I Only Believe In Science

February 27, 2009 by djackson.

“I dunno why you always have to be judging me because I only believe in science.” - Esqueleto, from the movie “Nacho Libre”

The adverb, of course, presents the problem. It renders the verb suspect. “Only” believing differs significantly from believing - even about science; maybe especially about science.

During the last presidential campaign Joe Biden spoke on the quad at the College of Wooster in Ohio. If the Obama/Biden ticket carried the election, the VP assured his hearers, the new administration would give America a country “that once again believes in science.” Here it is the lack of a qualifier that troubles me.

Now, I “believe” in science. But I “believe” in it in much the same way that I “believe” in, say, Poland, or the Texas blind salamander or my left shoe. That is to say, I believe it exists. The “D” on my high school report card next to “Science” is, after all, a little hard to deny.

But I get the feeling that the future second-banana chief executive used the word in a different sense, the same sense in which I would say that I “believe in God the Father almighty, the maker of Heaven and Earth, and in Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord.” It is a belief that implies faith, trust. If this was indeed what Mr. Biden meant to convey (one often wonders if he actually means anything), he is not alone. Professional scientists and their media groupies are doing a lot of dithyrambing these days about the wonders science. Maybe the Darwin bicentennial has overwhelmed them.

How else, for instance, do you get New York Times science reporter Dennis Overbye gushing that when President Obama vowed to “wield technology’s wonders,” he felt “the glow of a spring sunrise washing my cheeks, and I could almost imagine I heard the music of swords being hammered into plowshares”? The passage has such messianic overtones that one tends to picture the risen Christ returning, swathed in the white robe of a lab coat. The two-sided sword that he clutches in his teeth would be an all-purpose sentence beginning, “Science has proven . . . .” But it’s a bit much. After all, pondering Nagasaki, one might want to ask if Overbye doesn’t have the undoing of the arms race reversed. Perhaps the warm glow he feels is nuclear radiation scorching off ground zero. But Overbye remains blissfully ignorant, going on to praise science as the gateway to “utopian anarchy” and the basis of democracy itself. “So if you’re going to get gooey about something,” he declares, “that’s not so bad.”

Well, okay - a newspaper reporter. But Francis Collins, the man who gave us the Rosetta Stone of the human genome and who, by the way, is a convinced and committed Christian, gladly sings harmony for this gospel quartet. In his book, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, Collins scouts the idea that the scientific community would, for instance, cling to Darwinism even when the evidence began to run the other way. This is so, Collins believes, because “one of the most cherished hopes of a scientist is to make an observation that shakes up a field of research.” This is so because, “scientists have a streak of closeted anarchism” (see Overbye above) that makes them want to pursue Truth no matter where it leads.

Touching.

But I can’t get too comfortable with the notion that scientists, alone among the genus homo erectus, have freed themselves from emotion, self-interest, cowardice, greed and all the rest of it. Mind you, I don’t contend that scientists are more emotional, selfish, pusillanimous or avaricious than the rest of us; just that they share the heritage of Adam along with, say, seminary professors.

Nor is this simply the Bible Belt bias of a knuckle-dragging fundamentalist. I may be all of those things; I’m just saying that it isn’t only people like me who smell a rat. Michael Denton, in his book Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, directs our attention to a phenomenon called “the priority of the paradigm.” He takes the term from scientific philosopher Thomas Kuhn who argues that “it is impossible to falsify theories by reference to the facts or indeed by any sort of rational or empirical argument.” Why? Because, like polar bears leaping across arctic ice-floes, scientists won’t abandon one belief framework until another presents itself. Denton cites the geocentric universe and the phlogiston theory of combustion, two scientific theories that held their ground in the face of mounting evidence that made them look increasingly silly. And it wasn’t, Denton contends, skulking Catholic inquisitors who defended these ideas. It was the scientific community of the day that couldn’t muster the emotional nerve to release even untenable ideas until they had something else to reach for.

Trevor Hart, in his book Faith Thinking: The Dynamics of Christian Theology, sites the work of scientist Michael Polanyi who contends that “the picture of scientific activity painted by the popular myth-makers of our day is of an essentially dispassionate approach to reality,” a legend that Polanyi seems to believe belongs in the same category as Big Foot, the Loch Ness Monster, and an NBA championship for the Clippers. Scientific “knowing” (a better word than “proof”) involves, per Polanyi, the “personal coefficient.” Scientists choose which instruments to use, which measurements to make, which facts to pursue and the links to draw between them. This doesn’t mean they are dishonest; it does mean they are, like the rest of us, as much artists as thinking machines.

