photo from arstechnica.com
Let Me Hear You Say, "I Believe."
for release 11-07-05
Washington D.C.
I'm inclined to classify science in the same category as religion. Science has it's orthodoxy and it's high priests, just the same as religion. And there are just as many crack-pot scientists as there are religious fanatics. For every discovery of penicillin we have ten perpetual motion machines or UFO rumors or inventions of cars that run on air or cults of such devices as the E Meter and the polygraph.
Both religion and science depend on an intermediary clergy to reveal the 'truth' to their constituents. At some point it always comes down to a matter of faith. We 'laymen' have to accept the word of the priests.
Have you ever done a carbon 14 dating test on a relic which has been found somewhere in the sediments that 'proves' that man was cooking giant sloth 25,000 years ago in Patagonia? No. You accept this fact from science because you have Faith in whatever instrumental or technical voodoo they are using. Have you ever sniffed a stem cell? Do you even know what one looks like? How about a neutrino? Ever seen one of those? I don't think so. But you believe in them because a high priest scientist with Dr. in front of his name has assured you that science is infallible. Just like the Pope.
We would like to imagine that science is based on empirical observations and reproducibility and peer review. But this is not always the case. Money talks as loudly in science as it does in religion. If a researcher is paid by a tobacco company to 'discover' that cigarettes are harmless, he is likely to come up with the desired results. They did it for decades. And even the results of real, rigorous science can be skewed for commercial or political purposes.
So I have as healthy a skepticism about science as I do about religion. "Science" told me that if I took LSD that my chromosomes would crack and I would try to fly out of windows. I have three bright and healthy children that prove otherwise. And the only time I ever tried to fly out a window was when I was seven and had a new Superman cape. Luckily it was a first floor window. So 'science', and especially popular science, is as fallible as religion. Every few days 'science' tells us of a new imaginary disease. But don't worry, the drug company who sponsored the 'study' has a remedy which is about to emerge from their laboratories. Science contains almost as much voodoo as religion.
I must say that I trust science a little more than I trust religion. But only slightly. Experiments are easier to replicate and verify than are revelations. I'm slightly more inclined to believe that there is global warming than I am to believe that an itinerant Hebrew who may or may not have lived 2000 years ago, rose from the dead and is thereby somehow responsible for the salvation of my eternal soul.
When Louis Pasteur proposed the germ theory, his peers thought he was nuts because the orthodoxy at the time was spontaneous generation. When Pasteur performed his experiment in public it shook the scientific world as much as Luther's 95 Thesesshook the religious world. So both the orthodoxy of science and religion are subject to change. But in general religion is slower than science in this regard.
The Poet's Eye sees that in the end all that matters is what you choose to believe and whatever you believe you can find some priest or expert or scientific study to support it. It's a matter of faith. If you choose to believe that Krishna is blue or that Buddha was born out of his mother's side or that Christ rose from the dead or that Mohammed rose into heaven on the back of his steed, or if you want to believe that the world is flat or that swamp gas causes malaria or that the earth is the center of the universe or The Big Bang Theory.....remember....it's all a matter of faith.
Yeah, do you believe in magic
Yeah, believe in the magic of a young girl's soul
Believe in the magic of rock and roll
Believe in the magic that can set you free
Ohh, talking 'bout magic
--John Sebastian
