Two problems stand out in science as it is done today: the triumphant spirit of the End of History and secular occasionalism, which abandons the search for causes and only manipulates statistics.

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After the political turmoil in Brazil, let’s return to the subject of modern science, which emerged in the Catholic West and developed, initially, among Catholic and Protestant scientists. As we have seen, the West has been rationalist for longer than it has been Christian, and, when invited to choose between atheistic rationalism and Christian irrationalism, it opts for the former. Even before the invention of modern science, the Arabs passed very quickly from tribal status to that of a sophisticated civilization. The Islamic world dominated Greco-Roman philosophy and made formidable advances, such as the invention of algebra. However, the Muslim majority (the Sunnis), thought differently from the Western world; and, faced with theories that could contradict the Quran, they preferred to sacrifice philosophical speculation and never recovered.

To reflect on the subject, I used Georges Minois’s History of the Middle Ages. From there, we can also observe that the narrative that opposes religious obscurantism to atheistic science has more plausibility in the history of Russia than in the history of France, because while the French Revolution guillotined Lavoisier, the communists actually took an agrarian Russia and, in less than a century, placed it in the space race. If we are to believe Minois, this has to do with the tutelage of Orthodox monks over Byzantine public life.

In fact, the Byzantine branch of Christianity seems to have privileged philology over philosophy, which led to a freeze in time: while the Roman branch of Christianity risks doing social theory (see Rerum novarum and its developments) to try to guide humanity amidst social changes, the Byzantine branch remains fixed in the past. The very fact that Russia became a scientific power was not accompanied, as far as I know, by any Orthodox equivalent of Father Georges Lemaitre or Friar Gregor Mendel. On the other hand, the most important Russian for science is Mendeleev, who, having died before the Russian Revolution, had every reason to be a perfect Orthodox Christian, and yet he was a Deist.

Thus, looking at the history of the relationship between science and religion, it is clear that theology matters more to the development of science than factors such as ethnicity or climate (which 19th-century science preferred to emphasize). Consequently, we must ask ourselves whether in a militant atheist era it is still possible to have good science.

It seems to me that it is not, since today’s decadent science has everything to do with a worldview that has replaced causality with statistics. First of all, let us note that nowadays scientific curiosity has shifted from nature to technology. It is as if the certainty of the End of History also applied to science. Everything happens as if the universe (including humanity) were fully known and explained, so that the only pertinent question is operational in nature, namely: how to take all this knowledge and create an omniscient supercomputer capable of thinking for us? AI is a panacea; transhumanism, a superstition of rich people who, just because they are rich, think they are very intelligent.

The triumphant view today is very similar to that of occasionalism, the theory invented by the Sufi mystic Al-Ghazali according to which there are no natural causes, but only supernatural causes. The main occasionalist in the West was Nicolas Malebranche (1638 – 1715), a French priest influenced by Jansenism who wanted to sweep Aristotelian-Thomistic influence from the Church and replace it with an idiosyncratic combination of Saint Augustine and Descartes (which made him quarrel with the Jansenists, who had a different combination of Saint Augustine and Descartes). In the end, everyone ended up on the Index.

Since Descartes has a notorious difficulty in explaining the interaction between body and mind (res extensa and res cogitans), Malebranche solved the problem in a radical way: body and mind actually have no impact on each other, and all the causes we witness in nature (and not just the mind-body interaction) are nothing more than the expression of the uniformity of the divine will. Fire does not burn every day because of some intrinsic characteristic, but only because God has the general will to associate burning with fire (if the fire does not burn one day, it will be by a miracle, a particular will of God). We do not need an improvised Cartesian pineal gland to explain how the spirit of the murderer manages to move the arm that holds the knife: it is God who makes our volitions coincide with our actions, through his general will.

