“Our Science is a science of the dead world”. La pandemia come apocalisse culturale e l’ipotesi della scienza come religione

«Our science is a science of the dead world». The Pandemic as Cultural Apocalypse and the Hypothesis of Science as Religion · In the public debate around the pandemic, there are positions that have sustained how contemporary techno-science has assumed cultural meanings and operating methods proper to a religion. This thesis, amended by the political implications and critical of the management of the socio-health emergency, is here taken as a research hypothesis whose preconditions are intended to be verified. In other words: are empirical evidences identifiable within the technoscientific field, and not only therefore in the public communication of science, which can be used as a premise for the hypothesized outcome? At the basis of the hypothesis of science as religion there is a fact the idea, detectable in scientific publications, that the pandemic constituted a fatal threat to the human species, a real apocalypse. From the examples analysed, this idea refers to a long-lasting cultural theme – the cultural apocalypse – whose social meaning goes beyond a mere rhetorical and argumentative function to act as a shared horizon of meaning and symbolism on the basis of which to interpret reality, orient decisions and take action. This fact seems to call into question the process of secularization and «disenchantment of the world» by showing a translation into the technoscientific field of reasons and elements of religious traditions, such as the idea of «the end of the world» and the «expectation of salvation», both in its internal functioning and in its social perception. If the hypothesis is verified in the premises, it follows that technoscience, by reason of the collectively recognized authority, has legitimized and fed a public discursive order crossed by irrationalistic currents, feelings of fear, promises of universal salvation through pharmacological discoveries endowed with miraculous powers and prefiguration of epochal palingenesis with the announcement of a global «new normal» in the name of a due «faith in science».