By Mark Keenan
January 21, 2026
Modern civilization prides itself on knowledge, yet it is drowning in confusion. We generate more data than any society in history, but less wisdom. The modern technoscientific order asserts that it can split atoms and sequence genomes, yet these feats of technical power barely touch the immeasurable complexity of reality, and we remain unable to answer the most basic human questions: What is consciousness ? Why do we exist ? What is truth ? The paradox is not accidental. It is the result of a culture that mistakes speculation for understanding and technique for truth.
Ancient wisdom warned of this failure long before the modern age. It observed that when knowledge is pursued without humility-without recognition of a higher source of meaning-the result is not enlightenment but exhaustion. The image is strikingly simple: beating an empty husk of wheat. One may labor intensely, raising dust and noise, but grain will never appear. The substance has already been removed.
This metaphor applies with uncomfortable precision to much of contemporary science and philosophy.
In theory, science is a method: careful observation, falsifiability, openness to correction. In practice, it has increasingly become an ideology-one that begins with a rigid assumption that reality must be impersonal, purposeless, and godless. Any evidence pointing toward design, intelligence, or consciousness beyond matter is filtered out before inquiry even begins. The conclusion is decided in advance; the research merely decorates it.
The book Godless Fake Science documents how this distortion plays out across fields once considered sacrosanct: climate science, virology, evolutionary biology, cosmology, psychiatry, and media-driven consensus narratives
The common thread is not only manipulation of data to fit approved narratives but exclusion-the systematic removal of God, soul, and purpose from the framework of knowledge. What remains is an elaborate machine that can calculate endlessly yet never comprehend itself.
Science, properly understood, once meant reliable knowledge of reality, not endless conjecture. Today, however, it has become a cacophony of theories, models, and statistical fudges, many of them treated as settled truth despite resting on unprovable assumptions. Theory is not science. Even the word science comes from scientia, meaning "knowledge," while its philosophical roots remain inseparable from perception and consciousness. Stripped of any reference to mind or meaning, modern science no longer seeks understanding-it merely manages uncertainty and enforces consensus.
Take cosmology. The dominant creation story of our time-the Big Bang-presents itself as scientific while demanding faith in unobservable or purely theoretical entities: dark matter, dark energy, singularities, and mathematical infinities."
These are not discoveries; they are placeholders, invoked to rescue a materialist narrative that cannot explain fine-tuning, order, or intelligibility. We are supposed to believe a universe governed by blind chance somehow produces laws, constants, beauty, and minds capable of contemplating it. The story is recited with confidence, yet rests on speculation piled upon speculation.
For almost a hundred years, modern science has treated the failure of a strictly materialist framework as unthinkable, compensating for unresolved contradictions by inventing new particles, unseen forces, and provisional rules that continually defer rather than resolve the underlying questions.
Evolutionary theory follows a similar pattern. Variation within species is observable; the transformation of one kind of organism into another is not. Yet textbooks present this unobserved leap as fact, while dissent is treated as heresy. When fossils appear suddenly, fully formed, theory is adjusted. When transitional forms are missing, new explanations are invented. The process never ends because it never reaches substance. The husk is beaten again and again.
A brief but essential example of this same pattern can be seen in the modern climate narrative.
As previously analysed, the claim that carbon dioxide-a trace gas essential to plant life-is the primary driver of catastrophic climate change has hardened into dogma rather than remaining a testable hypothesis. Computer models are treated as evidence, dissenting scientists are marginalized, and political conclusions precede empirical debate. Natural climate cycles, solar variability, and historical temperature fluctuations are downplayed or ignored, while CO₂ is reframed as a moral pollutant. This narrative serves institutional power and financial interests more than scientific transparency, transforming speculative modeling into a tool of fear, compliance, and economic control.
In medicine, the pattern becomes more dangerous. During the "pandemic", entire populations were subjected to unprecedented policies based on models, tests, and assumptions that were shielded from scrutiny. Dissenting doctors were silenced, data was massaged, and fear replaced reason. As documented elsewhere, the question was never allowed to surface: What if the underlying framework is flawed ? What if the model itself is the problem ? Once again, speculation masqueraded as certainty, and the consequences were borne by ordinary people.
None of this means that empirical investigation is wrong. The problem is not science; it is scientism-the belief that knowledge begins and ends with material measurement. This belief is not scientific at all; it is philosophical. Worse, it is self-refuting.
Consciousness itself-the very faculty doing the measuring and by which evidence is evaluated, theories are formed, and truth is distinguished from error-cannot be reduced to chemistry without negating the concept of knowledge altogether. If thoughts are nothing more than biochemical reactions, then beliefs are not true or false, only caused. In that case, science ceases to be a search for truth and becomes merely the reporting of neural events. A worldview that cannot account for the knower is incomplete by definition and invalidates its own claim to knowledge.
Even committed materialists have acknowledged the problem. As J.B.S. Haldane once admitted:
"If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true."
