Last week when linking to the website of Fourth Congressional District candidate David Sanders, I digressed into a discussion of the Bush administration’s War on Science. Dr. Sanders was kind enough to copy me on a letter to the editor he recently submitted to the Indianapolis Star with respect to a column they ran today representing George Will’s attempts to cast doubt on global warming.
George Will in “Journalism Takes the Heat” continues to be a willing foot soldier in the Bush administration War on Science. His assault on the scientific consensus on the effects of human activities on climate change is filled with irrelevancies and half-truths. The quotation from Science magazine (which Will has been using for years) stating that scientists in 1976 warned of “extensive Northern Hemisphere glaciation” is a distortion; the full statement concerns “the long-term trend over the next 20,000 years” and explicitly does not include “effects as those due to the burning of fossil fuels.”
Meanwhile, I came across a Scripps Howard editorial in the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette on the Bush administration’s anti-science efforts. I had forgotten to mention the one about the 24 year old Bush administration flack who instructed NASA to make sure that “theory” appeared everywhere NASA talked about the Big Bang on the grounds that this widely accepted explanation of the origins of the universe was a religious issue. In addition, NASA’s public relations department had been instructed to restrict James Hansen’s access to the press, sit in on any interviews and monitor his lectures and writings lest he express views on global warming that didn’t square with those of the Bush administration.
I’m not a huge fan of the philosophy of Ayn Rand, but I’m reminded of John Galt’s big speech in Atlas Shrugged where he talks about “A” equals “A.” I took that part of the speech to mean that there are objective facts which have to be dealt with and one fails to acknowledge those facts at one’s own peril. Burning fossil fuels either does or does not contribute to global warming. The scientific method is probably the best tool we have to determine the reality of the situation. If we deliberately ignore the information obtained through our observations, then we’ll pay the consequences. Reality will not change simply because we ignore it.
The more I have seen this struggle, the more it has made me think.
There may be a way to get both sides to back down a little. I think everyone has forgotten that science is the best *current* explanation we can come up by observing what we can see, taste, hear, touch or smell. ALL science is the “best guess”. For those who get upset at summing it up like that, just look at what we discovered in the last 60 years that changed many a “best guess” that stood for 100’s of years. I can’t wait to see what we find in the next 60.
I don’t think the answer is a legal disclosure at the bottom of every science book a la McDonalds (This hot drink is HOT!). However, we need a public understanding that science is the unemotional “best guess”. I see some scientists who would puff their chests at such a label, explaining how there is no way their theory could be proven wrong.
To the other side of the debate, accept the limits of science and don’t fight it. Science might quote the big bang. If your faith has a better explanation, lay it out there for people to see. Don’t demand that it become taught in public school.
The same goes for our laws. The laws are (should) be the unemotional “best guess” of what is best for everyone. Many faiths have additional laws that can help fill in those gaps, but we all (should) agree that enforcing those gaps should not be somehting that the government does.
I think than even when our Christian founders created this country, there was a difference between what was legal and what was immoral. It should be that way today too. There will be a difference between what science can explain and what religion can explain. One is better at “How?” and one is better at “Why?”
Science is ‘evolution’ and religion is ‘Noahs’ Ark’. It’s as basic as that.