Researchers Violate Separation of Science and State
What are the limits of science? Many of us envision men and women in white lab coats holding test tubes, studying readouts on instruments, or hacking rocks with picks. A look at headlines from science news sites, though, shows some scientists inserting their opinions in areas traditionally led by scholars in the humanities – and doing so as if their opinions carry the presumed authority of science.
- Abortion policy: PhysOrg, normally concerned with science news, reprinted an AP story about “abortion foes’ tactics” on their site. The article portrayed crisis pregnancy centers as somehow devious in their attempts to help women find alternatives to abortion, even though New York City’s abortion rate is 41% – the highest in the nation, double the national rate.
Reporter Cristian Salazar disparaged the “small number of pregnancy service organizations accused by abortion rights groups and city officials of misleading women about their reproductive health options and disguising themselves as medical clinics,” as if abortion clinics could not be similarly accused. Salazar also mentioned Margaret Sanger having “opened a family planning clinic in Brooklyn in 1916” without any mention of her racist eugenics policies. - Wisdom science: To whom do you go for wisdom? A pastor, priest, or rabbi? A holy book? A trusted friend or academic? Never fear; science is here – science in the form of psychology. “What the world needs now? More wisdom,” is the headline of a press release from Concordia University reprinted by PhysOrg. While the headline is true, is science the one to tell anyone how to get it? Isn’t science concerned with natural laws and material processes?
Dolores Pushkar defined wisdom as “something that benefits society as a whole as well as the self.” Yet that definition might well be disputed; perhaps it is wise to sometimes stand alone against a whole society bent on evil, as did Bonhoeffer against the Nazi society at the cost of his own life. Paul wrote of a “hidden wisdom” that God performed in Christ’s sacrifice on the cross, a move that at the time seemed futile in Roman society. Does Pushkar, as a scientist, have more wisdom than King Solomon on wisdom? “No single definition of wisdom exists,” the press release admitted.
To be sure, the article described how the psychology department was engaging the philosophy department in research on wisdom, and was funded by sources in the Social Sciences and Humanities. Interdepartmental initiatives can be seen as wise moves; science can bring observational and statistical data to bear on questions about wisdom. Yet the press release frequently discussed research being done by Pushkar’s team. At some level, it implies that moral qualities like wisdom are amenable to scientific analysis. - Government spending: Live Science – the website name tells what it’s about. Why, then, did Chad Brooks write the following un-scientific headline: “Don’t Like How Tax Dollars Are Spent? Get Used to It.”
It’s part of a series the website whimsically calls “$ci-Fi: The Science of Personal Finance,” described as “an ongoing LiveScience series that explores the science of personal finance to help you navigate everyday life.” Again, science seems to be inserting itself into the wisdom business. Can science, though, provide anything more than raw data and statistics? Whose job is it to tell individuals how to live their lives? Does a science site have any more presumptive authority than a financial adviser or a research staffer in a senatorial office?
The article provided data about government spending, and made the inductive claim that things are not likely to change soon. Moreover, the article heavily quoted Scott Lilly, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a radically liberal think tank funded by multibillionaire George Soros. So not only is it unclear how science can do any better job of analyzing government spending, or helping individuals navigate everyday life, it here risked soiling its objectivity with accusations of partisanship. - Right-to-work: PhysOrg published another “scientific” finding that leans to the left. “Right-to-work laws not only hurt labor unions financially, they also may jeopardize worker safety,” according to “research” by Roland Zullo that conveniently plays into the liberal desires of union bosses to deny freedom of choice to workers.
Whether science should be concerned if labor unions are hurt financially seems a moot point. Zullo was quick to paint the unions in a favorable light; “Unions appear to have a positive role in reducing construction industry and occupation fatalities, but only in states without right-to-work laws,” he claimed. At least one reader wrote an angry comment about this article, focusing on the rights of individuals to work without being forced to join a labor union. - Girl scout cookies What can science say about Girl Scout cookies? Science Daily apparently thought the presumptive authority of science can judge that traditional Boy Scout and Girl Scout activities are guilty of gender stereotyping. Looking under the hood shows that Science Daily reprinted, under its banner of science, a press release from Sociologists for Women in Science, an organization that supports “feminist sociological research, activism and scholars.”
One might think that the standards of scientific objectivity would provide equal time for scholarly views from conservative organizations (perhaps Focus on the Family or the Family Research Council), but a Google search finds not a single mention of these prominent organizations in Science Daily’s listings, but three from the feminist Sociologists for Women in Science and nine from the ultra-liberal Center for American Progress. - The science of sin: Update 04/11/2011: in perhaps the most blatant act of usurpation by scientists of the humanities, McMaster University researchers decided they would find “scientific solutions to sin.” Is their solution theological? Do they have a new method of salvation? Are they suggesting moral teachings, or offering psychological counseling? No; their working assumption is that all sin has molecular underpinnings.
Their solution, therefore, was to look in the chemical cabinet for antidotes to human moral deficiencies. “Most people are familiar with the seven deadly sins – pride, envy, gluttony, lust, wrath, greed and sloth – but could there be molecular solutions for this daily struggle between good and evil?” (assuming science has the taxonomic tools for such distinctions). Groups of students were told to get out of the theological box and into the scientific box: “By getting students to think outside the box, the aim was to come up with the best molecule and design for a drug, or remedy, that counteracts sin.”
Looming questions rise when political ramifications of this research are considered. Who will control the medicine chest? Who will prescribe, and who will partake? The researchers apparently didn’t ask whether there is a drug to combat scientific hubris.
Paul Feyerabend, a post-Kuhnian firebrand in philosophy of science, thought that science was a threat to democracy. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy described his concern:
The separation of church and state should therefore be supplemented by the separation of science and state, in order for us to achieve the humanity we are capable of. Setting up the ideal of a free society as “a society in which all traditions have equal rights and equal access to the centres of power” (SFS, p. 9), Feyerabend argues that science is a threat to democracy. To defend society against science we should place science under democratic control and be intensely sceptical about scientific “experts”, consulting them only if they are controlled democratically by juries of laypeople.
Law professor Phillip E. Johnson found another Feyerabend quote to end his article on the pretensions of science for world conquest: “Scientists are not content with running their own playpens in accordance with what they regard as the rules of the scientific method, they want to universalize those rules, they want them to become part of society at large, and they use every means at their disposal—argument, propaganda, pressure tactics, intimidation, lobbying—to achieve their aims” (Objections Sustained, Inter-Varsity Press, 1998, p. 66). Feyerabend is widely regarded as extreme in his views, but readers can judge for themselves (as “juries of laypeople”) to what extent his fears have become realized.
All the so-called “secular” science news sites and institutions are uniformly leftist in their politics. They are the same ones that give uncritical acceptance of Darwinism. That’s why they are secular; they adore the secular religion Darwin founded, and science is their primary tool for spreading their intolerant bigotry around the world. Let the reader beware.
Science does not have to be that way; clearly it was not before the Darwinian revolution. But that’s what it has become. Many individual scientists are not that way, just as many hard-working Americans in labor unions hold views far more conservative than the union leaders, whose views are also uniformly leftist – often radically so, and just as bent on world conquest.
One cannot get genuine science out of science news or scientific papers these days without first a severe acid wash. By that, we mean not applying acid to the news, but applying heavy doses of pure water instead, to wash out Darwin’s universal acid that corrodes everything it touches. Another technique is to apply Darwin Acid to Darwinism itself, which causes an implosion, leaving a vacuum that intelligence rushes in to fill.