In God We Trust

As the debate on climate change took an interesting turn this week, I have been fascinated how quickly science has been left behind and the adherents to the Church of Man-made Global Warming have marched undauntedly forward, preparing to issue several edicts from the Council of Copenhagen. How they could do that gives us insight into human nature. Since Liberalism is a result of human nature and not actual logic, a dissection of recent events gives us a deeper understanding of the how we get not just “Cap and Tax” but why Liberals still pursue insane policies such as Obamacare and deficit spending in the face of high unemployment.

First we need to delineate between science and religion and figure out what their roles in society are. Both seek to get at the truth but both have entirely different approaches. Our founding fathers fostered science but were also men of deep religious convictions.

Science gets at the truth incrementally through human experience and is bound only by our intellect, curiosity and physical boundaries. Science exists in four tiers, each built upon the one below in a pyramid structure. At its base is the Science of Reason, mathematics. Next are the Empirical Sciences, physics and chemistry. They use observation to explain the world. The third tier has the Sciences of Extrapolation. Here, you cannot observe actual phenomena but you can observe the results and make conclusions base on that. Here you find such things as biology, archeology and geology. The last level contains the Derived Sciences, based on the previous three. Here are the “Is-too-a-science” disciplines such as psychology and sociology. Two fundamental rules exist here. First your theories cannot contradict theories of a science on the lower tier. Doing so incurs the responsibility of reworking the theory of the lower tier as well. Second, all data is forever subject to review, reinterpretation, reproduction but not refutation.

Religion gets at the truth from using another approach. It relies on the Deity (God) revealing itself. It can take you beyond the realm of human understanding but comes in so many stripes that we are, at present, unable to share it as a common experience. Religious organizations set their own rules of how you reach the truth. Sometimes certain truths are beyond reproach and questioning them can set you outside the group. If, for example, you do not belief that Jesus was the son of God, this may place you outside Christianity, at least as far as self-identified Christians are concerned. Although religion is not science, it can provide a rich, rewarding aspect to the lives of those choosing to pursue it.

Because religion and science aim for the same goal, you think they might complement each other. History, however, is replete with clashes. In medieval Europe, the church wielded direct political power and Copernicus found himself in 16th-century Italy under threat of excommunication until he recanted his theory that the earth went around with the sun. American colonists fled the motherland to escape imprisonment when they found their conscience at odds with the monarch who was also the head of the church. While religion can be life enriching, theocracies are not. Our founding fathers enshrined religious freedom in the First Amendment but placed religious organization outside direct government control and out of direct political power.

Now along comes Global Warming. It may have started as a scientific approach to explain the data but at some point the data was refuted, refitted and ultimately refused. This violates the second law of science as stated above. Since the data cannot be reviewed, all conclusions based on it pass out of the realm of science. So the question of whether there is man-made global warming goes back to being unanswered. If the belief in it persists, it must live on as a religion, not as a science. And live it has. It has placed its doctrines beyond reproach, distained its non-believers as Global-Warming deniers, and persecuted its heretical detractors as if they were Copernicus himself. While data comes showing the earth has cooled precipitously over the last decade, one true believer decried the data as a travesty. Another declares this is just a temporary break from global warming. Did God reveal to him that we will begin warming again in the future, because science has not.

So why do they march to Copenhagen as if nothing happened? Humans do not give up deeply held beliefs easily. Although religion has found a way to exist on a planet that orbits the sun, Copernicus was not formally exonerated by his church until the 1980s. It is not unprecedented that science has morphed into religion while claiming it is still a science. Darwin built his Religion of Evolution based on the doctrine that there is no god. It started as a science but now violates the Second Law of Thermodynamic (from chemistry and physics, second tier) and would need trillion, not merely billions of years to occur according to statics (from mathematics, first tier). Its predecessor theory, the Disuse Theory, said that animals changed because appendages that were not used discontinued in subsequent generations. In a famous experiment, after cutting off the tails of several generations of mice, subsequent generations of mice were still being born with tails. This led to a rejection of the theory. But wait, they were also still giving birth to mice. Would this not also refute evolution? No, because evolution is in keeping with the fundamental anti-deistic doctrine (You don’t need a higher being manipulating the biosphere, like chopping of tails). Intelligent design, however, is heretical at its core to the atheists of Darwin’s church, even if it also explains the data. I do not necessarily endorse intelligent design because it is too often placed within Christian dogma and placed outside scientific review but when the failings of Evolution are pointed out, adherents still cling to it, fearing a replacement theory may invoke an antithetical belief in God. And the punishment of Evolution heretics rivals that of the Spanish Inquisition.

The human ability for fervor surrounding deeply-held beliefs, religious or otherwise, is undeniable. People can continue on in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary. For example, the Senate worked this weekend to pass a healthcare bill. Harkin of Iowa declared that we have to do this because that is what the American people demand even though all polls show the opposite to be true. Tax cuts and decreased regulation have been shown to spur job growth but Obama acts like wild government borrowing, increased taxes and legislative chaos are the keys even as unemployment has rocketed past 10 percent. This because the Keynesian pinhead of liberal academia told him it was a good idea. Human fervor can be enhanced when, what Covey called the bread bowl, is threatened. Entire businesses and careers are in invested in Global Warming, Evolution, and Keynesian dogma. People make their living based on the supposition that these theories are true and you would have better luck getting the Pope to give up Catholicism than getting these people to reexamine their beliefs. Liberals in Congress are threatened with job losses by next year’s election and want to extend their power over us by controlling our health care. That way they can also make up stuff about what Republicans want to do it like they make up stuff about Medicare.

Now I do not mind that people have their beliefs but when they find their way into public policy, it is fair game to challenge them. And when they unilaterally declare that the debate is over, I get very suspicious that a religion, not a science, is being crammed down my throat. Furthermore, if you are not going to provide government funding for my religion to send out missionaries, why should I pay for Obama to go to Copenhagen? If the government is not going to pay to build churches, why should we pay for Cap and Trade?

So if I do not believe in Global Warming, Evolution or Keynesian Economics, you can call me a Global Warming denier, a religious zealot and a racist; I don’t care. But stop pretending you are scientists, ok? Remember, “In God we trust”, everyone else must bring data.