Claiming You Have Science On Your Side Is No Safe Guarantee That You're Not Going To Resist Reality

I think that kind of resistance to evidence and reason mentioned demonstrated here last night is a not only a hallmark of the vulgar materialism of Republican-fascism, such as in Trump, it's also a hallmark of supposedly elite materialism of the intellectual kind.  A while back I listened to an informal debate between the life-long, conventional scientist Rupert Sheldrake and Massimo Pigliucci the materialist-atheist-scientistic philosopher from the epicenter for such  fundamentalist faith, City College New York.  Rupert Sheldrake who has a life-long career of producing experimental procedures and producing not only theory but practical results pointed out that Pigliucci's atheist ("skeptic") ideology not only never did experiments into what they pontificated about, but when presented with rigorous experimental results which produced highly significant statistical results met with a wall of (badly reasoned) theoretical response that refused to look at the results.  The excuse that such results might upset the delicate balance in the elite-atheist-materialist understand of reality, when Sheldrake responded, correctly with historical precedents showing that not to be true and not to be a problem,  Pigliucci just piled it on.  And Pigliucci is somewhat less of an irrational bigot of that sort than most of his fellows in organized, semi-pro atheism.   And he also relies on argument from authority, that authority being untested as an assumption.  The ass even resorted to Carl Sagan.

No, the pretense that they have science on their side turns out to be no less of an excuse to be a lazy, bigoted ideologue than other forms of refusing to look at evidence and facts.  There is no overall framing of reality that will make someone immune from that, whichever one is taken as having supremacy at any given time and in any given context has the potential to be used to close your mind as any other one.  I mean, if science can be used that way, anything can be.   I think Sheldrake is one of the most eminently reasonable representatives of scientific methodology, far more reasonable than Sean Carroll or Jerry Coyne, certainly more so than P.Z. Myers (the rapidly fading one) and that's due to his good will and reason than any ideological inclination he has.  To start with, he doesn't misrepresent the issues under discussion in an ideological way.

Materialism is as much an ideology as anything else, it is the faith of many of the biggest mouths who claim to represent science and ignorant people, such as those in the media, are as big a bunch of suckers for that out of their near complete ignorance of science as they would be out of ignorance of any other topic.  Really, Trump's resistance to reality is just another flavor of something that's widespread.