Faith in science? | New York Post.
In fact, given that Americans have grown broadly more skeptical of institutions in general, it’s not surprising that conservatives are more skeptical of scientific institutions than they were almost 40 years ago. What’s surprising is that liberals have grown less skeptical over the same period. (Perhaps because scientific institutions have been telling them things they want to hear?)
Regardless, while one should trust science as a method — honestly done, science remains the best way at getting to the truth on a wide range of factual matters — there’s no particular reason why one should trust scientists and especially no particular reason why one should trust the people running scientific institutions, who often aren’t scientists themselves.
In fact, the very core of the scientific method is supposed to be skepticism. We accept arguments not because they come from people in authority but because they can be proven correct — in independent experiments by independent experimenters. If you make a claim that can’t be proven false in an independent experiment, you’re not really making a scientific claim at all.
And saying, “trust us,” while denouncing skeptics as — horror of horrors — “skeptics” doesn’t count as science, either, even if it comes from someone with a doctorate and a lab coat. (emphasis added)
After a century of destructive and false scientific fads — ranging from eugenics to Paul Ehrlich’s “population bomb” scaremongering, among many others — the American public could probably do with more skepticism, not less.
And from nobel prize winning physicist Richard Feynman:
Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.
The climate change/global warming crowd would do well to take a step back and ask if their zealotry has any relationship to science.
h/t to Instapundit for the first article.
Yep. This is what I’ve been trying to tell people. Unfortunately, if I referred those who believe otherwise to this article I’m pretty sure they’d dismiss it as the rantings of a conservative rag, and that’s all they’d think about it.
I came to the conclusion that there are certain people who have a religious faith in certain leaders, and they believe their job is to merely listen and follow, though they will swear up and down that they’re not doing this. They have misidentified their faith with powerful principles, which they do not apply on the principle that rational thought is akin to a hate crime, and is their enemy.