7.5.2 Follow the “Science“: Real Science or Scientism?

Introduction

From the start of the scientific era, which followed the Renaissance‘s rediscovery of ancient Greek wisdom, to the industrial revolution that propelled us into unprecedented prosperity, our societies have increasingly depended on science and technology. In a world that‘s becoming more materialistic and moving away from traditional spiritual practices that used to provide the foundation for our understanding of life‘s meaning, we‘ve even come to revere our technological achievements almost like sacred objects..

In a materialist world devoid of transcendence, the primary goals are the incessant accrual of power, status, and money, with everything they can buy. And everybody is closing the door of their golden cage while willingly accepting entrapment in it with all of their material comforts.

Paradoxically, as material comfort has become the ultimate hollow goal of life, the general knowledge of science and technology that underpins our material way of living has not received the attention required to equip citizens and decision-makers alike to propose optimal solutions in the face of complex problems.

To put it in simple terms, from the general public to the political class and everything in between, including the media, there is insufficient literacy in mathematics, the sciences, engineering, technology, and so on. Yet to those who master these disciplines, immense power awaits as they strive to capture the benefits of a growing monopoly on knowledge and technology. Hence, a new pseudo-religion and its mantra, “Follow the science,“ has subjugated the non-critical-thinking crowd.

As explained by many witnesses, confusion due to poor understanding of the scientific process as well as poor knowledge of cutting-edge science in epidemiology, virology, and immunology in the political class, institutions, the media, and not to mention the general public, was at the root of the mismanagement of this public health crisis. It was a situation exacerbated by widespread corruption, as we have witnessed.

Data, Information, Evidence, and Knowledge

Most people have been mesmerized by all the data yet fail to understand the distinction between data, information, evidence, and knowledge. Data is raw facts, statistics, context-free numbers. Information is data that has been processed to provide a proper framework of the context. Evidence is yet another level in which the information is framed to generate testable hypotheses upon which evidence can be fortified. From validated evidence, a body of knowledge accumulates over time as the evidence underpinning it withstands the trial of repeated testing and reproducibility.

Needless to say, during the pandemic, authorities frequently fed the public data that was of questionable quality, validity, interpretation, and scrutiny. Meanwhile, the mainstream media, clueless at the best of times, happily disseminated and endlessly commented upon the data with an air of authority.

Tragically, the population was misled by propagandized misinformation: not through so-called misinformation spreaders on social media but rather through the orchestrated work of official channels, in concert with mainstream media and the censorship of social media.

When a fact is yet to be verified, it is best to specify that all the explanations proposed are hypothesis yet to be verified. A golden rule in research is that one does not develop hypotheses on hypotheses but on validated facts--all of the relevant known and verified facts, that is to say, on observations and the description of phenomena validated by the scientific method. In addition, the methodology of the research and the population on which it was carried out are to be considered before making generalizations.

The sample choice, the experimental protocol—which hypotheses were tested—and the statistical analysis of the results are of paramount importance when it comes to generalizing a negative or positive result from a study to a complete population. Cross-correlations, observer biases, sample size, and many other factors must also be considered.

The study of human beings is complex and the study of an entire population even more so. In the end, ideally, rather than the observation should be free and unbiased. When our observations are unbiased, we avoid getting bogged down by more confusion than knowledge—even if for some it is more reassuring or gratifying to formulate fanciful, often simplistic, explanations to the detriment of scientific rigour.

The most insidious of ignorance is not what we do not know but what we hold to be true without question and which turns out to be false.

Science is constantly evolving through rigorous exploration of new theories, which are bound to gradually change in nuance or be invalidated by new evidence. Thus, the “consensus“ of the moment, supported by the majority of scientists, may eventually prove to be outdated or downright false in the light of new empirical findings.

This is compounded because too often results published in very good peer-reviewed journals have proven to be non-reproducible. How much of a problem is that? This is unfortunately very common in medical research as revealed by the famous article: “Why most published findings are false,“ written in 2005 by eminent epidemiologist John Ioannidis, one of the most cited scientists in the world in the field of clinical medicine and social sciences.

