On 'Non-scientific' claims

(How the Worship of “Science” Became a Cult of Certainty)

What Science Is—and What It Is Not

Science is a method, not a monolith of eternal truth.
Yet for millions today, the word “science” has been transformed into a sacred totem: disagree with the consensus and you’re not merely wrong—you’re irrational, anti-intellectual, or morally defective.

Neil deGrasse Tyson’s oft-repeated quip captures the new dogma perfectly:

“The good thing about science is that it’s true whether or not you believe in it.”

This is no longer the humble, self-correcting enterprise of Galileo or Popper. It is a loyalty oath. Doubt the current model and you’re excommunicated as a “denier” or “fundie.” That is not science; that is cult behavior.

(I say this as an atheist who accepts evolution and modern cosmology without reservation. My critique is not ideological—it’s methodological.)

Science is a toolbox—falsifiability, controlled experimentation, peer review, replication. The toolbox itself never changes; only our models do. When we treat provisional models as revealed truth, we freeze inquiry and punish heresy. We have seen this pattern before: geocentric cosmology, phlogiston, eugenics—each once defended as “settled science.”

One small but revealing example: the ontological status of irrational numbers (√2, π, e). They are routinely called “real numbers” in the same breath as integers, yet they are fundamentally unconstructible with finite operations. The contradiction is rarely examined because questioning the continuum hypothesis feels like blasphemy. Dogma protects even tiny inconsistencies.

I have opened threads explicitly inviting rigorous critique of such topics. The typical response is not counter-argument but insult and dismissal—“crank,” “Dunning-Kruger,” etc. That reaction is diagnostic: it reveals faith, not confidence.

Worse, we are told to “trust the statistics” without ever teaching people how statistics can be tortured until they confess anything. Selection bias, p-hacking, publication bias, and garden-of-forking-paths problems are epidemic, yet the public is trained to treat every confidence interval as gospel. The result is a population that can recite headlines but cannot spot a truncated y-axis.

In Defense of the Supposedly Irrational

A genuine scientist says: “Here is the evidence; try to tear it apart.”
A priest of Scientism says: “The Science is settled; shut up and comply.”

Consider the people dismissed as woo-addled crystal enthusiasts. Many of them report tangible changes in well-being after adopting a practice everyone told them was nonsense. We have a name for this phenomenon when it occurs in clinical trials: the placebo effect—one of the most robust, least understood findings in medicine. Belief itself is a variable with measurable physiological consequences.

I am not arguing that quartz crystals emit mystical healing energy. I am arguing that lived experience is data, and blanket dismissal of subjective data is itself unscientific. When a phenomenon persists across cultures and centuries, the rational response is curiosity, not scorn.

What True Rationality Looks Like

True rationality is not deference to consensus.
True rationality is not outsourcing your epistemology to journalists or blue-check experts.
True rationality is not mistaking a statistical model for reality.

True rationality is:

• Replicating claims yourself whenever possible
• Ruthlessly interrogating methodology and funding sources
• Remaining comfortable with “we don’t know yet”
• Changing your mind when the evidence demands it—no matter how inconvenient

Question everything—especially the things you’re told you’re not allowed to question.

That is the scientific attitude. Everything else is just dressed up group think.