When I first saw this article, I was convinced it was satire. This article is titled “This History Reveals That Science Isn’t Nearly As Objective As You Think” and was republished on the Everyday Feminism website. So the editors of this site thought “This is a good article, let’s endorse it on our website too!”

Disclosure: I like Everyday Feminism and that I think they produce some very good articles. But this article is so bad that I had to write a response. I won’t attempt to correct all its problems, but I’ll tackle some of the worst ones with quotes from the article and my response.

Modern, mainstream science finds itself deeply embedded in a supposedly objective, quantifiable worldview – one that is at best faulty, and at worst, is a form of scientism which denies new findings.

I admit that science as an institution has bias. Scientists are people too and people have biases. Scientists want their own theories to be successful for example. Another example is how scientific publishing has a bias against null results. Methodologically strong studies can be hard to publish just because they didn’t find a cool result. But those studies are still important if we want to expand our knowledge about a subject!

It would be great if the author discussed these very real issues with science, instead she goes into full blown defending of creationism. Seriously.

One of the most obvious examples of scientism today is the theory of evolution, which is still upheld as the dominant explanation of how life generates itself. The problem is that biologists still can’t answer the most basic of questions involved, including the origin of life itself, sexual reproduction, or how species originate.

Wow. 1) Evolution has a wealth of scientific evidence supporting it. But 2) the author seems to conflate abiogenesis and evolution as if they are identical. So instead of addressing all the evidence for evolution, the author just suggests it has major flaws and doesn’t explain why. She then jumps right into why creationism could be a good alternative explanation that needs to be explored.

It leaves no room for the possibility of Intelligent Design Theory, which posits “certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause.” IDT is often made synonymous with creationism – neo-Darwinists argue that it’s just Creationism in disguise – but there are many scientists and philosophers alike that believe IDT is just as compelling a theory as evolution for “the way things are.”

Yikes. Intelligent Design Theory is certainly another word for creationism. She argues “many” scientists believe Intelligent Design is just as compelling as evolution, but only names a couple and none of these have any sort of widespread support in the scientific community. You can always find a few people arguing against a particular theory, but the scientific consensus for evolution is overwhelming. Evolution is true.

The author then cites another example of scientism: we don’t actually think with our brains.

Another example of scientism is the continued definition of the heart as nothing more than a mechanical pump, giving the brain all the credit for who and what we are – the home of our soul, as it were. Doing so means holding on to the linear, reductionist view of a mechanical universe which reduces life to mere quantifiable parts in spite of the latest heart research that is producing a perspective vital in finding a reconnection with something western society has lost. … More than half our heart cells are neural, the heart’s nervous system wired to the brain’s amygdala, thalamus, hippocampus, and cortex. The heart has its own memory and is the primary organ of sense; the brain is secondary and responsive. We feel the world first, but when we believe – and are told, again and again – that the brain is the center of our being, our perception of our humanity and the world becomes stymied. Understanding the heart’s neural connections within the brain and how these areas deal with emotional memories, sensory experience, spatial relationships and meaning, problem solving, reasoning, and learning, we’re better equipped to understand that feelings come through the heart and body, whereas emotions come from thoughts that play through our minds (often like a broken record).

Wow. So because our heart is attached to nerve cells, that means we think with our hearts instead? Or that our heart is responsible for processing emotions and our brain does other things? But aren’t processing emotions still thinking? Or maybe our heart, like the rest of the body, communicates with our brain? I have trouble parsing out this argument (like most of the article). Sigh.

The last example of scientism again goes back into intelligent design or more specifically, that the universe is intelligent.

The dominant belief that science itself is predicated on a denial of intelligence in the universe and the superior power of quantifiable observation is fallacious; historians are being forced to admit this as evidence comes to light that the greatest minds science has known – from Copernicus to Newton – believed in and based their work on intelligent design. … Einstein knew this. Science has to adjust itself. It has to see the bigger picture. Intelligence is not limited to brain structure. A mind is an aggregate of interacting components; it is embodied in whatever system sustains life. Every self-organized system on this planet – from microbes to plant life to animal life to ecosystems – has a sophisticated ability to create relationships we have never considered possible.

Again, this is hard to argue against because it is so confusing. What does this even mean? Yes, different systems interact with each other. This is all explained by basic chemistry, biology, and physics. What are we missing?

Everything from new findings about the bacterial basis for life, to the interplay of energy fields, to newfound complexities of the solar system, could take us to the next level of awareness as point by point science works away at its own reductionist foundation in spite of itself. The Gaian Paradigm has much to teach us. All life on this planet is made of self-organized systems; Earth creates ecosystems which give rise to the plants and animals necessary to maintain the health of the system. The Earth is too vast to deal with itself in any other way. Our outdated, outmoded, top-down approach to problem solving and managing business, materials/food production, education, health care, environmentalism, and government – all these systems across the board in the western world are no longer adequate (if they ever were) to the task before us. (the bold was from the author)

Again, I don’t understand. What does ‘next level of awareness’ mean? Why are the ways we navigate the world no longer adequate? What is the alternative?

Sigh.

This was painful to read. The author seems to just want to argue that there is “more” out there, but does so with vague arguments that can’t be falsified. She tries to make this point by attacking science with pseudoscience. Pseudoscience can always sound better than science because you can’t disprove it. So statements like “we feel with our hearts” and “the universe is intelligent” are so vague that they are meaningless. Science is self-correcting so if any of these ideas had evidence to support them, they would eventually become embraced by the scientific community.

The entire article is just pseudo-intellectual nonsense. And it provides a great example for anti-feminists to bash feminism as being anti-science. I care about feminism and social justice. I don’t want this one article to be used as an strawman argument against feminism. I’m a feminist and I fully embrace science. There are many feminists who care about science as well. Again, science has bias because scientists are people. But attack the entire discipline with nonsense fails to make that point.

PS: I now have a Patreon if you’d like to support my writing and podcasting.