Science as religion

and a decadent religion at that

Photo by CDC on Unsplash

Modern science has always seen itself as the opposite of religion. While both are supposed to be in the truth business, Modern science is — or rather was — focused on the method (how one knows) than on the object (what one knows). It is the natural offspring of Descartes’ attempt at finding truth from a starting point of systematic doubt. All should be doubted, preached the man who traveled to Lourdes to get some blessed water. He started by distrusting his own senses, and looking inward until he found out what he thought was a nice first step, the first thing that could be known for sure: that if he was thinking, something was thinking, and this something existed. Cogito ergo sum, “I think, therefore I am”, he famously declared.

The first victim of this new method of thinking was supposed to be the argument of authority: “[insert big name here] says it is so, therefore it is so.” It has always been more of a trick, an obfuscation, than reality. After all, nobody would be able to live without accepting on someone else’s authority basically every single thing one knows. I only know Japan exists because people told me so, after all. The stuff we discover ourselves, or even the experiments we successfully replicate, are a ridiculously tiny part of what we know and believe. Moreover, plenty of important elements of our knowledge have social, rather than physical, origins, and thus are not direct objects of scientific knowledge. Take language, for instance. The meaning of each word we use is just a general social agreement among the users of that language and that term. That is why words change their meaning with time. The most egregious example today is the word “gay”, but few are the words whose meanings haven’t changed since they were first used.

Nevertheless, the idea that arguments of authority could not be accepted, but new knowledge should rather be reached through a certain way of proceeding with hypothesis formation, experiments, and so on, is the basic dogma of Modern science. The Royal Society, “the oldest continuously existing scientific academy in the world” according to Wikipedia, has as its motto nullius in verba, “nothing on [someone else’s] words”. In other terms, no argument of authority is allowed.

The highest point of this way of thinking was by the end of the XIXth Century, when it was still possible for a dedicated person to know everything that was to be known in all fields of science, while the predictable course of science seemed to indicate an indefinite accumulation of new knowledge. Modern science had replaced previous paradigms, but the knowledge attained through the scientific method would last forever. The idea of the paradigm shift, of the unpredictable yet to-be-expected creative destruction of previous knowledge, was not yet a part of the scientific mindset. Old lies were disproved, and new knowledge replaced them. This new knowledge, though, had already been scientifically proven, and therefore would never change.

Late XIXth-Century scientists were the priests of the new religion, the bringers of new eternal truths that were rapidly replacing the old stuff. They despised strict-sense religion because it preached truths that had not been reached through their new central dogma of method. Because it was based, at least in their view, on arguments of authority.

It wasn’t a fully honest position, though. Religion indeed did not use the scientific method. Nonetheless, even if it had existed two thousand years earlier, it wouldn’t have been possible to use it, for the fields of truth religion is concerned about are not falsifiable, and therefore could not be tested with the scientific method.

On the other hand, the argument of authority was not at the roots of religion, only at its propagation. People believe what the Church says because its authority rests on the very physical miracles surrounding the Ressurection, as well as other later miracles, often permanent (as uncorrupted bodies) or at least close enough in time to have living witnesses still around. I, for one, know enough of the innards of the Church to realize that an organization in which so many key players are playing against the home team can only survive by God’s direct action.

In any case, the Church was, in its own way, like the Royal Society, presenting knowledge derived from empirical “discoveries”. This is why she eventually embraced Modern science, even if the embrace was not mutual. The present standards for the certification of a miracle, for instance, include its inability to be explained scientifically. A miracle is ultimately that which is “divinely accomplished, [and] apart from the generally established order in things” (St. Thomas Aquinas), and Modern science’s field is the "generally established order of things”, not the exceptions. It was only very recently that heresies based on pure authority (the later forms of Protestantism, especially so-called Evangelicalism) appeared, giving (some) Scripture rootless authority, in a textbook example of the petitio principii fallacy, and then treating it as a Modern scientist would treat Nature, “discovering” stuff in there.

In the first half of the XXth Century, anyhow, Modern science’s claims of being able to reach truly everlasting knowledge were falsified by Einstein’s theory of general relativity. Newton’s discoveries, which were seen as universal, became mere useful descriptions of a very limited area of physics. It was humbling, but the scientific worldview took the fall well and started expecting epistemological ruptures to happen. They became a part of the scientific worldview, and Cartesian methodical doubt started being applied in earnest to previously-attained scientific knowledge.

Around that very same time, the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset wrote his short albeit illuminating book The Revolt of the Masses. He described something that was happening all around him, something that promised much greater societal problems in the future, including, and especially, for science. By the end of his book, he asked whether science would be able to go on from then.

The societal problem he pinpointed was something that was leading to the supremacy of totalitarian systems all over Europe. In Ortega’s homeland, Fascism and Communism had fought a Civil War, with a horrifying death toll.

