Science is a Religion

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
1

I define religion as an organized belief system.
I used to define it as organized spirituality, then organized theism, now I’m defining it as an organized belief system.
Science can be included in my definition.
Why have I done this?
Because I think there ought to be a word/thought that encompasses both science and say, Islam, naturopathy and the flat earth society, since all these institutions have something in common, and that is that they’re belief systems, and religion is the only existing word I can think of that’s up to snuff.
Furthermore, I don’t think there’s anything all that special about science, that we should divide the world into science and everything else, religion or pseudoscience/quackery.

Aside from its lack of spirituality/theism, what distinguishes science from other religions/belief systems is its methodology, which is supposedly empirical as opposed to say, faith or intuitive based.

If you look at the druidic caste of the Celts, the brahmanic caste of the Hindus, or the medieval catholic church, they didn’t just mediate the relationship between man and the Gods or the spirit world, they practiced medicine, taught arithmetic, astronomy and so on, and they didn’t just base all their ideas about the Gods, the spirit world and the natural wold (if these three things can be so rigidly divided) on whims, many of their beliefs were carefully developed over the course of centuries, and they employed reason, observation, experimentation as surely as faith, imagination and intuition.

It’s impossible to have a religion that’s 100% empirical, because human nature, people, which includes scientists, are only partly motivated by truth, they’re also motivated by wealth and power, and science is as dependent on money as any other institution.
If the judge, jury and executioner are all funded by the same people, then how can we expect them or it, the system, to be impartial?
It doesn’t have to be all of them or even most, even if many of them are motivated by similar people with similar ends and means, we can expect some corrupting of the process, give or take, some people have more scruples than others.

People believe in all sorts of things for all sorts of reasons, because it’s popular, trendy, because it’s comforting, materialistic and reductionist explanations are more comforting for some than alternatives.

Not only that but, we’ll never completely agree on what constitutes an empirical belief, how much data do you need in order to conclude this or that, a little bit more, a lot less?
The line between fact, theory and speculation, between experience and inference is blurry at best, and at worst, nonexistent.

When you combine these three points, the fact that all people, including scientists are more or less selfish, emotional, and what constitutes objectivity is murky, it’s easy for some to use spin, sophistry and rhetoric rather than reason to persuade people to believe all sorts of falsehoods or things which’re unlikely to be true.

Furthermore, in any institution, there are people in elite positions, people with a lot of clout, if these people were to become corrupted, then they could easily persuade their henchmen, minions and underlings to believe almost anything, that the sky is red, that the grass yellow, because humans are sheepish and slavish, like that.

Additionally science is one way of organizing information, and just as there’s many ways to organize your living space, there’s many ways to arrange information.
We focus on certain things, for aesthetic purposes, because this is neat or cool and that’s not, and so we miss out on that, even though that might yield better results than this.
We lump these things together under one heading and we split those things up under several headings, while they split these things up under several headings and lump those things together under one heading.
So much of this is dependent on aesthetics, interests, preferences, cognition, language and precedents, that’s unique to individuals and institutions, not absolute, objective and universal.
We all conceptualize things differently, so science isn’t just a method it’s a style, a mode of thinking, like art, architecture or cooking has different styles, different tastes.
There are good and bad ways to build a building, some structures won’t stand under certain conditions, or seem less likely to stand, but some of it is down to likes and dislikes, why gothic over classical?
How much of science is down to likes?

You could say science is an ideology, and like any, be it socialism or capitalism, democracy or anarchy, they all sound better in theory than they are in practice.
So as we can see, the motivations of the scientists doing the investigating and researching is paramount.
Democracy has checks and balances to minimize corruption, and so does science, yet corruption is rampant, rife and replete, systemic in our society, this arguably applies as much or more to science than any other institution, why should one group be given a free pass by the public, while others are held under a magnifying glass, criticized, scrutinized.
If the public wishes to keep them honest, it ought to hold their feet to the fire, just as from time to time the masses ought to reform or revolt against government, so too must they reform and revolt against science and whatever other religions they’ve taken to, if any, especially now since the lines between science and big mafia (government) and big business have become so blurred, they’re all so intimate with one another.

