Is "Scientism" really a thing or is that just a buzzword insult used by religious people against all those who are not...

Is "Scientism" really a thing or is that just a buzzword insult used by religious people against all those who are not religious?
Even people calling themselves spiritual seem to insult people skeptical towards their vague beliefs in souls, the supernatural and an afterlife of worshipping science.

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It's true. You need to suspect someone when they use circular logic, hand-wave, and appeal to authority like the supposed religions they often criticize. Hermeneutics of suspicion. You can mask that very ideology behind the institutions that hides the actual relationship of power and labor.

Power gets abused; what's new?

>what's new
A better way to hide it, perhaps?

Not sure if this is what you had in mind, but I've heard the term used before to refer to a certain philosophical approach that basically wants to subsume all human knowledge under science. The idea being that disciplines like ethics, political science, metaphysics, art criticism, and basically every other non-scientific discipline is valuable only insofar as it is reducible to (and explicable in terms of) our best scientific theories. Insofar as such disciplines are not reducible to science, they are either meaningless or worthless.

A typical first pass objection to such a view is that mathematics seems like a clear counter-example, though I think the actual debate is about whether disciplines like ethics and metaphysics and political theory are distinct from science and, if so, if they are worthwhile.

It's a meme word used by religious people (and idiot, larping redditors from/pol/) to describe the edgy fedoras and the "I fucking love science" brainlets. Actual scientists aside from some of the theoretical ones and meme ones don't talk about religion and science in the same sentence unless someone is pushing outdated religious theories over scientific data.

Source: t.biochemist

Like clockwork. Here comes the clergy.

It's retarded American meme.

Oh no. Don't pull that shit, Yuropoor. You are by far the most atheistic. America doesn't even come close.

This. It's a ploy to cut down the federal research funding.

It's a retarded idea since religion and science are, by definition, impossible to unite. That doesn't mean some "I fucking love science" retards give the Scientific process a bad name.

Sarcasm or bad reading comprehension?

Oh I get it, you actually are blinded by science. Cool.

>cientism

So not believing in religion = blinded by science?
It's exactly what OP was complaining about

That's not true. It's when they are united that it stands the best. Some of the best thinkers used the way that the universe was made as evidence of God. Everything was symbolic. The sun was at the center. Our orbits were circular, like the planets.

Also, that was how the Pythagoreans approached arithmetic. Beautiful how amazing science feels when you connect it with meaning in some way. These days there is no meaning. There is no purpose. They have reached their logical conclusion. All they have to do is go read Ragnar Redbeard and Darwin and they have their philosophy.

It is a meme word for materialist reductionism.

No, I said atheist.

Believing that there is no God = blinded by science.

Not believing in God just means you will find him eventually.

Never heard of Teilhard de Chardin, eh?
God does not exist yet. Omega Point will create Him.

Obviously if you are religious you will see it that way, that doesn't mean you are somehow worshipping science if you have some confidence in science like most people and you also happen to not have religious beliefs.
I don't believe Jesus roses from the grave and that miracles are real, the only God that I really think could be real is the one talked about in philosophy.
Yet I don't think that I worship science or anything.

You will not find God in technology, pleb. Put down the computer for two seconds.

So it's just bad because you don't like nonreligious people?

IIRC scientism is the belief that "science" (as most people wrongly understand it) can do no wrong and is always in the right

That isn't what I said at all.

The place of religion is not entirely abolished but only occupies some formal empty gestures in today's "scientific"-minded people, hence why you see a lot of quasi-religious acts among today's scientists, whom among them has risen into the priest class of contemporary society as Internet personalities.

Except a few weird groups obsessed by pop-science it's quite rare, unless you try hard to consider anything unbelievers do as being a religion.

>Is "Scientism" really a thing

Yes. Over 90% of the population has a minimal understanding of science, having never studied the sciences beyond the required high school courses, but still believe that science, as well as scientists, are infallible, even though they don't have a clue about the validity of the research in question. Take, for example, the people who believe race isn't genetic, simply because they heard "science" disproves the idea, despite the fact that they can observe that races are both different and hereditary. They see reality and they see "science", and so they reject reality. That is scientism in a nutshell.
>Inb4 someone bitches about my example because "we're all the human race!!!!"

