The arrogance of the presumption that empiricism is the end-all and be-all of societal organization

G. Shane Morris at The Federalist nails the heart of why Neil DeGrasse Tyson's tweet "Earth needs a virtual country: #Rationalia, with a one-line Constitution: All policy shall be based on the weight of evidence" is so objectionable:

The idea that religious people approach the world with dogmatic blinders while secular scientists approach it with a stiff upper lip and brave objectivity is laughable, but it isn’t new. The republic of reason Tyson thinks will logic away the world’s problems has been tried before. It was called the French Revolution, and it caused a lot of people to lose their heads—literally and figuratively. (Tyson should get a pass on this, since he’s already shown his grasp on history is tenuous, at best).

Man has been trying to achieve Rationalia for centuries—millennia, even. All the way back to the Tower of Babel, we thought our intelligence and ingenuity would redeem us, and we were wrong. Rationalia and its one-sentence constitution are, to quote Jeff Goldblum’s character from one of the way-too-many Jurassic Park sequels, “the worst idea in a long, sad history of bad ideas.”

But Rationalia is also the heart and soul of the progressive project for this country. Left-wing technocrats like Tyson advocate ceding control of our lives to an elite corps of experts every time they beat the consensus drum on climate change, or equate abortion-on-demand with “science.”

Rationalia and the rationale behind it are precisely the reason progressives today are so comically intolerant of anyone to the right of Lindsey Graham. If you’ve convinced yourself that you don’t have a worldview—that your beliefs are all self-evident, objective facts of reality—then anyone who disagrees with you must be, as Richard Dawkins so charmingly put it, “ignorant, stupid, or insane (or wicked).”

Morris goes on to cite some recent looks at how the whole notion of peer review is in shambles. Science, like any endeavor undertaken by fallen human beings, is vulnerable to  corruption.

That's why humility, a character trait at the core of Judaism and Christianity, is something the DeGrasse Tyson types of this world could use a bit of.