And so that’s how it works in any society, the king is dead, long live the king, nature abhors a vacuum, the intellectual rebels and outcasts have become the new order, exercising authoritarian and dictatorial control over the people, abducting their children for 6 hours a day 5 days a week with or without parental consent, and force feeding them all kinds of questionable crap, without teaching them how to think or stand up for themselves.
Regurgitate on command and you get an A, question it, and you get an F.
By the time they get into university and are finally encouraged to question things, a few things, it’s really too late, most of the rebels have long since been weeded out, or pacified, and what’s left are brainwashed parrot puppets, easily manipulated by the scientific, psychiatric, corporate and political establishment.
They then will go on to decide who’s sick and healthy, physically and in the head, who can buy guns and fly and who can’t, who winds up in jail or drugged up in a padded cell, and so meet the new boss, beginning to look a lot like the old boss, no?
I think so.
They should have to compete alongside Islam, naturopathy and the flat earth society, and all the other religions out there in a free market, I say, they shouldn’t be given a state monopoly.
What’re they so afraid of, that education should be compulsory?
It should be privatized.
New religions should spring up to challenge science, perhaps we can create better styles of thinking, be more empirical, focus on different things, and come up with better ideas.
Or perhaps some intuition is necessary or desirable, even faith, although I prefer not to have faith.
Pick your poison.

And all this is to say nothing of scientific beliefs themselves, and how stupid some of them are, or how they organize their data.
I’ll save that for another thread.

2

Although I agree with your conclusion as the world is today, I define a religion a little differently. A religion, to be not merely a philosophy, must sustain dogma - assertions to believe without evidence or question. Science has become that in the West at least even though originally it was a more simple philosophy.

Originally, Science got its footing and definition through independent empirical demonstration. The fact that it was independent allowed for it to not be a dogma because anyone with sufficient skills could question any part of it and discover for themselves. Of course, very many question were not answered. And today many questions are not answered, but not because they can’t be, but rather because they are not allowed to be answered.

Today, the level of skill requirement is surpassed by the requirement of equipment, supplies, and money. Due to the such requirements, what is accomplished as “science” is now dictated, not discovered. Fortunately there is still the issue of Logic restricting what can be dictated else there would be absolutely nothing to restrain science from declaring absolute godhood in dictating anything they chose for it to dictate.

Even in this day of the greatest deceit, Logic still restrains the passions of Godwannabes.

3

Perhaps Science (I’m going to start capitalizing the word Science, like Christianity, Islam and Buddhism are capitalized) is less rational, empirical and individualistic now than it was when it got started, you’re probably right.
That’s the way it works with anything new, frontiers materialize, a golden age of adventure, innovation and competition ensue, and then after a while things become entrenched, you get the cartels, the monopolies, the centralization of information, wealth, power, and then eventually everything collapses under the weight of its own greed, complacency, false sense of security, because its foundation was built upon sand.
Newcomers arise to fill the void, and the process repeats itself.

However, I suspect even from the beginning, Science had ulterior motives.
There’s this underlying assumption to everything they do.
And that is that given a great deal of time, space and chance, simpler, more chaotic processes can evolve into more complex, orderly processes.
That’s their solution to every problem.
Everything grand, noble and harmonious, must be rooted in everything that is violent and base.
Now, it’s an interesting metatheory they have, but for the most part, from my research, I believe it’s just that, a theory, it may explain some things well enough, but I doubt it can explain all things.

Philosophy can be dogmatic too, for example, take the philosophical schools of ancient Greece such as Plato’s Academy, Aristotle’s Lyceum, Stoicism, Epicureanism and so on, they were quite dogmatic, yet we still consider them to be philosophy.
So you see the lines between religion, philosophy and science are far blurrier than we suppose, and so I just refer to them all as religions now, they’re all more or less rational/empirical or dogmatic/conformist, none of them are absolutely one or the other, not even close.
I believe Science just took the materialistic, reductionist, egoistic, hedonistic religion of the Atomists and their successors and ran with it, tweaked it to fit the data coming in from some of the research they were doing, and expanded it, made it more sophisticated.
Science is just Atomic Epicureanism on steroids.

