As we used to hear with Global Warming, "It's the science! The science is settled!"
Is that true? Currently, lots of fighting going on about "science" being bandied about, as here about Oregon:
Oregon's governor, Kate Brown, said, "From the beginning of this crisis, I have worked within my authority, using science and data as my guide, heeding the advice of medical experts.''
Ah, but first off, the guv'ner had a 28-day window on how long she could impose restrictions, and she's exceeded that. The Oregon legislature has not extended that 28 days, but Oregon Supreme Court says, "Oh, no you don't." So chaos ensues, legally and morally.
(Personally, I suspect such issues will probably be decided by open rebellion. People are fed up with these Democrat Party Napoleons and things are going to get ugly. Or "government" may just wilt under the pressure. A good essay on the limits of government is here at the Conservative Treehouse.)
But the "science"...? Truth is, medical "experts" don't agree, neither do a lot of scientists in related fields, and debate rages. Heated debate. And it is clear that "the science" is being politicized. Massively so. The mainstream media clamps down on all this, but the debate is real. And I suspect the damage to "science" is real. Politicize anything and you pretty much ruin it.
Yet what is Science? I think a little background is needed.
First off, science is something that needs a specific metaphysical underpinning...
In most people's minds, "science" means the "scientific method." So, can we define "science" as a particular set of methods to study reality?
Ah, first, before any such method is developed, one has to have
a philosophy — and it is not merely a "belief" or opinion, but an
organized system of thought founded on logic — that objective reality itself
is real, objectively real; i.e. that we're not mad, or trapped in a Matrix,
etc. This is the great revolution in thought that produced the modern world,
for most humans have followed religions (and philosophies) that taught that
reality wasn't real, but a dream of some deity ("We are all a dream of
Brahma, and some day Brahma will awake") or as in Islam, wherein reality is real enough for the moment, but a capricious Allah might change the basic laws of physics (or morality or anything else) from one second to the next — because Allah's will is supreme: this is called
"Islamic Volunteerism".
Only in the West did we have a religion that
insisted Reality was Real, that God blessed it as a good in itself, and made a
covenant with it (first verses in Genesis 2). It was in defense of that First Covenant that God set out to rescue His Creation, to undo and repair and make anew the world He had blessed in that First Covenant when Adam and Eve marred His Creation by their Fall.
Reality was thus understood to be
good in itself, inherently good, and worthy of study, for of course we humans were there (in the unFallen Adam and Eve) when the Lord of Hosts "rested" on the Seventh Day and blessed it. This idea is foreign to
so many religions and philosophies that it is remarkable that it came into
existence in the first place. Indeed, its mere existence is a proof of the Existence of the God who made it.
Then the early Church took that theology and melded with the
Greek philosophical inheritance from Socrates through Plato and especially Aristotle — helped mightily by Boethius — cemented the idea in the West that reality was real and we could study it; i.e., that unlike in Islam, where the study of the physical sciences is
blasphemy, we in the West were free and encouraged — in fact, we were made to
study and interact with the world, rather than merely endure world -- to use our minds to
explore the creation we are a part of. Western empirical science is founded on
this ancient metaphysics.
Of course, the ancient competing idea that
reality isn't really real, somehow or other, or that the physical world is evil and
the spiritual world an escape from this evil (Manichean doctrine/Catharism, etc.) or
that we can make reality by willpower, manifests itself today in many, many
ways. Marxism/Leftism insists — against all evidence — that an earthly Utopia
can be made by sheer willpower (and killing enough of those who don't agree).
One of many current examples is that sex-change operations produce sex change:
that one can change one's sex, via gruesome surgery and hormones. Or of course that homosexual can marry, that their phyical intimacy, a mere tribadism, is the equal to the transmission of life between male and female.
This impulse — to demand that reality is malleable and conformable to our will, is a form of the ancient "reality is a dream" belief; it is what
lies behind these malicious (or deeply foolish) people wrecking modern Western
empirical science in the name of following some bizarre contemporary fetish or other that
motivates them, that gives meaning to their otherwise metaphysically empty lives. (Walker Percy, the great novelist, used to say that the Sexual Revolution was in part about modern people secretly suspecting that they were mere ghosts, and needed "hooking up" to try to convince themselves they weren't disembodied nothings.
Global Warming is obviously a classic example, and now the "Let's
kill ourselves to preserve ourselves from contagion" incoherence fits in the same genre. It's a great crusade, a jihad, to "save the planet" and thus, of course, give substance to ghosts.
An Préachan
No comments:
Post a Comment