A Social Psychologist Fails to Understand the Social Psychology of Universities

 A Salon.com article by social psychologist Frenk van Harreveld is entitled "In defense of doubt: Act of resistance in an age of bogus certainty." The article offers an "erring communities versus virtuous community" narrative that is extremely misleading because the supposedly virtuous community has all of the same problems as the erring communities described. In the article Harreveld shows a lack of social psychology insight about today's universities, portraying them as bastions of intellectual humility and epistemic caution when they are more like enclaves of intellectual hubris, dogmatism and extreme overconfidence, filled with authorities claiming to know deep important things that they do not know, and that are actually mysteries a hundred miles over their heads. 

Harreveld starts out with a little sociological insight about some of the psychology benefits of joining a dogmatic belief community:

"Certainty serves a powerful social identity function. Declaring a clear position, especially a strong one, signals belonging. If you know exactly where you stand, you know who your people are. Certainty is rewarded not just with clarity, but with community. Ambivalence, by contrast, is lonely. Few movements rally around moderation. People don’t take to the streets with signs that read: 'It’s Complicated.'

Certainty becomes a badge of identity. It distinguishes 'us' from 'them.' And in this way, many public debates shift from reasoned exchange to tribal contest. Argument gives way to allegiance. The substance of a position matters less than the clarity with which it’s held...

The underlying mechanism is the same: In uncertain times, certainty sells — and it sells best when it comes with a sense of belonging."

Harreveld mentions how social media can reward dogmatism and overconfidence, and how social media can put people in filter bubbles and echo chambers in which they tend to get only opinions and articles and posts matching their own viewpoints. Harreveld then starts painting a glowing portrait of what he thinks is a virtuous-thinking community that has escaped such pitfalls: the academia community consisting of professors like himself. He states this:

"Higher education, at its best, trains people to tolerate ambiguity. It rewards provisional thinking, revises conclusions and accepts that knowledge is always unfinished. At its best, higher education doesn’t just tolerate uncertainty — it cultivates it. In the sciences, this ideal is embedded in the Popperian method: Theories must be falsifiable, and progress comes not through confirming our beliefs, but by trying to disprove them. In the humanities and philosophy, figures like Socrates remind us that knowledge begins with recognizing the limits of our understanding. 'I know that I know nothing,' he famously said — not as an admission of ignorance, but as a commitment to relentless questioning. This culture of intellectual humility — of testing, revising and learning — forms the core of what universities are meant to instill. That epistemic humility — the willingness to admit what we don’t know — is increasingly out of step with a public discourse that values performance over inquiry."

But today's universities and colleges are mostly the exact opposite of what is depicted above. Today's universities and colleges are ideological enclaves dominated by very old belief dogmas that are sacred cows that cannot be questioned.  Among the main such dogmas are: (1) the groundless legend that biological origins are explained by the ideas of the 19th century thinker Charles Darwin; (2) the groundless but constantly repeated claim that human minds are caused by brains;  (3) the equally groundless myth that memories are stored in brains and retrieved from brains. 

There are very many good reasons for rejecting all such claims, discussed at my site here and posts such as my posts here, here, here and here. The human body has been found to contain mountainous levels of hierarchical organization, enormous amounts of fine-tuned functional information, and the most stratospheric abundance of component fine-tuning and systemic component interdependence. Such things help to show how groundless are all boasts that nineteenth century ideas such as so-called natural selection can explain human origins. Nothing but failure has resulted from all attempts to confirm ideas that brains store memories and that brains produce thinking and self-hood and 100 other wonders of the human mind. Microscopic examination of the human brain has failed to find the slightest trace of any learned knowledge in brain tissue. We know the type of things that allow the fast retrieval of information from physical systems: things such as sorting, addresses and indexes. The human brain has no such things. The study of the brain has shown that it is a place of gigantic signal noise, unreliable synaptic transmission, and rapid molecular turnover, thereby discrediting all claims that the human brain is the source of the human mind and the storage place of human memories that can last for 50 years. Contradicting the "brains make minds" dogma, a significant fraction of the population has had out-of-body experiences, with 11 features that are beyond any explanation of neuroscientists, who offer only fumbling faulty explanations like the one I discuss here. 

But academia clings to the dogmas of materialism and Darwinism because colleges and universities have been enclaves of dogmatic, overconfident belief communities -- something the opposite of what Harreveld portrays. Preaching a kind of godless religion (a religion in all but name), the biology departments and psychology departments and philosophy departments of universities have become places like what is depicted in the visual below.

Embedding itself within universities and taking over key departments in such universities, dogmatic materialism between 1850 and 1950 developed an authoritarian hierarchical infrastructure with many similarities to the authoritarian hierarchical infrastructure of the Catholic Church. That infrastructure is depicted in the visual below:

The professors of this infrastructure engage in indoctrination as dogmatic and overconfident as the indoctrination that occurs in the Sunday schools of organized religions. And just as the exclusion of troubling observations has long been a part of organized religions, the exclusion of troubling observations is a central feature of academia. 

This "ministry of materialism" extends far beyond the borders of academia, but colleges and universities are the core of this religion-in-all-but-name which aggressively pushes a discredited belief system, marketing it as "science" rather than the ideology that it is. 

