Yeah, I’m weird. I spent my early teens as a zombie-preoccupied militant atheist, aggressively touting the superiority of science, fostered by an overly literal prescriptivist perspective on religion, following forum users from thread to thread to call them nut jobs and dunk on their “irrational” beliefs. That kind of youth turns you into a weirdo, sorry.
Science fundamentalism, related to but distinct from scientism, is the belief that present popular consensus is infallible, discarding the essential epistemological uncertainty which tempers the scientific method. It’s, ironically, unscientific in that it confuses “contemporary models” with “absolute truth”, and thereby stifles the presentation and testing of new hypotheses. It declares any idea outside the purview of those models to be “supernatural” and thus wrong. It uses words like “proves”, which is an illogical concept outside of pure mathematics.
It forgets the history of science, the many once sacrosanct models like the aether and phlogiston (or half a dozen models of the atom) that were once considered absolute truth by the scientific minds of their day. It forgets the derision that models like germ theory and quantum mechanics faced in the scientific community at their inception. It’s the misguided conclusion that our present body of scientific knowledge has miraculously divested itself of all errors and blind spots.
This conclusion has been repeated for centuries, yet the science fundamentalist believes that we’re different now, we really know everything this time, and we could not possibly accept models that science teachers 100 years from now will humorously allude to in their introductory classes.
Science is a tool. It is extremely useful, the best tool we have for creating experimentally consistent models of the world. Those models can be shown to be incomplete. Phenomena can be measured which require them to be rewritten. It has happened many, many times before. There’s no rational reason to believe it will never happen again.
Yeah, I’m weird. I spent my early teens as a zombie-preoccupied militant atheist, aggressively touting the superiority of science, fostered by an overly literal prescriptivist perspective on religion, following forum users from thread to thread to call them nut jobs and dunk on their “irrational” beliefs. That kind of youth turns you into a weirdo, sorry.
Science fundamentalism, related to but distinct from scientism, is the belief that present popular consensus is infallible, discarding the essential epistemological uncertainty which tempers the scientific method. It’s, ironically, unscientific in that it confuses “contemporary models” with “absolute truth”, and thereby stifles the presentation and testing of new hypotheses. It declares any idea outside the purview of those models to be “supernatural” and thus wrong. It uses words like “proves”, which is an illogical concept outside of pure mathematics.
It forgets the history of science, the many once sacrosanct models like the aether and phlogiston (or half a dozen models of the atom) that were once considered absolute truth by the scientific minds of their day. It forgets the derision that models like germ theory and quantum mechanics faced in the scientific community at their inception. It’s the misguided conclusion that our present body of scientific knowledge has miraculously divested itself of all errors and blind spots.
This conclusion has been repeated for centuries, yet the science fundamentalist believes that we’re different now, we really know everything this time, and we could not possibly accept models that science teachers 100 years from now will humorously allude to in their introductory classes.
Science is a tool. It is extremely useful, the best tool we have for creating experimentally consistent models of the world. Those models can be shown to be incomplete. Phenomena can be measured which require them to be rewritten. It has happened many, many times before. There’s no rational reason to believe it will never happen again.