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Our future, our universe, and other weighty topics


Thursday, February 27, 2025

Bootlickers of Scientism Claim You're No Good If You Don't Think Like Them

At the atheist propaganda site Big Think, the egos are as huge as the errors. We have one page telling us that those writing at the site (mostly little-known figures) are "the world's greatest thinkers." This is not a statement made in small print, but in a very large font, a font so big you can read it from quite a few meters away. Some of the people referred to on this page have made some very stupid and fallacious statements. 

In a recent article at the site, we have some statements by philosopher and evolutionary biologist Massimo Pigliucci. Pigliucci tries to teach the foolish doctrine of scientism. Scientism is defined in various ways, and the most extreme definition you can give is the doctrine that science is the only way to acquire knowledge. It is just that extreme doctrine that Pigliucci teaches. He states this:

"So, if we’re talking about knowing things about the world as it is, then yeah, science is the only way of knowing. There really is no other way around that."

This is nonsense. There are, of course, many other ways to learn about things other than by scientific inquiry. For example,  I may learn that a relative is feeling very sad, and that is an important truth I have learned without using science. Or I may read on an online news site that a war has just broken out in Asia, and that the number of wars now raging in the world has just increased by one. That is a very important truth I have learned about the world without using science.

Below are a few very important ways of acquiring truth that are not science:

  • Personal experience: You can learn all kinds of important truths through personal experience, such as learning of the death of your mother. Personal experience is not science. You can also learn important truths about the world through personal experience. During cardiac arrest, a person may have an out-of-body experience in which his soul floats out of his body, and observes things he never could have seen while in his body. Later the details of his observations may be confirmed. Many such cases are discussed in my post here. A personal experience such as that does tell you something very important about the world: that the world does not work the way dogmatic Darwinists such as Pigliucci claim that the world works.  If a person is very careful to record any anomalous experiences that he has, and any spooky things that he observes, and to ponder such experiences, they may collectively tell him something very important about the world, that is does not work the way that materialists claim that it works. 
  • History:  From history we can learn some important things about the world. But history is not science. 
  • Journalism:  Journalism is the reporting of events now occurring in the world. Journalism obviously can tell us very important things about the world. But journalism is not science. 
  • Scholarship. By doing enough reading of books and other material (not necessarily scientific papers), you can learn important things about reality, and by studying first-hand testimony by others, you can learn that the world does not work the way evolutionary biologists like Pigliucci claim that it works. 
  • Reason and logic:  Reason and logic can tell us very important things, including important things about the world. But reason and logic are not science.  By using reason and logic, you can exclude some of the claims that Pigliucci makes about the world, some of which are illogical and irrational. 
  • Mathematics: Mathematics can tell us very important truths.  But mathematics is not science. By a sufficient use of a type of mathematics called probability mathematics, you can learn a very important thing about the world: that the world cannot possibly work the way that evolutionary biologists such as Pigliucci claim that it works, because that would require endless occurrences of things too unlikely to ever occur by chance or unguided processes in the history of the observable universe. 
The Big Think article attempts to teach a false and indefensible doctrine that people cannot be good unless they think like an atheist.  The article has a headline of "Why you must be logical and scientific to be a good person."  Of course, at this site we can be sure that by "logical and scientific" what is meant is "thinking like a proper atheist thinks." 

The doctrine is nonsense, like so much of the teaching at the Big Think site, where the self-described "world's greatest thinkers" often sound like the world's silliest thinkers.  Intellectual virtue is something very different than moral virtue. The world is filled with hundreds of millions of different types of very good people who believe very silly things.  There is little relation between thinking logically and scientifically and behaving morally. 

We have in the article some paragraphs in which Pigliucci tries most clumsily to defend this very stupid doctrine that you have to think logically and scientifically to be a good person. It is rather hilarious that this "you can only get truth through science" person mentions no science at all, but merely appeals to the writings of a mathematician and an ancient philosopher.  First he mentions an essay by some little-known mathematician named Clifford, as if that counted for much of anything; and then he mentions something he claims was said by the ancient philosopher Cicero, without even giving us a quote to show the claim is true.  Since when do you show something these days by claiming that Cicero said it?  That's the kind of thing people would do in medieval times. Read Cicero's De Natura Deorum, and you will not find someone teaching like what Pigliucci teaches.  There we read quotes like this:

"In explaining these things, I think that I have shown clearly enough how much superior is human nature to that of all the other animals. From which we must infer that such a shape and arrangement of our limbs and such a power of intelligence cannot have been the work of chance alone."

