Refuting Scientism.

Vic Biorseth, Tuesday, October 11, 2011
https://www.catholicamericanthinker.com

(Refuting Scientism is another third-column gathering of linked articles, this one showing the drift of Western thought into nonsense, under the title of “enlightenment.” Go to the links you see to the right on this page for the nitty-gritty details of where Scientism has taken us.)

The First Link seen at the top of the right hand column of this webpage describes the declared Catholic heresy of Modernism. A Catholic heresy may seem a strange place to begin talking about scientism; however, I submit that that is where science – meaning material, physical science – first took a wrong turn, began corrupting itself, and that Modernism is what morphed into Scientism. Modernism moved man to the center of thinking, and moved materialistic science to the preeminent position among all sciences, and that was and is the problem. If you read nothing else among the right column links, you should read that article.

The term Scientism was coined, I believe, by F. A. Hayek in his book, The Counter Revolution of Science. The term describes a movement of the scientific method away from strict empiricism, Critical Thinking and objectivity, and toward an unempirical, purely subjective, elitist and “collective” popular composite approach to doing science. This is an elevation of consensus over strict empiricism and independent open criticism, at the expense of the old, tried-and-true scientific method.

In this approach, “scientific consensus” trumps all, including even reason.

Thus, Scientism – i.e., Scientific Consensus – is why clear past scientific falsehoods, proven false with utter certainty long ago, are still held, promoted, built upon and taught by a majority of “scientists” today. Dr. Paul Erlich’s Population Bomb and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring are just two of many examples we could mention; they contain multiple utter falsehoods that have been proven false and fraudulent many, many times over the many, many years since publication, and yet they are still held in high esteem in scientific quarters, and their long ago falsified theories are still held to be true, and still held to somehow be scientific.

Every single thing they said turned out to be false, and every single prediction they made was proven wrong by time itself. And yet, we have in place huge, costly programs round the world to control human population and unnecessarily “redistribute” resources, and conserve resources that do not need to be conserved, and to eliminate products that do not need to be eliminated, and on and on. As a direct result of the political furor ignited by Silent Sprint, for instance, the perfectly harmless but extremely effective mosquito insecticide DDT was (and remains) banned. By now, if DDT had not been banned, it is entirely possible that malaria might have been wiped out on earth. Instead, millions continue to suffer and die from it every single year.

The reason untruth prevails in these instances is that the untruths have the near unanimous support of TTRSTF⁴ in all fields of material science, TTRSPTF⁵ in the upper ranks of academia, and TTRSJTF⁶ in the SLIMC¹ and in the world-wide news media.

Much of science today has become political science, in that Marxism has co-opted or commandeered many scientistic myths for purely political reasons. Marxists will invent crises if crises do not present themselves; if crises present themselves then Marxist will co-opt them for the benefit of the Marxist cause, which is, to achieve or increase concentrated political power, at the expense of power of the people. The move of science away from empiricism and toward the popular composite approach – meaning scientific consensus – was and is a great boon for the ultimate cause of Marxism.

Scientism has thus become a tool of ever opportunistic Marxism.

It has been clearly shown by simple mathematics that there is no such thing as a Human Population Problem; nevertheless, multiple governments, including this one, have multiple programs in place to “deal with” this non-existent problem. International political pressure is brought to bear on “over-populated” nations for them to get their over-population problem under control.

This is a Marxist-inspired effort to convince the world of scientistic or political-science myth that says that HBAACOTE¹¹ , and that the world is in need of WBESSWG¹⁷ , since this is a problem too big for one or even a few governments to properly resolve.

If it’s a global problem, then it needs a global solution. See?

(But in truth, it is not a problem at all.)

There are “double-whamy” falsehoods, that promote the need for more government control from both ends – such as, The World Is Running Out Of Fossil Fuels falsehood, right up against the Burning Of Fossil Fuels Is Destroying The Planet falsehood. Once again, it tells us that HBAACOTE¹¹ , and that the world is in need of WBESSWG¹⁷

There are many such clear falsehoods rampant on the world stage today. We are supposed to be running out of food, although food production continually increases, and is higher today than ever in history – which means nothing more than that this is a normal year, as regards food production. Some of these scientistic falsehoods are real killers, like the HIV-AIDS relationship myth. See the links to the right for the details; but this one has actually killed lots of people, and this government, and other governments, have spent untold billions to fight a non-existent problem.

