Podcast: Blind Faith in Science
Science is not the problem but the blind faith in science that is the religion of Secularism.
This Podcast is available for Gold subscribers and higher.Click here to become a subscriber.
Click here to become a subscriber.
Thomas Fleming
Thomas Fleming is president of the Fleming Foundation. He is the author of six books, including The Morality of Everyday Life and The Politics of Human Nature, as well as many articles and columns for newspapers, magazines,and learned journals. He holds a Ph.D. in Classics from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and a B.A. in Greek from the College of Charleston. He served as editor of Chronicles: a Magazine of American Culture from 1984 to 2015 and president of The Rockford Institute from 1997-2014. In a previous life he taught classics at several colleges and served as a school headmaster in South Carolina
Very big topic this one. I don’t remember where, I think the EB maybe, I read that first task the Royal Society did was to build a glass bee hive to study their habits, presumably in the interest of creating a more ordered population.
Listening to this podcast, the two stories that came to my mind were Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter” and George Bernard Shaw’s play “The Doctor’s Dilemma.”
.
The problem with scientists seem to be twofold. On the one hand, within their own sphere, they seem to not comprehend the limited scope of their capabilities. They truly believe they should be the lords over life and death, masters of all disease, genetic manipulators of all flora and fauna. They seem to very rarely respect the complexity of systems and designs within nature, and often create more or different problems with many of their solutions. The second problem is that they simply do not understand competence in one sphere does not make them fit to hold any kind of opinion in any other sphere, especially with regard to humanity and human nature. The last person on earth who should be allowed to govern a society should be a scientist, and this was proven by the almost unanimous response on COVID. In the middle of one scientifically minded person ranting and raving to me about the importance of masks and social distance and such, I asked if he had no regard for human dignity, and if he felt grieving families should be forced to cry into their masks, standing six feet apart from each other, at a funeral. He seemed legitimately stumped by the concept, as if the entire idea of human dignity was an alien thing. Such people should never, ever be allowed to hold power over others. (c.f. Anthony Fauci)
.
In short, the temptation to hubris within the scientific world seems almost insurmountable. I used to think technology was “neutral”, but “The Canticle for Liebowitz” and observation of social media has convinced me it’s almost always intrinsically disordered with good things only being wrought with it despite its natural tendencies.
.
Also, the Fleming Foundation – “Come for the critique of science, stay for the analysis of Scripture!”