Ancient traditions understood this clearly and distinguished between two paths of knowing. One path submits to reality as something given-an order not invented by the mind but received with humility and reverence, often understood as grounded in God or a transcendent source. The other seeks mastery and domination through prideful attempts without submission: intellect detached from reverence and meaning, calculation severed from wisdom. The first path leads to realization; the second leads to complexity without comprehension. Modern culture has chosen the second path.
Universities now train specialists who know more and more about less and less, while remaining silent about first causes. Students are taught how to calculate but not how to question assumptions. Funding determines conclusions. Prestige replaces truth. The result is a class of experts who can manipulate symbols expertly yet are blind to meaning. They are sincere, often brilliant-but trapped inside a closed system.
This is why modern science increasingly resembles theology without God. Its doctrines cannot be questioned, its priests guard consensus, and its dissidents are excommunicated. But unlike traditional religion, it offers no redemption-only management. Humanity is redefined as a biological accident, consciousness as a glitch, morality as a social construct.
From this view, control becomes inevitable. If human beings are nothing more than biological accidents-collections of impulses shaped by chance and environment-then there is no intrinsic dignity to respect, no higher purpose to appeal to, and no moral limit beyond efficiency. Behavior must therefore be managed, optimized, and corrected. When meaning is denied, optimization and governance replaces wisdom, regulation replaces conscience, and control replaces consent.
When life is stripped of intrinsic purpose, it does not become neutral-it becomes manageable. If humans are merely biological machines produced by chance, then there is no principled objection to redesigning them, regulating them, or sacrificing them for abstract goals. In a purposeless universe, control is not a corruption of science but its logical outcome. I argue that this trajectory is not accidental but civilizational
When God is excluded, power rushes in to fill the vacuum. Institutions claim authority over truth. Media replaces wisdom with repetition. Technology becomes a surrogate deity, promising salvation while delivering dependency. People are told what to think, what to fear, and what is "settled."
Yet cracks are appearing.
More people sense that something is wrong. They notice that "following the science" often means following money, politics, and narrative control. They see that dissent is treated as danger, not dialogue. They feel, intuitively, that reality is richer than equations and that consciousness cannot be an afterthought. This intuition is not ignorance; it is sanity.
True knowledge does not require rejecting reason. It requires restoring it to its proper place. Reason is a tool, not a throne. When intellect serves truth, it illuminates. When it replaces truth, it blinds. The ancient warning about speculative knowledge was not anti-intellectual; it was anti-arrogance. Reality is not conquered by force of intellect but disclosed through alignment-alignment of mind with truth, and ultimately alignment with a higher power or source of order that precedes human institutions. Civilizations forget this at their peril.
This may be why serious inquiry so often leads back to simplicity. Not simplistic answers, but simple orientation. A willingness to ask not only "how" but "why." A recognition that consciousness points beyond matter, that order points beyond chance, and that love points beyond survival. Love points beyond survival because it routinely contradicts it. Humans sacrifice comfort, safety, and even life itself for truth, for children, for strangers, and for principles. No materialist framework can fully account for this without reducing love to illusion. Yet love remains one of the most empirically undeniable facts of human experience.
These are not mystical evasions; they are empirical facts of human experience.
The most radical idea today is not rebellion but humility.
To acknowledge that truth has a source beyond institutions is to reclaim freedom.To accept that knowledge and truth have a moral-and ultimately divine-source is not to abandon reason but to rescue it from reduction and manipulation. Truth is not merely accurate calculation; it is alignment and loving service to what is real, good, and meaningful. Truth involves stepping out of the noise.
Beating an empty husk produces only dust. Returning to the grain requires courage-the courage to question assumptions, to resist manufactured consensus, and to admit that the deepest truths may be given, not invented. Civilization does not suffer from lack of intelligence. It suffers from misdirected intelligence.
Creation, matter, inspiration, and knowledge itself lose coherence when emptied of God or transcendent meaning. Science, severed from that source, becomes motion without purpose-an endless manipulation of symbols detached from understanding. Until science rediscovers and acknowledges this synthesis, it will remain like wheat without grain: impressive in motion, barren in substance.
Contrary to godless scientism, the fulfillment of science is not the elimination of transcendence but the recognition of its own foundations. Science reaches maturity not when it claims to explain everything, but when it acknowledges that order, intelligibility, and consciousness are not products of blind chance but signs of a deeper source.
As Max Planck, the father of quantum theory, observed:
"I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness."
Werner Heisenberg reached a similar conclusion from within physics itself:
"The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you."
And Lord Kelvin spoke plainly of what science encounters when it looks honestly at reality:
"Overwhelmingly strong evidence of intelligent and benevolent design lies around us."
The way forward is not more speculation, but intellectual humility and honesty. Not louder experts, but deeper responsibility. Not godless science, but science grounded once again in meaning.