At www.youtube.com using the link here, you can watch for free the 1936 movie "Things to Come," a science fiction movie that attempted to predict the future. There are six ways in which scientific academia resembles this old movie.
#1 Both "Things to Come" and Scientific Academia Had Amazing Successes
No one will doubt that scientific academia has had some stunning successes, so to justify the statement above I need merely describe some stunning predictive successes of the movie "Things to Come."
For one thing, the movie pretty much predicted a conflict like World War II, a few years before World War II started in Europe. Also, the movie predicted large flatscreen televisions before anyone had a television in their house. Below is the part of the movie showing a flatscreen TV, and in the movie the boat shown on the TV is moving.
Things to Come also predicted tablet devices like the iPad. In the scene below a character is watching a live TV show on the thin tablet device.
Things to Come also predicted helicopters years before the first helicopter was invented. In the movie characters ride in the vehicle below, which has a whirling top rotor blade just like that of a helicopter.
#2 Scientific Academia Suffers From Huge Conceptual Errors Just Like "Things to Come"
The Things to Come movie was guilty of a huge conceptual error: the idea that the first mission to the moon would occur by a gigantic space gun shooting astronauts into space:
There was no excuse for this kind of error, because anyone could have figured out that such a gun would have caused acceleration that would kill any astronauts shot out from the gun. Long before 1936, Robert Goddard had done his famous experiments showing that rocketry was a powerful technology for reaching very high altitudes. There was no excuse for the author (H. G. Wells) failing to depict a moon mission as a rocket rather than a firing of a space gun.
Today's scientific academia is guilty of errors as silly as the moon gun silliness of Things to Come. Science professors continue to teach utterly unbelievable claims that the vast organization and fine-tuned machinery of the human body (more impressive than any invention of humans) arose because of mere accidental factors such as random mutations and survival of the fittest. Science professors also continue to teach utterly unbelievable claims that the human mind is merely the product of brain activity, or the same thing as brain activity. Just as H. G. Wells ignored the obvious reality that a giant space gun would kill anyone shot from it, today's professors ignore a host of reasons for rejecting their claims about brains, including the short lifetimes of synapse proteins, the lack of anything in a brain that could explain instant recall, the unreliability of synaptic signal transmission, the failure of scientists to find any trace of learned information by examining brain tissue, and a host of observational reports indicating that human consciousness can exist when a mind is separated from a body and a brain (near-death experiences and out-of-body experiences).
#3 Scientific Academia Paints Critics Using Cardboard Caricatures, Just Like "Things to Come"
In the movie Things to Come one of the characters is a critic of some of the work of scientists, a character named Theotocopulos. Theotocopulos is depicted as a cardboard caricature of critics of scientific activity. Theotocopulos makes almost nothing but bad arguments, and is depicted as being opposed to all progress. Talking like no sensible critic of scientist activity would, he states this:
"What is this progress? What is the good of all this progress, onward and onward? We demand a halt. We demand a rest...Is man never to rest?...Make an end to this progress now. Let this be the last day of the scientific age."
Similar to this cardboard caricature depiction of Theotocopulos, the professors of scientific academia depict their critics in wildly distorted ways. Professors depict those who advise caution in genetic engineering as being anti-progress or anti-science. Professors try to depict those who reject the boasts of evolutionary biologists as being motivated by scriptural considerations, even when such critics make no mention of scripture but make arguments based solely on the oceanic depths of accidentally unachievable organization, fine-tuning and functional complexity in biological organisms. Professors depict as wild-eyed conspiracy theorists those with reasonable suspicions about lab leaks (supported by the conclusions of some US government agencies). If you show some serous interest in common and important mysterious human experiences that have been well-documented for hundreds of years (experiences that most science professors senselessly avoid seriously studying), you may be dismissed as a "zealot," "mystic" or "crank" (the latter being a particularly empty epithet meaning nothing other than a source of irritation). We almost never hear a science professor refer to a critic of his dogmas as a scholar, even when such a person has done more study of the relevant topics than a newly minted PhD.