If the use of Saint Augustine against Aristotelianism was a hallmark of Calvinism, it is therefore not surprising that Malebranche’s philosophy crossed the English Channel and ascended to the land of John Knox, where the Scottish skeptic David Hume removed God (and Descartes) from the equation and created his famous theory according to which causality is not in nature, but is a human projection. Because of Habit, a principle of human nature, man does not need to see fire burn a thousand times, nor see the sun rise a thousand times, to infer that fire burns and that the sun rises every day. Thus, instead of philosophizing with five elements and four causes (like the Aristotelian-Thomists) we should philosophize only on the basis of the constant conjunction of observable phenomena. Fire burns because fire burns, that is, because the phenomenon of burning has a constant conjunction with that of fire. Investigating nature is discovering causal relationships, which, in essence, are nothing more than statistics.

Nowadays, science isn’t much different from statistical manipulation. The structure of a paper is to select a sample, conduct experiments, produce statistics, and claim causality according to the sponsor’s interests. If a given number of test subjects received a Covid vaccine and contracted less Covid than the test subjects who didn’t, then the vaccine causes an increase in protection against Covid (even though, before 2020, vaccination meant not a reduction in the chances of getting sick, but rather the certainty of not getting sick). When, after mass vaccination, the general population began to experience a lot of heart attacks, sudden death, and cancer, the vaccine couldn’t be blamed because “correlation does not imply causation.” To make matters worse, we can’t even compare the data from populations that haven’t undergone Western vaccines (like Venezuela, Cuba, Russia, and China) because their governments are “authoritarian” and therefore their data is not “reliable.”

Now, in the statistical or secular occasionalist conception of science, correlation is the same thing as causality. What these secular priests who go by the name of science communicators want to do is monopolize the differentiation between coincidences and causes – along with the available empirical basis itself, since only data from liberal countries are valid. David Hume knew that man does not need a peer-reviewed paper to understand that fire burns, but science communicators think that the lay population needs papers and peer reviews to make causal inferences. Wanting a human being to take a Covid vaccine, get sick, and not connect one thing to the other is like wanting a child to stick their finger in a socket, get a shock, and learn nothing. It’s unnatural.

The difference between an ordinary man and a scientist should be precisely the knowledge of causes. Instead of tables filled with selected data, the scientist should have a theory at their fingertips that explains the causes. Instead of an occasionalist response, such as “the wave of heart attacks and sudden illness followed Covid, therefore it is due to Covid,” the response should be “Covid works this way, the vaccine works this way, so the wave of heart attacks and sudden illness is due to this and not that.” As for the current wave of cancers in young people (which no one has yet dared to attribute to Covid), journalistic articles that talk about lifestyle only have the capacity to convince the captive public, since, until proven otherwise, we have no reason to believe that young people only started eating poorly after Covid vaccination. It is, as can be seen, a tyrannical monopoly of causal reasoning, a reasoning which is natural to man. In current science, only an establishment can determine which correlation is causality and which is not, and the people need to ask for the blessing of peer review before putting two and two together.

Secular occasionalism is also the father of “science” based on mathematical models. Ultimately, models are based on numbers, and this eliminates the need for critical thinking. If the data indicates that the proportion of evangelicals is growing at x% per year in Brazil, then within y years Brazil will become a country with an evangelical majority. Following this reasoning, one day Brazil will reach 100% evangelicalism, and both I and the YouTubers who are fans of Dawkins will buy the towel with Pastor Valdemiro’s tallow. It looks like bullshit, and it is. Nevertheless, during the pandemic, the YouTuber Átila Iamarino came up with a mathematical model from Imperial College and predicted three million Covid deaths “if nothing was done.” Instead of admitting that using models uncritically is stupidity, people preferred to say that something was done, while accusing Bolsonaro of genocide for doing nothing. It is the typical reasoning that fails Popper’s falsifiability test, which science communicators now only cite to “punch Nazis.”

Thus, two problems stand out in science as it is done today: the triumphant spirit of the End of History, which means that research into nature is no longer conducted and instead the focus is solely on technological innovation; and this secular occasionalism, which abandons the search for causes and only manipulates statistics.