By way of John Cole, we find a startling post from Mark Noonan, a leading far-right blogger, who does not appear to be kidding.
[T]oday ii [sic] occured [sic] to me: science is dead. We have reached the end of the Age of Science – what will come after, I don’t know, but I don’t think that we’ll ever again have a time when Science is enshrined as some sort of god-like arbiter of right and wrong. The question now: what killed science?
A lot of different factors – but the main thing was that science could only thrive as it did from about 1650 until 1850 when everyone agreed on the rules. The prime rule of science was truth – everyone involved in science had to tell the truth to the best of their ability, and always be willing to correct one’s views when new evidence called in to question previously held beliefs. What killed science was when its strongest advocates stopped telling the truth.
It was, after all, science and its enthusiasts which fell for the Piltdown Man, Haekel’s embryos, eugenics, Population Bomb, ALAR, etc, etc, etc. So many bogus theories, dressed up as science, and greeted by the believers in science as the be-all and end-all of existence. After a while, it was bound to errode [sic] the foundations of science – and now it has. Science is now so intertwined with myth and political gamesmanship that whatever judgements [sic] are pronounced under the cover of science are immediately suspect – everyone who hears such things wonders when some future science will completely refute what is held as rock-solid science today.
As Noonan sees it, these “problems” stem from our failure to force religion on people. When scientists failed to learn “the relationship of man to creation, and his Creator,” they went astray.
Oh, where to begin.
First, as Cole noted, a Noonan commenter “points out that the self-correcting nature of science is what exposed theories previously held to be true to be inaccurate.” In other words, Noonan dismisses science because of a handful of notorious hoaxes and abuses — which were exposed thanks to science and the scientific method. The logic seemed lost on Noonan, which, as it turns out, is not terribly surprising.
Second, as Cole also noted, Noonan would replace real science with notions such as intelligent-design creationism, pushed by far-right groups such as the Discovery Institute. These activists, Noonan said, “will soon start to really educate people.” I can hardly wait.
Third, if the right were truly worried about the integrity of science, they probably ought to be a little more concerned about their president, who has a habit of muzzling scientists at NASA, ignoring scientists at the EPA, and punishing scientists who stray from the party line at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the U.S. Geological Survey, promoting creationism in public school science classes, rejecting all scientific evidence as it relates to global warming, dismissing and restricting the scientific breakthroughs promised by stem-cell research, and generally on using bogus science to justify his political agenda.
And, finally, I think posts like Noonan’s are important to highlight the height of anti-intellectualism that the right has embraced so enthusiastically. Indeed, Peggy Noonan penned a similar piece bashing science in the Wall Street Journal just a couple of months ago. Modern science offers lessons they don’t like (biology) and truths with which they’re uncomfortable (global warming), so naturally, they lash out against the discipline and declare it “dead.” It’s a sadly predictable conservative approach to reality.
Here’s Cole with the final word:
Science is alive and well, but the GOP is not — it is currently led by hacks, frauds, religionists, self-concerned activists, and deluded fools. Bookmark this post so in the future, when asked, you can provide people with a short description of what it means to be a “Bush dead-ender.”