But, Polanyi ventures, “once a theory is accepted by the scientific community . . . it is effectively invested with something resembling prophetic powers.” So exit Collins’ “closeted anarchism.” Instead, one of their own outs the scientific community as a set of orthodox believers adhering to their creed. And see, the thing is, as Hart argues, that scientists don’t withdraw into the Delphic oracle of their laboratories where realities appear before them so that they can emerge from the sanctum and pronounce, “Thus sayeth the facts.” They figure stuff out, use methods, intuit. They have a way of knowing that can be wrong and, even when it is right, can be right only in ways that the methods allow.

Nor am I just making stuff up. Geologists have long believed that the early Earth was way yonder too hot to support life. For the first 700 million years (give or take), hellish temperatures prevented life from beginning and, even if it had, meteor bomardments would’ve wiped it out instantly. The place didn’t become a respectable home to organic cells until, anyway, three billion years later.

Now, all the sudden, the whole field of research is crying King’s X. “We thought we knew something we didn’t,” admits T. Mark Harrison of the University of California, Los Angeles. The evidence, he marvels, is “completely inconsistent with this myth we made up.”

Well, anybody can make a mistake. I once thought leisure suits were chic. But ponder one interesting facet of this story. In 1986 Norman H. Sleep, a professor of geophysics at Stanford, submitted a paper calculating the odds of some upstart form of life surviving one of those early meteor beat-downs. The journal’s reviewer issued a summary rejection without even reading the statistics because “obviously nothing could have lived then.” Scientists invented a myth (I’m quoting them, remember) and then “knew” on the basis of that invention. And what they “knew” was incorrect.

Well, okay - honest mistake. (See the Leisure Suit Confession above.) But science corrected its error because, per Collins and Overbye, the unseen hand of Scientific Truth did its inevitable work. But nobody did it on purpose; nobody only saw what she wanted to see. That sort of thing never happens in science.

Only it does. John Tierney, another science writer for the Times, admits in an article entitled “Politics in the Guise of Pure Science” (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/24/science/24tier.html) that scientist-types are running all about the place saying things that aren’t accurate, and he accuses them of doing it because money and political power are on the table. Citing the book The Honest Broker by Roger Pielke Jr., a professor in environmental studies at the University of Colorado, Tierney claims that many scientists, believing themselves to be offering objective truth to guide public policy, have instead become shills for various political agendas. “Some scientists want to influence policy in a certain direction and still be able to claim to be above politics,” Pielke opines, “so they engage in what I call ’stealth issue advocacy’ by smuggling political arguments into putative scientific ones.” This isn’t Pat Robertson I’m quoting here, or the Institute for Creation Research. This is coming from within the guild.

And then there’s Joseph Bottum and Ryan T. Anderson writing in the November, 2008 issue of First Things. In their essay, “Stem Cells: A Political History,” the authors chronicle the mad rush to manufacture human embryos then chop-shop them for parts to fix various diseases. The problems (simply put) were at least two-fold: First of all, stem cells weren’t able, and weren’t ever likely to be able, to fix many of the things they were billed for, such as Alzheimer’s or paralysis. Regarding this, Ronald D. G. McKay brazenly explained that the lie was a helpful one. “To start with,” said McKay, a stem cell researcher at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, “people need a fairy tale. Maybe that’s unfair, but they need a story line that’s relatively simple to understand.” So not only do scientists have a lock on objective reality, but their high priesthood qualifies them to decide when you and I are too stupid to hear the truth.

Second, technology very quickly emerged that allowed the production of stem cells from adult cells, making the Brave New World bit unnecessary. “There are lessons in all this for America’s scientists,” the writers claim, “beginning with the reminder that politicians are always going to be better at politics than scientists are. The scientific community invested a great deal of its prestige - its standing as an objective, non-partisan reporter - in a public account of stem cells that is now discredited.”

Or maybe not, because this embarrassing story remains inaudible, drowned by the thunderous applause of millions of hands clapping to show that they still believe in the fairy of scientific objectivity. Tinkerbell is alive but the truth has taken a major hit.

So anyway, back to our Vice President. Yes, I believe in science, but I’m reserving the right not to believe scientists just because they are scientists. As Nacho later says to his tag-team partner, “You only believe in Science. That’s probably why we never win!” Of course, to be fair, Esqueleto offers the scientific rejoinder, “We never win because you are fat!” But no one has tested either claim in a large study with a control group.

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