{"id":30297,"date":"2015-02-19T04:00:13","date_gmt":"2015-02-19T09:00:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=30297"},"modified":"2015-02-17T12:48:26","modified_gmt":"2015-02-17T17:48:26","slug":"when-you-believe-in-science","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2015\/02\/19\/when-you-believe-in-science\/","title":{"rendered":"When you “believe” in science"},"content":{"rendered":"

In last week’s Goldberg File<\/em> newsletter, Jonah Goldberg looked at the odd situation of people who “believe in”<\/a> science:<\/p>\n

When I hear people talk about science as if it\u2019s something to \u201cbelieve in,\u201d particularly people who reject all sorts of science-y things (vaccines, nuclear power, etc. as discussed above), I immediately think of one of my favorite lines from Eric Voegelin: \u201cWhen God is invisible behind the world, the contents of the world will become new gods; when the symbols of transcendent religiosity are banned, new symbols develop from the inner-worldly language of science to take their place.\u201d This will be true, he added, even when \u201cthe new apocalyptics insist that the symbols they create are scientific.\u201d<\/p>\n

In other words, the \u201cDon\u2019t you believe in evolution!?!\u201d people don\u2019t really believe in science qua<\/em> science, what they\u2019re really after is dethroning God in favor of their own gods of the material world (though I suspect many don\u2019t even realize why they\u2019re so obsessed with this one facet of the disco ball called \u201cscience\u201d). \u201cCriticism of religion is the prerequisite of all criticisms,\u201d quoth Karl Marx, who then proceeded to create his own secular religion.<\/p>\n

This is nothing new of course. This tendency is one of the reasons why every time Moses turned his back on the Hebrews they started worshipping golden calves and whatnot.<\/p>\n

At least Auguste Comte, the French philosopher who coined the phrase \u201csociology,\u201d was open about what he was really up to when he created his \u201cReligion of Humanity,\u201d in which scientists, statesmen, and engineers were elevated to Saints. As I say in my column<\/a>, the fight over evolution is really a fight over the moral status of man. And, if we are nothing but a few bucks worth of chemicals connected by water and electricity, than there\u2019s really nothing holding us back from elevating \u201cscience\u201d to divine status and in turn anointing those who claim to be its champions as our priests. It\u2019s no coincidence that Herbert Croly was literally \u2014 not figuratively, the way Joe Biden means literally \u2014 baptized into Comte\u2019s Religion of Humanity.<\/p>\n

Personally, I think the effort to overthrow Darwin along with Marx and Freud is misguided. I have friends invested in that project and I agree that all sorts of terrible Malthusian and materialist crap is bound up in Darwinism. But that\u2019s an argument for ranking out the manure, not burning down the stable.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In last week’s Goldberg File newsletter, Jonah Goldberg looked at the odd situation of people who “believe in” science: When I hear people talk about science as if it\u2019s something to \u201cbelieve in,\u201d particularly people who reject all sorts of science-y things (vaccines, nuclear power, etc. as discussed above), I immediately think of one of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,11,16],"tags":[447,39,244,42],"class_list":["post-30297","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media","category-religion","category-science","tag-atheism","tag-junkscience","tag-publichealth","tag-sociology"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-7SF","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30297","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30297"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30297\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30298,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30297\/revisions\/30298"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30297"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30297"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30297"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}