AIDS is supposed to be rampant in Africa, because of a high detected HIV infection rate; it is therefore assumed that homosexuality and general promiscuity is more prevalent in Africa than elsewhere. However, the reason for the higher African infection rate with the perfectly harmless HIV retrovirus is almost comically simple: it is caused by the re-use of hypodermic needles by all medical practitioners all across Africa, something unheard of in America. If we really wanted to cut the spread of harmless HIV in Africa, the way to do it would be to ship billions of hypodermic needles instead of billions of dollars over there. We use them once and throw them away, a practice that is unheard of in Africa. They reuse them until they don’t work any more.

You have heard that figures don’t lie but figurers do. Africans are assumed to be dieing of AIDS at a higher rate than other continents because of extrapolations made regarding symptoms of those who die; i.e., many Africans deaths involve dehydration, a symptom associated with AIDS. But, you see, dehydration is also associated with many other diseases more prevalent in Africa, such as cholera, which simply dehydrates the victim unto death. But, don’t think about it too much. Just listen to what the experts tell you.

Now that Marxism has entered the game and taken over so many of the scientistic myths, we need to look more closely than ever at the political spokesmen for the myth-of-the-moment. These are the ones who most strongly promote the myth that HBAACOTE¹¹ , and who most strongly promote the myth that the world is in need of WBESSWG¹⁷ . They do not follow, and indeed they oppose our commonly held Judeo-Christian Ethos, in favor of MPAV¹⁶ . Your very life, and the lives of those you love, could depend on your recognition of that simple fact.

The Western world has drifted into error. We must change course.

Read Refuting Marx; learn whatever you can about Machiavelli's evil scheme, about the Hegelian Dialectic, and about how Marxism advances today by capitalizing on crisis, panic, falsehood and propaganda. The less informed and more poorly educated they can make the populace, the more elite they make themselves, and the more control they gain. Read the links, and see how the scientific method is almost never applied today. Speed, spin, and an induced false sense of emergency, trumps truth.

It is your job to persist in the quest for truth. It is your job – not the government’s job – to properly educate your children. It is your job to insist on honesty and integrity in your elected representatives. It is your job to attack clear falsehood.

Seek the Truth; find the Way; live the Life. Please God, and live forever.

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Sarcastic Acronym Hover-Link Footnotes: For the convenience of those readers using devices that lack a mouse, these footnotes are provided for all webpages, in case any webpage contains any hover-links. (If you don't have a mouse, you can't "hover" it over a link without clicking just to see the simple acronym interpretation. Click any footnote link to see the acronym and a detailed explanation; "Hover" the mouse over it just to see the simple interpretation.)

SLIMC¹ Secularist Liberal Intellectual Media Complex
GESGOEAEOT² Gradually, Ever So Gradually, Over Eons And Eons Of Time
PEWAG³ Punctuated Equilibrium's Wild-Assed Guess
TTRSTF⁴ Them There Real Scientifical-Type Fellers
TTRSPTF⁵ Them There Real Smart Perfesser-Type Fellers
TTRSJTF⁶ Them There Real Smart Journalistical-Type Fellers
SNRTACBT⁷ Surely No Right Thinking Adult Could Believe Today
STNSEACPB⁸ Surely Today No Serious Educated Adult Could Possibly Believe
WDN⁹ We Don't Know
BMDFP¹⁰ Baboons, Mongrel Dogs, Filthy Pigs and ...
HBAACOTE¹¹ Human Beings Are A Cancer On The Earth
ACLU¹² Anti-Christian Litigation Union
FLORMPORIF¹³ Flagrant Liar, Or, Mindless Parrot, Or, Innocent Fool
MEJTML¹⁴ Marxist Ends-Justify-The-Means Liar
IEJTML¹⁵ Islamic Ends-Ends-Justify-The-Means Liar
MPAV¹⁶ Marxist Principles And Values
WBESSWG¹⁷ Wise, Benign, Elite, Super-Scientific World Governance
TRMITM¹⁸ The Reason Man's In This Mess
IYI¹⁹ Intellectual Yet Idiotic
TTRSCBTF²⁰ Them There Real Smart Catholic Bishop Type Fellers
IACMPVND²¹ Illegal-Alien-Criminal Marxocrat-Party-Voting Nation-Destroyers
PEJTML²² Palestinian Ends-Justify-The-Means Liar
PSYOP²³ "Psychological Operation" Mind Trick
CDC²⁴ Covid Developmentally Challenged
LGBTQ+ Every Letter Represents A Serious Psychotic sexual Identity Disorder
HEJTML²⁶ Hedonist Ends-Justify-The-Means Liar
SEJTML²⁷ Scientistic Ends-Justify-The-Means Liar