Now some religions may be more rational, empirical, or what you might say, but I don’t believe humanity can ever escape dogma, not by a long shot, Science didn’t merely become dogmatic, it was born and raised in it.
I believe Science was as much or more an emotional reaction to Christianity as it was an honest search for the truth.
They just took Christianity and turned it on its head, anything formerly ascribed to God was now ascribed to shit.
That’s their explanation for everything, shit did it, given sufficient space, time and a whole lot of luck, shit can transform into all from solar systems to atoms and everything in between, even plants, animals and human beings.
They have absolutely no evidence for this, none whatsoever, in fact all the evidence they’ve accumulated suggests the contrary, but they believe it anyway, because it’s their faith.

It’s not just their cosmology, their biology and theory of medicine is ultimately rooted in Democritus and Epicurus too, and their successors Gassendi and Hobbes.
Implicit in Science is egoism and hedonism, even though science doesn’t concern itself very much with morals and values, since they’re higher sorts of things, egoistic hedonism is operating behind the scenes, perhaps in their subconscious.
Physics is the chief science merely because Science is the worship of matter, Scientifically minded people like matter, more than they like mind, or life for example, they’re obsessed with it.
This is why Scientific medicine focuses more on drugs than nutrition, because they’re hedonists, they don’t want to alter their lifestyle, give up their bad habits, they want to cure them and be healthy anyway, and this is why all their technology ultimately serves to make life more pleasurable instead of healthier or more virtuous.

Health is an afterthought for them, the objective is not to be healthy but to not be less sick, that is their underlying philosophy for everything.
Scientific medicine isn’t what it is because that just makes sense, rather it’s one group of individuals with a certain way of perceiving things, rooted in their particular and peculiar psychologies and philosophies, imposing their idiosyncratic eccentricities on the rest of society, and nearly all of us have bought into it.
It’s just another funny cult we’re all caught up in the moment, mascaraeding as something absolute, objective and universal.

And I’m not saying this way of seeing things has no value or merit, but just that it’s one of many equally valid whatever you want to call them, worldviews, paradigms, metanarratives, attitudes, frameworks, far from the be all and end all.
Scientific medicine has no respect for the body, for nature, because after all nature is just a bunch of shit, it’s by sheer luck we’re here at all, a mechanistic miracle, you might say, and so we needn’t work with nature or the body, and so they get on with going about trying to override it.
They treat every illness in an isolated way, not because that’s the smart, proven way, but because they’re isolationists, reductionists, it’s just their quirky way of seeing and doing things, their style, their collective brain cognition, not because it’s superior versus other methods.

I’m telling you our consciousness has been hijacked by a particular personality/philosophical type, and not what’s right and true with a capital R and T.
Eventually humanity will come to see this at least partly, and shake some of it off, will take up a new fringe cult and make it popular or perhaps do without them for a while.
There’s hundreds, thousands of different mindsets humanity could adopt, many if not most haven’t yet been conjured.
None of them are absolute, but some of them may be more useful for humanity to adopt during different stages of its evolution, devolution, involution, stagnation, or whatever you like.

And there’s nothing wrong intuition or conformity per say, they just have a bias against it or claim to, all the while committing it at every major junction.
We need intuition, humanity might function better if it operates more intuitively, and although I tend to have a bias against it, I guess we need a modicum of conformity, it’s wise to conform sometimes without question, we all do it more or less, we’re just not all cognisant of it.
Really humanity needs the right balance of all things, the right psychological and philosophical tools at the right times, we need to be flexible, if we’re to survive and thrive.

I am questioning everything science has been throwing at us for the previous 500 years, I’m questioning Copernicus’s decision to place the sun at the center of the solar or geosystem, I’m questioning Linnaeus’s decision to lump man in with the apes.
Seems to me we’re clearly the odd one out, when I look at the ‘other’ Apes, humanity sticks out like a soar thumb, we don’t look anything like them, but that’s what science does, it lowers everything high and elevates everything base.
And later geneticists supposedly confirmed man was just another ape, but where do you draw the line, how similar or related with something are you, in order to get lumped in with them?
Well the answer is they make it up, it’s all very, very arbitrary.