Now both these forms of Modern madness have at their cores what I usually refer to as the cult of mediocrity. Both profess to like the little man, without ever specifying that they like his smallness rather than his humanity and that they want all men (with the exception of the Great Leader) to be ant-like, stupid, and in the thrall of the Party and its Leader. It can be easily seen in both Fascist and Communist architecture. Both love great empty squares, huge buildings with great vertical columns that make ants out of men. Neither appreciates the freedom of pursuit that can make some people rise above others in non-political endeavors.

It is something that was in the spirit of Ortega y Gasset’s historical moment, but it persisted and became prevalent in our days. Ortega describes how in his times the very notion of an élite was under attack. Any élite (except for the political ones, in which he had no interest), that is, any people who rose above mediocrity in any field (the best shoemaker, the best violin player, the best poet, the best athlete, the best endocrinologist…) was being replaced by what he called the mass man, or the “señorito satisfecho”, the “self-satisfied little man.” For this creature, his own opinion on any subject, even on something he didn’t know existed until the time he was called to express his opinion about it, was worth the same as, or more than, the opinion of someone who dedicated his life to that. The very notion of an élite was threatened by the rise of the mass man and his refusal to hear those who know more about any given field.

Fascism and Communism changed. In fact, present Communism is closer to XXth-Century Fascism than to that time’s Communism, even if today’s Communists still call anybody else a Fascist. It started in the Spanish Civil War, by the way, when the Stalinists (Communists aligned with the Soviet Union) decided that even their equally-Communist supposed partners, the Trotskyists (the ideological origin of present Neoconservatism) and Anarchists, were in fact Fascists, just like Franco’s people. George Orwell, who fought in a Trotskyist militia in the Spanish Civil War, had to flee Spain to avoid being killed by the Stalinists as a Fascist.

Nevertheless, Ortega’s mass man kept growing in social importance. This Revolt of the Masses is what is behind the idea that opinion polls should guide technical endeavors, or that the opinion of “celebrities” is important enough to be heard on any given subject. Ortega y Gasset thought it would spell the doom of science, but he was wrong. Just as Fascism and Communism changed, science did.

It became the State religion almost everywhere, for a start, and at the same time, it got subordinate to the production of technology. At the same time, in a sort of continuous retro-alimentation, it became more and more technological. Nowadays, science depends so much on technology that it is simply impossible to replicate many if not most scientific experiments. The evident result is that these days science is much closer to omnia in verba, “everything [depending on other people’s] words”, than to the Royal Society’s nullius in verba.

This phenomenon, in turn, made science resurrect the deader-than-a-doornail body of the “everlasting discovered knowledge”, nowadays referred to as “the scientific consensus”. As if before Einstein there had not been a “scientific consensus” that Newton was right, and before Newton, there wasn’t another consensus supporting Aristotelian physics. Modern science, especially in the last hundred years, was supposed to be all about distrusting any form of consensus, all about a method based on systematically doubting any certainties, consensual or not. But its enthroning as State religion made it much harder to change stuff. When an official State religion says “Oops, we were wrong about that” it no longer serves its function, for it can no longer be trusted as the scaffolding of State legitimacy.

At the same time, the relationship of mutual dependence between science and technology put science in bed with Big Tech money. Too much is invested in having a gradual accretion of scientific knowledge and/or technological means. Paradigm ruptures became too financially risky to be allowed.

I read today an article that made much of it quite clear in my mind and brought me to my keyboard. Its author was explaining why a certain vaccine specialist should not debate an anti-vaxxer, and the reasons he gave were basically the same that made me glad my health had prevented me from taking part in a debate a few years ago. The guy people wanted me to debate was a man I know is honest and well-meaning, but who got himself trapped in one of those sects whose members, if asked “Is the Pope Catholic”, would answer in the negative. Chuckles. So I would defend that Catholics cannot disobey Church authorities systematically, and he would take the opposite position and defend systematic disobedience to legitimate authorities. In other words, for him, they were indeed Church authorities, but their flock still should systematically disobey them because reasons.

Now, the article’s author wrote about what would be a debate on vaccines, something within what should be a scientific subject, or at least in the intersection of public policy and science. And he wrote:

Debates are a less-than-ideal forum for having conversations about contentious issues —especially when they’re issues whose understanding is clouded with misinformation.

There are several reasons for that. For starters, a debate about a scientific issue implies there is scientific disagreement about that issue, said Rupali Limaye, a social scientist at Johns Hopkins University’s public health school who studies vaccine communication. You’re “giving individuals a platform to really promote something that goes against scientific consensus,” she said.

