This is Not the God You’re Looking For

I can’t stop thinking about Nic Carter’s tweet a few days ago pointing out the hypocrisy in framing science as if it’s some divine truth dictated from on high instead of what it really is: a process of trial and error that requires a tremendous amount of interpretation.

We have supplanted our culture’s diminishing faith in God with a blind faith in “science” and “data”. Our priests are The Men in Lab Coats, the studies they publish are our Scripture, and the data they compile become our Sermons.

The fundamental problem is that we are worshipping the product of “science” and not its process — the Scientific Method, or, more simply put, Experimentation and Debate.

Supporting the results of “science” requires understanding and approving of the process by which those results were determined. And this process is filled with pratfalls, errors, and nuance.

This sort of nuance doesn’t scale.

We’ve abstractified science to avoid dealing with these scaling issues. We need sound bites, not discussion! Policy, not debate!

Most of the scientific fields are now hyper-focused, psuedo-scientific jargon. Psychology, Sociology, AI, data science: these fields use a scientific veneer to affect societal and cultural change based on dubious agendas.

If having a heap of “scientific” data really worked, then Google would have already solved all of our world’s problems, sociology would have cured us of racism, Netflix would never release a bad movie again, and the Coronavirus would be a thing of the past.

Scientism gives us a false sense of comfort that we’re solving problems that are inherently unsolvable. It makes us believe that our solutions are fundamentally correct and undebatable. This is not the God we’re looking for!

“Scientist’s” results are hailed as Holy Words, and we’re told to “believe in science” because there’s no way for us to dig into how this so-called science was determined.

We’ve decided as a culture that acting on the words of God is superstitious nonsense. But how is worshipping science without a nuanced view of the Scientific Method any better?

Religion has thousands of years of a proven track record. The most recent scientific tablature barely survives a decade. Both require faith. Which God would you choose?

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