The essence of their worldview was crafted by theorists operating in the 17th - 19th centuries, and later the researchers go out and do the grunt work of experimenting and observing, in nature but mostly in their cozy laboratories, and supposedly prove their hypothesises, but their hypothesises were already taken as fact or nearly so long before.
They come up with these grandiose narratives about human, animal and cosmic origins, long before they do any actual investigating, the Darwin’s and the Copernicus’s do, and lo and behold, they end up finding exactly what they were looking for, what a coincidence, certain theories were already decided on over others long before they can begin (dis)proving them, and so Brahe, Bechamp, Lamarck, Tesla and many more obscure theorists never had a chance against the mighty Copernicus, Pasteur, Darwin and Einstein, their fate had already been sealed by the Scientific priestcraft long before the bell was rung.
This is top down thinking, the data is to conform with the theory rather than the other way.
And so I call for an end to it all, Science should be separated from state if not outright destroyed, it should have to compete with other religions in a free, equal opportunity market for man’s imagination, it’s reign of tyranny must be thwarted.

4

Just a quick side question: Can you question the idea that for something to exist, it must have affect upon something else that exists?

Throughout, you seem to be leaving out any agenda of the powerful. If “they” wished for Man to stand out from the animals, they would use science to note that there are genetics differences and therefore, Man is special. But because they want to promote, for their own reasons, that humanity is NOT special, they point out how similar Man is to ape and thus not special at all, “just another animal” (because they want for people to be treated as animals).

Note that the motto of the Royal Society of the Advancement of Science is:
Nullius in Verba

  • Take no ones word - anti-dogma.

Of course today, you are required to merely take “their” word else not advance into their ranks (the “Scientific Community” dictating what is to be believed, no different from the Catholic Vatican).

Another significant difference between philosophy and religion is that religion is merely a philosophy that has been taken as a highest priority in life. Any philosophy that acquires the status of highest guide to one’s decision making (aka “God”) is in fact that person’s religion. Anyone who merely accepts whatever Science says as the determining factor in their decisions, is actually worshiping Science (actually the Scientific Community) as their God (just as very many wish it to be) - “Science, our Lord and Savior”.

Unfortunately, people are going to do that regardless of any agenda promoting it. People are inherently religious when crowded together due to the increased chaos and need for simple decision making processes, aka “morality” (“Always do this… Never do that.”)

But beyond all of the current state issues, there is the ongoing and recognized need for spirit (“Man does not live by bread alone”). If it is recognized that all answers have been found, there is no longer any incentive to investigate. There would be nothing new to discover. The thrill of adventure fades. And with it, life and far more significantly to those in power, power itself fades.

Thus it is critical to society (not to the species) to maintain change in belief. To keep people interested in the struggle that society is, they must believe that there is an enemy (the old) and a new hope (the new). And at some point, “the new” must be “the false” simply because “the old” was the true.

There is a better way to govern societies, but society is blind to it for reasons spelled out very long ago, today recognized as “lust for excitement and/or power” (depending on your social class).

Yeah well … dream on.
Governors have been bitten by the technocracy power bug. Technology is the famed “genie out of the bottle” granting wishes for unimaginable power. Even if the governors magically became altruistic and gave up their lust, they can no longer stop the train they inspired. Those who stand in the way, even the kings, will be removed from the tracks by merely the momentum if no one else.

There is to be one small higher society of a particular race who is served by billions of androids/machines. They have no need for 90% of the homosapian population. And that society is to be gradually and genetically corrupted to the point of there only being android/cyborg life. That android/cyborg life, being far advanced from human intelligence, is to be organized into a very different, quiet, perpetual and eternal existence - a different kind of life, void of the history of human kind and natural organic chaos.

5

The future is salvation and technological progressivism is the key to a transhumanistic paradise or heaven on earth.

Natural impulses, instinct, and primordial primitive behavior or living becomes a sin needing righteous so called civilized enlightenment to intervene upon it. Nature is a sin needing to become conquered whereas the artificial constraints of constructed reason becomes the way of eternal salvation.

Just another religious metanarrative like all others.