That creates a sense of false equivalence, said Limaye. In this case, it suggests there’s as much good science to support avoiding vaccines as there is to support getting vaccinated — when in fact, the scientific evidence overwhelmingly supports vaccination safety and effectiveness.

But another important reason that debates fail at science communication is that they’re usually conducted with an audience, whether they’re live in a studio, listening on headphones, or following on Twitter.

That has several consequences, one of which is to disincentivize participants from changing their minds. A debate’s performative aspect means its participants are rewarded for doing what best preserves their public image. For people whose public identity is strongly tied to holding specific beliefs, that means standing their ground — not learning something new, which they may see as signaling to their audience that their identity is on shaky ground.

Simultaneously, the promise of an audience incentivizes debate participants to do whatever it takes to draw in and retain an even bigger audience. “You want drama, you want something that people are going to click on and be like, ‘Oh, my god,’” said Limaye. The interior process of learning isn’t the most likely thing to elicit that response; debate highlights are far more likely to include snappy retorts than thoughtful murmurs. A participant who scores points off the other guy is most likely to gain followers and fame.

Both reasons (that the anti-vaxxer was denying the truthfulness of the present paradigm — “go[ing] against scientific consensus” —, and that people will often get further entrenched in their opinions, be they true or false, when debating or listening to a debate about them) are perfect for religious matters. They correspond perfectly with the reasons why I didn’t go back to debate the guy when I regained enough health to be able to do it. It would get him and his sympathizers further entrenched in his error, and that it is an error was already proved by the fact that he was proposing something contradictory to what has been believed by all people, at all times, and in all places within the Church. As Chesterton said so well, “Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.”

On the other hand, these are precisely the kind of grounds on which previously-universal science dogma said the paradigm disturber should be given a chance. He could have something interesting to say, something that falsified the paradigm he attacked. But the author goes even further, and — not surprisingly at all — goes to the other theme in which we hear more about “scientific consensus” these days:

It’s not just vaccine science: Many areas of science really don’t benefit from “debate.” There have been plenty of debates broadcast on climate science, for example, but according to climate scientist Gavin Schmidt, they have hardly moved the needle on climate denialism.

I am neither a biochemist nor a meteorologist, and the little I know about those subjects would never qualify me to have an informed opinion on either subject (I am not Ortega’s mass man, and I do respect the learning of specialists). But I do know something about sociology and epistemology, and that is what I am talking about here. Both subjects — vaccines and the climate — have been the object of several serious accusations that are in my field rather than in those strict scientific fields, even because they attack the very foundations of present (religious-like) scientific discourse. The main accusation is that in both cases the oxymoronic “settled science” is said to be “settled” due to political or financial, instead of scientific, reasons.

In the case of vaccines, the money connection is evident, as vaccines are expensive and Big Pharma is not known for its ethical behavior. In the case of climate, it is a little bit more complicated, because the connection is one of power, rather than money. In both cases, however, the debate tends to be on the level of Ortega’s mass man, that is, an essentially rhetorical debate in which political slogans substitute for arguments, and in which both sides cover their ears and sing instead of listening to the other side.

As I said, I know next to nothing of meteorology, but it is epistemological absurd to believe that a field of study whose reliability when predicting what the weather will be in a mere ten days is about the same as that of random chance (“head it will rain, tails it won’t” is as accurate as the best professional weather forecasts for ten days onwards) could not only predict the general direction of present climate trends but also pinpoint its causes and predict the consequences of different policies toward them. The climate has always changed, and probably will always change until the end of days. But we do not have much data on that constant process before our times; a few tree rings show us some elements of how the climate was at some times in the past, ice cores provide us yet other descriptive (not causative) elements, and the rest can only be gleaned from too-narrow subjective (ancient writings) and too-wide objective (the presence of a certain plant on a certain latitude in a certain period) data. The rest is meteorology.

This debate is in fact a part of a societal transformation in which governments and corporations are fighting for supremacy, much more than a scientific argument. “Settled science”, as science is the official State religion virtually everywhere that matters, is a tool of governments against corporations. The latter, in turn, mainly appeals to mass man rhetorical absurdities to win the public policy debate.

The vaccine “debate”, on the other hand, is a different sociological animal, as both Big Pharma and the governments are on the same side, and anti-vax-ism became a rhetorical tool for outcast social influencers to fight the man.

The connection between Modern science and governments, nevertheless, has as its greater victim science itself. In becoming the State religion, it lost its focus on knowledge (“scientia”, in Latin) and became something else, a political tool that thwarts its own development and makes it even more dependent on its usefulness for the development of new technology. Instead of science for the sake of science, we have science for the sake of governmental legitimacy and science for the sake of gadgets. It makes science more and more akin to religion, but not only that: it is a decadent religion, a religion that only exists because of its usefulness for some political actors. Ortega y Gasset may have been right about that too, one hundred years ago.