Trying to  defend a thesis that science is some moral guide, Pigliucci fails utterly, offering only the clumsiest argument. Science is no moral guide. Science is morally neutral. When you know through moral insight that it's wrong to kill the innocent, that's an example of knowing something with the knowledge not coming from science. Such examples further show the folly of Pigliucci's scientism.  A study of the misdeeds of Communist materialists will provide no support for any claim that thinking as an atheist is good for morality. On the page here of The Black Book of Communism, we read this estimate of state-caused deaths in communist countries:

U.S.S.R.: 20 million deaths
China: 65 million deaths
Vietnam: I million deaths
North Korea: 2 million deaths
Cambodia: 1 million deaths
Eastern Europe: 1 million deaths
Africa: 1.7 million deaths
Afghanistan: 1.5 million deaths

Pigliucci has written much about what he calls a "demarcation problem" involving science, and his writings on this topic have been very lacking in insight. The underlying assumption he has made seems to be the simplistic assumption that basically there is some line between "science" and "pseudoscience," and that once that line is drawn, pretty much everything on the left side of the line must be damned, and pretty much everything on the right side of the line must be blessed and accepted "hook, line and sinker."  The idea is profoundly erroneous. 

The truth is that in all kinds of inquiry, there is a mixture of truth and error.  A very thorough scholar of modern scientific work, its atheistic ideological motivations  and its economic underpinnings will discover a world heavily infected by groundless boasts, bad methods, triumphalist achievement legends, irrational belief traditions, hype, clickbait and agents pretending to be impartial judges of truth who are actually like bribed jurors because of their financial conflicts of interest, corporate ties and membership in conformist belief communities strongly resembling organized religion, communities in which obsequious servility is rewarded far more than speaking truth to power. 

So in fields such as biology we have much truth being taught, along with very much error being taught. It is a very bad mistake to uncritically accept en masse the teachings of people in some field because you have placed that field on the right side of some demarcation line, and a a very bad mistake to uncritically reject en masse the teachings or insights or observations of people in some field because you have placed that field on the left side of some demarcation line. 

poor neuroscience

science news

Pigliucci's approach leads to the laziest rebuttals and the laziest scholarship.  Thinkers such as Pigliucci think they can be excused from studying hundreds of years of writings describing very important anomalous observations, on the grounds that they have categorized some field of inquiry as being on the left side of some demarcation line.  Were they to study such writings they would find evidence and arguments debunking their cherished dogmas. But guys like Pigliucci keep thinking: No need to seriously study such stuff-- it's on the left side of the line! It's a very misguided approach.  A much better approach is: study the writings of your ideological supporters closely, and study the writings of your ideological enemies just as closely. I  follow such a principle, as you can see by the fact that my blog sites so often contain discussions of articles and papers contrary to what I believe. 

Life would be a lot easier if you could follow simple rules such as believe everything in Category X, and disbelieve everything in Category Y. But such rules lead you astray.  In the world of today's science, peer reviewers are often failing to do their jobs, approving very low-quality work for publication in science journals. Meanwhile many scientists (eager to up their citation count) routinely produce article titles claiming their research showed something it did not show; and universities every day send out science-related press releases making false claims. Within some Category Y that you may scorn may be reliable observations by trustworthy witnesses that give you the most important clues about reality.  A good rule is: pay little attention to some category, and scrutinize every new observation report, asking whether it meets high standards of good evidence. Financially unmotivated people giving first-person accounts of spooky things while giving their names and the observation dates can provide better evidence than found in most scientific papers, where we typically have passive voice accounts that fail to tell us who exactly was the observer and when the observation occurred, written by financially motivated claimants.   

The diagram below illustrates in the first rectangle the fallacious and simplistic viewpoint of scientism, and in the second rectangle a realistic viewpoint recognizing that there is a mixture of truth and error in every category of human thinking.

scientism

There are many millions of very good people in every ideological camp. There are hundreds of millions of very good people who are atheists. There are hundreds of millions of very good people who are fundamentalist Christians or Catholics. There are hundreds of millions of very good people who are Muslims. There are hundreds of millions of very good people who are Buddhists. There are hundreds of millions of very good people who are Hindus. It is not true that you have to think in a particular way to be a good person. 

Blundering very badly, Pigliucci, has endorsed the bootlicking nonsense that is scientism. To speak metaphorically, the boot that Pigliucci keeps licking is a boot that keeps stomping our faces, by using gigantically misleading dehumanization rhetoric that deceptively depicts us as very much less than what we are

scientism
A boot that keeps stomping your face

Pigliucci is a big fan of the ancient Stoics, but he would have done better to have followed the example given by the dialogues of Plato, where the hero is a character (Socrates) ever prone to question all types of authorities and all boasts of knowledge, someone not at all a bootlicker. 

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