It’s long been known that psychiatry is almost entirely unscientific. Now, it’s becoming evident that even the supposedly medical aspects of it are pseudo-medical as well:
Millions of people taking commonly prescribed antidepressants such as Prozac and Seroxat might as well be taking a placebo, according to the first study to include unpublished evidence. The new generation of antidepressant drugs work no better than a placebo for the majority of patients with mild or even severe depression, comprehensive research of clinical trials has found.
As I quoted the historian Daniel Boorstin, the chief obstacle to science has never been ignorance – the dramatic hysterics of the New Anti-Theists notwithstanding – but rather the illusion of knowledge. And there is no group so manifestly caught up in this illusion as the scientific community. Atheists such as Dawkins like to accuse the religious faithful of arrogance because they believe God cares about them. (It’s arrogant to believe someone loves you? That certainly explains Dawkins’s multiple marriages.) But even the self-centered religious individual accepts the concept of faith’s limited reach, the increasingly delusional scientific community accepts no such limits on the application of its favored methodology, all empirical evidence to the contrary.
It is because science is far more dangerous than all the religions of the world combined that it would behoove scientists to be careful in their investigations and humble in their claims. Instead, far too many of them view themselves as Man’s secular priesthood and blithely issue one nonsensical bull after another. But if they are a priesthood, it must be noted that history shows they bear far more resemblance to the bloody-handed priests of Technochtitlan than any other.
I have no objection to scientific knowledge or the scientific method. I mean, I’ve been busy for the last two days wrapping up a patent application that could conceivably be of some small use to a few scientists in the future. But it borders on inarguable that Mankind is in dire need of a scientific profession less prone to ideological, intellectual and pecuniary prostitution.