy to disproving Shadow Scientists. It is a shame, then, that they find so little success in it. To be sure, their results are (sometimes) resounding successes among other mainstream Scientists.6 Their failures are in actually convincing the Shadow Scientists that they are wrong. This is because they frequently approach with insufficient humility. They assume that if they just explain the position of the mainstream clearly enough, then the Shadow Scientists will have no choice but to accept their positions. Obviously, this doesn’t work, and it is because they cannot conceptualize their mission clearly while they labor under dogma.
The mission of stamping out the Shadow Scientists, framed as such, is as immoral as it is impossible. Rather, Scientists should desire to integrate the Shadow Scientists. They should do this in two ways. With the outsider type, they should commit themselves to a real investigation of the claims given by outsider Shadow Scientists. Mainstream Scientists reject the claims of these Shadow Scientists on an aesthetic basis, which is not a sufficient basis to keep themselves from cognitive dissonance. A frequent attack by mainstream Scientists on the claims of outsider Shadow Scientists is that there is “no known mechanism” by which their claim could be possible. This does not and should not pose an issue for an honest Scientist. Science involves building theories to comprehend all of the available evidence instead of ignoring some evidence for the sake of theoretic simplicity. Mainstream Scientists must either falsify or integrate the claims of outsider Shadow Scientists, instead of ignoring them.
With respect to anti-Scientists, they must also be approached with humility. Mainstream Scientists, if they believe that a Shadow Scientist is in error, must actually meet them at their level and work with them in dialogue to find where the error is. This requires a very good understanding of the Scientist system. So long as the Shadow Scientist admits to one part of it, if they are truly in error, then their error can probably be shown with something that they do admit.
By repressing Shadow Scientists, mainstream Scientists deprive themselves of the totality of their system and the Shadow Scientists of hopeful freedom from cognitive dissonance and from the pain of being silenced. If it is a moral good in the Scientist system to proselytize Truth, the advantages of Shadow Scientist integration should be obvious.
THAT DOGMATISTS ARE INCAPABLE OF APOLOGETICS
I have shown that the common approach of Scientists to Shadow Scientists is flawed. How much worse, then, is their approach to non-Scientists! Really, most Scientists, even many of the somewhat thoughtful ones, are incapable of conceiving of a framework outside of Scientism. They are only able to deal with the Shadow Scientists because the Shadow Scientists already fundamentally agree with them. They are the same kind of thinker who have only come to slightly different conclusions. They both validate the supremacy of empiricism and falsifiability. They have no need to conceptualize a different system of truth because they work in the same Scientist system. This means that, since Scientism is so predominant in America,7 they have almost no practice in engaging with someone with a different epistemology at all.
Having neither questioned their own system nor seriously confronted another with a different system, dogmatic Scientists are rendered helpless in defending Scientism. They cannot draw the line between any sort of pure a priori Truth and their dogmatic Truth, because they have never had to differentiate them. They are unused to clearly defining their axioms or fundamental assumptions.
Scientists do have an advantage, which is that science is very good at producing accurate predictions, especially of hypotheticals. In the Modern world, where prediction is power, scientists are backed in their assertion of the validity of science by real power to change the world. However, this only goes so far as to show that science has power, not that Scientism is a correct viewpoint. One can easily mix science with another fundamental framework such as Christianity, as almost all European scientists did before the 20th century.
If Scientists wished to convert others to their viewpoint, they would be best served by entering into true doubt of their view. The touch of darkness that doubt brings about is necessary to true empathy, which is necessary for a real conversation between people with different epistemologies. One must be able to affirm their own epistemology from the position of doubt in order to be able to justify it to others.
THAT SCIENTISM IS EPISTEMICALLY BASELESS
The danger to the Scientist who enters into doubt of their own position is that they will likely never come out of it again, at least not back into Scientism. I am not sure I have ever heard of a true positive convert to Scientism. I have heard of people who disavow the religion that they were raised with come to Scientism, not as a positive movement towards Scientism, drawn to its tenets, but as a negative reaction to their original religion. Scientism is so prevalent in America that it is seen as a default ideology, which they can relax to after rejecting religion. Many of the people who apparently convert to Scientism were in fact originally Scientist, with certain morals from or presentations made at another belief system.
People do not positively convert to Scientism because there is no well-founded reason to. Scientism cannot even support itself. Science has two fundamental premises: one is the assertion that measurement renders the noumena (the object-in-itself) into fully shared phenomena (the object perceived), and the other is the assertion that there are physical laws of the universe which do not change. To accept these premises is unscientific. It is impossible to say from phenomena alone (which is all that we have access to) anything about the noumena. To assert that there is a relationship requires a leap of faith. Additionally, it is impossible to say anything about the future from the past. We can say that up to this point, we have never observed the laws of physics to change. That does not mean that we can say that they will not change. Without this leap of faith, science is only a record of the past. One might also say that the assumption that there is a reality is a leap of faith, but it is made by everyone without fail, so it doesn’t seem fair to count it.8
On what basis are these leaps made in preference over another? Science is only capable of producing provisional universals, which are not universals at all. This is because even if we accept that the laws of physics do not change, it is evident that our understanding of them does change. One can never be certain that one’s inference from phenomena is in any way a complete accounting of the universe. Being incapable of producing universals, Scientism also cannot produce the ethical. Every person accepts ethics of some kind. Remembering that ethics are an “ought to,” and not a “should do” or “impelled to do,” counter-claims to the effect that evolutionary psychology may one day be able to explain ethics is insufficient. Yes, evolutionary psychology can explain “feeling like one ought to,” but if one recognizes that these are mere patterns in behavior, why would they not then be liberated to do as they please? For certainly, no matter how warm a feeling one gets about another person, if there were not a real ethical feeling, one might feel that they were free to ignore their warm fuzzies and commit murder. Scientism does not account for this important part of the fabric of the universal psychic experience.
It is a great betrayal of the self which we have come to accept: to sacrifice observed and felt psychic phenomena in favor of that which is perceived to be external. Explaining feelings, which are primary phenomena, for a reverse-Gnostic veneration of physical law. Further, what access do we have to the external world but our perception of it? We give up certain feelings of ours to value others, but on what basis do we do so?
The leaps of faith necessary for Scientism neither account for psychic phenomena nor material phenomena (again, only provisional universals). Their strongest possible argumentis that science has historically been associated with a power over the material world. What kind of reason is that? Even children do not admit that might makes right, either ethically or epistemically. Scientism as a self-contained system holds no explanatory power, only wishes and trends. From the position of doubt, it cannot hold a glimmer of hope to pull one out of the darkness. It is necessary to cast about elsewhere to find a sufficient leap of faith to make. Only then can we have a foundation to build science upon.
THAT THIS WAS ABOUT THE SOUL
As above, so below.