It is amusing to hear Harreveld claim that "higher education doesn’t just tolerate uncertainty — it cultivates it." To the contrary, anyone expressing doubt about the sacred dogmas of academia such as Darwinism and the "brains make minds" dogma is likely to be treated within academia as some heretic to be shunned, shamed or penalized. Harreveld's mention of a "Popperian method" centered upon trying to falsify existing tenets is laughable. In academia occasional lip-service is paid to such a method, but no such method is followed by neuroscientists or psychologists or evolutionary biologists. Instead, the general rule is: make sure you mostly spend time trying to gather evidence for the type of things you are expected to believe in, and please do not dare to gather or seriously study evidence for the type of things you are forbidden from believing in. So, for example, today's professors almost all senselessly refuse to seriously study two hundred years of written evidence for paranormal phenomena and paranormal abilities. Moreover, they fail to follow-up on hundreds of promising observational and experimental results, whenever such results conflict with their belief dogmas.  Should some other scientist do such follow-up work and present new observations or analysis conflicting with prevailing academia dogmas, he is likely to have his work censored by the soft censorship of peer review denial of publication. 

It is also very amusing to read Harreveld state this:

"In the humanities and philosophy, figures like Socrates remind us that knowledge begins with recognizing the limits of our understanding. 'I know that I know nothing,' he famously said — not as an admission of ignorance, but as a commitment to relentless questioning."

Socrates lived thousands of years ago, before there were any colleges or universities.  A Socratic attitude of 'I know that I know nothing" is not taken by today's academic philosophers, who tend to be uncritical "hook, line and sinker" pushover consumers of the most groundless dogmas of biologists. 

It is also amusing to read Harreveld state this: "This culture of intellectual humility — of testing, revising and learning — forms the core of what universities are meant to instill."  For well over 150 years there has prevailed in universities a kind of Culture of Hubris or Culture of Conceit that is the exact opposite of a "culture of intellectual humility."  It is a culture in which everyone is expected to keep claiming they understand deep origins mysteries (such as the origin of man and the origin of human bodies and the origin of human minds) that are actually a hundred miles over the heads of humans. 

A good social psychologist will tend to realize that humans in many different places and many different institutions tend to follow the same patterns of conduct in constructing and maintaining what I call ideological regimes. An ideological regime is some structure of belief and related social structures and habits that have become popular in a particular place.  In a particular country there may exist more than one ideological regime,  and multiple ideological regimes may contend with each other, each trying to become dominant or maintain its dominance. An ideological regime may be political, religious, or some kind of ideology such as Darwinist materialism that is a church-in-all-but name. 

We see the same tendencies again and again wherever ideological regimes exist:

(1) The tendency to create a large class of authority figures who are made to look like some figures of superior mind or virtue. 

(2) The tendency to kind of canonize a few authority figures who are put on some very high pedestal, and made to look like some figure of rare wisdom or insight. 

(3) The tendency to create and propagate belief dogmas which typically are articles of faith that followers of the ideological regime are expected to adopt.

(4) The tendency to give work to a large lesser-status class of enablers and enforcers of the ideological regime, who have the job of drumming up support and maintaining support for the ideological regime and its belief dogmas. 

(5) The tendency to deprecate, defame and penalize critics of the ideological regime and those who disbelieve in its dogmas. 

(6) The tendency to control information so that it becomes harder for people to learn about facts and opinions conflicting with the dogmas of the ideological regime, which may take the form of either hard censorship or a less noticeable "soft censorship."

We see these tendencies every bit as strongly within the halls of academia as we see such tendencies in the political area, the ecclesiastical area and the social media area.

For a discussion of the common tendencies in excessively dogmatic academia, organized religion and political parties, read my post "The Sociological Dynamics of Ideological Regimes." 

The table below lists the similarities between scientific academia and the Roman Catholic Church. 

	Scientific Academia	Roman Catholic Church
Physical Bases	University buildings, high schools, natural history museums	Churches, monasteries, convents, seminaries, Catholic schools
Old Revered Texts	Books of Charles Darwin	The Bible and works of the Church Fathers (Augustine, Aquinas, etc.)
Sacred Dogmas	Accidental origin of life, accidental origin of species by “natural selection,” brains as the source of minds, brains as storage places of memories	The Trinity, the resurrection of Jesus, the divine inspiration of the Bible, papal infallibility, dogmas about Mary, mother of Jesus
Lower Prestige Workers	High school biology teachers, experimental subjects, paid lab workers	Nuns, deacons
Middle Prestige Workers	PhD candidates, college instructors, assistant professors	Priests
High Prestige Workers	Professors	Bishops
Highest Prestige Persons	National Academy of Science members, Nobel Prize winners	Cardinals, the Pope
Arcane Speech	Jargon-filled scientific papers	Jargon-filled theology papers, Holy Mass language
Indoctrina-tion Meetings	Biology classes, psychology classes	Sunday sermons, Sunday school
Financial Base	Countless billions in old university endowments, tuition, government funding, with $800 billion in US university endowments alone	Billions in old endowments, church property,  Sunday donations, tithes
Rituals	PhD dissertations, experiments (often poorly designed and implemented), science conferences, rituals of science paper writing, countless legend and dogma recitations	Sunday Mass, baptisms, weddings, First Communion, funerals
Specula-tions	Abundant	Abundant
Persecu--tion or Libeling of Heretics	Frequent (currently non-physical, including gaslighting, slander, libel, accusatory insinuations,  stereotyping and discrimination)	Frequent in the past
Censorship	Massive “soft” censorship and repression of undesired observations such as witnessing of paranormal phenomena and successful ESP experiments	Once very frequent, such as Legion of Decency
Speech Taboos	Very many (including fair discussion of the paranormal or evidence for design in nature)	Very many
Miracle Stories	Accidental origin of life, and accidental origin of billions of types of protein molecules in the animal kingdom, most having hundreds of well-arranged parts, requiring many miracles of accidental organization, like hundreds of falling logs forming into extensive log cabin hotels or a row of fifty tall sand castles forming from random wind and waves	Miracle stories involving Jesus, Catholic saints and the Virgin Mary (Fatima, Lourdes, etc.)
Officials in Fancy Robes?	Yes (professors during graduation ceremonies)	Yes
Despised Deviants	Witnesses of the paranormal, Darwinism critics, teleology theorists, those having spiritual experiences	In previous years, Protestants and gays
Chanting?	Very much, such as “blind evolution explains it all” chant and “it's all just brain activity” chant	Very much, such as Hail Mary prayers and the chants of monks
Art Forms	Materialist science fiction	Sculpture, painting, sacred music, sacred architecture
Saints	Many science figures whose work is described reverently	Many canonized saints
Catechisms	College textbooks and biased Wikipedia articles	Official catechisms teaching Catholic dogma
Legends	Many “just so” legends such as the legend of trans-Atlantic rafting monkeys, and many achievement legends such as the legend Darwin explained biological origins	Many legends about saints and their miracles or legends about miraculous healings or the Virgin Mary
Helper Workers	Unquestioning conformist science journalists	Laymen volunteers
Icono-graphy	Sparse iconography including including "Bohr model" atom diagram, and endlessly repeated side-profile “Evolution of man” diagram with four or five figures facing right	Vast iconography

