Science is the New Religion

When Identity, Cognitive Dissonance, and Scientific Dogma 'Intersect': A Guide for the Over-Educated and Under-Realistic

This was prompted by a post I saw on Twitter (X) at the start of this year (2024). I still can’t get used to calling it ’X’. It just feels weird. There was some post on Twitter about someone supposedly doing “research” on gender identity, and they wrote a paper on it. I feel sorry for people who genuinely have gender dysphoria; however, the rate at which people claim to be this or that has exploded suggests to me there’s something else going on. People are being led and convinced they are something they’re not; it feels a lot like propaganda. It seems to be doing much more harm than good. Perhaps the perception of all this is heavily skewed because of their prominence online—which I believe it is. However, it seems to be more than enough to sway people’s opinions on certain topics.

Let’s get this out of the way—I do believe gender dysphoria is a real condition. The contention I have is the sudden influx of everybody wanting to “change” their gender. I don’t believe this resolves the underlying issue of gender dysphoria, and I think it exacerbates any mental health conditions in individuals who believe they have gender dysphoria but are simply questioning things or are confused because of conditioning they’ve been exposed to growing up or even as adults. Some people are highly susceptible to suggestive conditioning—especially children; stay away from our damn children with this stuff.

There are bandwagon waves that propagate through societies constantly. If you take a step back from everything and pay attention, you’ll see what I mean. I’m not just talking about memes and singular words that appear and disappear from the vocabulary of the various pockets of communities through different generations. I’m referring to overarching popular beliefs and how people view the world, in general. These ideas and ways of thinking spread like viruses, and the ever-increasing popularity of the Internet has greatly exacerbated the speed at which these ways of thinking are taken up. On an individual level, we don’t like the idea that we are susceptible to being “programmed” or convinced of things we might not truly believe in. However, this happens more than we realise—we are constantly being bombarded with information and suggestive programming, and if you are active online and even in the real world, there is subtle manipulation going on. There are many psychological explanations for these phenomena.

We are all trying to get by in one way or another in this little thing we call life. In general, when an opportunity presents itself to us, and the resistance is less than the overall benefit, we’ll jump at the chance. Sometimes the overall benefit might be something subjective to us, so there’s a lot of decision-making and attempts to resolve inner conflicts and so on to take into account. Some people’s advantages in life seem like they live life on easy mode. We don’t see the whole picture.

Let’s consider the case of some dude whose main goal in life was to be recognised as an elite athlete. On the face of it, this might not seem like an extraordinary feat—we are lambasted by professional and elite athletes daily through various sources. Because of this, it skews our thinking. However, if we look at some actual numbers, we can begin to appreciate how rare it is to be recognised in this way. It’s not something that everyone can achieve—no, you’re not going to be able to just pull yourself up by the bootstraps and become an elite athlete. We’re talking a combination of genetics, hard work, dedication, and existing in the right environment to incubate all of these variables. Here’s a breakdown of rough numbers for us to work with:

Breakdown of Elite Athletes by Gender

To estimate the percentage of the general population that becomes recognised as elite athletes, we perform the following calculations:

\(\begin{array}{|l|c|} \hline \text{Category} & \text{Count} \\ \hline \text{Olympians} & 15,000 \\ \text{Professional Athletes} & 100,000 \\ \hline \text{Total Elite Athletes} & 115,000 \\ \hline \end{array}\)

\(\begin{array}{|l|c|c|} \hline \text{Gender} & \text{Olympians} & \text{Professional Athletes} \\ \hline \text{Men} & 7,680 & 70,000 \\ \text{Women} & 7,320 & 30,000 \\ \hline \end{array}\)

\(\begin{array}{|l|c|} \hline \text{Total Elite Male Athletes} & 77,680 \\ \text{Total Elite Female Athletes} & 37,320 \\ \hline \end{array}\)

\(\begin{array}{|l|c|} \hline \text{Population} & \text{Count} \\ \hline \text{Global Population} & 7.8 \text{ billion} \\ \text{Male Population} & 3.9 \text{ billion} \\ \text{Female Population} & 3.9 \text{ billion} \\ \hline \end{array} \)

\(\begin{array}{|l|c|} \hline \text{Percentage of Elite Male Athletes} & \left( \frac{77,680}{3,900,000,000} \right) \times 100 \approx 0.002\% \\ \text{Percentage of Elite Female Athletes} & \left( \frac{37,320}{3,900,000,000} \right) \times 100 \approx 0.001\% \\ \hline \end{array}\)

Total Elite Athletes

We consider:

• Olympians: Approximately 15,000 (including both Summer and Winter Olympics).

• Professional Athletes: Approximately 100,000 (generous estimate across all sports).

