A Post-Truth Reformer Needs to Post Better Truth
What they mean by truth,
critical thinking and evidence
is not what we mean
A Classic Case of “The Haidt Effect”
Part 1: Beware of Academics Bearing Reforms
by John D. Wise, PhD
Reference: The post-truth era and how science education keeps ignoring it, by Sibel Erduran. Science 1 May 2025, Vol. 388.
As a philosopher I was intrigued by the title of this article, but when I read the opening lines, I knew I had to comment:
The term “post-truth” has been used to characterize the contemporary era. Designated as the word of the year for 2016 by the Oxford English Dictionary, “post-truth” refers to “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping political debate or public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” Authors advocate that more needs to be done to address the adverse effects of post-truth…. But what exactly needs to be done?
Another alarm ringing in our failing Academy. The irony is too thick to pass up.
In October 2022 Jenny and I coined a phrase, “The Haidt Effect,”[1] to designate what we observed repeatedly amid the dark days of Covid-19: individuals on the political Left having flashes of causal self-awareness that something is wrong but missing the bigger picture.
What is the Haidt Effect?
The Haidt effect occurs when a Left-leaning figure acknowledges a specified problem linked to Leftist actions or beliefs. However, they see the problem as a limited and fixable “bug,”[2] rather than as the logical outplay of Leftist ideology.
This article is a spectacular example of The Haidt Effect.
What is “Science Denial”?
Our author, Dr. Sibel Erduran, is a professor of Science Education at Oxford University. She laments the rise and proliferation of the “post-truth” era[3] and its implications for “the science education ecosystem.” The problem, it seems, is quite intractable. She and her research group have “been investigating strategies to support evidence-based reasoning in secondary school science lessons for more than 25 years,” yet “the bigger problem remains.”
She asks the searching question, “Why do we continue to witness accounts of science denial even when scientific evidence is available …?”
And then she says this:
The “post-truth condition” cannot be fully addressed through correcting occurrences of misinformation nor by cultivating appreciation of the scientific process. It has been demonstrated that people may selectively credit or dismiss evidence depending on whether information affirms or threatens their identities and social groups. Furthermore, we live in times where there is loss of trust in expertise and institutions. There are broader political dynamics in play such as deliberate engineering of doubt and misinformation to serve the interests of certain stakeholders.
A more complete unpacking of this passage will have to await part two of this article. For now, however, we should note that, according to our author, post-truth is not something that can be adequately corrected by Truth alone. Rather, the real issue is the faulty people who have lost “trust in expertise and institutions” and therefore “dismiss evidence” based on their identities and social groupings.
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The Truth about Post-Truth
One group Dr. Erduran seems to have in mind as explicitly post-truth are the postmodern theorists who explicitly eschew rationality and evidence as mere stand-ins for power-broking. As an academic, I have lamented with alarm the rise and predominance of postmodern thinking in academia at all levels. I certainly agree with Dr. Erduran that postmodern philosophies are the heart-and-soul of the post-truth era. Postmodernism has followed Hegelian logic unflinchingly, and I have been commenting on this issue for many years.[4]
I would argue, however, that Dr. Erduran (perhaps unconsciously[5]) is on the same logical path as the postmodern theorists she critiques. She is simply less willing to follow the logic where it leads.[6] She clings quaintly to what Nietzsche might call “the corpse of God,” the dead idea that Truth is defined and stable. She wants, that is, an ambiguous notion of truth that is transcendentally grounded (God’s corpse) when it’s convenient, and a relativized-truth (postmodernism) when it’s not. This helps illustrate my point about the irrationality of Darwinian/secular scientific thinking. While abandoning transcendence (the Western God), they cling to its functional attribute, Truth with a capital T, as an anchor and support for their positions, refusing to face the logical consequences of their ideology.
They want, that is, the relativizing logic (Hegel’s) that turns Truth and Being into Process, allowing for molecules to man evolution, AND they want to hold on to the dead notion that Truth is stable and unchanging, with the Laws of (traditional) Logic: Contradiction, Excluded Middle and Identity.[7]
It is on this irrational foundation that the Haidt Effect plays out.
If Only This Critic Had Thought Critically
However, before I begin my commentary on this article, I’d like to list a series of “if only” statements that Dr. Erduran makes early in the article, a sort of wish-list for addressing the problem of post-truth and increasing “scientific habits of mind” in students:
If only we could highlight better that science is a process of inquiry, if only we could enhance students’ critical thinking skills and scepticism about unfounded claims; if only we could improve students’ media and information literacy to distinguish facts from fake news; if only we could marry statistical and scientific literacy; if only we could get students to engage with scientists and participate in scientific projects to give them a sense of how science works. If only.
