Science Intrudes Into Morality

The Pope recently declared that we need to save humanity from self-destructive behaviors, like homosexuality.  Can science intrude on questions of human behavior and morals?  New Scientist thought so; a blog entry today says the Pope “misuses science to attack homosexuality.”
    One would think that moral behavior would lie outside the field for a scientific news source, but online news editor Rowan Hooper went on, mocking the Pope’s claim that the church has a role in saving “human ecology” like scientists have a role in protecting tropical forests.  Hooper called this “a bizarre misunderstanding of science” and “religious values imposed on” a scientific subject.
    Justifying homosexuality with appeals to genetics, neuroscience and Darwinism, Hooper claimed that “genetic evidence” suggests homosexuality is “hard-wired before birth,” and that “The idea that homosexuality evolves by natural selection is also well supported.”  Pointing to homosexual behavior in animals, too, he said, “This all strongly suggests that it is an outdated metaphysics to insist on ‘the nature of the human person as man and woman’.”  Most people come in man or woman forms.  His complaint only makes sense if he is endorsing transgender identities and transsexual behavior as well as homosexuality – the whole gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender package.  Would he draw the line at any other sexual behaviors, like pedophilia, necrophilia or polygamy?  Apparently not.  If natural selection is capable of producing one non-reproductive behavior, why not others?  The word “moral” appears nowhere in his blog entry.
    Hooper called on ecologists and other scientists to complain about the Pope “misusing science to dress up outdated ideas,” which obviously includes the Pope’s reference to creation and a Creator.  It’s not an “outdated metaphysics,” the Pope had said, “if the church speaks to the nature of the human person as man and woman, and asks that this order of creation be respected.”

What business of it is New Scientist to lecture the Pope on morals?  You would think that is the province of a religious leader.  Who is he to talk about outdated metaphysics?  You would think that is the province of philosophy and theology.  The Pope was speaking to his own Curia, for crying out loud.  Do you understand what is going on?  You thought science dealt with ammeters and microscopes and polymerase chain reactions.  Wrong; New Scientist is not like Old Scientist.  It asserts its tyranny over all realms of thought.
    Thousands of good scientists quietly continue to do great research in their respective fields, but the scientific institutions of our day have dirty hands.  They have become part and parcel of the radical leftist, atheist, social-progressive empire that controls the courts, media, education, labor unions, the UN, journalism, Hollywood and science.
    Did you notice that Hooper justified a sexual behavior that religious (and rational) people have for millennia described as perverted with an appeal to natural selection?  Did you notice he said behavior is genetically hard-wired?  Well, then, out goes any argument based on reason.  You see, Mr. Hooper, natural selection made you say these things.  You can’t help it.  You thought you were preaching a polemic on rationality and values, but you are a captive of impersonal forces from your animal past.  If we wanted to really tease Mr. Hooper, we could say that to be consistent, he would have to agree that natural selection produced the Pope as a mechanism to save the human population from self-destruction.  It’s pointless to fight it, then.
    Consistency is apparently not a value to this dogmatic Darwinist.  Without consistency, though, one can prove anything; therefore one proves nothing.  Don’t talk to us about truth, then, Mr. Hooper, you have nothing to say.  Your reason has left you.  You want to model your life on the animals?  Fine; go out into the field, and live like a king of beasts.  We hope it doesn’t take seven years for you to stand up like a Man and get your reason back.
    This commentary is not endorsing the Pope; it is simply insisting that science stop looking silly by refuting itself.  The essence of being human is using your reason and conscience to guide your physical passions.  That reason is the basis for science; it presupposes intelligence, which presupposes judgment, which presupposes absolute truth and morals.  Science cannot breathe without these things.
    2008 may become known as The Year Science Died.  Or was that 1859?