Gender Distribution of Elite Athletes

Olympians:

Men:

≈ 7,680

Women:

≈ 7,320

Professional Athletes:

Men:

≈ 70% × 100,000 = 70,000

Women:

≈ 30% × 100,000 = 30,000

Total Elite Athletes by Gender

Men:

• Total Elite Male Athletes = 7,680 (Olympians) + 70,000 (Professionals) = 77,680

Women:

• Total Elite Female Athletes = 7,320 (Olympians) + 30,000 (Professionals) = 37,320

Global Population by Gender

Total Global Population:

≈ 7.8 billion

Male Population:

≈ 3.9 billion

Female Population:

≈ 3.9 billion

Percentage Calculation by Gender

Men:

• Percentage of Elite Male Athletes = (77,680 / 3,900,000,000) × 100 ≈ 0.002%

Women:

• Percentage of Elite Female Athletes = (37,320 / 3,900,000,000) × 100 ≈ 0.001%

Summary

• Elite male athletes: Approximately 0.002% of the male population.

• Elite female athletes: Approximately 0.001% of the female population.

As we can see by looking at raw numbers, the chances of regular people becoming elite athletes are astronomically small. This highlights the discontent many people feel when they cannot achieve their goals despite their efforts.

Let us revisit our guy whose life goal was to become an elite athlete. For argument’s sake, let's say he achieved his goal and is now an elite athlete. Unfortunately, he is unable to reach number one—he doesn’t feel like he’s achieved his full potential. Now what? He has a disconnect. For regular people like you and me, we’d be happy if we could get anywhere near that level of success in any given field. However, for someone who is already in that life and has dedicated so much of their time to it—it might not feel like enough.

In the back of his mind, he might know or realise he’s hit his plateau, his limit. Unfortunately for him, this doesn’t help resolve the inner turmoil and conflict that’s going on. Surely there must be some way he can satiate his desire for becoming number one. This is where the influence of modern societal narratives, often backed by questionable scientific and academic narratives, comes into play. He might consider transitioning genders, believing this could give him an edge in a less competitive field.

This decision represents a significant cognitive dissonance, where the societal narrative, reinforced by academic and scientific communities, promotes the idea that gender can be easily changed and that such a change could solve underlying issues. It’s a stark example of how science, losing its way in terms of objectivity, can lead individuals to make life-altering decisions based on a flawed understanding of identity and success.

Cognitive Dissonance in Academia

Within science and academia in general, there seems to be a growing level of cognitive dissonance.

What is cognitive dissonance?

Cognitive dissonance happens when individuals have conflicting beliefs inside themselves or experience conflicting attitudes or behaviors. This can lead to discomfort internally and a resounding need to resolve the inconsistency in one way or another.

We can see this occurring in various ways throughout academia. I’ll give the bullets and then go into a more detailed version:

• Publication pressure

• Funding biases

• Reproducibility issues

• Ideological polarisation

• Ethical dilemmas

• Identity conflicts

Publication Pressure

If you’ve ever had anything to do with academia, even just a taste, a whiff, you’ll know there is a lot of pressure to publish, publish, publish! Academics face relentless pressure to publish quickly, which can lead to the feeling of the powers that be focusing more on quantity over quality.

Funding Bias

Money is a funny thing. People don’t just give it away for free—maybe there are some rare cases where people do, but in general, this isn’t what happens. Especially when you’re in the business of making money. A university is a business, believe it or not. They have to be able to justify their existence much the same as any other type of business. When people or organisations provide funding to academic institutions, it’s not out of the goodness of their hearts. They want something in return. When you see all these super “generous” philanthropists, on the surface, that might be exactly how they seem—just some super generous person improving the world, one buck at a time. What you often don’t see is the why. There are many ways to buy things—and to us normal old regular folk, it’ll seem like a foreign concept to buy something indirectly, like influence, favor, or power. It’s entirely possible that you’ve had someone in your life do it to you—they buy you something, whether it’s food or some object. You think they’re just doing it because right now you’re struggling. Then a short while later, they hit you with the, “Hey remember when I bought you that thing, yeah I’m gonna need you to return that favor on Sunday, yeah thanks.” At that moment, you have a bit of an epiphany.

When someone funds an academic institution, they expect something in return—do any of you remember how long it took to get the tobacco industry to recognise the harm tobacco was doing to people? Yeah, decades of lobbying and all that guff.

Reproducibility Issues

There is a fundamental problem within science, a reproducibility crisis of sorts. Many studies cannot be replicated. This is a bit of a conundrum because reproducibility is kind of a little bit of a core tenet of the scientific method. Having this type of problem I would say is a pretty big deal. I would argue this problem is more critical in hard science fields and more prominent in other areas such as the social sciences, where qualitative data is utilised much more liberally. There is significant pressure for scientific researchers and academics to publish novel and interesting findings while at the same time recognising the importance of reproducibility. This pressure may lead to them fudging numbers or selectively reporting certain data.

