Philip Adams is an atheist with faith in the scientific method
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| The global warming icon for the ubx. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
"I am an atheist with faith in the scientific method" Weekend Australian magazine. Personally I don't have enough faith to believe in atheism, but that's another story.
One result of our culture’s post-modernism is its entirely modern love affair with its own view of science.
Once-upon-a-time, the word science referred to the scientific process: verifiable propositions, experimental procedures, and reproducible observations.
And today? Science may still mean that in the dictionary, but in popular culture? Not so much.
Instead, the concept of science stands in for anti-supernaturalism with a political agenda—which I assume has probably always been the case to some extent. But today’s science seems marked by a very unscientific illogical and contradictory nature exceeded only by its own level of dogma.
Some examples: The pro-abortion movement claims that science does not allow it to say that a baby in the womb is human life. Of course the baby is human, and is alive, but simply those observations are deemed “unscientific.” In fact, after Senator Marco Rubio was foolish enough to use the antiquated concept of science in this statement:
“Science is settled, human life beings at conception”
the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists released a statement saying that they could not agree with Rubio, because they “approach everything from a scientific perspective.” They were fine saying that pregnancy begins with implantation, but the science is just not settled on if pregnancy and life are the same thing. Its not that they haven’t done the right research, but rather they can’t comment on the connection between human life and pregnancy because they approach everything from a “scientific perspective” (one blogger described this as “being super confused about where babies come from”).
Meanwhile, a baby born at 24-weeks did not survive. No word on the scientific perspective on this.
Another example: yesterday AOL news used this headline: “Global warming likely to cause colder winters.” The lede said, of course, that “Scientists now believe that global warming is to blame for extreme cold snaps in North America.” If scientists say so.
Which leads to the news this month that polar ice is actually increasing, scientists say. Which is good news according to some scientists, but bad news according to others—after all, it could break out into “global cooling” (the actual phrase used, without irony, in the International Science Times, and attributed to “scientists”).
Note the irony that this all comes seven years after “the science was settled” and the polar ice caps would likely disappear by the year 2014. Well then.
Non-Christians I know (and many Christians too) often wonder why pastors who may be otherwise respectable suddenly sound like raving, backwards luddites when it comes to “science.”
Why does it have to be the Christians who bring up the fabricated science and outright lies—remember the hockey stick graphs!—behind global warming?
One reason is because the same people who say science is settled on the global warming—or possibly cooling—also dogmatically say they know how old the earth is. They are as confident in our shared ancestry with monkeys as they are in the original big-bang—but have no idea if a fetus is human life. By the way, are those pesky ice caps still around? I thought the science was settled?
So I don’t mind being the backwards, young-earth, six-day-creationist. I can compare my world view to the dogma and self-proclaimed intellectual superiority of science with confidence.
Tyson can tell his 2.41 million twitter followers (!) that religious people have no place in any authority because they lack an objective reality. My retort: his form of science is confused about where babies come from, fabricates its findings, and ultimately ends up denying the creator for the sake of creation. That track record hardly counts as being founded in objective reality.
