Insane Clown Posse as Philosophers of Science.

On Massimo Piggliucci’s blog, Julia Galef wonders why some of the masses distrust science. She takes a clue from the analysts at Insane Clown Posse, Violent and Shaggy, who have produced a video on the subject of knowledge, apparently.

”At first, "Miracles" sounds like a paean to scientific curiosity, urging us to appreciate the wonders all around us instead of dismissing the natural world as prosaic and mooning over the imaginary supernatural. I wholeheartedly agree with this. The "magic" we marvel over in stories is not inherently any more marvelous than what already exists in our world -- it just seems that way because we're so used to the real stuff. After all, are dragons and wizards really any more amazing than real things like -- well, let me hand the mike to Shaggy and Violent: "The sun and the moon, even Mars! The Milky Way! F-ckin' shooting stars!" Well said. Thanks guys.”

Of course, dragons and wizards are not what Philosophical Materialism and Atheism are all about; dragons and wizards are a sideshow, a red herring, one that is easy to refute. So the knowledge video is off to a great scientistic start.

This is something I really do think is important to keep in mind, because getting excited only by the supernatural isn't simply unjustified, it's also a recipe for unhappiness. "Sooner or later you're going to be disappointed in everything," Yudkowsky writes. "Either it will turn out not to exist, or even worse, it will turn out to be real."

Real? What she really means of course is “Material”: that is all that is real in her protected philosophical hot house. What is worse for her is that non-materiality is, in fact, real.

And as for unhappiness, who is an Atheo-Materialist to judge my happiness? For them, it is tautological that they are happier. It is a definition they have. PZ could have told her that.

After all, they get to make up their own morals and change them every day if they want to, to coincide with their proclivities; that's a sure road to happiness, is it not? On the other hand, the poor absolutists must control their behaviors to co-incide with concepts of Good and Evil which are archaic and denied by Nietzsche, of course.

Charismatic science popularizers like Richard Dawkins, Carl Sagan, and Neil deGrasse Tyson have argued again and again that understanding the world scientifically should increase our sense of wonder, not decrease it. And listening to them waxing rhapsodic about the universe, it's hard not to ask yourself, "How can people think there's no poetry in science?" Or as Richard Feynman put it, "What men are poets who may speak of Jupiter if he is a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?"

Feynmann also had an abiding disdain for philosophers and their philosophies, which he sneered at. He was an Atheist but not a Philosophical Materialist. Presumably this comment on science poetry was made in a similar vein: sarcasm. OK then, so much for the poetry of science.

” But I've been making an effort recently not to get stuck on the rhetorical question, "How can people think that?" and instead push onward to the earnest question, "Why do people think that?" If a belief is widespread, even if it's a mistaken belief, it cries out for some explanation. Hence, I ask: why are so many people with an innate curiosity about the natural world so uninterested in, even hostile to, scientific explanation?”

But the answer to that is so EASY! It is not the science, the scientist or the scientific explanation that is producing hostility, it is the morality and the uncompromisingly elitist worldview that is unrelentingly pimped along with the answer. Of course, sometimes it is the explanation, but only when the explanation is declared unchallegeable, impermeable to questions, fixed and certain for all time (think global warming and its unshakably loyal “science” adherents). Once again the semiconscious perpetrators do not even see the crimes they commit.

” And as Neil deGrasse Tyson describes in Death by Black Hole, scientific explanations can require multiple layers of abstraction, each of which takes people successively farther away from the immediacy of the phenomenon. "[To] explain how we know the speed of a receding star requires five nested levels of abstraction," Tyson writes…

So people just can’t grasp that which they (special that they are) have grasped.

Are we too unintelligent to comprehend abstraction, to dimwitted to follow the simple idea of red shift and doppler effects? This explanation is, itself, rather dimwitted. Not to mention its arrogance by ignoring that there are plenty of scientists who are not fooled by the Materialist ignorance of scientific boundary conditions. Materialists presuppose that all scientists are also Scientism-ists and Philosophical Materialists. This presupposition is false.