Floundering Physicists and Getting-Nowhere Cosmologists Plead "Jump on Our Bandwagon!"

A while back we had an interview with physicist Leonard Susskind, appearing in the CERN Courier, a publication of CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, a large international group in charge of some of the world's biggest particle accelerators. Susskind spouted the same old multiverse baloney he's been pushing for decades. Susskind calls his version of the multiverse "the landscape," a term he introduced in a book with a title that made it very clear his multiverse was all about trying to escape evidence the universe was well-designed.  Susskind makes this groundless claim: "I would say the best explanation for the patterns we see in cosmology and particle physics is a very diverse landscape of possibilities and an extremely large universe – a multiverse." His "multiverse" is actually a groundless speculation about some near-infinity of different universes, each with different physics. 

Among many other cases of cosmic fine-tuning, physicists had discovered what looked like very precise fine-tuning regarding the Higgs Boson or Higgs mass, which I discuss in my post here. Physicists tried to evade this fine-tuning with a wildly speculative theory called supersymmetry, which was the "foundation of sand" for an even more wildly speculative family of theories called string theory. All of the predictions of supersymmetry failed, and the particles it predicted were never found. To try to sweep under the rug this failure, the string theorist Susskind gives us this bit of hair-splitting:

" I call that string theory with a capital 'S', and I can tell you with 100% confidence that we don’t live in that world. And then there’s string theory with a small 's' – you might call it string-inspired theory....The string landscape is one such guess. It’s not based on absolutely precise capital-S string theory, but on some conjectures about what this expanded small-s string theory might be."

You get the idea? Susskind was trying to preserve his string theory landscape multiverse fantasy by telling us that it is only string theory with a capital "S" that has been ruled out, not string theory with a small "s." This hair-splitting is like when a wife finds her husband naked in bed with his naked mistress, and the husband says, "Don't worry, darling: this merely shows that I have been unfaithful with a small 'u,' not unfaithful with a capital 'U.' " 

In a more recent interview, Susskind resorts to the dubious business of consensus-claiming, a form of bandwagon-boasting.  Nowadays, the term "consensus" is being used massively by scientists and science journalists, often in a very misleading way. 

The first thing that should be discussed is: what is meant by the term "consensus"? To get a proper sense of the denotation and connotation of that word, we should look at how "consensus" is defined by various dictionaries. Below is how "consensus" is defined by various dictionaries and authorities:

• A Google search for "consensus definition" gives "a general agreement" as the first result.
• The Merriam-Webster dictionary gives us two definitions of "consensus" that disagree with each other. The first definition is "general agreement; unanimity." The second definition is "the judgment arrived at by most of those concerned." The first definition specifies 100%, and the second definition merely means 51% or more. 
• Dictionary.com also gives us two defintions of "consensus" that disagree with each other. The first is "majority of opinion." The second is "general agreement or concord; harmony." The second definition implies near-unanimity; the first does not. 
• The Collins dictionary defines "consensus" as "general agreement among a group of people."
• The Britannica dictionary defines "consensus" as "a general agreement about something : an idea or opinion that is shared by all the people in a group."
• Vocabulary.com defines "consensus" as "agreement in the judgment or opinion reached by a group as a whole," and at the very beginning of the page with this definition, we are told that  "when there's a consensus, everyone agrees on something."
• The Cambridge Dictionary defines "consensus" in two ways: (1) "a generally accepted opinion among a group of people"; (2) "agreement among a group of people."
• The Macmillan dictionary defines "consensus" as "agreement among all the people involved."

From the definitions above, you can make the following conclusions:

(1) "Consensus" is a word that is often defined as if it meant a unanimous opinion on some topic, but also often defined as if it meant a mere majority opinion on some topic.

(2) Because it is often defined as if it meant a unanimous opinion on some topic, "consensus" is undeniably a word with at least a strong connotation of meaning a unanimous opinion on some topic, with everyone agreeing about it.  The connotation of a word is the kind of impression or feeling that the word creates, regardless of how the word is literally defined. 

