How Secular Science Deceives Itself

Like a muddied spring or a polluted fountain is a righteous man who gives way before the wicked (Proverbs 25:26).

A Classic Case of “The Haidt Effect,” Part 2

by John D. Wise, PhD

This article continues our discussion of: The post-truth era and how science education keeps ignoring it, by Sibel Erduran. Science 1 May 2025, Vol. 388.

Dr. Sibel Erduran wants reform.

She seeks to confront “post-truth” and exorcise it from our culture through science education. Who could possibly disagree? Don’t we all support Truth?

As we saw last week, that depends on what you mean by truth.

For today’s education reformers, for scientific materialists, for Marxists and Darwinists, for far too many scientists … truth evolves. Though they appear to be endorsing our values and speaking our language, they are not.

The reformation of education in the US (and other Western countries) has been a progressive “long march through” our academic institutions. One of the hallmarks of education throughout my lifetime has been its never-ending voracity for “reform,” its step-wise movement of the goal-posts as “the work” is done to undermine the traditional institutions, practices and beliefs that had defined Western culture for nearly two millennia, but which now present barriers to “Progress.”[1] Along the way a host of useful innocents[2] have taken up “the virtuous Cause” of reform without understanding or appreciating the underlying agenda: what I refer to as ideological possession by Spirit (dialectical logic).

It is these “useful innocents” that are most likely to exemplify the Haidt Effect.* Professor Erduran and so many like her in the academic world, are useful innocents. They are being used.

*As explained in Part 1 (29 May 2025), 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,” rather than as the logical outplay of Leftist ideology.

The Process of Self-Deception

Last week we made the point that adopting Process-metaphysics and the logic that accompanies it changes the meaning of everything in our worldview. As a new Kuhnian paradigm ascends without completely supplanting the old one, shared concepts like truth, logic and critical thinking mean very different things in the different paradigms. When important terms like these become ambiguous in this way, a dangerous conceptual space for their abuse opens up, especially when we factor in another aspect of Progressive thinking – its ethics. For Spirit, the end (Progress) justifies any means of achieving it. This is the explicit doctrine of the most popular ethical theory today, Utilitarianism.

Our ‘useful innocents’ are innocent because they are supporting a “good” cause: truth, critical thinking, kindness, justice, opposition to racism, and science. We all support these things, and we certainly do not want to be perceived as opposing them.

Progressives use this fact to effectively silence opposition and skeptical inquiry.

Click image to watch the ad! (J & J Wise)

Our ‘useful innocents’ are useful because they either don’t know or refuse to believe the logical, historical and natural results of their ideology. They are, that is, (willingly or not) ignorant of the Cause they are serving. As we saw last week, what these terms mean in a Process-metaphysical context can radically differ from what we understand them to mean. What our useful innocents are in fact supporting (the death of Truth) often bears little resemblance to what they think they are supporting, what they tell themselves they are supporting.

Thus the importance of narrative over Truth in Hegelian/evolutionary thinking.

Spirit[3] (Reason) doesn’t care how or by whom it advances, only that it advances. Hegel calls this “the cunning of Reason.” Spirit advances by all possible means, and without respect of persons. The Cause doesn’t care who you are, or what you believe so long as you serve the Cause – Progress! This is why liberals today drip with contempt for all that is conservative.

• Conservatives stand for BOUNDARIES.
• Boundaries STOP PROGRESS.
• BOUNDARIES ARE BAD.
• Evolutionary logic dissolves boundaries, and is, thus, good.

This is the dominant logic with which we think today,[4] and it is “darkness for light.” When God completed creation, He looked at the boundaries He put in place, declaring them all “very good.”

Truth Requires Boundaries

A real boundary is the one thing Hegelian process-metaphysics cannot abide. Hegel’s dialectical logic is a universal solvent – nothing can resist it. Encountering a real boundary would be like dropping a seed crystal into a super-saturated solution. It solidifies the flow.

God establishes boundaries. If boundaries are real, Hegel’s logic cannot be foundational.[5]

What notion of truth, then, does Dr. Erduran seek to “return” us to? Let’s see what we can gather from the article.

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.

We have learned, I hope, to question what Dr. Erduran means in saying these things. First, she has no confidence that truth is sufficient to correct post-truth. This follows from the commitment to evolving truth. If truth is not in itself stable, it must find its ground, its guarantor, in something else. What else? The authority of science. For this reason, she laments the loss of trust in “expertise” (read here authority) and “institutions.”

The irony of Dr. Erduran’s lament is what the Haidt Effect is all about.

What is most responsible in our culture for the decline of trust in authority and institutions? The ideology that truth evolves. Who promotes this ideology? Science* and science educators like Dr. Erduran.[6] In other words, their ideology has created the very problem they are now lamenting and seeking to fix by doubling down on their ideology! In their paradigm Truth is demoted to an argument from authority: “trust the science.”

*This, of course, is not quite fair. On the long march through the institutions Science (especially the hard sciences) was one of the last great holdouts, which makes its (relatively recent) compromise all the more sad. With the Big Science cartel now in place, however, the takeover is well on its way.  

