Science & the arts are systems of contingency (though they have deep epistemological differences, whereas fundamentalist religions & conspiracy theories are systems of certainty. Systems of certainty are, by both definition & experience, fantasy. I was about to say that systems of certainty are infantile, but in fact most six-year-olds have a better sense of the world’s uncertainty than the various peddlers of fundamentalist faith. The hatred of the quasi-Christian & quasi-Islamic fundamentalists is a function of the difficulty of maintaining a simplistic worldview.
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Consider that defining a ’system of certainty’ as ‘fantasy’ is a definitive statement - one that might be made from a system of certainty. Surely, one speaking from the underlying basis that knowledge is contingent upon proof and always subject to being revisited and challenged would not make such a declarative statement about another system.
From another point of view, one can also take the position of the currently-in-vogue ‘many universese’ understanding of spacetime, in which every possible reality does exist; where does that leave us vis-a-vis religions which one professes to be false?
And then one might consider the frameworks of reality as understood by William James. Religion as being as ‘real’ and scientific theory as being ‘real’, though both might be considered systems of contingency from the point of view of a person inhabiting the opposite framework.
One might posit that any declarative statement and any definition are implicitly exclusionary and therefore take on the characteristics of something coming from a system of certainty.
all statements are true and false and meaningless in some sense…
Or if you can imagine St. Bill McWilly, unconciously channeling Korzybski, “it all depends what your definition of “is” is.”
Junebug, I think the truth, falsehood and meaningfulness of statements are secondary to what the author was getting at. Some systems provide nothing with which to investigate themselves. They’re closed loops. Scientism, hyper-rationalism, fundamentalism and conspiracism — which I would use instead of “conspiracy theories” — negate anything outside themselves. St. Billy’s New Age relativism does that too, in an inverse, by reducing everything to a semantic mush.
Science and art, done right, are investigative, correctable and can grow. They’re imperfect — far from perfect — as the author acknowledges, but they can be dynamic enough to cope with chaos. The wrath and hatred of fundies come from closing off avenues and trying to live within shrinking limits, that they make worse with every attempt at control from authority.