Science is a process for finding truth
in our material world. The blossoming of science occurred in Medieval
Europe and continued to flourish until the early part of the last century,
almost exclusively in the Western world. This was not coincidental.
The
combination of the ancient Greek desire for free inquiry combined with the
Judeo-Christian belief in an orderly universe and, most vitally, the
Judeo-Christian primary value of honesty created in poor, small Europe
explosions in thought that the old, rich empires of the East could not
achieve.
It is also not an accident that the
overwhelming majority of early great scientists were either among a small pool
of ancient Greeks – essentially Pythagoras, Archimedes, and Euclid – or among
especially devout Medieval Christians – (Friar) Roger Bacon, (Bishop) Jean
Buridan, (Bishop) Robert Grosseteste, (Father) Nicolai Copernicus, and (Canon)
Galileo.
Because
these profoundly devout Christians considered physics and mathematics simply
another manifestation of a holy and ordered Creation, they never worshipped
science. Lying was a sin, and lying about the nature of the world was a
particularly serious sin, because it knowingly concealed the true nature of the
world.
Within
the Medieval university was that same sort of freedom and mutual respect that
had never existed before except in the academy of Plato. As with the
academy, the Medieval university had schools of thought and different
interpretations of what phenomena meant. This was science.
Scientism, on the other hand, is a vile
misology that arose at the end of the nineteenth century and has infected those
processes intended to discover the truth about our world ever since. The
most evil and dishonest regimes in modern history – Nazi Germany, Stalinist
Russia, and Maoist China – were all utterly and passionately devoted to
whatever pseudo-science was needed to support the party.
Often
these regimes cranked out huge numbers of physicists, mathematicians,
engineers, and related hard science disciplines, but it is not the quantity of
trained scientists, but the quality of their environment that matters. We
were afraid, at the beginning of the Cold War, that the hordes of physicists
and engineers that the Soviet Union turned out would leave America
behind. In fact, science did much better under the tsars than the
Soviets.
Scientism is ossified and
reactionary. There are never schools of thought, for example, in
scientistic regimes. Honesty and integrity cannot survive, because honest
inquiry is always punished and because the atheism at the heart of regimes of
this sort means that there is no moral restraint regarding experiments,
observation and the presentation of other explanations for data.
The
left has pushed us farther and farther away from science and toward
scientism. When our attorney general seriously ponders criminal
prosecution against scientists who challenge the prevailing orthodoxy of
man-made global warming, when universities drive out scientists who question
global warming, when the state rewrites historic temperature data so that the
revised data conforms to global warming, when the "proof" of global
warming consists of what a certain percentages of scientists support, then
scientism as supplanted science.
Why
has this happened? First, everything today is political, including
science. Second, treating the Judeo-Christian religious tradition as
poppycock means that the vital check on dishonesty that comes from fear of a
morally serious God is nonexistent in the minds of many scientists.
Third, as the lust for power overwhelms all decent human instincts and
scientism becomes a very simple path to power, the aim of seeking truth fades
and then dies.
All
of those factors are present in leftism today; every issue is political, honesty
is nonexistent, and power is everything. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, we
are sliding into a new Dark Age. This grim fact is something many of us
feel about modern life. Those toxins in cognition and integrity that are
the heart of leftism have infected many other areas of life and are strangling
science to death. That is precisely what the left wants.
