Group says faith eroding science (Concerned that voice of secularism growing ever fainter)

WASHINGTON – Concerned that the voice of science and secularism is growing ever fainter in the White House, on Capitol Hill and in culture, a group of prominent scientists and advocates of church-state separation on Tuesday announced formation of a Washington think tank designed to promote “rationalism” as the basis of public policy.

The brainchild of Paul Kurtz, founder of the Center for Inquiry-Transnational, the small public policy office will lobby and sometimes litigate on behalf of science-based decision making and against religion in government affairs.

The announcement was accompanied by release of a “Declaration in Defense of Science and Secularism,” which bemoans what signers say is a growing lack of understanding of the nature of scientific inquiry and the value of a rational approach to life.

“This disdain for science is aggravated by the excessive influence of religious doctrine on our public policies,” the declaration says. “We cannot hope to convince those in other countries of the dangers of religious fundamentalism when religious fundamentalists influence our policies at home.”

While the speakers at the National Press Club unveiling were highly critical of Bush administration policies regarding stem-cell research, global warming, abstinence-only sex education and the teaching of “intelligent design,” they said that their group was non-partisan and that many Democrats were hostile to keeping religion out of public policy.

“Unfortunately, not only do too many well-meaning people base their conceptions of the universe on ancient books – such as the Bible and the Koran – rather than scientific inquiry, but politicians of all parties encourage and abet this scientific ignorance,” reads the declaration, which was signed by, among others, three Nobel Prize winners.

Kurtz, a professor emeritus in philosophy from the State University of New York at Buffalo and a longtime critic of the influence of religion on public policy, said that the nation needed the equivalent of a “second Enlightenment.” He said the methods of science, which have led to much human progress, “are being challenged culturally in the United States today as never before.”

Several speakers also accused the media of distorting scientific consensus in the name of journalistic balance.

Lawrence Krauss, an author and theoretical physicist at Case Western Reserve University, said the scientific community has done a “poor job” of explaining its logic and benefits to the public. He also said scientists have a more active role to play in opposing faith-based governing, which he said the public often rejects once it understands the issues involved.

“In the current climate, there is an implicit, if demonstrably false, sense that if your actions are based on a belief in God you are good person, and if they are not you are a bad person,” Krauss said.

The goals of the non-profit group are to establish relationships with sympathetic legislators, provide experts to give testimony before Congress, speak publicly on issues when they are in the news, and submit friend-of-the-court briefs in Supreme Court cases involving science and religion.

Much of the problem is based on what science is: a game of strict rules.

A good analogy is chess. If you play with chess pieces on a chess board, and follow the rules of chess, then you are playing chess. But that's all you have done. If you make the false assumption that by playing a game of chess, you somehow divine reality, like casting I-Ching, then you are mistaken. And if you don't follow the rules, you haven't played chess.

Science behaves in the same way. An experiment is set up with strict rules. If you follow those rules, you should get the same results every time, as if you played the same game of chess the same way. Anyone, anywhere else in the world should also be able to do exactly what you did.

And if they can and do, it is scientifically valid. AND THAT IS ALL. It means it conforms to the rules of a scientific experiment. It does NOT mean that if you extrapolate or interpolate from that experiment, that the results from those actions are also scientific, unless they, too, are conducted by the rules of science.

But looking at the game of chess again, even if you play that same game of chess a thousand times, and it comes out exactly the same way every time, it in no way changes reality, or even interprets reality. This is because the game is just an absract, as are the pieces, the board, and the rules.

And while abstracts, like mathematics, for example, may seem to be gosh-darned accurate, they do not define reality, they just explain it well, with the accuracy of a game played a thousand times.

But people are convinced that science is so much more than just a game. That it actually defines reality. And this mistaken belief both corrupts science itself from within, and leads people to try and interject non-scientific rules into the game, in an effort to co-opt it.

One example are herbs and drugs that are advocated based solely on anecdotal evidence. Anecdote means nothing in the game of science, even if a thousand people say the same thing. Because it does not obey the rules of science.

Now this does not mean that these herbs and drugs are not effective. They may work miracles. But they may not claim that they are "scientifically" effective until they have gone through all the rules of the game of science. That still doesn't mean that they will work, just that they have passed the test.

Even if one or more scientists claim that it is effective, it is still not science until anyone, anywhere on the world, can demonstrate that it is effective, strictly by using the rules of science, devoid of subjectivity. Only if and when they do so, can it be said to be "scientifically effective".

Which doesn't mean that it *will* work, just that it has passed the test of scientific experiment.

So this being said, good scientists have multiple problems. They must conduct good experiments that strictly obey the rules of science. They must reject those within science who try to incorrectly extrapolate and interpolate from their results. They must reject those within or outside of science who wish to subvert the rules to support their beliefs, which have not or cannot be tested. And finally, they must reject those who seek to misuse their discoveries in terrible ways.

For example, a politician who, by analogy, watches a game of chess, then uses its outcome to say that SUVs should be banned, because the chess game predicts that SUVs cause global warming. "See," says the politician, "Every time you play that game of chess, it comes out the same way, which means I am right."

UCSD Surveys of introductory courses at UCSD show that about 40% of our students are Creationists, believing that the Earth is 6,000 years old, that humans did not arise from evolutionary processes, or that humans were contemporary with dinosaurs. This level of ignorance can not be blamed on our K-12 school systems. It must be attributed to intentional stupidification by organized religion. The Scopes Monkey Trial did not resolve the issue; it merely increased the resolve of the Christian mythologizers.

LEFT UNSAID IN THIS DIATRIBE: And if you will not convert to our religion of secularism, we will file a lawsuit against you, picket your house and shoot your dog!

Translation: To be "scientifically minded" and rational, you must prefer killing embryos to saving lives, embrace one side of a debate that has not even remotely been settled (and presumably assault freedom and economic growth in order to "solve" the problem) and keep on doing things the same old way when they have clearly failed. You must also decide that it's "rational" to demand that scinetific theories remain unquestioned, in the same way that it's "rational" for a prosecutor to demand that his witnesses escape cross-examination.

In other worrds, except for the last item, to be "rational" you have to be a death-loving Lefty. Sorry, not buying it.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.