Ideological Polarisation

This one is interesting to me. When I was at university, I noticed a massive left-leaning bias. As far as I’m aware, this has only gotten progressively worse. What I personally found was that it was a little bit like walking on eggshells most of the time. You didn’t want to “trigger” anyone, lest you traumatise them for life—no leave it up to the real world to do that, “it’s not your job,” I would constantly tell myself. Though there were a few instances where I could definitely not hold my tongue. One such instance was when a group of us were sitting in a room discussing our thesis topics. A certain topic came up, which led to statistics about this topic. Subsequently, this arrived at one of the most egregious misinterpretations of statistics I’ve ever encountered. Their claim, which was supported by the vast majority, I think everyone (including the lecturer, mind you!) except for me and another person, was that because 98% (don’t quote me on the exact number, it was years ago) of criminal offenders in a particular crime category were men, that means that 98% of men are bad. Not you guys, obviously pointing to the only 2 guys in the room.

In case this seems to make sense to you, I’ll break it down logically so we can visualise why it doesn’t ring true.

Say we have a city with 100,000 people.

• 50,000 men.

• 50,000 women.

There’s one particular crime that we’re tracking, and for that crime, it was discovered there were a total of 500 offenses.

• 10 committed by women.

• 490 committed by men.

Conveniently, 490 / 500 is exactly 98%

Just as a quick aside, this is a perfect example of how data and impressions can be manipulated through the misinterpretation of data and/or information—whether it’s deliberate or not, the end result is the same.

Let’s continue.

We now have a few numbers to work with. The two we are most interested in are:

• 50,000 men

• 490 offenders (also men)

Out of our 50,000 male inhabitants, 490 of them are deemed offenders for this one particular crime (even this doesn’t justify painting them with the broad brush of ‘bad’ people).

0.98%—less than 1%!

So even if we wanted to use the broadest stroke possible, we would only consider 0.98% of men to be bad. Keep in mind this is only one example of what I personally witnessed. After my experience, I had no intention or motivation to continue on in academia. None.

My Dogmas Be Barking

Back in the day when everyone was religious, people looked to religion to provide them with a framework for understanding the world and where we humans fit into it. Religion relies heavily on faith and dogma. As belief in religion has declined over the past century—most prominently in Christian nations, other areas within society have taken up the slack. Namely, science and politics. As politics isn’t known for its rigor when it comes to the integrity of facts, we can put it to the side for now. Science has increasingly been filling up the void where religion used to be. As such, people refer to “science” as an authority on truth and reality.

Many popular contemporary scientific ideas, spread by the media in particular, are passive-aggressively purported as unquestionably true. These ideas are not “allowed” to be questioned because our new lord and savior, science (the new religious sect), says so.

From my perspective, this is such a bizarre phenomenon because it’s doubly reinforced from the outside and within. From the outside, you have the media, the useful idiots, and the faithful, who honestly believe that people would have no reason or ill-intent to spread or publish anything false. From the inside, you have the people who are in on it, the people who are too afraid to speak up, and those who are legitimately following the scientific method and assume everyone else is as well. It’s a mess and no one is willing to dig into it—because money, for the most part.

This is scientific dogma—the new religion. The public at large are beginning to view science with the same reverence reserved for religious faith. It’s a burgeoning push-and-pull—a paradox if you will, whereby scientists are seemingly revered and scrutinised simultaneously. They are expected to have all the answers and provide them definitively. Yet the very nature of true scientific discovery opens up two gaps in knowledge for every discovery.

Another way in which science is taking up the slack of religion is the pressure to provide moral and ethical input and guidance on many issues.

Human Nature and Dogmatic Thinking

I strongly believe that as long as there have been humans, there has been a form of religion in one way or another. We refer to it as religion because that’s what we’re comfortable with. Perhaps it’s better to refer to this overarching system simply as dogmatic thinking—either way, I think this is part of the reason humans have been as successful as they have been. Not just through our intelligence, but our ability to work together, for the most part, and organise ourselves relatively effectively. Belief in Christianity has likely halved in the last century or so. It’s been on a relatively steady decline since the beginning of the 20th century.

Conspiracy Corner Intermission

Put up your feet, relax a little, and let’s indulge ourselves in a little conspiracy. In the previous section, I mentioned that belief in the Christian faith has been steadily on the decline for the past century. Imagine if this was by design. I can’t imagine people would be planning things like this a century in advance, so I’m pretty confident this will safely secure its status as a conspiracy theory. However, let’s humor ourselves for entertainment purposes only. The conspiracy itself is relatively simple:

1. Convince Christians that religion isn’t a real thing and that you should all disband it, in lieu of, well nothing, because we didn’t think that far ahead and we don’t really care what you do.