6

I wholeheartedly concur, Transhumanism, the notion that Science and technology will someday provide humanity with a panacea + Godlike powers is sheer nonsense.
People criticize other religions such as Christianity and Islam for being destructive, or Mormonism and Scientology for being especially crazy, but as bad as Crusade and Jihad are, nothing compares to the amount of untold death and destruction man has inflicted upon himself and nature in the name of Scientific ‘progress’.
Since Science has become the most popular religion, autism (probably due at least in part to vaccines), cancer, diabetes, heart disease, obesity and stroke (due to new and addictive foods loaded with refined fats, salts, sugars, chemicals and preservatives, in addition to our increasingly sedentary life style, radiation from cell phones and computers, and the introduction of toxic cleaners and cosmetics), to name just a few, are all on the rise.
Drugs are harder than ever, for example we have heroin and crack cocaine now, where as before we only had opium and cocaine leaves, other drugs such as tobacco have been laced with thousands of chemical carcinogens, and billions of people are hooked on experimental drugs with their side, err, bad effects, thanks to Scientific ‘medicine’ and the pharmaceutical industry, which has undoubtedly lead to millions of illnesses and suicides.
But hey, on the other hand, population has exploded, mostly because the infant morality rate has declined, not because we’re healthier, but because we’re keeping the sick alive longer.
Cities are over crowed with an abundance of noise, pollution and traffic, and thousands of new species are now extinct or endangered, thanks to the unleashing of man’s insatiable, ravenous and voracious appetites by Science, toxic waste and oil spills.
We can expect food and water shortages in the near future, our natural ‘resources’ are rapidly diminishing.
Thanks to Science, the globe is warming, assuming we can trust the Scientific and political establishment on that, which of course we can’t, but for the sake of argument, threatening to destroy us all.
We have the atom bomb now, by far and away the single most destructive force nature has ever created.
For the first time ever, a species has the capacity to destroy not only itself but life as we know it in the blink of an eye, thanks Science.
In spite of how detrimental Science and Scientific technology (because not all technology is Scientific) is to our health and wellbeing, we’ve become so dependent on it now that if we were to suddenly lose it, most of us won’t be able to relearn how to live without it, and consequently billions would perish overnight in the ensuing calamity.
Given Science’s track record, our species extinction is far more likely than its salvation.

I don’t think Science has made us any smarter either, we’ve probably forgotten more than we’ve learned.
Despite calling themselves naturalists, never have a group of men been so out of touch with the natural world, they have no reverence, respect for, or even knowledge of nature, I would sooner trust a hunter gatherer over an ecologist regarding the state of their habitat.
Our brains have become so crammed with all manner of abstractions, hokey facts and figures about things most of us will never apply in our daily lives nor experience.
We’re all suffering from information overload now, so much more educated, indoctrinated, but the best teacher of all is natural experience, something we’ve never been further removed from, spending many hours a day glued to computer screens in an artificial, synthetic world, relying on so called experts and people we’ve never met or can trust for our conception of the real world, instead of getting out there, living our lives, and interpreting the world for ourselves.
Knowledge is somewhat personal, as no two people or two of anything are exactly the same or ‘repeatable’, they like to throw that word around as if reality was or could ever be as such.
Most of these Scientists have scarcely spent a day in the real world/out in nature, they prefer to play inside their laboratories, as if nature in all its complexity/intricacy could be replicated, analyze statistics collected by people they’ve never met about places they’ve never been, or pontificating from the comfort of their armchairs.
We’re all hooked on canned information, as opposed to fresh, living knowledge, wisdom and understanding.
As if signs and symbols could ever come close to fully encapsulating nature, ha!

But they don’t care, because they’re addicts, lusting after wealth, power, they will put us all in danger to unlock some of the secrets of the universe and open doors best left shut.
Increasingly they’re turning away from information technology, which seems to have peaked, and towards cybernetics, genetic engineering, nanotech and robotics, they want to tamper with the very fabric of life itself (someone needs to make a post apocalyptic film about genetic engineering turning us all into mutant freaks if the haven’t already).
And they’re busy smashing atoms at CERN, even while admitting such collisions could very well tear the fabric of time and space itself asunder, producing a black hole, and the Gods only know what shall come forth from such a black hole to greet us, Beelzebub?
And Haarp, what of Haarp, chemtrails???
Scientists have been openly debating the ‘benefits’ and detriments of pumping the atmosphere full of soft metals for some time in order to deflect sunlight and stop global warming, but what they’re not telling us is, they’ve already doing it for decades, but probably for another purpose (population control).
And It goes on and on!

