So, scientists have an incentive to cover up.
It’s people who pay for science through their support of the NIH, the NSF, and the universities where most research happens. The best reason is that the answers to the persistent questions are not what people want to hear, and the bad news may lead them to kill the messenger-scientific research. There are more than enough reasons they are reluctant to do so. Most scientists are reluctant to admit science’s answers to the persistent questions are obvious. You don’t have to be a scientist to be scientistic. In the book here summarized I take a page out of the PR of the gay and lesbian community and (mis)appropriate the word ‘scientistic’ the way they did to ‘gay’ and ‘queer.’ Scientism is my label for what any one who takes science seriously should believe, and scientistic is just an in-your face adjective for accepting science’s description of the nature of reality. I plead guilty to the charge, while taking exception to the ‘unwarranted’ and ‘exaggerated’ part. Attempts to do so will be accused of “scientism”-the unwarranted and exaggerated respect for science. And yet they all have simple answers, ones we can pretty well read off from science. These worries are a luxury compared to the ones most people on Earth address.
We all lie awake some nights asking questions about the universe, its meaning, our place in it, the meaning of life, and our lives, who we are, what we should do, as well as questions about god, free will, morality, mortality, the mind, emotions, love. Why Leave Life’s Persistent Questions to Guy Noir? My excuse is that I stand on the shoulders of giants: the many heroic naturalists who have tried vainly, I think, to find a more hopeful version of naturalism than this one.ġ. This is a vast agenda and it’s presumptuous to address it even in a format 30 times longer than this one. It is one that most naturalists have sought to avoid, or at least qualify, reinterpret, or recast to avoid its harshest conclusions about the meaning of life, the nature of morality, the significance of our consciousness self-awareness, and the limits of human self-understanding.
This is a précis of an argument that naturalism forces upon us a very disillusioned “take” on reality.