Adulation distortion and denigration differentiate scientism from science

Thank you. One thing of one thing to be everything, that is considered to be knowledge in the mode of ignorance.
Some skeptical materialistic scientists like to refer to anything that does not agree with their dogmatic understanding of reality as reductionistic and materialistic. They like to label it as pseudoscience. So, however, far from it being pseudoscience, it is they who are pursuing scientism in the name of science.
Scientism can have broadly three criteria, adulation, distortion and denigration. Adulation means that those who are advocates of scientism. So, there is a heavy appreciation and admiration for science, for its capacity to explain.
But sometimes some people go beyond appreciation, admiration to adulation. Adulation refers to a form of worship that borders on uncritical sentimentality. So, now, when this happens, science is almost made into a god and this adulation, where a halo of omniscience is put on science, where science is treated as if it can give us all knowledge about everything.
There is no scientific experiment to prove that science can give all knowledge about everything and that is itself a distortion. And further, there is the distortion about the real nature of science. Scientists like to believe it is a pure form of knowledge that emerged because of clear-headed, intelligent, courageous people who were seekers of truth.
There may be some who are like that, but science also emerges in a particular culture, in a particular socio-historical context. And there is always politics involved in which scientist’s theory gets favored, which gets propagated. So, the history of science reveals, for example, that, say, without a particular kind of culture, a particular kind of science cannot emerge.
There is a particular kind of thought, thought world in which people live. And that thought world is what is inhabited by those people at that time. And unless someone recognizes that thought world, thoughts cannot be contextualized, which have emerged from that world.
So, it was in the time when there was an ethos of wanting to do away against, do away God, that the Darwinian theory of evolution emerged. Now, the historical context does not necessarily mean that the theory is right or wrong. It simply means that the theory’s propagation, its popularity, that was determined by the socio-cultural context and its historical setting.
So, irrespective of the demerits or merits of evolution, there is no historically a doubt that it was propagated extensively because it was seen as an atheistic alternative to theism. Today, any critical evaluation of theory of evolution is immediately dismissed by being labeled as creationism or as intelligent design movement has been called creationism in a tuxedo. Irrespective of whether creationism or intelligent design is right or wrong, this sort of dismissal, it indicates ideological predilection, where alternative views are not evaluated objectively, but they are labeled derisively based on whether they disagree with one’s ideology.
Beyond that, scientism involves denigration of other forms of knowledge, all other forms of knowledge. For example, Richard Dawkins, sorry, not Richard Dawkins, Stephen Hawking, in one of his recent books, The Grand Design, he says that philosophy is dead because philosophers have not kept up with the developments of science. Now, the number of problems with this one song statement are so many that it raises the question how such an intelligent person can make no problem in a statement.
First of all, it’s not necessarily true that philosophers are not kept up with the developments of science. In fact, philosophy of science is a field that focuses on evaluating the various fields of science from a philosophical perspective. And there are many, many philosophers who do study, say, neuroscience carefully, they study its implications very carefully.
And more importantly, science and philosophy do they necessarily have overlapping domains by which, you see, the study of science will make redundant, make outdated, make obsolete the study of philosophy. Neil Bohr said that he considered himself a philosopher first and a scientist later. So it means he was a pioneering scientist, a Nobel laureate scientist, and he didn’t consider philosophy dead.
Science usually asks the how questions, philosophy asks the why questions. Of course, any demarcation like this will always be fraught with problems because reality does not fit into our neat conceptual categories. It’s too complex and messy.
But still, categorization like this can get us, can help us get a broad sense of what is what. And thereafter, we can evaluate which things are right and which things are less than right. So there is neuromania, there is Darwinitis, as one scientist called.
But a philosopher of science pointed out neuromania means there is an almost manic obsession among some scientists. They imagine that everything about everything, everything about our human personality, everything about human beings can be explained simply in terms of brain functions. That’s neuromania.
And Darwinitis is also that. Darwinism is made into not just a theory that explains, it changes among species, it is made into an ideology that claims to explain everything about everything. And thus, people end up misled.
So we can respect science without having to, without having these three things, that is, adulation, distortion and denigration. We avoid these three. We move onwards objectively.
Then science can be a source of great knowledge, which can help humanity progress without necessarily acquiring a distorted vision of reality. Thank you.