THE PARTY OF SCIENTISM, NOT SCIENCE

In a commencement speech at Rutgers, President Obama took an indirect shot at Donald Trump and the Republicans:

"Facts, evidence, reason, logic, an understanding of science: These are good things. These are qualities you want in people making policy . . . We traditionally have valued those things, but if you’re listening to today’s political debate, you might wonder where this strain of anti-intellectualism came from."

Obama here indulges one of the hoariest progressive clichés: that they are the party of enlightenment, reason, and fact, while conservatives are ignorant obscurantists, “bitter clingers” to the superstitions of religion and tradition. This prejudice is false about both conservatives and progressives. Most of what many progressives think is science is, in fact, scientism: the application of the methods, techniques, and jargon of genuine science to subjects for which they are inappropriate.

Indeed, leftism was born in scientism. Karl Marx believed that his ideas about the historical development, economics, and human nature comprised “scientific socialism,” as true as the laws of natural science. As Friedrich Engels said at Marx’s funeral, “Just as Darwin had discovered the law of development of organic nature, so did Marx discover the laws of human history.” Of course Marxism is no such thing. It is a reductive view of human nature and action, based on selective evidence, unexamined assumptions, and jargon modeled on real science.

Liberals go against science when it follow their political statements.

For example, on “gender” issues, the liberals are blatantly against science.

Regarding gender identity, they go against the science of penis and vagina, against the scientific facts of chromosomal and physical differences between the two sexes, in order to say that some men identify as women, and vice versa.

They go against science on some environmental issues. For example, in their zeal to go to electric cars, they ignore the fact that the electricity needed to recharge those cars will, in many parts of the country, come from coal fired power plants.

So, if we suddenly had millions of electric cars on the road, we would actually see more of their dreaded greenhouse gases as more and more fossil fuel power plants generate the electricity needed.

So I laugh out loud, when I hear sanctimonious liberals preen about their enlightened sophisticated nuanced beliefs about various subjects............

The abuse of the word ‘science’ nowadays is endemic. It is what Neil deGrasse Tyson does when he takes what is normally a neutral term that describes a useful methodology for testing a hypothesis, and he stretches it all out of proportion in order promote a pop political agenda of pure materialism and atheism.

SCIENCE! is my shorthand for this kind of word abuse. (’Climate change’ = AGW is another example.) It is a rhetorical bludgeon used by NdGT, Bill Nye, Ricky Gervais, Richard Dawkins and others to attack any faith belief - other than their own - by asserting that only things that can be seen or felt actually exist (which is itself also a faith belief). It is the same terminological sleight of hand that Engels and Marx had used to promote dialectical materialism. ‘Marxism is scientific!’

SCIENCE! is used as a rhetorical weapon by modern atheists to attack the foundation of Western civilization as embodied in the Reformation and the Enlightenment, the recognization that faith and reason are compatible.

The idea of the Reformation was that God’s plan for us could be understood by anyone - that the Bible was not to be read only by priests who understood Latin. God is a rational being who loves us, and He wants us to get to know Him directly and personally, to read the Bible for ourselves. This led to the Enlightenment, the belief that all the laws and principles that controlled Creation could be understood, that God is a logical being whose creation operated on logical rules.

This drove and encouraged rational thinking, learning, and the development of what would later be called the scientific method. Great thinkers like Johannes Kepler and Isaac Newton were showing that the motions of the heavens operated only with a few basic rules, and they were predictable and universal. Meanwhile Christian philosphers like Erasmus argued that faith and reason were compatible. Not only compatible, but essentially so. And so there was a strong desire to explore God’s Creation, to understand it, so as to understand Him. It set the stage for the explosion of learning and scientific discovery that allowed the West to dominate the world for four centuries.

SCIENCE! turns this all upside down. It attacks the very same Judeo-Christian beliefs that enabled free scientific inquiry and shuts it all down in favor of strict authoritarianism and credentialism in the service of hard materialism and marxist ideology.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.