Science, It's Magic and The Tragedy of Climate Change Denial

This is another post in response to that most potent and widespread of superstitions current today, that science is some kind of disembodied, natural phenomenon, some process of nature unencumbered by the processes of human minds instead of science being a product of intentional human invention, its invention, documentable in history.  Which is a superstition most strongly held by atheists, as I was rather astonished to discover in my interactions with large numbers of atheists online in more than ten years, now.  Though it is held, usually to a lesser extent, even among non-atheists.

Just where they believe science resides, if not in human minds, is a good question to ask them.  It's as if they believe in some Scientific Olympus which, though it must be physical, as all things in their Cosmos must be,  doesn't seem to have a determinable location in space and time.  They would seem to hold that science, comprised of knowledge and methods, would have to preceded the human minds in which those make their only known appearance in the world. The alternative to an eternally existing "thing" that is "science" which is disembodied would be what is, in fact, the case that it is a human invention subject to ALL OF THE FALLIBILITY of human minds, the most innocent to the most intolerably  self-interested.   And also to such things as attention lapses and lapses in judgement.

But that fact would seem to be the most intolerable to just those people who make the greatest pretense of dispassionate objectivity, many of those people who have worked in the sciences.  But the most passionate of believers in that romantic, fantastic and mythic thing they call "science" are people who know absolutely nothing about science that they didn't absorb through cable TV, Hollywood movies, Star Trek reruns and the work of Penn and Teller, James Randi, and to throw in a bit more of non-self reflective irony,  "The Myth Busters".

To put it plainly, for many millions of people, even after half a century of the collective action of entities such as The National Academy of Science, The National Science Foundation, The American Association for the Advancement of Science .... Americans, EVEN THOSE WHO ARE THE OFFICIAL SUPPORTERS OF SCIENCE, hold the belief that science is some magical entity that comprises absolute truth, proven and entirely reliable and, perhaps most ironic of all, durable for all time.  That even as the more informed of them will also claim to believe that all of the claims of science are automatically to be questioned and tested (HA!) and to be susceptible to constant falsification and overturning.   Apparently they hold that proof both does and does not produce reliable information that can and cannot be safely used to make predictions about outcomes.

And it is what only the most informed of the jr.  sci-guys who have that level of awareness of the matter.  For most of them, at least among online atheists,  their conception of science doesn't seem to rise above the level of fandom in sports.   I've had minor brawls with two of those in two different places in the last two days.

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The fact that even scientists who have an acknowledged expertise in their specialty have no choice but to accept the conclusions their colleagues reach on faith is something I've brought up before.   There simply is not enough time in the life time of even the greatest of minds to master the mathematics and science to have a universal grasp of "science", considering what is held to comprise that area of human knowledge.   And, as even some mathematicians and scientists will admit,  they are often as at sea when confronted with the conclusions their colleagues make in areas outside of their field off expertise as a non-mathematician or scientist.  They might know about as much about that as someone who can locate a country or city on a map off the world will know about the place the name on the paper is supposed to represent.

All of that must be taken on faith that the person or group of researchers making the claims have practiced sufficient rigor and care and that many other ideas which went into their conclusions, but which they, themselves didn't have the time or resources to rigorously investigate, are correct.   In some areas of science, often those dealing with very simple, non-complex objects and phenomena*, the structure and bonding of chemicals, the simple objects studied by physics, perhaps the total confidence in the reliability of those assertions is highly justified.  Though the assertion that those things and their motions and movements and interactions are completely known is never fully justified because that is limited by the aspects of those that are studied.  Human interest and what the time and resources of scientists choose to study about them is relevant to the consideration of the completeness of what is known about them.  As well, the limits of insight, the blinding effects of academic training,  if you will the culture current within the colleagues of the scientist, and even such things as the gender bias of the scientist is also relevant to how reliable and complete the commonly held body of knowledge called "science" is at any one time.

As the phenomena and objects studied become more complex, such as in living organisms, the reliability and completeness of what is said about them must diminish.  If it is impossible to completely know an electron, one of the most reliable of scientific discoveries of the past century, then the uncertainty and so unreliability of what is said about more complicated objects, comprised of larger collections of only partially understood objects must grow.   Yet scientists come up with some reliable statements about living organisms which, statistically, hold true as a trend in large numbers of organisms and instances, though not in all of them.  But there is a limit as to what we should put our faith in when assertions are made about organisms.  The wild swings in the field of nutrition science is a good sign that the claims of nutritionists to the faithful belief in what they assert are not justified.  And the wild swings in the quasi-science of nutrition are nothing as compared to those in the attempts to treat behavior and thought in animals.  In no area of what can be passed off as science is it more obvious that the claims of reliable knowledge unjustified.  And that is when those are not a demonstrable fraud.

The fault for a lot of this problem comes from scientists who oversell what they do, often for no better reason than that they enjoy the prestige and respect given to them.   In many cases, when their science has been profitable for the military-industrial complex, the status of science also figures into their wealth in the most self-interested way.   When you mix in other aspects of business, which hires putative scientists to tell them how to cheat and gull people, starting with Sigmund Freud's nephew, Edward Bernays,  the alleged quest for reliable truth obviously turns in on itself.    That psychology and its allies were ever included under the name of science is something like proof that the naive faith that science is as rigorous or interested in the truth is misplaced.  Frankly, I think that was a matter of wishful thinking and academic politics and nothing more elevated or idealistic than that.

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The greatest tragedy of science, today, isn't that lots of people don't believe in evolution.  The greatest tragedy is that, with all its faults, we need science to save ourselves from ourselves and from the work of scientists.   The general predictions of climate change science are manifest all around us, even as detailed descriptions with it are not commonly agreed to or complete.   The climate system of Earth is an extremely complex, dynamically changing "thing" and its study is bound to consist of ideas of greatly varying reliability.  That it has been attacked by the entirely self-interested oil, gas, coal and other industries, using the purchased "reliability" of people with PhDs and even careers in science to discredit climate scientists may well be a product of the corruption that scientists enjoy no less than any other humans involved in any other area of activity.   It is a tragedy that the overselling of science might have contributed to the failure of science in human life just when our existence as a species on a livable planet is most at risk.   But it was a tragedy which is brought to us by the pretense of the kind that I described above and by the failure of those who are in the best position to disabuse people of that pretense to tell the truth.


*  It's possible that even what we consider to be very simple objects and phenomena have far more complexity than can be handled with science, in which case the range of interest in dealing with those is relevant to the consideration of reliability or completeness of what science can say about them.