Neuromythopedia

Philosopher Karl Popper claimed that what distinguished science was that its hypotheses are constructed to be falsifiable by experiment. Physicist Wolfgang Pauli once responded, when asked about an ill-posed theory, that it was “not even wrong”.

Physicist Stanislaw Ulam once challenged Nobel economist Paul Samuelson to “name me one proposition in all of the social sciences which is both true and non-trivial.” After several years, Samuelson answered with David Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage. “That it is logically true need not be argued before a mathematician; that is is not trivial is attested by the thousands of important and intelligent men who have never been able to grasp the doctrine for themselves or to believe it after it was explained to them.” This theory is the bedrock of free trade ideology. Later, James K. Galbraith stated that “free trade has attained the status of a god” and that ” … none of the world’s most successful trading regions, including Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and now mainland China, reached their current status by adopting neoliberal trading rules.” Despite these falsifications, comparative advantage lives on in elementary economic theory.

The Protestant Reformation marked a renaissance of the Sophist philosophical attitude, that led to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and thence to the humanist religious movement that has developed over the past three hundred years.

The key precepts of the Protestant Reformation, as distinguished from the Catholic tradition, are:

Sola scriptura (“by Scripture alone”): that Scripture overrides tradition and priestly interpretation, which led to biblical literalism and later scholarly hermeneutic interpretation of historical texts

Sola fide (“by faith alone”): by faith, irrespective of works, God may justify saving you. Faith later became theory.

Sola gratia (“by grace alone”) by God’s grace, not by any merit, you may be saved. Society later replaced God, while the subordination of individual agency became

Solo Christo (“through Christ alone”) by Christ alone, without any priestly intermediary.

Soli Deo gloria (“glory to God alone”): a rejection of the church as an institution, and of an exalted class of priests, saints, and angels, as a kind of idolatry (or later, ‘fetishizing’) that errantly diverts worship of God alone.

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