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Note:

Tuesday, September 11, 2012

Updated this page to the new BB 2.0 - SBI! 3.0 release, and/or to make better use of the new reusable code feature.
LOVE this new release!

Regards,

Vic

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Date:  Sun Dec 08 12:43:27 2013
From:  John
Email:   jbubs55@comcast.net
Location:  Wyoming, Pa
Comment: 

Vic,

In his book The Last Superstition, Edward Feser shows that “modern” science is not science in the sense that what science originally was or is what it used to be. What Hayek has labeled “scientism” Feser shows it to be the result of a war between two opposing philosophical conceptions of nature, a topic that has also been covered by Francis Schaeffer.

According to Feser, one view is the classical “teleological” vision of Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas, that the inherent feature of nature is that of purpose or goal-directedness, (God Centered) and today includes such inanimate things as the 4 laws of physics: gravity, electro-magnetic force, and weak and strong nuclear force. The other view is the modern “mechanical” vision of Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, and Hume, that the inherent feature of the physical world is purposeless, meaningless particles in motion, (Man Centered) and today includes such animate things as the thoughts generated in the brain. (I am sure you can already sense the inherent absurdity here.) Feser then shows that with the classical teleological view the existence of God, the immortality of the soul, and the natural-law conception of absolute morality are logically unavoidable. With the modern mechanical view, the denial of God, the denial of the immortal soul, and the conception of moral relativity is logically unavoidable.

The SLIMC¹ has swallowed the insinuation by TTRSPTF⁵ that the modern, mechanical picture of the world has been established by “science”. It is insinuation because this view is demonstrably false. The modern mechanical view can never be established by science because it is not a scientific theory. It is a philosophical statement about science. All TTRSTF⁴ such as Hawking and Dawkins make this error. However this fallacy is now being recognized by an ever widening circle. It is what I would call “The Fallacy of Scientism”.

Both Feser and Scheaffer have shown the inherent absurdity of this view: If one holds to the mechanical conception of the natural world its logical conclusion says that rationality and the human mind itself is illusory. In other words, if my thoughts are only the result of molecules in motion, how can I know my thoughts are true? In what way could I possibly justify my thoughts except by force or by ridicule? These tactics are exactly those of the SLIMC¹ . This is because the “scientific worldview” championed by TTRSTF⁴ and the SLIMC¹ actually undermines its own rational foundation, and by default undermines the foundation of morality. Scientism is thus nonsense, and nonsense, as you have written elsewhere, is evil at its root.

The Last Superstition concludes that the without the classical teleological picture of nature, morality and reason cannot possibly make sense. The classical thinking of Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas, is the only view that can be rationally justified – and with it the rational justification of the religious worldview upon which it is based.

Vic, because the SLIMC¹ world view is so prevalent today, the task of evangelism as I see it (and this was the thrust of my last letter to you), would mean that we soldiers have to be ready to begin a defense of the faith most often at even the “pre-evangelism” level. If the majority of people today have been taught that science is the only way to knowledge, the very idea of supernatural would be rejected outright and scorned. This means that arguments and examples from a book such as The Last Superstition would be the necessary “pre-evangelical” starting point.

It follows that a person who truly embraces the SLIMC¹ view would not be open hearing about the realities of Catholicism. Such as person would laugh at the words of the Pope, except for those resembling Marxism. Such as person would smirk at the very mention of salvation through Christ. The very idea of salvation would amuse such a person, for why would a person need salvation if morality is relative? “What’s true for me is true for me and what’s true for you is true for you, Silly.”

An effective evangelist must first determine a person’s type of misbelief. Is the person a former believer whose faith has been shaken by the SLIMC¹ onslaught? Is the person a devout believer in a non-Judeo-Christian religion? Is the person a militant atheist who espouses the mechanical/relativistic world view?

