How to undermine scientific authority

Benjamin Wiker is a conservative with many very particular gripes about how the Enlightenment ruined everything for civilization; in his book on the Reformation, he tells this story of how Benedict Spinoza, the famous rationalist philosopher who was also one of the pioneers of biblical philology, wanted to undermine religion:

To make sure that Scripture cannot be revived and used with the irrational, impassioned Christian multitude, Catholic or Protestant, Spinoza set forth as one of the additional tasks of the new scientific exegete, the maximizing of confusion about the real meaning of the text, by ferreting out all the possible ambiguities inherent in the original languages, and by displaying prominently all the variations that occur in the multiple manuscripts discovered since the Renaissance—and, of course, publishing the results. It’s hard for the Bible to have authority if we can’t figure out what it actually said originally. Better just to mind your own business, and embrace tolerance.

The very scholarly apparatus that both Catholics and Protestants believed would take them closer to the revealed truth, and bring about ever more accurate translations of God’s Holy Word, thereby became the vehicle Spinoza and his followers used to sow confusion and doubt, leading to the secularization of the West.

Wiker doesn’t give references to support the idea that Spinoza had this goal, but it’s an interesting thought that I have remembered even though I basically forgot the rest of the book. Undermining biblical authority by the proliferation of textual variants is something that doesn’t do any harm to the Catholic Church, which has the Pope who can simply decide for everyone else what “the Bible says” on an issue, but it does do damage to Protestantism, which has always relied on (the ridiculous idea of) there being some objective science that can determine “what the Bible says” in such a way that experts can reach consensus.

It also does work against anything else that is taken as authoritative, and for which there is no Pope. If you don’t want natural science, say, to be an authority in society, you don’t have to directly make people lose respect for its process, you just have to multiply and amplify the minority viewpoints within it, especially the ones that have gotten a foothold in academia already. The frequency of agreement between experts is a major reason why people want to trust science, but it is a contingent feature of it, and efforts to undermine it can be successful.

If you hate a certain discipline, study more variants of it than its practitioners do.