2. This takes time so we’ll have an intermission within our intermission—a meta-intermission, if you will.

3. 50 to 100 years later.

4. Now that a sufficient number of people have stopped believing in Christianity, we’ll begin the next phase—mass immigration of people who follow dogmatic religions (but not Christianity).

5. ????

In this hypothetical scenario, what would be the motivations?

You might have heard about this bloke, Sun Tzu—he knew a thing or two about war, before it was cool. His text, The Art of War, has been pretty influential. One of his core tenets was, “divide and conquer.” Specifically, he was referring to driving a wedge between the enemy’s front and rear, “to prevent co-operation between his large and small divisions; to hinder the good troops from rescuing the bad, the officers from rallying their men.” By bringing in en masse, people who are diametrically opposed to the host population, this could be seen as deliberately creating social division. Congratulations, first you undermined the dominant religion over the span of a century and introduced immigrants whose dogmatic beliefs will generate social tensions. These tensions could lead to division. This division might just make it easier for those in power to seize control of the population at large, as well as manipulate them—because a society that is divided is much easier to control than a united one.

In turn, social cohesion overall would diminish because the initial shared belief system has been eroded. With the social fabric and cohesion severely reduced, they’ll be much less likely to unite against even common issues—even if this involved the introduction of potentially oppressive government legislation.

Another motivation could be to introduce their own social values to society—by eroding the traditional values shared by the population more than a century prior, they are now free to inject their own values through various means. Think of it kind of like a sick psychological experiment.

Or it could simply be an attempt to make science the new religion.

I guess we’ll never know.

Politics and Science: A Dangerous Mix

Politics and science seem to be becoming more and more enmeshed, and in my opinion, these are two things that should never cross paths. Science shouldn’t be mixed with other doctrines. The ideals of politics don’t align with those of science. Politics, in general, is all about fluffing up the truth, spinning a yarn as long as time, and just outright lying if we’re being honest. It’s about manipulating people’s opinions in order to get elected. That’s how I see it.

Last year I was reading Common Sense by Thomas Paine, where he goes over how monarchies formed and why it seemingly became necessary to have elected officials.

You see, when you have small groups of people, it’s easy to vote amongst yourselves. You can easily vote for your own interests. It’s a very simple system. However, as the group gets bigger, if you want to retain some consistency in values and the like, it becomes necessary to have some sort of elected officials. For argument’s sake, say the group expands to double its size, you assign one elected official for each group. These officials act on behalf of the other citizens, the other residents, people, whatever you want to call them.

Because these officials are still part of a very small group, they still retain the core interests of the group. They’re still very close to it. Problems start arising when the population grows more and more and more. As the population grows, the elected officials become more and more detached from the common people within the population, the regular folks, people like you and me.

They end up deviating a lot from the core interests of the common people. The whole point of these elected officials was to mimic the interests of the people. As they become more and more detached from the common people, they start living a different life altogether. They’re in another world. This issue is exacerbated when you have multiple elected officials within a population. Then all of these elected officials are getting together, potentially living together in their own little elected official communities—they’re socialising in the same circles, no longer socialising with the common folk.

They end up building these iron thrones for themselves.

An alternative to the above is a monarchy. Which is a very, very small subset of people. It’s one group of people who are supposed to be deciding for those they rule over, but the problem is they tend to hoard a lot of wealth, they become very powerful, and it ends up becoming a game of nepotism.

Paine brings up a very good point in that when you have this type of method—nepotism, keeping it in the family, you open yourself up to giving rise to terrible rulers down the line. You may have a father, for example, who is a great and effective leader, ruler. However, this does not guarantee his son will be an equally good leader. The father and son have grown up two worlds apart. A king’s son is going to grow up with all the privileges and whatever else comes with growing up in a monarchy. He’s not going to have gone through the same struggles as his father, he’s not going to have the same level of fortitude.

Even if you go from a monarchy to say, a democracy, or a hybrid—combination of the two, how can you trust that people will vote in somebody who will do what’s in the best interests of everybody? That will never be possible, we’ll always have to settle for what’s in the best interests of the majority.

Politics is ingrained with these types of power struggles. Science has been blessed with being separate from all this, until now.

How can we guarantee that a scientific paper driven by a political ideology, namely an identity political ideology, is going to have any merit? Or any integrity whatsoever? This guarantee can’t exist because there is a fair chance that it’s being driven by their own personal agenda.

Summary and Conclusion

In summary, this article explores the notion that science is becoming the new religion, supported by various points such as cognitive dissonance in academia, funding biases, reproducibility issues, and the problematic mix of science and politics. This analysis challenges readers (that’s you) to question the integrity and motivations behind scientific and academic practices, emphasising the need for a more objective and transparent approach in these fields. The comparison between science and religion underscores the importance of maintaining a critical perspective on widely accepted scientific dogmas.