This article, the most downloaded from the Public Library of Science Medicine journal, is the most consulted article on the site with more than three million views. It has become an essential reference in relation to the difficulties linked to the reproducibility of scientific studies. Since the publication of this shocking article, a multitude of studies have come to corroborate this worrying observation.

In general, however, these difficulties are poorly documented because the system in place does not favour the dissemination of such information. Indeed, it is very difficult to publish results invalidating what has already been published in the scientific literature. This, therefore, singularly complicates the practice of scientific research and sets up researchers to embark on the wrong track.

This pre-mature publication of studies that cannot be faithfully reproduced is a serious problem, and it was was greatly exacerbated in the COVID-19 era as a large number of experts from all walks of life rushed to contribute to the scientific effort to confront the pandemic. Discernment to avoid going astray requires research training and experience, which the vast majority of media commentators, who have little or no practical experience in scientific research, lack.

Any well-trained researcher is perfectly aware of the limitations unverified and unconfirmed data and examines with great circumspection studies that have not been reproduced by independent teams protected from conflicts of interest. Minimally, before fully embarking on a research project, it is necessary to begin by reproducing the crucial results at the basis of the hypotheses to be explored.

Ultimately, it‘s not primarily about being right or wrong; it‘s about fostering dialogue to gain a clearer collective understanding and to implement solutions that can improve the resolution of stubborn issues stemming from complex systems, which challenge our overly simplified analyses.

Despite anything the mainstream media, social networks, or our politicians might postulate, it is important to recognize that one cannot lie with physics or biology. We must be cognizant of what nature reveals to us, avoid the pitfalls of ideological filters that hide or distort reality, and act accordingly. We must be extra vigilant not to be bogged down by confusion, which is all the more comfortable when it is widely shared.

Scientism

We must make a clear distinction between the belief system or ideology of reductionist materialist science and the pursuit of knowledge that science engages in with an open-minded approach to all new discoveries.

This quest for knowledge, the which is built up through accumulated observations, the development of explanatory theories, experimentation and the generation of new data that confirm or invalidate current theories, should not be restricted to the physical material world alone.

The quest should encompass the entirety of reality, including the metaphysical and spiritual realms. However, this is where most materialistic scientists encounter difficulties. Despite new neurological evidence supporting both the placebo and non-placebo effects, many materialistic scientists still find it challenging to recognize the influence of the mind on physical health.

In this emerging pseudo-religion that materialist science has taken on, often presenting itself as the sole valid path to knowledge, we find ourselves marvelling at the immense capabilities of humanity. It‘s hard not to believe in our potential to achieve remarkable feats, given the extraordinary progress we‘ve made since the Industrial Revolution.

We succumb to hubris, a trait warned against in ancient tales like the Tower of Babel or the story of Sisyphus, who challenged death. Armed with our science and advanced tools such as computers, we create models aimed at describing nature in immense detail, with the ambition of making highly precise predictions. In doing so, we believe we can alter the course of events with surgical precision, if needed.

We believe that everything would only have beneficial effects, without collateral damage. And we take ourselves for demiurges who can only make good decisions.

This intoxication of power pushes the limits of our ignorance into a blind spot. And the most ignorant are those who are convinced that they know enough but who understand only very superficially the evolving knowledge of science and especially its limits.

With their pseudo certainty, they derive narratives used to justify decisions and actions that cannot be doubted because they have followed the science. Any opposition to this scientific orthodoxy being decried as “conspiratorial“ or backward is easy to denigrate, ignore, or censor. And the hunt for heretics is relaunched as in the days of the Inquisition.

It is as if the questioning of the dominant “consensus“ of “accepted” science, of which the media is the mouthpiece, was in essence unscientific, ignoring that science fundamentally progresses according to an iterative process that does not sit well with a fixed dogmatism promoting a doxa to which we should adhere.

