The Intolerant Church of Scientism

“It is pretty obvious that most scientists in every field are what I must call knee-jerk materialists, meaning that they accept philosophical materialism without question, as axiomatic, often without being aware of their own beliefs.”

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Original article found in Atlantas Rising Magazine.

In the 1950s the media never tired of telling us all about the wonderful world of the future. In 1955 there were television specials about what life would be like in 1965, 1975, and beyond. There would be teardrop-shaped, gas turbine cars, electric monorails, gleaming cities with futuristic architecture, atomic power so cheap that it would not even be metered, an end to all diseases, including aging, huge space stations with spin-induced gravitation, bases on the Moon, manned flights to Mars, and so on. As late as the first manned Moon landing in 1969, many scientists and engineers confidently predicted that we would send people to Mars in the 1980s. Controlled fusion power would be perfected; in fact, progress would be exponential, proceeding at an ever-faster rate. Physicists and cosmologists would reconcile relativity and quantum mechanics in a grand unified theory, unlocking the last secrets of the universe.

But we were in for a letdown. Sure, there has been some progress; some things have gotten better, and nuclear power might be more widely used save for some unfortunate political decisions. We have the big, flat-screen, color televisions the futurists promised us, and the more efficient lighting in the form of LEDs. And the widespread use of computers and microprocessors was not expected by anyone, nor did anyone foresee the Internet. I will even concede that there may be, for example, advanced “free” energy and even gravity control technologies that the elites are hiding from us—maybe. But the “hot fusion” boys have sucked up tax dollars for over two generations (time for the grandchildren of the original researchers to go to work in the fusion research “industry”) without passing the break-even point with a sustained reaction.

No one has returned to the Moon in decades, and, while our unmanned space program has produced one spectacular success after another, our manned program is going nowhere. Save for (finally) the use of ion rockets and the testing of photon sails, we are still using the chemical rocket technology developed in the 1940s. There are more horrible diseases than ever, and many of us have grown old—what happened to the cure for aging? The grand unified theory continues to recede like a mirage as the theoretical physicists produce ever more complex and exotic and incomprehensible theories replete with “strings” and then “membranes.” The particle zoo expands with each day, and, again and again, experimental physicists find flaws in the new theories. Could it be that both pure and applied science have gone horribly wrong somewhere along the way? If so, what went wrong, and how, and when—or was something wrong from the very beginning?

Continue reading the article on the Atlantis Rising Magazine website.