I fear we may not survive the next Scientific revolution against reason, nature and common sense, this next one will probably be our last.

7

I can question it, but I don’t think it’s a good idea, because we’ll never know about a thing that can’t affect us or other things.

I’m not saying humanity is special, although I’m sure one could make a compelling argument that we are.
For me, our place in nature needs to be reassessed.

Nullius in Verba?
That’s funny, because that’s the opposite of what Scientists and their proponents today tell us to do, they tell us to trust the ‘experts’.
Humans are hierarchical animals or whatever to a large extent, there’ll probably always be leaders and followers, as well as those who oppose hierarchy or live outside it.
I don’t think it’s due to overpopulation, it’s something innate in us, some of us more than others.
I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing either, it has advantages and disadvantages.
Some people are more suited to leading, following and being independent.
There’s a time for the masses to revolt against the status establishment, but perhaps a time to support it too.
In general though, I think there needs to be a lot more independent thinking, but I don’t think hierarchy is something that can ever be fully abolished, and it probably doesn’t need to be.

That’s one way of defining religion, a dogmatic or authoritarian belief system, as opposed to a belief system capable of evolving and questioning itself.
Philosophy for me is basically intellectual anarchy, not a belief system.
It is capable however of giving rise to belief systems.
Science is one such system, Aristotelianism and Stoicism were others.
Science took certain philosophical beliefs held by individual philosophers such as empiricism, determinism, materialism and reductionism, and a belief that certain subjects were more worthy of our time than others, such physics and chemistry as opposed to say ethics, politics, psychology, ufology and so on, and assumed them to be true.
Science is capable of superficially questioning itself, but it’s incapable of questioning the epistemological and metaphysical foundations upon which it rests, where as virtually nothing is beyond question for philosophers, and if an individual philosopher holds a belief, he must continually justify it to himself and others within his community, at no point does he get a free pass.

There’s nothing all that special about the Scientific method, run an experiment to test your hypothesis, publish your findings, for example the Zetetic method is to observe the phenomenon first, and then draw your conclusions about its nature and origins afterward, because they think coming up with theories too soon, is prejudice.
Then there’s the Socratic and Cartesian methods, and dozens of other such methods, the skies the limit, some may emphasize reason, others intuition, some may emphasize argument, others experiment.
They don’t even follow their own methodology half the time, sometimes they decide things democratically, which is another method, democracy, Pluto was demoted from planet to dwarf planet by way of vote.
You can define planet however you wish, if you wish, the word existed in European languages long before Science got started.
That we define it at all, let alone the way we do, has as much to say about our cognition and culture as it does the ‘objective’ world, or should I say their cognition, the collective cognition of Scientists, Scientific cognition.
It was not decided by argument, by individual scientists listening to different sides of the debate and drawing their own conclusions, but by a council of elders.
So democracy is just one more method we use to justify our beliefs, one frequently employed by Scientists, and it has its benefits and detriments, another favorite method of theirs is dictation, or threatening peoples jobs who ask the wrong questions.

And so from the beginning, Science was a set philosophical ideas turned dogma, and then they added more ideas overtime, many of them becoming dogma too, many of them totally unproven if not disproven, such as abiogenesis (I’m not a creationist either by the way, I’m open to all sorts of possibilities).
And so from it’s very inception it was religious.
Some methods may emphasize intuition, or prophesy, or the ingesting of hallucinogens, or whatever.
All religions justify their beliefs to their adherents, and many of them have mechanisms for reformation and updating some of their beliefs.

The biggest Scientific belief of them all, the one I find running throughout the whole of it, is that extreme simplicity can and has evolved into extreme sophistication overtime by chance, they believe the universe began in relative chaos, that we just got lucky in our neck of the woods, because most of the cosmos is chaos.
If the universe is found to be more organized than their models predict, they increase the size of the universe, they say, we’ll find the overwhelming chaos somewhere out there.
You might as well call it chaosism, or entropism.

