When You Wish Upon the Pinhole in the Sackcloth which Shields Heaven from Our Sight...

God is Dead. Nietzsche is Dead. Now this:

"Not too long ago the blogosphere was rocking with the great debate of Intelligent Design vs Darwinism. It was an interesting debate, though I doubt much that anyone had the mind changed. Be that as it may, the whole thing got me thinking, and today ii (sic) occured 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 the foundations of science - and now it has. Science is now so intertwined with myth and political gamesmanship that whatever judgements 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.

Why did science stray from the path of truth? I think it is because we ceased educating the men of science with a knowledge of religion - a knowledge, that is, of genuine truth, genuine reason, and the relationship of man to creation, and his Creator. When science became a narrowly forcused search for something immediately practical, it was bound to eventually be hijacked by people who wanted to use the cover of science for very impractical efforts. Keep in mind that communism, once upon a time, was considered irrefutable because it was supposedly hard-nosed science about the human condition and destiny - the crackpot theories of an out of touch German intellectual were peddled as if they were on par with the theory of gravity.

The truth will out - and that means that the quest for the truth will continue, and that will mean that efforts in science will continue to yield results...but the Age of Science is over, killed off by lies. I don't regret its passing - hopefully we will soon start to really educate people, so that even as they pursue science, they keep it in perspective, and in relation to the real human condition."

It would seem that we are entering a Post Science/Post Reason era. By implication, I suppose we need to respect, nay, exalt Flat Earthers, Holocaust Deniers and folks who think the Moon Landing took place in Nevada.

It's interesting to me that we have entered a millenial malaise in which feelings and belief, however ridiculous, are more important that verifiable theory vis a vis phenomenon. This seems to be a weird offshoot of Post Modernism, or rather its logical conclusion. It seems bizarre that the kind of theoretical work which yielded the variable sign, difference, etc. has become an excuse to deny the undeniable.

America was made with science and innovation: We owe everything to it. So it makes me shudder with dread that so many are now denying it, declaring it dead?

Our failure to innovate has created chaos in our manufacturing sector and our educational institutions. As a corollary, we now held hostage by an anti intellectual auto de fay, wringing confessions out of the apostates who dare to think science is the future because we owe everything to it. I mean, as I light another Camel, a primitive science made it possible for us to tame fire, which made it possible to grow crops and build cities, which made it possible...down the line, to blog.

If there is any humor in this, I suppose it would be the supremacy of feelings. There was a time when "feelings" were for pussy, tree hugging leftists like myself. Now, we are captives to "feelings", the "feelings of others", who, while proclaiming the subjectivity of everything seek to make their "feelings" objective reality.

Hincty, no?