Knowledge is Not Wisdom

Wisdom invites us to cultivate the humility stemming from our ignorance, which is far greater than what we think we know. Complex phenomena cannot be reduced to simple causes that are supposedly invested with such high explanatory power that we can predict the future with an easily deployed computer model. For models to be valid, they should consider all parameters that can affect the system, as well as the degree of their combined interactions.

We often forget that at our stage of knowledge, these models have limited predictive power. They have to be constantly refined by empirical data, which is often difficult to obtain. However, it is sometimes possible to obtain the data when we take the trouble to compile and analyze relevant observations and the empirical tests of our theories. Retrospective and prospective studies are essential for closing the loop on our often risky predictions. These studies should teach us humility in the face of our cognitive limits and should influence us to exercise caution when we attempt to predict the future.

Unfortunately, the need to communicate, often on a daily basis, a simple message that is accessible to people who may not have the expertise (or the attention span) to appreciate the complexity of these systems, can lead one to propose simplistic, reductive explanations. Those can produce the illusion that we understand what is happening well enough to intervene only positively on the system. As Albert Einstein advised: we must strive to formulate explanations that are as simple as possible but not simplistic.

In our scientific exploration of complex phenomena, it is crucial to take advantage of the long experience of our ancestors who learned to develop strategies which, although imperfect, nevertheless made it possible to face difficult conditions whose complexity overwhelmed them. In other words, we must learn from past experiences, with their share of errors, so we do not have to rediscover knowledge already acquired at the cost of painful historical attempts at trial and error.

We must also be careful not to consider that new theories are necessarily better because they are more recent. The hegemony of these theories du jour is more often due to the philosophical, psychological, and cultural bias of the time than to their scientific merit.

There is a great body of ancient knowledge and wisdom that could be more valid than the new theories because it has stood the test of time. One must be wary of theories that deviate into militant ideologies under the guise of science. Above all, let‘s remember that while science describes nature with ever-increasing acuity, it is powerless to advise what to do with this necessarily partial and provisional knowledge and technology. Knowledge may be one of the important elements of the process, but it is certainly far from sufficient to access wisdom.

One wonders what sort of world we live in when people refuse to be exposed to different viewpoints and quickly resort to denigration and censorship as a way to protect themselves from information that would challenge their worldview—our “religion.“ Our world seems to be under the influence of two dominant ideologies: scientism in synergy with wokeism. Both ideologies are completely at odds with science.

The COVID-19 crisis exposed profound societal issues that existed before but had not been widely recognized. The pervasive sense of fear, especially among baby boomers, about death had in many ways numbed our ability to fully embrace and celebrate life. We saw a form of intergenerational prejudice during this pandemic in the willingness to mortgage the lives of the youngest to reassure the oldest.

This obsessive fear was rooted in the disconnection of the meaning of our lives as revealed in all the mythological, religious, and spiritual accounts of humanity, for millennia. In the dominant materialist narrative that we inhabited, there was nothing outside of the material dimension, and after the physical death of our bodies, that would be nothingness. This nihilism was frightening. It was also a source of fragility that the authorities exploited in order to govern through fear.

Recommendations

Considering the critical reliance of our modern society on science and technology, there is a need to distinguish knowledge derived from the rigorous scientific method from beliefs often influenced by ideologies and propaganda. To help distinguish between the two, we recommend the following:

A. Basic training in epistemology and critical thinking should be incorporated into both humanities and scientific or technological education curricula.

B. Experts who participate in public forums should undergo scrutiny based on the following four fundamental criteria:

• Demonstrated cutting-edge knowledge and expertise, as evidenced by their involvement in past or ongoing scientific research, providing proof of their understanding of the subject under discussion.

• Lack of conflicts of interest.

• Willingness to engage in evidence-based public debates with other experts who may hold differing opinions. Such engagement should involve using rhetoric that avoids ad hominem attacks, appeals to authority, or invoking the mislabelled “scientific consensus.“

• The detailed, unedited credentials of these public figures must be made known and available to the public. This will enable the public to ascertain the credibility of such experts.