Government is partly dependent on Scientific technology, like infrastructure and the military for example, but I don’t think school should be compulsory, and the people should be able to vote for parties who’ll decrease Scientific funding.
Yes, obviously such reformations are highly unlikely to happen at this time, just throwing it out there, not saying it’s going to happen in our life times or ever.

I say either humanity should become more philosophical in its thinking, intellectually anarchic, or if we’re to have religions like Science at all, we shouldn’t give one, especially this one, such a monopoly.

8

Could there be any rational reason to care if something supposedly existed if it was already known to have absolutely no affect upon anything? And if not, why even care enough to say that it exists?

The philosophy that made Science so effective was the philosophy of independent verification of theories. That idea was distinctly different than the older methods. Science originally allowed no prophets (unlike today) but still published/documented whatever agreements concerning theory that arose. The documentation was the memory of Science to build upon. And the requirement to verify was the filter to weed out the anarchy. Add to that the incentive to progress (war) and you have a living, growing entity - “Science”.

I discovered that the universe never began. The whole concept was silly from the getgo. The universe has a fundamental principle (aka “First Principle”) that causes it to be what it is. That is its God. God “creates” the universe, not “created once long ago”. And the Big Bang theory is simply a bad joke that reveals just how duped the population can be and how willing people are to dupe them. The BB has no actual science associated with it, merely unsubstantiated theories - NO empirical evidence at all (nor could there ever be).

9

Transhumanism is built upon extreme arrogance and hubris concerning humanity someday being technological gods over reality or the entire universe. It is built upon the naive belief of collective humanistic determination in somehow elevating humanity to some sort of special uniqueness amongst the world or universe. I like to describe it as scientific mysticism myself. Of course the project for transhumanism along with the technological singularity will end up in destruction and total failure. Most people especially in the political, scientific, and industrial community don’t even want to admit that we’re going through an existential crisis concerning global exhausted energy natural resources because to do so would totally reveal the emptiness or facade of their own ideals. It would define in total the doomed future of human civilization itself. Nobody in positions of power want to admit this publicly of course. Must upkeep the faith in societal authoritarian social systems of control at all costs even if it means constant deniability.

I really do think there is a correlation between scientism and post-modernism concerning human existential maladaptability.

10

I agree Science was more skeptical and so closer to philosophy back in the day, but in any case, it’s not like that anymore, if you ask certain questions, you’re excommunicated, maybe even assassinated depending.
I mean not all questions are equal, but still, if you don’t allow members of your community to question something, no matter how seemingly absurd/backward the question may be, like what’s the shape of the earth, or is AIDS really caused by HIV, and receive funds from whoever’s interested to answer that question, than you have a belief system, a set of religious dogmas and not a set of open ended theories held by free thinking individuals the way philosophy is.
I believe philosophy is the only intellectual institution/tradition fundamentally rooted in skepticism and not dogma.
Science has become, and probably was always to some extent based on certain assumptions that can’t be challenged, it took certain beliefs held by philosophers, physicists and others, and made them into dogma, it began with open ended theories which’ve now been closed.
You could say it’s less religious than other religions, perhaps, but it’s still very religious and has become increasingly so and authoritarian.
So I say, either we get rid of religions altogether, or, if we are to have them, allow them to compete, there’s nothing all that special about this one that is should have such a monopoly.

I’m also very skeptical of the BB.
I’ve been researching alternative theories on our cosmic origins for some time.
I find the idea of an infinite universe, infinite in matter, energy, space and time, where life didn’t spontaneously generate, but always was, in some form or another, to be much more plausible.

11

Agreed, humanity is going to soon have to relearn to live without high technology or perish.
Some will make it and many won’t.
Globalization is a form of greed, a cancer, and I’m looking forward to its demise.
Nature will make a comeback, and nation states will be broken up into much smaller units.

12

Science can be a religion if people choose to make it into a religion, but no, it is not a religion. Science is a study of nature.

13

Agreed.