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Scientism, Schmientism - whatever it is, it sure ain’t Science. Vic Biorseth, http://www.Thinking-Catholic-Strategic-Center.com This is written in partial response to perceived threat of the Redirection previously discussed in the American Redirection article. This article treats only the SANE-supplied vision of the Science-Scientism contention only; another article will speak to the Democracy/Open Society part of it. There is much said these days about the word Scientism being a purely rhetorical term invented by Creationists as a straw-man villain, of use in opposing the supposedly scientific theory of Darwinism, or, Darwin’s conjectures - guesses - regarding speciation. We are told by experts that there really is no such thing as scientism, and I suppose that’s true enough. Obviously, it’s a purely rhetorical term, just like the term homophobia. However, Scientism remains a useful term, and Creationists are not the only ones who use it. In fact, probably most of us who use it may not be described as Creationists, or even as people who hold to any alternative theory at all regarding how the species came to be. Having a hard and fast “scientific” theory regarding speciation is of much greater importance to devout atheists and other forms of fundamentalists than it is to me; I don’t really worry too much about how the species came about. The uncritical embracing of theories quite obviously without scientific foundation raises questions regarding the professional and/or scientific qualifications of majority membership in such diverse fields as archeology, medicine, psychoanalysis, education, biology and many others. The list today is almost endless. How many, in each of these fields and in many others, reveal in their daily language and terminology how they casually embrace such notions as
You can see some of these topics in more depth at the various links below: The Darwinism Page Now, the opponents of the term scientism generally wind up reducing the meaning of “science” to being delimited by the boundaries of the so-called hard sciences, such as mathematics, physics, chemistry, and “mathematical physics,” whatever that is. The interesting thing is that these fields and their practitioners are the least likely to ever be rhetorically associated with the term scientism, by those of us who use the term, or even those who may injudiciously throw the term about. No one in his right mind would call an Archimedes or a Newton or an Einstein unscientific, and that is precisely what the purely rhetorical term scientism is intended to do. Is medicine a science? Is an MD a scientist? Many of them seem to think so, and the image their professional organizations portray is, predominantly, scientific. Free commerce knows this image, and that’s why whenever you see a commercial hawking a pill or treatment or health aid, the guy on the screen will be wearing a lab coat and have the obligatory stethoscope badge of office hanging around his neck, laying over his shoulder or generously protruding from a lab coat pocket. Image is everything. Like I said, I don’t worry too much about the mechanics of how the various species came to be; but that cannot be said of the fiercest opponents of the term Scientism. Indeed, many of them will defend, virtually to the death, Darwin’s silly notions as being not only somehow scientific, but as comprising an actual scientific theory. Which calls into question the scientific qualifications of whole “scientific” fields, such as biological evolution, paleontology and archeology. It’s interesting that these giant “scientific” fields of study exist and thrive everywhere today despite the simple fact that, in all of recorded history, no solid empirical evidence has ever been produced to support Darwin’s theory. Darwin’s so-called scientific theory says that, GESGEAEOT, tiny mutations occur, those for the better survive, others do not, and, eventually, GESGEAEOT, a new mutant strain may still reproduce itself but can no longer reproduce with the parent species from which it mutated. Poof. A new species. What the massive, huge, colossal fossil record shows is something else: the term for it is Stasis, and it means, the species do not change. Everywhere you look in the fossil record, you find stasis, stasis, stasis. Darwin said that failure and/or intermediary species absolutely must outnumber successful species. The fossil record shows no failure and no intermediary species. Stasis, stasis, stasis. The species do not change. Completely and fully formed species suddenly appear in the record, live their millions of years absolutely unchanged, and then disappear. Natural Selection is supposed to be the tool of evolution by which only the best suited to the environment and the most capable of reproduction survive to pass on their characteristics to future generations. Survival of the fittest. But the sole evidence of this piece of the theory is the tautological or circular argument that says
Mutations invariably demonstrate less, not more, genetic material than the parent sets, which means a lower and more limited future possibility of future variation. Devolution rather than evolution. From the more complex to the more simple, and never, ever, the other way around. Practitioners of scientism who, on seeing the clear fossil record of stasis regarding the species, and reject the GESGEAEOT “fundamentalist” Darwinian theory in favor of the newer PEWAG Darwinian theory are similarly undone by the fossil record. Species just appear, fully formed, with nothing in the fossil record for them to have mass-mutated from. We’re not talking about something that just appears here and there in the fossil record; we’re talking about every single case, with no exceptions. The same is true of parts or portions of beings, meaning structures or organs such as hands or wings or eyes or sex organs or claws or lungs. In every case, they appear fully formed and fully functional. Using the Nautilus as an example, it suddenly appears in the fossil record with a fully formed set of eyeballs, fully formed tentacles, fully formed everything, lives its millions of years absolutely unchanged, and then goes extinct. Just like everything else in the fossil record. No one has ever seen any “light sensitive spot” or “pre-eyeball” any more than anyone has ever seen a “sex sensitive spot” or pre-sex organ, male or female. The theoretical light sensitive spot, just like every other aspect of Darwinian speciation dogma, was hypothesized and guessed into being, never verified, never even observed, but immediately embraced by all of TTRSTF in a completely unscientific way, by immediate knee-jerk consensus. Which is the whole of how practitioners of Scientism do what they pretend is science today. How do we know that the globe is warming, and that that warming is due to human activity? By poll. Proponents can say, often truthfully, that there are more of TTRSTF who agree with that Scientisic notion than disagree with it. It’s seen to be Democracy in action, even though it does not even involve a legal ballot yet, but only a purely unscientific poll. It’s how we know that the perfectly harmless HIV retrovirus is able to morph or “evolve” into AIDS, and how it miraculously rapidly “evolves” new defenses against ever increasingly expensive serums and vaccines. By poll. By consensus. That’s it. And what is popularly accepted is pure hypothesis and nothing else. No observation. No experiment. No independent verification. All peer review of published theory strictly limited to subjective agreement with hypothesis. No application of Popper’s rule of Falsifiability. Nothing but a pure conjecture and subjective opinion. Note well that it is Darwin’s unproven theory that is legally mandated to be taught in the same government schools in which all competing theories are legally censored. If what I am saying here is wrong, I challenge you to prove it by producing any empirical evidence at all supporting Darwin’s theory on speciation. If you cannot do that, then your inability to do so proves conclusively that Darwin’s theory on speciation is false, and deserves no consideration as a viable hypothesis, let alone scientific theory. Right? Yet the preponderance of Scientistic heads continue to bobble in idiotic unison, and just about all of academia, and all of the SLIMC, and most of the rest of show-biz, can be expected to bobble and nod in lockstep with all the rest of the bobble-headed idiots promoting this crap. They are exactly and precisely as scientific as are any other bobble-headed dolls you can find anywhere. Yes, my dear reader, there is indeed such a thing as Scientism.
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