Because it is defined in ways that conflict with each other, "consensus" is a slippery and ambiguous word to be using. You might call it a very treacherous term, a term very prone to mislead or confuse. Since it has two very different definitions, using the word "consensus" is as potentially misleading as using the word "gay" soon after people first started to use that term to mean "homosexual," at a time when it was hard to tell whether "gay" meant "homosexual" or simply "merry."  

One of many deceptive speech habits occurring in science literature is that misleading claims are being made of a "scientific consensus" about opinions which do not at all involve any unanimity of opinion among scientists. Because of how often "consensus" is defined to mean "unanimity of opinion," such claims are designed to create an impression that scientists agree about something. But typically there is no evidence that anything close to 100% of scientists agree on such an opinion, and in very many cases there is not even good evidence that a strong majority of scientists believe in the opinion. 

Because of the almost total non-existence of secret ballot polls of scientists, there are almost no claims about scientist opinions that are well supported by evidence. We know that certain opinions are what we may call reputed majority opinions of certain types of scientists. For example, it is repeatedly alleged that most cosmologists believe in dark matter and that most biologists believe in the doctrine of common descent, that all species are descended from a common ancestor. But what percentage of cosmologists believe in dark matter, and what percent of biologists believe in the doctrine of common descent? 

You cannot tell such a thing by asking for a show of hands at a meeting of cosmologists or a show of hands at a meeting of biologists. When there is a reputed majority of opinion about something in some scientific field, a scientist in that field may think that he will get in trouble by publicly stating an opinion contrary to the majority in his field.  So such a scientist may fail to honestly state his opinion whenever he can be publicly identified as someone holding a contrarian opinion. 

You can try to figure out what scientists think about a hypothesis by going through their public statements, but that would be a not-very-reliable approach.  Publicly scientists will often make statements that do not show a definite belief about something.  For example, having read innumerable scientific papers on memory, I know that an extremely common type of statement in such papers is for a neuroscientist to say something like this: "It is commonly maintained that memories are stored in synapses." But what does that tell us about what the author of the paper believes? You cannot tell. 

The only way to get a reliable measure of the opinion of a scientist is to do a secret ballot poll, one that includes a variety of belief options including "I don't know" or "I'm not sure." However, such polls are virtually never done. When opinion polls of scientists are done, they typically fail to be secret ballots, and also fail to offer a full spectrum of answers including options such as  "I don't know" or "I'm not sure."  

In his recent interview  fantasy-physics salesman Leonard Susskind gives us this little bit of "go with the herd" talk using the word "consensus":

" Think about the consensus of the largest fraction of physicists working on these things, and you’ll probably be right. The overall consensus of the field tends to be right. Peculiar individuals, no matter how famous they are, no matter how brilliant they are, if they’re off that consensus, and they’ve been off that consensus for a long time, they’re probably wrong. That doesn’t mean for sure that they’re wrong. Don’t look for the weirdos. Look for what the consensus of the majority of well-respected, highly accomplished physicists believe. And you’ll probably be right. "

This is bad advice, because in the fifty years there have been claims of a physicist or cosmologist c0nsensus on ideas that have failed very badly. Specifically:

• Physicists got all excited about a wildly speculative theory called supersymmetry, which has failed all observational tests.
• Not waiting for supersymmetry to be confirmed, physicists built upon it an even more speculative mountain of speculations called string theory, which has never been supported by any evidence. 
• Physicists kept telling us most of the universe's mass energy is dark energy, but no one has ever directly observed dark energy, and no has ever been able to connect it to the Standard Model of physics. 
• Physicists kept telling most of the universe's matter is dark matter, but no one has ever directly observed dark matter, and no has ever been able to connect it to the Standard Model of physics. 
• Physicists and cosmologists got super-excited about something called primordial cosmic inflation theory,  a theory that has not been confirmed by any evidence. 

So Susskind is way wrong in trying to suggest that it is a sound principle that you should follow what is claimed as a  consensus or majority opinion of theoretical physicists.  He fails to have any sociological insight about how often stupid herd effects and baseless bandwagons arise in the little belief communities that are the small tribes of theoretical physicists and cosmologists. 

What often goes on in the world of science is that misleading claims are made about a consensus when there is no actual agreement among some group of experts.  We saw a recent example in an article by cosmologist Ethan Siegel, who has spent decades being a tireless pitchman for the empirically groundless theory of primordial cosmic inflation, invented to try and explain away very precise fine-tuning in the earliest part of the Big Bang. Siegel claimed that "almost everyone" believed in such a theory.  95% of scientists have no opinion on such a theory. And even among the tiny little tribe called cosmologists, it is not true that almost all of them believe in such a theory. 

To prove that, you have to do the very hard work of looking for an opinion poll of cosmologists. Scientists are extremely bad about running polls about their own opinions, and it is all but impossible to find a poll of cosmologists. But I found such a poll at the end of a 2016 paper, the one here. 

In Question 11 of the poll, on page 77, cosmologists were asked to complete a sentence beginning with "Our understanding of inflation  will..."  The results were these:

• Only 44% predicted success for the main effort of cosmologists to get evidence for the theory of primordial cosmic inflation, predicting that there would be  "primordial B-mode detection" occurring.
• 7%  predicted that inflation would be "ruled out."
• 5% predicted there would be a detection of "non-zero spatial curvature," something that would rule out the theory of primordial cosmic inflation. 