...

This two things senpaitachi

You have a point but I find that annoying when religious people try to say that about you just because you don't believe in their religion or follow any form of philosophical naturalism.

>t.biochemist
so you’re probably one of the posters who shits up our board with your infantile understanding of both history and humanities, correct?

Yeah, that's why there were lots of talks with Indian religions and quantum physics way back then. It's a symptom that even when you replace Christianity, since the place is not formally abolished, they'd just be replaced by other religions, including the predominant civil religion of liberal democracy.

Inb4 'that's not religion'. Yes, it is. Rousseau actually made that term up, so it's not just a strawman made by butthurt "religious" fags.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_religion

Scientism (by which I assume you mean cult-like faith in 'science' viewed as some external higher power) is really a thing. However, what a lot of religious people who argue online do is try to discredit science by implying that all science is scientism, which is laughably untrue.

I'm not denying that kind of things never happen, just that it's not synonymous with not being religious.
There is a difference between saying that many people will keep the habits left by religion and fulfill them in other ways and implying that litteraly everyone need religion to fill the God-shaped hole in their heart.

One day, you are talking to your friends about your favorite mathematician, Leohnard Euler. Your friends say that even if Euler had not died in 1783, he would still be dead today. You take the contra-positive, and conclude that if Euler were alive today, he would have died in 1783. Your friends say that this makes no sense. After a heated discussion, you lost track of the time and wonder what time it is. Your friends say "If it is after two o'clock, it is not much after two o'clock." You take the contrapositive, and conclude that if it is much after two o'clock, it is not after two o'clock at all, a clear contradiction!

Is all of logic/math invalid?

Scientists, like surgeons, can be enormously talented in their field of study while clueless without any self-awareness at all outside that field. But, because they necessarily understand how skilled and intellectual they are, it's incredibly easy to think your proficiency at biochemistry or JAVA qualifies you as a psychologist, a civil engineer, an artist, or a politician.

Yes, indeed we must distinguish science proper and "science" as ideology. Science proper is actually quite hysteric in character, always eluding the totalizing control of ideology.

Anyway, what fills the god-shaped hole is materialist religion passing itself off as naturalistic observation, not "science" properly. Startrek fags and ignorant normies are really crypto-communists deadest on securing themselves in historic inevitabilities.

Can you not believe in religion, the spiritual and souls and all these things without following that "materialist religion" or are you litteraly accusing everyone who is not religious to be part of it?

It's real, it's letting our current grasp of science which is subject to change dictate how people live their life regardless of what past ethics and customs hold as true or sacred.
Instead of science to improve humanity it's science for it's own sake or the pursuit of profit.

Calories don't exist

The thing is, religions aren't as simple as a switch that you can wilfully turn on and off. It might be possible but you might not like it. It's almost like a damnation and an absolute state of inhuman despair. Only the truly faithful can ironically go beyond. The thing is, even when you don't realize it the "scientific" community itself is grounded on some belief-systems. There are even some unspoken rules and gestures that govern how you are supposed to think and act. To be truly faithful to science means you have to be ready to throw away everything in case, say, your scientific research goes against the academic establishment or something like that.

A better way to keep each other in check

Isn't that a bit fallacious to extend that much the meaning of the word religion? That's why I was making fun of some christians talking about how everyone has a god-shaped hole in their heart, it's mostly a lot of projection even if obviously a lot of behaviours among religious people also exist outside religion but they were never exclusive to it. (And even if it was the case it's weird to critize your opponent by saying that they are just as "bad" as you)

It's not fallaciously. Religion and (organized) dogmatic suspension of naturalism can be used interchangeably. That's just the way it is, there's no way to escape it without getting into a pretentious discussion about existentialism and the application of meaning by faulty agents.

Where Christians see the "God" hole, secular people see "brotherhood" or "peace" or "liberty". It's the same thing, our irrational value judgements are the yoke of science, not the opposite.

No one self identifies as practing "scientism" it's a buzz word that the non-educated use. I think it started with Christians.