“Science Tells Us Everything” – Society

I’m tired. Most of all, the thing that is grinding my gears at the moment is the epistemic authority our society gives science. Want your child to behave better? Pump him full of medication and send him to a psychotherapist. Want to deal with issues of poverty in your locality? Use sociological data. Want a child? Test tube.

I’m being somewhat unfair, that much is clear. Science has a place. Medicine does cure diseases. Chemistry does explain chemical reactions adequately. The problem is the authority we give these disciplines. When we see an issues relating to say poverty, we assume that the gathering of sociological data can provide real and meaningful answers to those questions. We don’t question the notion that an objectifying positivism can be applied to something as complex as society-wide, subjective human behavior. When we say someone is acting strangely we direct them to a psychologist who is assumed to be able to use a certain kind of empiricism to “correct” our behavior. When we want to steward our beautiful earth we turn to the physical sciences, whose authority we used to rape it in the first place, to try and correct our own mistakes.

I’m angry. I’m angry enough to waste this post on a rant. Do I think the sciences are worthless? Not at all. I think they are beautiful in their explanatory power. I am only alive because of modern medicine. The question is whether we are correct in granting them complete explanatory power. Is everything reducible to physical phenomena? Most people reading this article will want to answer “no” to that question. But think for a second, putting aside a belief in God or anything eternal that many people of the sciences would call antiquated; don’t you believe that? Brains determine consciousness. We can solve our problems by using objectively determined therapeutic methods based on a neurological understanding. We don’t want to question it, but most of us give almost complete epistemic authority to the sciences. I’m here to ask everyone to rethink that. Maybe I’m generalizing, but I can say that my recent experiences have made me sufficiently upset enough to beg my fellow human beings to remember the importance of their subjective experience, to remember that the unexamined life may not be worth living.