Clearly at this time there was no unanimity-type consensus in favor of the theory of primordial cosmic inflation, with a significant fraction of cosmologists rejecting it.  In the eight years since the poll, there have been big expensive projects trying to get "primordial B-mode detection," but all have failed. If the poll were to be taken today, it would probably show an even larger fraction of cosmologists rejecting the theory of primordial cosmic inflation.  

Moreover, the poll discussed above was not a secret ballot poll. The poll makes no claim to have followed a secret ballot  methodology. Whenever scientists are given an opportunity to confess to some belief regarded as heresy, you will always get a much higher rate of people confessing to such a heresy if you do a secret ballot poll. 

So Siegel's claim that "almost everyone" supports the theory of primordial cosmic inflation was false.  The same writer sometimes claims that almost all cosmologists believe in dark matter. But on page 78 of the 2016 paper, 10% of the polled cosmologists predicted that the theory of dark matter would be "overturned."  And in Question 14 of the poll (page 77),  18% of cosmologists predicted that the future would show that dark matter "is modified gravity," a statement equivalent to the belief that dark matter does not really exist.  And since this 2016 paper, all searches for dark matter have failed. If you were to do a secret ballot poll of cosmologists today, you may easily find 25% or more rejecting the doctrine of dark matter. 

Most claims by scientists about a consensus in some scientist group should be rejected unless they are supported by a well-designed secret ballot poll or are claims about some topic utterly uncontroversial.   Since scientists are almost never polled about whether they believe in controversial scientific theories (in well-designed secret ballot polls), almost all claims made about the popularity of such theories are unreliable. 

The very idea of using an alleged popularity of some theory as an argument for the theory is a misguided idea. Theories should be defended by facts and arguments, not dubious claims about their popularity. There are all kinds of sociological and economic and psychological and "gone viral"  reasons why some theory may become popular in some group of scientists, despite a lack of a sound rationale for the theory.  In the case of Susskind's multiverse,  it is pretty clear what was  the main reason why he conceived the idea. It was mostly analgesic, a very clumsy attempt at irritation relief. 

The idea of a multiverse does absolutely nothing to diminish the evidence value of cosmic fine-tuning, for the elementary reason that you do not increase the chance of success of any one trial by increasing the number of random trials.  The odds of you throwing a deck of cards into the air and getting a triangular house of cards out of the thrown deck is basically zero. You do not increase by even .000000000001 percent the chance of you ever getting that result by imagining an infinity of card deck throwers.  Ditto for universes. Imagining some infinity of them does nothing to increase the chance of getting a habitable universe on any one try. 

For a discussion of the reasons why imagining a multiverse does nothing to explain cosmic fine-tuning in our universe, see my posts here and here. Evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin confessed the willingness of materialists to believe in absurd explanations, a willingness stemming from their zeal to exclude purposeful divine agency. He stated this:

"Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door."

The quote above by Lewontin is found on page 27 of the paper "Balloons on a String: A Critique of Multiverse Cosmology" by Bruce L. Gordon, an excellent expose of multiverse nonsense, which can be read here. On page 28 he states this:

"So with all due respect to Leonard Susskind and his coterie of devout string landscape naturalists, there is no landscape of mathematical possibilities that gives rise to a megaverse of actualities and provides a mindless solution to the problem of cosmological fine-tuning, for even an infinite arena of mathematical possibilities lacks the power to generate one solitary universe. The mindless multiverse 'solution' to the problem of fine-tuning is, quite literally, a metaphysical non-starter."

That would actually be a futile maneuver

Postscript: A recent news article states this:

"The standard model for how galaxies formed in the early universe predicted that the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) would see dim signals from small, primitive galaxies. But data are not confirming the popular hypothesis that invisible dark matter helped the earliest stars and galaxies clump together. Instead, the oldest galaxies are large and bright, in agreement with an alternate theory of gravity, according to new research from Case Western Reserve University published November 12 in The Astrophysical Journal."

Our Current Intellectual Overlords Are Much Like Their Ecclesiastical Predecessors

Recently I watched on TV the 2015 film "The Hunger Games -- Mockingjay Part 2."  The film has a fascinating plot twist near its end (spoilers ahead), although to properly understand the plot twist you have to watch the last part of the film very carefully.  

The movie involves the participation of the hero of the film series (Katniss) in the overthrow of the tyrant Coriolanus Snow, who started the "Hunger Games" rather resembling the games of the old Roman Colosseum.  Katniss (played by Jennifer Lawrence) works with a rebel leader named Alma Coin to try to achieve the overthrow of the tyrant Snow. A large crowd of rebels surrounds Snow's palace. We see a scene in which what looks like gift packages are dropped from the air, the packages hanging from balloons. Children run towards the gift packages, which then explode, killing many including the sister of Katniss, and leaving Katniss unconscious. 

When Katniss wakes up, she is told the regime of the tyrant Snow has been overthrown. It seems the bombing of the children was so terrible that Snow's men revolted against him. Katniss meets the captured Snow, who says that he did not order the bombing (which did nothing to help him), but that it was instead ordered by the rebel leader Katniss has been working with: Alma Coin. He says Coin ordered the slaughter to whip up sentiment against Snow, to help defeat him. 

Later at a meeting including Katniss we see Alma Coin urging that the horrible Hunger Games be restored, this time using the children of Snow's henchmen as the participants.  In an implausibly quick insight, Katniss seems to realize the sad truth: that the supposedly virtuous Alma Coin is really just another tyrant like Coriolanus Snow, the tyrant she has replaced.  It's a situation that can be described by the old saying, "Meet the new Boss, very much like the old Boss." 

