Science or Creed?

I think it is time for us all to review the difference between science and "accepted wisdom", between observation and experimentation on the one hand and conforming to a dominant view of the world on the other hand. There are few things that one needs to accept on faith; only things that cannot be proven. Paramount is the existence of God; this has always been the subject of faith. Morality is another item that many take on faith, but even so, it is an item that changes. One hundred years ago, behavior that today is commonplace was considered immoral; the reverse is true as well. Here in America, we have been taught to question the validity of societal determinations of what constitutes moral behavior. In my lifetime, I have watched behavior models change drastically. There are whole groups in society that make their careers promoting the issuance of challenges to accepted morality, to the accepted wisdom of society.

Science, however, has nothing to do with accepted social wisdom. It involves primarily observation of the natural world, development of theories that explain the observations and then verification of these theories through testing. Much of the advancement of modern man has been the result of the advancement of scientific knowledge. Science has also led to some of man's greatest disasters.

In many ages there has been a tension between religion and science. Religion, of course, is a matter of faith; it cannot be questioned through observation, etc. The common example used to illustrate this point is the treatment of Gallileo by the Church hundreds of years ago. Gallileo theorized that the sun was the center of the solar system and that the Earth orbited around the sun. This view was considered heretical by the Church and Gallileo was forced to recant or suffer severe consequences. As time has moved forward, however, the ability of religion to thwart scientific advancement has been greatly reduced and essentially ended. Supposedly, science is now paramount. Indeed, an entire vein of political thought has advanced the view that religious beliefs and societal views of morality should be shunned when determining the actions of the government and that these sources should be replaced by learned experts who will guide the affairs of man with their superior knowledge and intelligence. While this view is rarely stated in such a simple manner, it is the driving force of progressive thought today.

The problem, of course, is that progressive thought suffers from its own dogma. The idea that progressives listen to learned experts who rely on science to determine the best course for society is simply a lie. In truth, this is just part of the progressive belief system and it has little relationship to reality. Here are two examples:

When Charles Darwin proposed his theory of evolution through natural selection, it was construed as a direct attack on religion. Most people have heard of the Scopes trial in which the real question was choosing evolution or creationism as described in the Bible. Progressives, however, took Darwin's work and expanded it into the realm of everyday human existence. Natural selection among people was supposed to be the proper way to look at the population. This manifested itself in a variety of ways. The doctrine of Social Darwinism, the eugenics movement, even the extreme racial views of the Nazis were a direct result of this scientific theory run amok. Although progressives like to forget this, organizations like Planned Parenthood were started, in part, with the purpose of reducing the reproductive rates for "lesser" people, the poor and uneducated. Herman Cain recently mentioned that Planned Parenthood had been started to prevent black babies. He has been attacked for saying this, but it is the truth. It took the Holocaust, the final logical extension of this "scientific" belief to finally end this idea as a commonly accepted school of thought.

Another example of progressive dogma is the current global warming hysteria. A scientist would look at the data first, something that progressives cannot do. What, after all, do we know? There are extensive climate records that were compiled at the university of East Anglia that form the basis for much of the discussion in this field. This, of course, is the very data that was revealed as questionable in the Climategate scandal. Numbers were manipulated to fit within the theory rather than the theory crafted to explain the data. There is a total fog over the actual data that is available. Indeed, there are atmospheric temperature records that have been kept since the 1940's that can be reviewed rather than the surface temperatures used by East Anglia. The atmospheric recods show no warming trend at all. In short, we do not even know if there is a warming trend underway.

Then, we have the question of what is causing the warming trend -- if there is one. The progressive crowd has taken Al Gore's word that the science is settled: man has caused this to happen. So once again, the world has a non-scientist, a high priest of global warming, who we are supposed to accept as correct and "believe". The problem, of course, is that the actual data does not support the Gore thesis. Man made global warming is based upon the premise that greenhouse gases produced by man are trapping heat in the atmosphere and thereby warming the Earth. In the last year, however, we have finally gotten data from NASA of the rate of heat radiation into space over the last eleven years. The worldwide data shows that the radiation of heat is proceeding at a level about 4 or 5 times higher than the global warming models predict. This is not a minor variation; it is a data stream that completely destroys the logical underpinning of global warming theory. But, since this data does not comport with the progressive dogma of global warming, it is ignored. Just as Gallileo was told to ignore his work, the current progressives tell us to ignore the actual data and stick with a disproven theory.

The truth is that actual science needs to be used to determine what we can about the question of climate change. Breakthrough work was recently done at the european science center at CERN. Experimentation demonstrated that the largest (by far) cause of climate variation may be the levels of solar radiation hitting the Earth. This area of inquiry is still in its infancy, but it holds the promise of letting us know much more about variations in climate. Man made global warming theory has not yet been disproven, but we are well along the road to do that. In the interim, no one should accept the theory as "settled science" or even a likely result. If science is indeed to be paramount, then it has to be actual science, not just a new dogma designed to replace some older one.