Pathetic Science

There are many engineers and scientists who labor in the bowels of corporations who generally remain anonymous and rarely publish anything because they are there to create a competitive edge and profits for their employers. Then we have the “popular” scientists who inhabit the halls of academia and who regularly publish articles describing their latest scientific finding with great fanfare. These “findings” usually run along the lines of “Scientist discovers a link between Twisted Tail Porcupine Poop and marriage”. It seems that women who regularly apply Porcupine Poop to their bodies have an 82% chance of not becoming pregnant. Of course they have a 90% chance of not having any male come within smelling distance but like most of these “scientific discoveries” based on statistics salient facts are left out and thus it is with the latest finding coming out of Academic Science.

The academic scientific community is losing all credibility as they move from empirical science and the scientific method to data mining and statistics. But worse than this shift from science to data sampling is the insufferable arrogance and supercilious air that characterizes the academic scientists. Challenges to their beliefs are no longer accepted and foremost among these beliefs is the denial of a supreme being. Science is becoming more and more of a religion with its practitioners expected to embrace it uncritically and with complete faith. This attitude is most commonly associated with Evolution which is no longer viewed by these scientists as a “theory” but as a “fact” even though all of their evidence is simply evidence of adaptation and not evolution in the sense that a new species is created. But most recently we have the popular science academics all in a lather about “global warming (or cooling depending on the year)” What they ignore in their rush to judgment is that no one denies that global warming is a reality, the dispute is over the cause. The scientists who actually study climate and climate changes are ignored while scientists in other fields are being quoted by the popular press as if they knew what they were talking about.

Now the academic scientific community has managed to combine their denial of God, their overweening arrogance, and total acceptance of Evolution into one finding, and THAT is that a belief in a supreme being is the result of Evolution. Washington University Anthropologist Pascal Boyer in his drive to determine why people who seem otherwise perfectly rational choose to believe in God rather than the more rational non-belief of atheism, has concluded that this characteristic is the result of Evolution. Indeed, he and a gaggle of other atheistic scientists have written a variety of books debunking God. These books include such provocative titles as “The God Delusion”, “The End of Faith”, “Breaking the Spell”, and my personal favorite “God is NOT Great: How Religion Poisons Everything”. These books and these “scientists” view faith in God as some sort of mental flaw or aberration, but fail to see their blind faith in (non-empirical) science as tantamount to the same thing. Faith based science seems very like faith based religion and both require total belief with each denying any facts or evidence presented by the other group.

Boyer takes the position that even though he is an atheist his objective is not to debunk God but simply to present his findings, which sound more like opinions than facts. The academic community believed that as civilization advanced and societies based on science became the norm, religion would disappear, but surprisingly this hasn’t happened and approximately 97% of the population continues to persist in their irrational belief in God. Therefore, the only logical conclusion according to these atheists, is that a belief in God is some sort of Evolutionary defense mechanism. That this belief in a supreme being provides a framework for social behavior – such as working together and fighting off enemies, that allows individuals to survive in a hostile environment and it extends the life expectancy of the group and individuals within that group. This latter point was based on a study of Mormons in Utah but the scientists do admit that this correlation between belief in God and longevity among the Mormons might also be attributed to their relatively healthy lifestyle, which includes no alcohol (not even the highly touted red wine so dear to the hearts of many academics), tobacco, drugs, and unmarried sex. In effect this was not an unflawed study.

What seems to have escaped Boyer and his fellow atheists is that if their theory is correct and that a belief in God is driven by evolution, then there can only be two logical conclusions. One is that those who believe must be higher on the Evolutionary scale than those who don’t believe. Or alternatively the atheists among us are more highly evolved because they no longer require the approval of others, teamwork, or cooperation with the society, and they can exist as totally independent entities. It is fairly obvious which of these alternatives the scientists believe, but they seem to ignore that if Evolution is not a theory but a fact, then we are in fact highly developed animals. In the animal world, those individuals who are different, flawed, or unusual are shunned, driven from the group and ultimately die off leaving the gene pool cleansed of the deviants. therefore, it would be the atheists who are deviant and would be eliminated by natural selection. Their small number would seem to bear this out.

These scientists are so driven by their religion of atheism, that they are blinded by the illogic of their position. They ignore the first singularity that initiated the big bang, they ignore all of the findings of Quantum Physics, they ignore all metaphysical studies like near death experiences, but instead postulate a position and a conclusion that God doesn’t exist without offering any facts in support of their belief. I am reminded of the famous graffiti “God is Dead – Nietzsche” “Nietzsche is Dead – God”