Prostituting science
From politicians to philosophy majors, everyone is feeling the need to defend reason these days. It seems that the 200-year failure of the Enlightenment to replace Christianity is finally beginning to seriously worry godless humanists on both sides of the Atlantic, as it appears to have belatedly occurred to a few of them that the moderate growth of atheism in a greying Europe is being outpaced by the incendiary growth of Christian evangelicalism in the growing societies of the United States, Latin America and Asia, to say nothing of the literally explosive growth of Islam around the world.
In a recent article in the Chicago Times, James Taylor, a senior fellow at a Chicago-based think tank, noted that Al Gore's recent book, "The Assault on Reason", is full of assertions that have been refuted by the very science he claims to be defending. Taylor lists published refutations of Gore's unscientific assertions with evidence of Himalayan glaciers growing instead of shrinking, the number of hurricanes shrinking instead of growing, the retreat of African deserts instead of their expansion, temperatures in Greenland falling instead of rising and the enlargement of the Antarctic ice sheet instead of its reduction.
The reason for Gore's apparent carelessness isn't due to the fact that he's a politician, not a climatologist, but because he doesn't actually care about science at all. Gore is simply using the pseudo-scientific issue of global warming to justify his true goal of advancing democratic socialism. This is why every prescription to the various problems diagnosed involves transferring more power to the central government authority. If the scientific consensus flips again and global warming is abandoned in favor of warnings about an Incipient Ice Age, one can be sure that Gore will be recommending precisely the same solution for global cooling that he has provided for global warming.
As shamefully abusive of science as Gore is, the New Atheists are arguably even worse due to the status of their nominal leader, Richard Dawkins, as a former scientist. Dawkins no longer engages in science, he is now little more than a professional propagandist for science, and the scientific method is entirely missing from his latest screed, "The God Delusion". And yet, what Dawkins is selling under a fraudulent label is not science, in fact, it is not even atheism. The 1996 Humanist of the Year and vice-president of the British Humanist Association confesses:
"As an academic scientist, I am a passionate Darwinian. ... But, at the same time, as I support Darwinism as a scientist, I am a passionate anti-Darwinian when it comes to politics and how we should conduct our human affairs." - A Devil's Chaplain, p. 10.
Dawkins, like Gore, is selling an unscientific product, an avowedly anti-scientific one, marketing it with the trappings of science in order to ensnare the unwary, the insufficiently educated and the too-easily impressed. There is no science to determine the optimal level of ice on the planet any more than there is one that will tell right from wrong or articulate the ideal system of government. Such things are not only beyond the capacity of current scientody, they are beyond the conceptual limits of the scientific method.
Science is very good at answering questions that begin with "what" and "how," it is significantly less useful for answering questions that begin with "should".
It is inherently dishonest to sell a political ideology through the use of science. Such efforts should be disregarded by laymen and decried by scientists, for the prostitution of their professional means in the pursuit of unscientific ends can only taint their profession in the cold eyes of history. What Gore and Dawkins are doing now is no different than what Trofim Lysenko and Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer did sixty years ago in the service of scientific socialism and racial eugenics. Their abuse of science on behalf of globalism and humanism will one day see both Gore and Dawkins repudiated by scientists of the future, as Lysenko and Verschuer are disavowed by scientists today.