At The Stream, a comment on a local billboard slogan for the city’s star research hospital:
‘In Science Lives Hope.’
I don’t want to make too much of a local city advertising campaign, but do you see the reflection of scientism in this billboard? It’s not just that science is a valuable pursuit. We live in a culture that thinks science is the pathway to hope.
This is the ultimate promise of scientism. And the first thing you should notice is that it’s not a scientific claim. You can’t do a science experiment to prove that “in science lives hope.” And you can’t use science to show that science is the only way to know things. That’s because those kinds of claims aren’t scientific. At best, they are philosophical. And in the end, they’re really religious. – Bob Perry (March 11, 2023)
Other bad things follow too (cf the potential risks of any religion):
- Science gets defined as “hope,” no matter what is really going on.
- Actual science gets suppressed in favour of an Establishment “hope parade.”
- People who call out the bad stuff become heretics, not just critics. We saw plenty of that during the COVID crazy.
But hey, they voted for it, paid for it, they own it so…
Meanwhile, heartfelt apologies from a newly Unwokened writer. There is hope but it is not from “Trust the Science!”