JUST-SO STORES

50% of what you learn in medical school is wrong…

 

 

Yeah…but which half? (They don’t teach you that until 10 years later!)

 

This saying, which may be up to 50% true, is not just saying ½--but ½  of Sciencia false after only 10 years!  So after 30+ years, I am not left with much; except for the disturbing thought that, “Maybe we are going about this  entirely the wrong way.”

One must start with skepticism; and still come away with something from the store...

 

Most people, who don’t practice science, are far more sanguine about it than actual bench scientists, who know that even a shred of truth comes at an incredibly high cost, and will be called into question sooner or later, if for no other reason than to discredit you and glorify your ceaseless critics for their own uses.  The motives of scientists are no different than those of your average construction worker, only dressed up in obscure language. (see  “The Little Prince” re: the Turkish astronomer.)

(more on the uses of obscurantism in a later blog)

 

As I have said in these pages previously, “Science Proves:”-- not much.  But people are entranced  by   and in thrall to maj-ick and new toys and living as long as they possibly can even if they are quietly desperate and empty, day and night. 

For most Americans, their prosperity goals and materialism have become not just their de facto gods, but their publicly professed ones. It is now again fashionable to praise Darwin and make him into a God-substitute. In other words, the expansionism of scientism and evolutionism has brought back social Darwinism with a new poison dart of advanced technology and the overwhelming reliance on statistical analysis which unintentionally  renders medicine itself increasingly powerless to fulfill its promises.

Sanitation and immunizations are nothing  new –the Jews survived because of God’s health instructions—yet they are far and away the best thing that science can offer. Antibiotics are only a rearward defense. Preventive medicine has come back from Vitamin E, biotin, and antioxidants to whole foods and exercise, not crude megadosing of refined nutrients. But the propaganda science starts has a long shelf life in the health and vitamin section and the internet.  "Come, buy, ingest: 50% off!!!)

This is why science—based on the word for “to know”-- may be a misnomer—or represents only hubris and “sand blind” ambitions.  Perhaps it would be more accurate to say we practice ”Cogito”—something like mental yoga—or “Cognitism,” which says “I think that…”  Sciencia implies that there are absolutes  and constants that can be progressively known, and modern science’s stumbling forays into metaphysics puts them out on a limb when they use publicity to utter the unprovable, say, that Darwinism is a fact—when even statistically and mathematically it is anything but.  This also puts science in the unenviable position of being increasingly political.  And being, first and last, “polity-driven.”

If it is not well known, it should be, and five minutes of lucid and unprejudiced thought (if there is such a thing) will demonstrate in practical fashion that science as god is only a few inches from virtual and practical nihilism and self-annihilation—and leans ever more towards becoming mere opinion, here today and subsumed tomorrow ,with lots of costly publicity, all down the same drain.

In other words, those whose god is science think it is the top dog; but if that is so, even in name only, then we plainly see that the tail of culture is wagging and commanding what is left of science in a post-Christian and now post-Enlightenment human global environment.  “Nihilism is the air we breathe.”  One cannot derive science from Sartre—but Sartre can, and did, grossly misuse science; or rather, assumed it was on his side. Seriously.

There is nothing to suggest that the human and esp. the male inclination toward competition is an avenue to truth. Through all human history it has mostly been quite the opposite, more of a means of suppressing the truth for the sake of narrow self-interest; if no more than to activate the popular hunger game of “the tearing of the flesh”, sarx into the mills of sarcasm. If it stumbles into  truth, it first stumbles over many corpses; and like mutations, it is unlikely to do any good much less advance; if it’s all by chance, as we are preached to  day and night.

If science has no origins above and beyond the seas of humanity, it is the more to  be pitied, then—but I would not waste either pity or love or something that is a mere concept at best, with diminishing returns if it is not a slave; and which will be thrown out when no longer of any practical use. Being a poster boy for atheism is pretty precarious—your job and your existence is always on the line. 

On the other hand, if we desert the Sadducean camp, there are dangers galore also.  Equal and opposite reaction is no bargain or guarantee. Many people believe in “God” but do not tremble—fallen angels have more sense—“the demons believe, and tremble.” "The fear of man is a snare."

Again and again- if persons—actual souls—put themselves in bondage to their excretions (see Monod)/abstractions of thought alone, then one ends up in the pig’s wallow. (Thoughts left to themselves have a short half-life).  And many purport this to be their delight!

("Government is a soft pig," indeed!) 

If "science" is to be again useful for more than toy design, it will have to get real, realize it is next to nothing and did not create itself, and owes any integrity it has to Someone--a person not a concept-- far above it in scale, and unapproachable by the bootstraps or  petards of “science so-called.”  Maybe it could start by calling itself something less ambitious—and avoid the crowds  of  publicity-seeking absolutists with no access to the Absolute.

 

"Summa" ergo cogito.