The Fuck is “Scienceism”?

I have a new complaint. Shocking, I know. Have you noticed how people add “ism” to things they don’t understand? I often see creationists use the not-at-all-made-up words “scienceism” and “evolutionism”. The idea is that they’re trying to bring science and evolution down to their level. Here’s the problem. Just because YOU don’t understand something, doesn’t mean no one else does.

Science isn’t a belief. It’s a method. In more general terms, it’s a field in which knowledge is gained. Do you ever check the weather? Why? Why not just trust that your god will make you comfortable? Because of the scientific method. If you see that it’s going to be 50 degrees, you associate that with “cold”. You know that wearing a jacket helps keep you warm. How do you know that? Science.

At some point in your life, you had a hypothesis. “If it’s cold, and I wear an extra layer of clothing, will I be warm?” The next step was experimentation. And not the lesbian kind. You tried wearing an extra layer, and found out that it did, in fact, keep you warm. Thus your hypothesis became a theory. You continued your experiments, and established that wearing more clothes makes you warmer. You might have even further experimented, in the opposite direction. If more clothes made you warmer, would less clothes make you cooler? And it did. This is science. That’s all it is.

What really bothers me is that people aren’t saying that science is wrong. They’re saying that they don’t understand it. If someone disproved evolution, even if we had to update every school book in the world, they would still get a Nobel Peace Prize for such an extraordinary revolution in how we understood the world. Theists act as if science is it’s own belief system with it’s own agenda. It’s not. It’s A METHOD. It’s the WAY we learn, not WHAT we learn. Creationists can’t compete with that. They already have their answer. Testing the answer could disprove their assumptions, so they don’t risk it. They already know what they believe. Then they use that same closed minded logic to evolution. They assume that since they KNOW what they believe (without any study or evidence) that scientists must also KNOW what they believe (even though we don’t need “belief” since we have fact compiled from decades of consistent evidence).

Bringing something you don’t like down to your uneducated level, doesn’t diminish the truth. It doesn’t “even the playing field”. It just makes you look stupid by direct comparison. It’s like if a college student got into a verbal fight with a three year old. The three year old calling the college student a “poopoo head”, doesn’t make the college student’s face region fecal based. It just makes the three year old look like… well, a three year old. This is what’s happening with the people that say that evolution is a lie, or science is a belief system.

There’s one HUGE difference between science and faith or evolution and creationism. EVIDENCE. We have been testing and retesting evolution for decades. It’s all come to the same conclusion. Just because that conclusion disagrees with your preconceived beliefs, doesn’t make them wrong. It makes you closed to new evidence. This is another reason why science is more evolved, pardon the pun, than religion. We accept new ideas.

I love the “teach the controversy” argument. The idea is that just because 95% of scientists have agreed that evolution fits the evidence, the 5% who don’t agree, constitutes a controversy that needs to be discussed. There is no controversy. There are those who accept facts and those who don’t. Oddly enough, the “controversy” isn’t even between evolution and creationism which are polar opposites. It’s between evolution and intelligent design. intelligent design is the idea that evolution is real, but was controlled by a god. So even in the “controversy” BOTH SIDES AGREE WITH EVOLUTION.

The final argument against evolution I’ll mention today is that it’s “just a theory”. This is said by people who can’t distinguish the difference between “scientific theory” and “I came up with a theory after a few shots of tequila”. Gravity is “just a theory”. Man made climate change is “just a theory”. The earth revolving around the sun is “just a theory”. For all intents and purposes, scientific theory is nearly synonymous with “fact”. The only difference, is that unlike religion, science admits the possibility of being wrong. So rather than say something is a law of nature, and then being wrong about it, they say it’s a scientific theory. A scientific theory is a “well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world, based on a body of knowledge that has been repeatedly confirmed through observation and experimentation.”

Look. If a hypothesis or theory is proven wrong, we (and I’ve used that word repeatedly, because everyone is a scientist in a way. We all use the method, even if we don’t notice it) come up with a new hypothesis that incorporates the new information. We make the hypothesis fit the evidence, not make the evidence fit the hypothesis.

Religion has no hypotheses. No theories. They deal only in absolutes. They are right. No matter what. They have a book written and translated by numerous authors over the centuries composed of folklore by tribal people with no knowledge of the universe. What does science have? Oh yeah. The integrity to seek out the truth, not confirm what we want to hear.