Scientology… Whenever I hear this term I immediately picture Tom Cruise eating his daughter’s placenta… What I want to explore in this article isn’t so much related to the controversial religion as it is to our tendency to consider science the pinnacle of truth and “British Researchers” as modern-day evangelists. I will attempt to walk the thin yet deep no man’s land between faith and reason, between religion and science in order to express my own threshold view on the subject and maybe encourage others to do the same.
There have been numerous debates and studies on the “Relationship between Religion and Science” so instead of faking a researched knowledge about these studies, I will direct you to this Stanford article.
My scope here is different though. I am not talking about a relationship but rather an equivalence. I am trying to explore whether or not science is slowly replacing religion as an instrument for mass manipulation.
As I concluded in this article about the effects of glyphosate, fact-checking is becoming as important a skill as reading and writing and the attempt to do an in-depth fact check on any kind of science-based idea opens up a rabbit hole.
So for us, “laymen” of science, this so-called reason and evidence-based discipline requires a great deal of faith, as fact-checking down to basic principles would require us to be “ordained” in the area of science we’re fact-checking. That takes years of study and research and only covers a specific area, leaving out all the others. More so: even if you are the researcher that comes up with the raw data, your suppositions and biases influence the way you interpret and set up that data, so scientific objectivity becomes more of a myth than a reality. I am not saying that throughout scientific history, there have not been men and women that were conscious about their biases, but even they can not be considered as objective as science would have us believe.
I am not saying that science is a bunch of bullshit, as I am not saying all forms of religion are bullshit. The first point I am trying to make is that both science and religion are mistaken if they are proposing a singular universally true perspective on reality.
If we look at the evolution of what we currently call science (and what was called natural philosophy before the nineteenth century) we realize that new discoveries either completely nullify previous theories as is the case of psychology, or just puts things in a MUCH broader perspective as Einstein’s Relativity Theory did for Newtonian physics. The second point I am trying to make is that both disciplines would benefit from a more humble posture that would entail declaring what they don’t know yet even louder than they declare what they do know.
The human need for certainty, for control and for power over our fate is in my opinion something that from now on will rather slow down our progress rather than accelerate it.
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