Unthinking Adherence - the religion of Scientism
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This is unfortunate, and scientism is flawed. Perhaps as dogmatic as religions based on supernatural things.
Consider this: let us say that current science may have incomplete models, and making judgements based on that can be wrong. For example, if the universe actually has more dimensions than just three, and we can only see three but there might be things in existence in higher dimensions we cannot perceive, then the concept of gods on a higher plane becomes more believable. Maybe we just can't see them, and maybe we are so far below them we don't get much attention from them.
I think it was Godel who identified that some logic systems cannot tell from within whether all their beliefs are true or have flaws. So scientism may be inherently limited.
Excellent response man you touch on a ton of really interesting stuff related to this idea!
In the first place, you’re absolutely right, it’s as if our overconfidence in our own knowledge, or our hubris even, leads us to “ruling out” things which cannot justifiably be ruled out when given an honest accounting.
It seems in regards to the fields of science, this is mostly based on the assumptions or even beliefs of the scientists who make up that field. And if anything has been shown time and time again, it’s that when you assume, one tends to make an ass of everything.
I see this whole subject as echoing Kuhn’s ”Paradigm Shift” perspective, where entrenched beliefs and the paradigms built on these beliefs actively resist the shift towards greater truth, when it threatens their foundational beliefs structure.
Likewise, your point about Gödel’s ”Incompleteness Theorem” is spot-on. Not only did he prove that some logical systems are incomplete, but actually that ALL symbolic logical systems (i.e. “math”/“language”/“code”) are INHERENTLY incomplete. Where “incompleteness” seems quite complicated, but it basically means “no logical system is capable of actually proving itself correct” - which has insane repercussions on things like math in general, which is inherently based on making assumptions (axioms) which mathematicians all regard as “proven”, but which ultimately are totally undermined by Gödel’s work. It’s a mind blowing thing to try and wrap your head around, and directly relavent to this subject, so thanks for raising it!
The implications of quantum mechanics suggesting that there are many parallel universes implies there may be other dimensions, and somehow our space shares existence distributed among them. This has implications for the 'supernatural' which may be a case of a larger universe than we can see. That opens up so many cans of worms, but also that we may have a more enlightened future. In fact, guaranteed more enlightened, as we know right now that our current paradigms have holes, unknown areas. Obviously that means we have discoveries to make that may change our current models. Thus being too dogmatic is an error; theories can be overturned and certainly that does happen.
So many open questions, some that come to mind:
the “problem” of consciousness (aka the source and mechanism)
the observer “problem” of quantum mechanics
the “dark matter” “problem”
the “dark energy”/“zero-point energy” “problem”
hell, going on 100 years now and we still don’t have a scale-invariant theory of the universe (quantum and macro systems don’t reconcile)
(Edit) 6) the finely tuned universe “problem” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fine-tuned_universe
The fact that people are so confident in their error is the worst part. “Safe and effective” - until their priests educate them otherwise