The Science God

Fundamental beliefs are hard to change. People will cling to them in the absence of evidence and even in the face of negative evidence. Thus there is a great deal of rhetoric devoted to defending the hard-and-fast positions on questions regarding the origin of the universe, evolution and intelligent design.

There is, among a large group of people, a fundamental faith in something called science and the ability of a group of people called scientists to find answers to every question. This belief is especially strong in people with limited scientific training. Law professors (like Glenn Reynolds who wrote about this recently in his incredibly popular weblog), for example. People who can write serious articles comparing democracy and sex, dissecting the minutia of the democratic process, will in their adoration of the God “science” have a childlike faith in the ability of science to provide the answers to the ultimate questions.

There is a justly famous saying on Wall Street that the four most dangerous words are “this time it’s different.” The worshippers of the latest scientific theories should be encouraged to remember that science has developed – and abandoned – some of the most widely believed and generally accepted theories of reality over time. For example, the four elements of antiquity -- earth, water, air, and fire -- dominated natural philosophy for two thousand years. The premise that everything was formed from these four elements was developed by the Greek philosopher Empepedocles of Sicily, and continued to be believed for centuries because it seemed to be empirically true. Keep in mind that this theory was good enough for the technological development for entire civilizations. All it needed was a little tweaking from time to time.

We can cite the phlogiston theory which dominated the discussion of burning for a century; the theory of the ether which was designed to explain how light waves propagated survived well into the 20th century.

I would be the last to deny the validity of most scientific theories that can be replicated, demonstrated and used in practical applications. But I am skeptical, and rightly so, of theories that are advanced to explain phenomena that cannot be observed, replicated and demonstrated. To depend on the validity of theories simply because they sound reasonable and are espoused by scientists has been demonstrated time after time to be faulty. And no, this time is NOT different.

This brings us back to fundamental belief systems that cannot be observed or proven without Mr. Peabody’s “Wayback machine” from the Rocky and Bullwinkle series.

Theories regarding the origin of the universe, of life and of man have to begin with a fundamental question: was there or was there not a prime mover that got the whole thing going? If we approach the question by assuming the answer is “No,” we can then spin a whole bunch of theories of how it all began. I believe that the current favorite is an endless series of explosions from some core universal event followed by expansion, cooling and coalescing, contraction and … repeat. But we should keep in mind that the original answer must be taken on faith, since we have not found a way to prove this point one way or another. Although whole forest have been sacrificed for paper to print theories and mega-jillions of electrons have been sacrificed in calculations to put number on these theories, they all assume that there is no one there to give things a push. This is an article of faith based on a belief system. As lawyers would say: it assumes a fact not in evidence.

To suggest that one position on this faith based issue is more correct than another is dogmatic and anti-intellectual. In fact, in my humble opinion, it is unscientific. Real scientists should have open minds to the possibility of virtually any possible answer to the questions being debated. The elimination of any one theory, such as intelligent design, whether this is a theory held by a few or a majority of people (as is the case of the belief in God) without evidence is not science, but intellectual bullying.

But intellectual bullying is particularly popular on college campuses, especially if they can bully the red state yahoos who hold superstitious beliefs in a supreme being.

So we lets trot out the current theory for the beginning of everything and put some lipstick on that pig.