How science became dogma

Speaking to fell substacker The Free Press’s Bari Weiss on The Honestly podcast, famed venture capitalist Peter Thiel defended the incoming administration’s picks, particularly vaccine skeptics such as RFK, Jr. as being a counter to the dogmatism of science. I include this long quote from the interview for context about what Thiel is pointing out:

WEISS: On one hand, it’s right for people to be skeptical of “Big Pharma.” But it can tip so fast into, “vaccines cause autism” territory. How do you think about the fine line between skepticism of an elite, whose gatekeeping has been too strident and falling into a rabbit hole, where there’s no gatekeeping and no institutional authority at all? 

THIEL: One institution where you can ask this question is science. I always think of the history of science—that it started as a two-front war against both excessive dogmatism and excessive skepticism. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a scientist was a heterodox thinker who didn’t believe in, say, the decayed Aristotelian scholasticism of the Catholic Church.

Maybe you were empirical, and there were dogmas you were questioning. But you also couldn’t be extremely skeptical—you couldn’t trust your senses. Extreme dogmatism was incompatible with science. Extreme skepticism was incompatible with science. The problem is, it’s easy to be against one. If you’re always against dogmatism, maybe you’re too skeptical of everything. If you’re always against skepticism, maybe you’re too dogmatic. There’s this complicated balance where we need to be both anti-dogmatic and anti-skeptical. 

If we fast-forward to 2024 and you asked scientists: Where are people too skeptical? Where are people too dogmatic? I think there is a whole long list of things. There are climate-change skeptics; there are vaccine skeptics; there are Darwin skeptics. There are all these people who are too skeptical, and the skepticism is undercutting science.

Then if you asked the scientists: Where are the scientists too dogmatic? I don’t think they could tell you. Doesn’t that tell you that we have completely lost the sense of balance? What has become “science” is something more dogmatic than the Catholic Church of the seventeenth century.

Thiel is claiming that scientists are too dogmatic. As his evidence, he suggests that scientists regularly accuse people of being too skeptical of science but never accuse anyone of being too dogmatic.

There is some truth to what he’s saying, but his examples of conflict between science and religious dogmatism are unfair.

Science grew out of the quest for greater knowledge about God, seeking to answer the question: What kind of universe did God create? Scholasticism attempted to merge the best science of the day, Aristotle’s, with Catholic teaching, believing that the two must not be in conflict since both must be true.

The main difference between Scholasticism and the later scientific revolution was not in their relative skepticism or dogmatism but rather in the questions they asked.

Scholastics were interested in questions like:

Is there a God and how can I prove He exists?

Do we have souls and what are they?

Today these are seen as theological or philosophical questions, but at the time no boundary between scientific questions and Big Questions (that today we believe have no scientific answer) existed.

Big Questions were addressed, particularly by Saint Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225 – 7 March 1274), with a large degree of skepticism since his belief was that knowledge was best gained by objecting to those things one believes to be true.

Antonio del Castillo y Saavedra, c. 1649

The method of scientific inquiry in which one forms a hypothesis and then attempts to disprove or falsify that hypothesis is grounded in Scholasticism.

While the Scholastics were not interested in empirical evidence, they did lay the groundwork for evaluating evidence impartially and logically.

Scholasticism’s great enemy was not skepticism but extreme dogmatism from the church authorities and groups such as the Fideists who denied the utility of reason.

Ironically, Scholastics are remembered now as dogmatic when they were the skeptical ones and often risked censure by the Roman Catholic Church. A couple of centuries later Scholasticism itself became the basis for Roman Catholic theology and has since been taught dogmatically. For example, transubstantiation, the literal transformation of the bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ, is explained using concepts of substance and form developed by Aristotle.

The beginnings of science, meanwhile, occurred because scholars of the Renaissance and early modern period took the Scholastic approach to reality and added empirical evidence. Francis Bacon, 16th-century philosopher, father of empiricism, and poster boy for secular science, wrote in 1605:

For certain it is that God worketh nothing in nature but by second causes[.]

Bacon means that everything in nature stems from God as the primary cause. He then writes:

[A] little or superficial knowledge of Philosophy may incline the mind of man towards Atheism, but a farther proceeding therein doth bring the mind back again to Religion[.]

The concept that scientists had to battle the dogma of the Catholic Church was true at times, but the Church also fostered science. Why do we think that science became so strong in Christian Europe? If you look at another religion, Islam, you see a rise of science in the 8th century, much earlier than in Christendom, followed by a decline after the 13th. This is because the relationship between the religious authorities and scientific knowledge changed. Islam became extremely dogmatic, embracing its own form of Fideism, while the Church became less so with Scholasticism and even less with the Renaissance.

The unfortunate battle between Galileo and Pope Urban VIII, often held up as an example of the church suppressing science, was far more complex than a church merely trying to bludgeon well-meaning scientists with religious dogmas. Galileo’s abrasive personality, his proximity to the Pope, and that his theory appeared to contradict the evidence at the time because stellar parallax, the movement of the stars as the Earth orbits the Sun, had never been observed, all contributed to the unfortunate result.

No one believed the stars were so far away that they would require far more advanced equipment to observe their movement. Stellar parallax would not be observed for over 200 years after Galileo, in the 1830s. Only the preponderance of other evidence such as the phases of Venus, the moons of Jupiter, and later the astonishing success of the Keplerian model, solidified the heliocentric model. At the time, the Copernican theory was a poor predictor of planetary positions and seemed plain wrong.

Thus, what appeared to be a case of scientific skepticism vs. religious dogmatism was a case of scientific skepticism vs. scientific dogmatism.

Nevertheless, Galileo’s theory won out because, however slowly, when allowed to proceed science corrected itself.

Fast-forward to 2024 and we see scientific dogmatism everywhere, but dogmatism that comes not out of ideology but a consensus based on evidence.

And isn’t that how science is supposed to work? Are we not supposed to close in on the truth and once having found it establish it against all attacks?

Well, no. Science does need to be defended against those who seek to suppress it or alter it for ideological reasons as happened in the 1960s in the Soviet Union with Lysenkoism, but it doesn’t need to be defended from attacks based on evidence.

Unfortunately, many scientists do self-censor and censor other scientists who question consensus results, and that comes from a recent shift in the philosophical underpinnings of science.

Science as an institution today contains two warring factions who may not even know they are members of those factions or that they subscribe to certain underlying philosophies for their worldviews.