The Hunger Games series is fiction, but the situation we see at the end of the film is like a situation that has tragically occurred again and again in history:  a hated regime is replaced by some supposedly superior regime that ends up having most of the faults of the old regime. So, for example, when the ruthless regime of the Russian Czars was replaced with the regime of the Communists, the Russians ended up with a regime as cruel as the regime that had been replaced (and actually far crueler). 

It often happens that a hated political regime is replaced by some new political regime that ends up having most of the same faults as the regime it replaced. It may also happen that an old ideological regime (a reigning structure of belief) gets gradually eclipsed by some new ideological regime that brags about its intellectual virtues, but which ends up having most of the same faults as the old ideological regime it superseded. 

To describe a particular system of belief that gained some ascendancy,  we may use the term "ideological regime."  An ideological regime is some structure of belief and related social structures and habits that have become popular in a particular place.  In a particular country there may exist more than one ideological regime.  For example, in the United States there are currently multiple ideological regimes, such as these:

(1) the belief tradition and social structure of Catholicism;

(2) the belief tradition and social structures of Protestantism, taking several different forms;

(3) the belief tradition and social structures of Darwinist materialism;

(4) the belief tradition and social structures of what we may call money-centered consumerist capitalism.

It seems that in today's press the ideological regime of Darwinist materialism has gained ascendancy. Such an ideological regime is centered around four unproven dogmas:  the dogma of the accidental origin of life, the dogma of the  accidental origin of species by so-called “natural selection,” the dogma that  brains are the source of minds or that mind activity is the same thing as brain activity, and the dogma that brains are the storage places of human memories. The average person has heard these claims so many times that he may think of one or more of them as "facts of science," but none of them is a fact. There are actually strong reasons for doubting each one of these dogmas. In particular:

• Scientists discovered the genetic information in all cells around 1950, but it is now the year 2024, and no has ever used a microscope to discover any stored memory information in a brain of a human being, even through brain tissue has been examined at resolutions vastly greater than the resolutions sufficient to discover DNA in cells. 
• Many humans (both children and adults) have had half of their brains removed to stop very bad and frequent epileptic seizures, but when such surgery is done, it has little effect on intelligence or memory, with learned knowledge being well preserved. 
• Many humans can remember very well things they learned or experienced 50 years ago, but the average lifetime of the proteins in synapses (claimed to be the storage place of memories) is 1000 times shorter than 50 years (less than two weeks). 
• Humans are able to form new memories instantly, in contradiction to all theories of brain memory storage, which typically postulate "synapse strengthening" that would take at lease quite a few minutes.
• Even though the brain has no physical characteristics that might help allow any such thing as instant memory retrieval (something like an indexing system or a position notation system or coordinate system that might allow stored information to be quickly found), humans are able to retrieve learned information instantly upon hearing some person name or event name or place name, even if they haven't heard such a name in many years.
• Very many humans (as many as 10 percent or 20 percent of the population) report floating out of their bodies, and observing their bodies from above them in space. 
• Inside brains there is very severe noise of several different types that should prevent humans from being able to reliably recall large bodies of information stored in a brain, but it is a fact that many people (such as actors playing the role of Hamlet) can recall very large bodies of textual information with perfect accuracy. 
• There are hundreds of documented cases of people who saw an apparition of someone who died, but who they did not know was dead, only to soon learn that the person had died about the time when the apparition was seen. 
• There are also very many cases of apparitions seen by more than one person at the same time, something we should expect to never or virtually never happen if a mere brain hallucination was causing the sighting of the apparition. 
• Instead of having some vastly greater brain connectivity that might help explain the superiority of the human mind, a study found that brain connectivity is about the same in all mammals; so we have about the brain connectivity of mice. 
• As discussed here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here, there is two hundred years of written evidence (often written by very weighty figures such as scientists and doctors) for the reality of clairvoyance, an ability that is not explicable under any theory that minds are created by brains. 
• Quite a few people who have lost  half of their brains due to disease or epilepsy surgery have average or above average intelligence; and the physician John Lorber showed that some people have above-average intelligence despite having the great majority of their brain tissue destroyed by disease. 
• Besides a wealth of narrative evidence that some humans can have ESP (an ability inexplicable as a brain effect), there is abundant robust laboratory experimental evidence for ESP (discussed here, here and here). 
• No one has any credible detailed theory of how a brain could ever store learned information (such as academic information) or episodic memories as neuron states or synapse states; and if such a thing were happening, it would require a whole host of very specialized memory-encoding proteins, which have never been discovered (along with some not-yet-discovered encoding scheme millions of times more complicated than the genetic code discovered around 1950). 
• Brains show no signs of working harder during heavy thinking or memory recall, and brain scan attempts to find signs of such greater activity merely report variations such as half of one per cent, the kind of variations we would expect to get by chance, even if brains don't produce thinking or recall. 
• Because of numerous severe slowing factors such as the cumulative slowing effect of synaptic delays and dendrites, signal transmission in the brain should be way too slow to account for the blazing fast thinking speed of some people able to do mathematical calculations at incredible speeds, and also the instant memory recall humans routinely show. 
• People with dramatically higher recall of episodic memories or learned information seem to have no larger brains or brain superiority that could explain this.
• Contrary to the dogma that brains produce minds, ravens with tiny brains can do as well on quite a few mental tasks as apes with large brains; and also tiny mouse lemurs do just as well on quite a few cognitive tests as mammals with brains 200 times larger. 
• As discussed here and here, scientists have very well documented inexplicable physical effects occurring around some people, suggesting they either have powers that cannot be explained in terms of brains and bodies, or are somehow in contact with others who have such powers. 
• There are numerous reasons for suspecting some source of a human soul or spirit outside of the human body, including the sudden unexplained origin of the universe with just the right expansion rate to allow eventual planet formation, the very precise fine-tuning of fundamental physical constants and laws of nature needed for biological habitability, the origin of life so hard to credibly explain as an accidental chemical event, the extremely hierarchical organization of biological organisms, the great abundance of complex fine-tuned protein molecules in organisms (each seeming to involve a vast mathematical improbability), the great abundance of immensely organized biological forms that are not explained by genomes that merely specify low-level chemical information, and abundant photographic evidence for paranormal effects that seem to suggest some unfathomable intelligence beyond any human understanding (see here and here for examples). 
• People (sometimes called autistic savants) with very serious brain defects sometimes have astonishing powers of memory almost no one else has. 
• Dying people commonly report seeing apparitions of the dead (usually their relatives), as reported here, here, and here; people having near-death experiences very frequently report encountering their deceased relatives; and widows and widowers frequently report voices or apparitions corresponding to their deceased spouses -- all just exactly as we would expect if we have souls that survive death. 
• Many decades ago Leonora Piper was studied at great length for many years by scientists and scholars, and for many years she reported information about deceased people that should have been unknown to her. 
• Human beings have many subtle and refined mental abilities (such as philosophical imagination, artistic creativity, musical ability, and subtle spirituality) that are inexplicable as results of brain evolution, such things having no value in increasing survival or reproduction. 
• Despite more than seventy years of experiments trying to reproduce a natural origin of life from non-life, all such experiments have failed to produce anything living, and have also failed to produce any of the main components of microscopic living things (functional protein molecules). In fact, all experiments realistically simulating the early Earth have produced neither the "building blocks" of microscopic life (functional protein molecules, things vastly more organized than mere building blocks) nor the building blocks of the building blocks of microscopic life (amino acids). There are multiple reasons why the famed Miller-Urey experiment (producing amino acids) was not a realistic simulation of early Earth conditions.  
• Claims that we have an explanation for the physical origin of species tend to be made by those who have not paid adequate attention to two supremely important considerations: the matter of functional thresholds and the matter of interdependent components, as I discuss here. 