What is most important to note in these words is their appearance of innocuousness. It appears as if these are things that theists generally, and Christians specifically can “get on board with.” We certainly would like to foster “critical thinking skills,” skepticism about “unfounded claims,” and improve students’ “media and information literacy,” enabling them to “distinguish facts from fake news.”
What is subtle, however, about papers of this sort in our compromised academia,[8] is the fact that what is meant by these words can be opposite to what we understand by them.[9] What makes it doubly-difficult is that the authors themselves often do not recognize the ideological possession (Hegelian logic) that reverses their meaning. It is as if we are seeing graphically portrayed the phenomenon warned of in the Bible – “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter!”
Reality Check
The issue is metaphysics: What is real?
For our purposes there are two mutually exclusive (contradictory) answers: 1) Being, or 2) Process.
If Being is real, as in the Judeo/Christian concept of God (and Platonic/Aristotelian metaphysics), then process is that which happens to being/s. This is the traditional understanding of metaphysics in the Western world.
If, however, Process (or change) is what is ultimately real, then being is just arrested change. Evolutionary theory is this metaphysical view applied to biology. This is the revolution in thought Hegel foisted on our unsuspecting world. It is not a new idea, but as old as sin itself.
Dr. Erduran is a product of this revolution. Even in her use of terms like “the science education ecosystem” she sees everything as Process.
What’s wrong with Process?
Nothing if we conceive of process as happening to Being. But what if there is no Being, only Process? That is, if Process is the fundamental reality, then being must be “cashed out” in terms of Process. Being is, for Hegel, phenomenal – mere appearance. This is why his philosophy is called “Absolute Idealism.”
So, if Process is all there is … there is no stability, only ongoing change and interrelation; there are no objects – they are merely moments of apparent stasis; there are no real boundaries[10] – everything is flux.
In Process, therefore, truth evolves.
When truth evolves, Truth dies.
“Truth” becomes, in this view, the process of change itself. Stasis, objectivity and boundaries are no longer real – they are temporary and merely phenomenal, subjective, and relative.
Same word – “truth” – but radically different meaning. And worse, this change in philosophical worldview changes more than just the meaning of individual words. Terminological “flexibility” opens the space for dangerous ambiguity in language, and this fact has been very successfully weaponized by the Left, to the extent that ‘even the elect’ are being deceived – ‘bitter for sweet,’ indeed.
Since 1859, science has sold its soul to the notion that truth evolves. Once Hegelian process metaphysics became the overarching paradigm in which “science” is conducted, there was no longer space for Truth (with a capital T) as real, objective, and unchanging.
Truth requires radical and real boundaries. If truth evolves, no boundaries can stand.[11] Truth and evolution/Process are opposed. Science has been feeding on the corpse of Truth for 160 years. When they talk to us about “truth” they freely modulate between the two meanings, playing on the ambiguity.
We think of Truth as unchangeable.
They know better.
Wolf grins at human credulity. [credit: Illustra Media]
There are two parties to this dispute, both representing today’s science.
Here’s what is at issue.
Colossal BioSciences claims to have de-extincted the dire wolf, which vanished 12,000 years ago.[12] They did so by genetically editing 20 places in the grey wolf genome.
Critics cry, “foul!” Why? Because the “de-extincted” dire wolves are simply grey wolves with 20 genetic edits.
ARE they dire wolves, or NOT?
In defense of their de-extinction claim, Beth Shapiro, Colossal’s chief scientist, said this:
“It’s not possible to bring something back that is identical to a species that used to be alive. Our animals are grey wolves with 20 edits that are cloned…. And we’ve said that from the very beginning. Colloquially, they’re calling them dire wolves and that makes people angry.”
“We are using the morphological species concept and saying, if they look like this animal, then they are the animal.”
Grenyer, a critic, shoots back:
“While Colossal is making significant scientific advances, that claim [of de-extinction] is simply wrong. It is transformative, and it is breakthrough science – it’s just not de-extinction,” he says.
If truth evolves, this question and these assertions dissolve into nonsense. Yet (like professor Erduran above) the warring evolutionary scientists on each side of this debate want to have their cake and eat it too.