Today, one’s defense of the faith must include basic philosophical knowledge (for pre-evangelism) along with Christian truths (for evangelism). Equally important is using the correct tactics. The essential question of tactics is this “Is it better to argue a point or would a question get the job done?” In my opinion, a question (Socratic Method) is always more effective. A question is never assertive. A question gently places the burden of proof on the misbeliever, who is usually happy to explain, while you wait for an opening with another question. A question is thus a defensive tactic used as offense without being offensive.

1 Peter 3:15 says “But in your hearts honor Christ the Lord as holy; always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and respect.” By asking questions an evangelist will always be gentle and respectful. Like an effective teacher that must meet the student at the student’s current level of understanding and guide him with questions to understanding, an effective evangelist must meet the person at his current level of misunderstanding and then guide him with questions to “true truth”.

It is also written, “Do not answer a fool to his folly, but answer a fool as his folly deserves, that he not be wise in his own eyes.” Proverbs 26, verses 4 and 5.

Semper Fidelis

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Date:  Sun Dec 08 15:57:59 2013
From:  Vic Biorseth
Comment:  

John:

You have brought the argument back to the beginning point, before Philosophy was split into two increasingly divorced, increasingly alienated and increasingly competitive (at least on one side)  fields of theology and material science, by the advance of Modernism.  Questions regarding whether thoughts are somehow generated in the brain by mere accidental interaction of particles of some kind, or not, re-raise ancient questions, such as, what is the soul?. 

As much as Freud and others since him have described conscious and even sub-conscious minds, he never really experienced one, because he couldn't.  No one can.  And yet his wild and completely unverified conjectures regarding the human mind are near universally accepted today as actual science. 

There is much wisdom in your "ask a question" approach to pre-evangelism, however, it might only work well in a one-on-one dialogue, or at least in a dialogue, even if it involved multiple participants.  In this website I have determined to rely on flat out open attack on un-truth, as an overall strategy.  So most of the articles I have written that do that, do it with a combination of naked aggression, mockery and open ridicule.  I treat the champions of un-truth pretty much the way they treat Christians, not only because turn about is fair play, but because of the ancient rule of war that says, "He who defends may only survive, but he who attacks may win."  I like to go after them on their own turf, and on their own terms, which are supposed to be purely empirical and scientific.  I enjoy making them squirm. 

That being said, in many of the dialogues that have resulted from many of these articles, I have been perhaps less than civil, and not what you might call very evangelistic.  It is hard, for me, to know where the balance line is.  One-on-one conversation is different, for then you look into the person's eyes and you have body language to interpret.  But these website conversations are much less personal, and the electronic words are stark, in black and white. 

There is the added difficulty of somehow properly deciphering whether the person at the other end of the electronic dialogue is really what you have called a pre-evangelism prospect, an evangelism prospect, or just an obstinate unrepentant sinner who is never going to convert no matter how much time and energy is spent on the project. 

I don't think many American citizens fully comprehend the horrible damage that has been done to our whole culture by the encroachment of predominantly Marxist thought into American education, news reporting, commentary, entertainment, and even - God help us - politics and government.  An insidious, pernicious, atheistic and anti-constitutional ideology of sneaky revolution is actually in control of most of our sitting government right now. 

So what I go after is the big thoughts, or the big areas of contention.  Darwin, Freud and Marx are at the core of it.  But Dawkins too; all the related pages in the right column.  It is the False Education that I attack, the untruth that most everyone smugly and condescendingly holds as truth, because they have been taught that that is true science.  It is not, and I intend to set the record straight. 

That means my weak spot is in the discourses after these webpages when I cannot tell if the commenter is really championing untruth, or, perhaps at the beginning point of discovering something new. 

My inclination is to speak the Truth, and then shake the dust and move on.  Perhaps that is not always the right thing to do. 

What scares me about all of this is the need for proper and correct education.  Whatever else I may be, I am no real educator.  America needs something decent to either counteract or preferably completely replace the public school system. 

Regards,

Vic

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Date:   Mon Sep 15 2014
From:  Vic Biorseth
Comment:  

Changes pursuant to changing the website URL and name from 
Thinking Catholic Strategic Center to
Catholic American Thinker.

Pulled the trigger on the 301 MOVE IT option June 1, 2014. Working my way through all the webpages.  . 

Regards,

Vic

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