Once we understand that the four main teachings of Darwinist materialism are belief dogmas rather than scientific facts, we can start to understand how this currently dominant ideological regime  acts today largely as a kind of stealth religion, pretty much as a kind of church-in-all-but-name. Religions have many different forms, only some theistic, and it is possible to reasonably define religion in a way that applies to many diverse systems of belief and dogma. For example, anthropologist Clifford Geertz defined a religion as " a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic." 

Using a definition similar to that of Geertz, I have previously defined a religion as " a set of beliefs about the fundamental nature of reality and life, or a recommended way of living, typically stemming from the teachings of an authority, along with norms, ethics, rituals, roles or social organizations that may arise from such beliefs." This definition covers Christianity, Islam, Taoism, Confucianism, Buddhism, and Scientology, religions which stem from authority figures such as Jesus, Muhammad, Moses, the writers of the Bible, Lao-Tzu, Gautama Buddha, Confucius, and L. Ron Hubbard. Interestingly, using the same definition of religion, it seems we should also classify Darwinist materialism as a religion. It is a fundamental way of looking at the nature of life, stemming from the teachings of an authority figure (Charles Darwin).

The table below gives some reasons why Darwinist materialism is like Roman Catholicism.

	Darwinist Materialism	Roman Catholic Church
Physical Bases	University buildings, high schools, natural history museums	Churches, monasteries, convents, seminaries, Catholic schools
Old Revered Texts	Books of Charles Darwin	The Bible and works of the Church Fathers (Augustine, Aquinas, etc.)
Sacred Dogmas	Accidental origin of life, accidental origin of species by “natural selection,” brains as the source of minds, brains as storage places of memories	The Trinity, the resurrection of Jesus, the divine inspiration of the Bible, papal infallibility, dogmas about Mary, mother of Jesus
Lower Prestige Workers	High school biology teachers, experimental subjects, paid lab workers	Nuns, deacons
Middle Prestige Workers	PhD candidates, college instructors, assistant professors	Priests
High Prestige Workers	Tenured professors	Bishops
Highest Prestige Persons	National Academy of Science members, Royal Society members, Nobel Prize winners	Cardinals, the Pope
Arcane Speech	Jargon-filled scientific papers	Jargon-filled theology papers, Holy Mass language
Indoctrin-ation Meetings	Biology classes, psychology classes	Sunday sermons, Sunday school
Financial Base	Countless billions in old university endowments, tuition, government funding, with $800 billion in US university endowments alone	Billions in old endowments, church property,  Sunday donations, tithes
Rituals	PhD dissertations, experiments (often poorly designed and implemented), science conferences, rituals of science paper writing, countless legend and dogma recitations	Sunday Mass, baptisms, weddings, First Communion, funerals
Speculations	Abundant	Abundant
Persecution or Libeling of Heretics	Frequent (currently non-physical, including gaslighting, slander, libel, accusatory insinuations, and stereotyping of ideological opponents and witnesses of the paranormal)	Frequent in the past
Censorship	Massive “soft” censorship and repression of undesired observations such as witnessing of paranormal phenomena and successful ESP experiments	Once very frequent, such as Legion of Decency
Speech Taboos	Very many (including fair discussion of the paranormal or evidence for design in nature)	Very many
Miracle Stories	Accidental origin of life, and accidental origin of billions of types of protein molecules in the animal kingdom, most having hundreds or thousands of well-arranged parts, requiring many miracles of accidental organization, like hundreds of falling logs forming into extensive log cabin hotels or a row of fifty tall sand castles forming from random wind and waves	Miracle stories involving Jesus, Catholic saints and the Virgin Mary (Fatima, Lourdes, etc.)
Officials in Fancy Robes?	Yes (professors during graduation ceremonies)	Yes
Despised Deviants	Witnesses of the paranormal, Darwinism critics, teleology theorists, those having spiritual experiences	In previous years, Protestants and gays
Chanting?	Very much, such as “blind evolution explains it all” chant and “it's all just brain activity” chant	Very much, such as Hail Mary prayers and the chants of monks
Art Forms	Materialist science fiction	Sculpture, painting, sacred music, sacred architecture
Saints	Many science figures whose work is described reverently	Many canonized saints
Catechisms	College textbooks and biased Wikipedia articles	Official catechisms teaching Catholic dogma
Legends	Many “just so” legends such as the legend of trans-Atlantic rafting monkeys, and many achievement legends such as the legend Darwin explained biological origins	Many legends about saints and their miracles or legends about miraculous healings or the Virgin Mary
Helper Workers	Unquestioning conformist science journalists	Laymen volunteers
Iconography	Sparse iconography including endlessly repeated side-profile “Evolution of man” diagram with four or five figures facing right	Vast iconography