#4 Scientific Academia Pushes Scientific Authoritarianism, Just Like "Things to Come"
Doing a Google search for "authoritarianism" produces this definition at the top of the search results: "the enforcement or advocacy of strict obedience to authority at the expense of personal freedom." The movie Things to Come was a sales job for scientific authoritarianism. In the movie the world is taken over by a group of scientists and technocrats called Wings Over the World, one that uses a "Gas of Peace" to achieve its end. At the 39:34 mark of the movie, a representative of this Wings Over the World organization says, "We don't approve of independent sovereign states." Similarly, scientific academia often pushes a form of scientific authoritarianism, in which the idea is that crucial decisions about how people should live and be educated are to be made by scientists or politicians who follow whatever scientists recommend, and in which people are encouraged to adopt worldviews shaped not by lengthy philosophical and scholarly analysis but by meekly following ideas about themselves, their species and the universe suggested by scientists. The power structure in academia is a hierarchical structure resembling authoritarian power structures such as those of the Catholic Church and totalitarian regimes, with the hierarchy of lecturers, PhD candidates/postdocs, assistant or associate professors, tenured professors, committee chairpersons, department heads, and deans or NAS members resembling the hierarchical organization of the Catholic Church (consisting of levels such as nuns, deacons, priests, bishops, archbishops, cardinals and a pope). See here for a look at academia's and the NSF's recent aiding online censorship, with the censoring activity or thought diversity suppression activity labeled with noble-sounding slogans such as "fighting misinformation" or "content policing."
#5 The Heroes of Scientific Academia Can be Guilty of Cold Callousness, Just Like a Hero of "Things to Come"
In the movie Things to Come the character of Cabal lets his daughter be one of two guinea pig astronauts who will be shot into space using a giant space gun, in an attempt to reach the moon. This is after the same Cabal character says this to someone: "Do you realize there's an even chance of not coming back alive -- a still greater chance of coming back a cripple?" We then have this dialog showing Cabal's icy callousness, and the reference to not coming back is a reference to death in outer space:
Passworthy: "If they don't come back, my son and your daughter, what of that, Cabal?"
Cabal: "Then, presently, others will go."
As a father this made me shudder. To any parent the death of their child is like the Earth crashing into the sun, not something to be brushed off with an icy "there can be others to do their job" comment.
The same cold callousness was involved when scientists filled the world with hydrogen bombs, without paying much attention to how such a thing was putting a knife to the throat of mankind. I could give many examples of cold callousness in scientific academia, such as exposing great numbers of subjects (and sometimes the general public) to unnecessary risks through reckless scientific experimentation, which often occurs mainly to advance career goals or private interests of scientists. I have written about the oppression and inhumanity that has arisen as consequences of professors callously depicting humans in dehumanizing ways.
#6 Scientific Academia Pushes Hubris, Like the Closing Hubris of "Things to Come"
The movie "Things to Come" ends with a speech that epitomizes scientific overconfidence and hubris. We have this dialog:
Passworthy: "Oh God, is there never to be any age of happiness? Is there never to be any rest?"
Cabal: "Rest enough for the individual. Too much, too soon and we call it death. But for man no rest and no ending. He must go on, conquest beyond conquest. First this little planet with its wind and its ways. And then all the laws of mind and matter that restrain him. Then the planets about him. And at last out across the immensity of the stars. And when he has conquered all the deeps of space and all the mysteries of time, still he will be beginning."
Cabal is guilty here of very great hubris. He thinks that science is something that will allow man to conquer the entire universe. The idea is ridiculous. The universe has billions of galaxies, and there are scientific reasons why travel between galaxies is very probably impossible (the average distance between galaxies being about 10 million light-years). And if there are many other planets with intelligent life, the idea of one planet conquering the universe is hubris as bad as the idea of one nation conquering planet Earth.
Scientific academia is guilty of similar hubris. The professors of scientific academia keep reciting boastful achievement legends that claim scientists accomplished things they never actually accomplished, such as figuring out the composition of the universe, figuring out how mankind arose, and figuring out how humans have minds. None of these things are understood by professors, who also often speak as if they had some understanding of a mystery a thousand miles over their heads: the mystery of how a speck-sized zygote is able to progress to become the vast organization of a full-grown human body. A proper study of the complexities of nature and the shortfall of current scientist explanatory claims (something requiring very many hours of study) will lead you to a great humility that is the opposite of the hubris of today's professors, a humility in which you recognize that man's knowledge of reality is merely fragmentary.
No comments:
Post a Comment