Dr. Erduran’s truth, therefore, is post-truth.

Secularism Is Necessarily Postmodern

Watch and share this Short Reel about this article! Click to view “Truth has left the chat.”

Many of us have lost faith in scientists (and by extension science) because we see them playing fast and loose with Truth. Critical thinking on their view has come to mean thinking like them and thinking what they think. We now routinely see science engage in “deliberate engineering of doubt and misinformation to serve the interests of certain stakeholders,” and they all too often “selectively credit or dismiss evidence depending on whether information affirms or threatens their identities and social groups.”

The difference between secular scientists and postmodern philosophers is not one of kind but of degree. Postmodern philosophy abandoned objectivity and rationality as traditionally understood because that is the logic of their post-truth/post-God position. Science preferred to deny their operational logic and cling shamefacedly to the corpse of the God that anchored science in Truth.

Since 1859 science has sold its soul to the notion that truth evolves, but when truth evolves, Truth dies. Once process metaphysics became the overarching paradigm in which science is conducted, there is no longer space for Truth, as Truth requires radical and real boundaries, forbidden by dialectic.

I am not alone in thinking this.

C. S. Lewis saw the problem before I was born. His essay, “The Funeral of a Great Myth”[7] is a brilliant exposition of the problem, even if he remained somewhat ambivalent on the biological theory of evolution. He clearly saw the complete logical disaster that scientists engage when, thinking like Hegelians, they attempt science.

• They demand objectivity while denying objectivity
• They demand rationality while embracing irrationality
• They demand skepticism but retreat into certainty
• They demand “evidence-based” reasoning, yet deny what is most evident[8]
• They demand rejection of “post-truth” while being party to its origin and one of its most egregious purveyors.

As Lewis said, “whatever the real universe may turn out to be like, it can’t be like that.”[9]

Self-Deception Is Seductive

I must confess that what is most troubling is not the worldview itself. It is quite seductive, and I was taken in for over half my life. It was a satisfying and comforting story, even if it did leave one afloat on a sea of cosmic irrelevance. What is most troubling is that some of the smartest people I know either cannot or will not see through it. Lewis felt the same:

The fact that some people of scientific education cannot by any effort be taught to see the difficulty, confirms one’s suspicion that we here touch a radical disease in their whole style of thought.[10]

A radical disease, indeed.

One of my most cherished philosophical practices is that if we seek to learn what someone truly believes, we must watch what they do, not listen to what they say. What people say may or may not reflect the truth. We human beings are so radically good at self-deception that we can convince ourselves we don’t believe what “in practice” we do, and vice versa. It is possible to affirm in words an entire credal system but not believe a word of it. Today’s mainline Protestant churches are a great example.

Scientists are as potentially self-deceived as any other human being. Science rejected continental drift (plate tectonics), on what they told themselves to be evidence-based reasoning. Scientific consensus must not be mistaken for Truth, but it has become the standard by which truth is measured, the standard Dr. Erduran endorses here. This retreat into certainty by argumentum ad verecundiam (appeal to authority) is just another aspect of the circular self-deception of dialectical logic.

The Haidt Effect is in full swing in today’s scientific-academic world. Leftist scientists (and educators) now lamenting the death of “truth,” seem blissfully unaware of their role in slaying it.

Footnotes

[1] The infinite perfectibility of human beings is another of those assumptions that follow on the acceptance of an evolutionary viewpoint. Things are always progressing upward; Progress is inevitable if we (conservatives) will get out of its way.

[2] The term “useful idiots” is also sometimes used, but I have rubbed elbows with academics my whole career, and most of them are well-intentioned and kind, like any other demographic of humanity. I am not seeking to insult my colleagues, or to cast aspersions. My interest is a truthful analysis of what is going on in today’s culture.

[3] For Hegel, Spirit is personified, another reason that science seeks to distance itself from philosophy, as we saw in our last article.

[4] Dominant, but not exclusive. There are two active logical paradigms – Aristotelian and Hegelian. We (theists, Christians, Creationists) would align ourselves with Aristotelian logic, but I fear that we are more deeply infected by dialectical logic than most of us know. It is in the air we breathe these days. We must learn to see this logic – in others and in ourselves – and come out from among them. We want the mind of Christ – God’s logic, not man’s.

[5] We have discussed this before. Is ultimate reality Being or Process? This is a metaphysical question, and how we answer it will radically affect our view of the world. If the answer is Being – we would call this God, then process happens to Being. But if our answer is Process, then being must be “cashed out” as process, and our experience of it as phenomenal, not real.

[6] Not exclusively, of course, as this ideology has slowly but surely pervaded nearly every nook and cranny of our academic and popular culture. The hard sciences were the longest to hold out, but even these have now been compromised.

[7] In Christian Reflections, edited by Walter Hooper. Eerdman’s: Grand Rapids, 1967.

[8] Dawkins’ famous claim about the appearance of design. See also David Coppedge’s article “Dodging the Main Issue in the Cambrian Explosion.”

[9] Lewis, “The Funeral.” (p. 89).

[10] Ibid.

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.