The enormous current success of Darwinist materialism in getting people to believe in its main dogmas comes from a failure of people to perceive that Darwinist materialism is pretty much a kind of stealth religion, basically a kind of church-in-all-but-name that has infiltrated the halls and rooms of our universities.  Once you recognize the strong similarities between Darwinist materialism and an organized religion such as the Roman Catholic Church, there is a kind of "Toto pulling back the Wizard's curtain" effect in which we can suddenly see how much bluffing and bluster is going on when unproven belief community dogmas are marketed as scientific facts.

The research communities of scientific academia and the clergy of religions both are what can be called ideological enclaves. An ideological enclave is some small subset of the population in which some particular belief system is required. The diagram below illustrates how ideological enclaves get new members and keep the enclave committed to its ideology:

An expert existing in some "echo chamber" ideological enclave may be filled with dogmatic overconfidence about some opinion that is popular within his little ideological enclave. He may think something along the lines of: “No doubt it is true, because almost all my peers and teachers agree that it is true.” But the idea may seem senseless to someone who has not been long-conditioned inside this ideological enclave, this sheltered thought bubble. 

Do you want to read some of the "ignored conflicting evidence" depicted at the left of the visual above? Read the posts of this blog and this blog. To read more about the resemblance of biologists to clergy, read my post "Scientists and Clergy Have Much in Common."  

Academia serves as a kind of "Ministry of Materialism" that has quite a few similarities with the structure of organized religions.

The hierarchical structure of Darwinist materialism is depicted below. The structure maintains its dominance because it is funded by gigantic sums that we may call "Darwin dollars" and "materialist money."

In the table above I claim that censorship is common in scientific academia. This conclusion is backed up by a paper "Prosocial motives underlie scientific censorship by scientists: A perspective and research agenda."  We read this:

"A recent national survey of US faculty at four-year colleges and universities found the following: 1) 4 to 11% had been disciplined or threatened with discipline for teaching or research; 2) 6 to 36% supported soft punishment (condemnation, investigations) for peers who make controversial claims, with higher support among younger, more left-leaning, and female faculty; 3) 34% had been pressured by peers to avoid controversial research; 4) 25% reported being 'very' or 'extremely' likely to self-censor in academic publications; and 5) 91% reported being at least somewhat likely to self-censor in publications, meetings,...In a 2023 survey of academics in New Zealand, 53% reported that they were not free to state controversial or unpopular opinions, 48% reported that they were not free to raise differing perspectives or argue against the consensus among their colleagues, and 26% reported that they were not free to engage in the research of their choice."

The paper gives us a great visual, looking like the one below. We see how censorship and bias by peer reviewers and self-censorship by scientists can cause the scientific literature to present a false version of reality, leading us to think that something is true when it is not true. This is just what is happening in the world of neuroscience. Innumerable facts and observations defying the "brains make minds" dogma are excluded from scientific papers, particularly observations of the paranormal. 

In previous centuries, Roman Catholicism or Protestantism were the dominant ideological regimes.  In today's world Darwinist materialism seems to be the dominant ideological regime. But it's a "meet the new Boss, very much like the old Boss" situation. Darwinist materialism sold itself as something intellectually superior. In reality it is a dogmatic belief system that suffers from most of the same flaws of the ecclesiastical regimes of thought that preceded it.  But we all love myths with a flavor of "Progress Marches Gloriously Onward." So it's hard for people to realize that our current intellectual overlords have chained us to a tyranny of dogmas as oppressive as those in medieval times. 

That's why the conference scene near the end of "The Hunger Games -- Mockingjay Part 2" is so implausible. In an instant flash of insight, Katniss seems to realize that the new regime she has served is something with the same glaring defects as the old regime that it superseded. Such an insight comes only after lengthy deep thought and analysis, not in some flash of insight that instantly occurs as an epiphany.  The movie then follows with a semi-final scene that has dramatic impact but fails as a moral example and also by suggesting the misguided and unrealistic idea that regrettable regimes can be overthrown merely by a little muscle action.