They want to cling to a transcendent Truth that validates their assertions, but that their Process-logic and materialist assumptions deny. The dire wolf was never a being that could be “brought back.” It is merely a conventional index to a moment in the evolutionary Process.
When evolutionary scientists take a question like this seriously, squaring off against one another as if one side of their dispute is True, they reveal the profound contradiction within which they operate. Truth has been instrumentalized. They will pick it up when it is convenient, and brush it aside when it isn’t.
Truth is dead, guys; you killed it.[13]
Time to man up and face the consequences.
Be wary of academics and scientists bearing reforms. What they say may sound good, but what they mean is likely poison to us all.
Next week we will sew all this together into a startling exemplar of The Haidt Effect.
cartoons by Brett Miller
Footnotes
[1] We presented it on our cross-listed podcast, “No Compromise” (episodes 16-18) under “The Christian Atheist” label, in which Jenny and I discuss various issues. It is named in honor(?) of one of my favorite popular intellectuals, psychologist and author Jonathan Haidt.
[2] Limited also to a different segment of the Left (in their minds anyway) from that of the Leftist author pointing out the problem. ‘They (the offenders) are not seeing the problem as I do.’ This is why the problem in their view can be fixed – it is localized, not a feature of Marxist ideology, but a bug. In effect they say, ‘if only the others would see as I do, the Leftist agenda could go on undisturbed.’ For anyone familiar with Marxist apologetics, you will recognize the pattern. “If only I had overseen the _____ Revolution (insert the name of any failed Marxist society, e.g. “Cuban,” in the blank), it would have been a success, a true Utopia.”
[3] This is the first indication that we are witnessing the Haidt effect. The post-truth era (we are told) has its most perfect expression in, you guessed it, Donald Trump and his followers – the perfect “post-truthers.” The intellectual myopia and lack of self-awareness required to seriously put forward this claim is stunning.
[4] The work of Dr. James Lindsay on this topic, coming from a non-theistic perspective, is important and worth engaging.
[5] See our article “Evolution is Hegelian Process-metaphysics” on the nature of the “unconscious” in Freudian thought.
[6] And in this way, Dr. Erduran serves as a stand-in for the whole academic community over the last two centuries.
[7] I recognize how difficult it can be to understand Hegel from a traditional mindset. It is immensely frustrating for me to explain Hegel’s philosophy to others, as it can’t be seen in parts, but only as a whole. Whenever I explain something about Hegel’s philosophy, I recognize that I need ten other explanations to clarify my explanation. Every part affects every other part. It is why this way of thinking is so powerful and so seductive that it has taken over the Western world unconsciously. If we are to counter it, we must learn to see it, both in ourselves and in others.
[8] I have been trying to progressively make the case in my articles for CREV that how we think and not just what we are thinking, has changed radically over the last 200 years. Christians must learn to be “as wise as serpents” in approaching and evaluating our compromised world-system and those who advocate for it.
[9] This is the Kuhnian problem of communicating across paradigms. When a paradigm changes, as from Aristotelian to Hegelian logic, a common terminology remains, but differences in meaning from subtle to gross (often unnoticed by those using the terminology) make cross-paradigm communication fraught.
[10] And because this is a universal thought-system this lack of boundaries applies in every field of thought – ethics, taxonomy, law, etc. Nothing is what it is, all categories are “soft,” fluid, and blend together.
[11] This is why the LORD is a god of real boundaries: ‘of all the trees of the garden you may eat, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day you eat of it, dying you shall die.’
[12] Conventional dating, not mine.
[13] And Dr. Erduran laments the loss of trust in experts and institutions?
John Wise received his PhD in philosophy from the University of CA, Irvine in 2004. His dissertation was titled Sartre’s Phenomenological Ontology and the German Idealist Tradition. His area of specialization is 19th to early 20th century continental philosophy.
He tells the story of his 25-year odyssey from atheism to Christianity in the book, Through the Looking Glass: The Imploding of an Atheist Professor’s Worldview (available on Amazon). Since his return to Christ, his research interests include developing a Christian (YEC) philosophy of science and the integration of all human knowledge with God’s word.
He has taught philosophy for the University of CA, Irvine, East Stroudsburg University of PA, Grand Canyon University, American Intercontinental University, and Ashford University. He currently teaches online for the University of Arizona, Global Campus, and is a member of the Heterodox Academy. He and his wife Jenny are known online as The Christian Atheist with a podcast of that name, in addition to a YouTube channel: John and Jenny Wise.