No, that is actually not the problem at all. We don’t hate science and we are not stupid; to the contrary, many of us do science. We love real science, objective determinations made without oppressive worldviews attached to them. It is not science, but science worshippers that are the issue. The problem is that Atheo-science worshippers like Dawkins, Piggliucci et al. (who are not science promoters, they are anti-religion hate promoters who use a false aura of science for their purpose of attempting to demolish religion) also wish to tell us what is True; and that followed by what our morals and politics should be. The problem is that such “scientists” cannot be trusted to tell the truth, or even to recognize it; for the most part they are not contributers to science at all, they are teachers and science parasites. And the result of that problem regarding these certain scientists is that they have driven away respect for elitism in science, and from that the scientism-ists deduce that science itself has lost respect.

There is no “loss of emotional contact” present in the skepticism toward real scientists and their products. There is skepticism toward elitist, Atheist, false intellectuals. This is what is totally transparent to science worshippers who have no knowledge of history or philosophy or logic and little knowledge of current events outside of rock groups (or whatever the Insane Clown Posse might be). This hermetic knowledge enclosure allows in no perspective for understanding the actual place of science in the overall world of knowledge; the enclosed myope in fact assumes that science is knowledge, all of it; there is nothing else to be known. This naïve oversimplification personifies the Materialist approach to every aspect of life and the universe: the axioms are very simple and easy both to understand and to parrot:

Axiom #1: material stuff is all there is.

And axiom #2: science says so.

Both of these simplistic axioms are incorrect; they are unprovable tenets of a religion. But for the Philosophical Materialist and Atheist these are First Principles, beyond which there is no use in thinking.

” And as for the hostility that some people feel towards scientific explanations, that might have something to do with the fact that unlike magic, science doesn't allow humans to be special. The anti-materialist notion that the universe is shaped around us, or that our thoughts and feelings can produce tangible effects in the world has a particular kind of romance to it that people find appealing. Scientific explanations, for all their objective beauty, take that away from us.”

The motivation to find an irrational reason for people to distrust scientists bearing truth statements leads to interesting depths, depths that are irrational themselves. It is perfectly valid to conclude that science, or at least evolution which attempts to pass as science, declares outright that a) no non-material cause may be thought of as a cause; b) therefore there is no deity and c) humans are not only just another animal, they are merely meat machines, hosting DNA, and have no value beyond that. And from that point the Materialists attempt to derive an ethic, a worship of humanity but not individual humans. Why should anyone be uncomfortable with that?

”Nevertheless, I think the perfect quote to close with is this one, from 18th-century bishop Samuel Horsley:

"Wonder, connected with a principle of rational curiosity, is the source of all knowledge and discovery... but wonder which ends in wonder, and is satisfied with wonder, is the quality of an idiot."

A great quote, and one I would wholeheartedly endorse, except for that fact that I'm a little skittish about calling Violent and Shaggy idiots. I hear they stab people.”

The Horsley ditty is a perfect description of SCIENCE, a fact that is completely lost on the Materialist author who tries to apply it to anti-science. Scientists are satisfied with exactly that: the fact that every question answered opens up ever more questions to be answered; and all answers, however glorious the explanations, are contingent. This is what Horsley is against: the denial of absolutes, a fundamental of Materialism. The idea that the infinite regression which is scientific knowledge leads to all actual knowledge, and therefore, wisdom. Horsley does not refer to material knowledge; he refers to wonder, to rational inquiry, and to knowledge and discovery. Galef erroneously plugs into Horsley's statement her own limited understanding of the source of knowledge: science.

Horsley is right, but the Galef doesn't even understand his position!

If there ever were to be an indictment of the complete lack of science comprehension of Materialist, Atheo-Scientism-ists, this article would qualify as evidence for the prosecution.

However, all this is right at home on the blog of Massimo Piggliucci.