Conclusion Regarding Truth, Scientism, and Gullibility.

Anyone can give you a belief system, whether it is justified by Scipture or by Data. By opening your mind to it uncritically, while you enjoy the ethos of an open mind, you allow that "truth" to proliferate within your mind. Yet simply because one has painted the tree red does not mean that the tree was red to begin with, and so entertaining any sort of dogmatic point of view or metaphysical generalisation would appear naiive; any evidence one finds for it is a constructed fashion statement.

So many of these are currently in circulation, so readily accessible and seldom questioned, that should one consistently refuse to accept them one would be labeled a close-minded elitist, and at the moment one questions them and criticises them instantly at their very core, one is accused of jumping to judgements and refusing to open one's own mind. Scientism is so prevalent and people so hesitant to pick up a book (more than ten years old or so) that, unless one foregoes politeness and ethos, one is condemned to forever be a mouse in a labyrinth, bumping into walls again and again, (in the instance that one rebels against Scientism) or one is a mouse in a cage, running on the same exercise wheel and getting nowhere, for all opinions must be entertained and even the ones one disagrees with are equally arbitrary.

The patience to question a statement is most easily understood in this example: Michael asserts that "Human beings are intrinsically greedy." One may listen for hours to Scientific justifications for this "truth", but does at any point one hear another say what the phrase itself means? What does the word "intrinsic" mean? Does one have free will? Even if one has a genetic predisposition towards greed, does free will not allow it to be overcome? What is greed? How can we presume it to be the same for one person as it is for another? What does the WORD mean? Are we justified in simply presuming that our ancestors had the same experience with greed as we do? Why does it seem likely to one person and unlikely to another?

There may not be definite answers for these questions, but like most mysteries, they may never be solved, and we may be more than happy to see that they are never truly cleared away.

I have heard it said that this is the difference between Philosophy and Religion:

Philosophy deals with Questions that may never be answered.
Religion deals with Answers that may never be questioned.

When I hear anyone mention an absolutely sweeping generalisation as Universal "fact", I can only naturally think back to this definition of Religion. True Scientists are not Sciencists. The more that one knows about the world as seen through the lens of Science, the more one rejects any pretense to Science offering an answer to all problems and questions, as though it were the old God. The spaces in the reasoning are most glaring to those who have followed the reasoning to its ultimate cliff. It is they, not those who are still lost in the forest and preparing to turn back, that can fathom the expanse before them. The more one knows, the more one really knows that one does not know. Any idiot can say to a wise person, "No. You don't understand." And the more that one knows, the more idiots there seem to be, just waiting to say it.

dm.A.A.