If you live in a neighborhood anything like the typical suburban area in which I grew up, you have likely seen the common phenomenon of yard signs emblazoned with various progressive slogans such as “love is love”, “no human is illegal”, and “science is real” adorning the lawns of various houses. It is this last quote that I have always found rather confusing and out of place in the midst of the obviously ideological slogans promoting homosexuality and illegal immigration. Why is science being thrown in the mixer with the other progressive catchphrases?
The truth is that ours has become an era uniquely marked by political turbulence over scientific issues. As COVID still looms large over the psyche of our public health officials, policy issues over climate change, technological regulation, and bioethics will continue to play increasingly important roles in the American political scene. Yet, it is these issues that continue to polarize our society and as the yard signs demonstrate, even science itself has become a political football. In some circles, science has gained a status almost on-par of a moral code and being “anti-science” a terrible insult. I think this stems from an attempt to use science to replace the philosophical and moral vacuum that exists in our public life.
To trace the origins of the issue, namely science being miscategorized as a means of morality, we have to place the issue within the greater context of the liberal (in the classical sense) milieu in which we have been raised. As a political philosophy, classical liberalism seeks tolerance and pluralism in public life. While we all may differ in creed and confession, a liberal society places great value on the “self-evident” values we can all discern by reason that allow us to cooperate in spite of our differences. The political realm is to be religiously neutral and governed by reason alone. Science, given its use of reason and methodological naturalism (assumption of no outside supernatural interference), fits perfectly into the liberal paradigm of a neutral institution. And in fact, it is one of the glorious things in science that an experimenter achieves the same results no matter his beliefs about the divinity of Christ or the nature of evil. However, science also relies on philosophical assumptions about truth and reason (such as methodological naturalism) and the discoveries it makes also have implications for how we understand the nature of creation and the role of man himself.
With liberalism’s hesitance to make absolute moral truth claims, it is perhaps inevitable that science is dragged outside of its native domain to serve a quite foreign role as adjudicator of public policy. Perhaps the most obvious example today is COVID policy, particularly in the value of extended lockdowns. While it might be best to stay at home forever epidemiologically, directing our attention solely to the data ignores the ethical and teleological questions it poses. How much risk is worth taking to interact in-person? To what extent should we preserve life to the detriment of living it? What is the point of preserving human existence if we die anyway? To answer these, an appeal to common reason is insufficient, we need an understanding of what humans are, where we came from, and where we are going.
This brings us to the problem with the classical liberal approach: these sorts of questions demand theological and philosophical answers, not scientific ones, and this demands we bring moral reasoning squarely into the public realm. Appealing to science as a basis for action only works if we agree on the moral implications of the evidence. Thus, our approach to public policy cannot be dissociated from how we view the nature of God and the nature of man; there is no neutral ground on which to stand.
The real danger in this lionizing of science is that far from eliminating moral truth claims, it actually provides disguise for various radical ideologies. Because theology and philosophy are seldom taught to public schooled Americans and even less likely to be integrated into scientific thinking, there exists a generation of students who cannot recognize (and thus unwittingly imbibe) postmodern assumptions about reality. When these students bring these assumptions into the field of science, they believe that their beliefs are based on rationality and in accord with what is obviously true, oblivious to the philosophical underpinnings of what they believe.
For instance, biology students swallow the implications of queer gender theory being used as a treatment forgender dysmorphia hook, line, and sinker without realizing how radical the assumptions are that gender theory makes about the nature of the self. By imbedding postmodern and deconstructionist philosophical ideas within a scientific framework, activists are able to promote practices such as hormone therapy for juveniles under the guise of medical best practice. It is hard to argue effectively against this sort of Trojan horse-style propaganda since any disagreement can be framed as “anti-science” yet our hesitancy to make appeals to universal moral truth neuters our ability to attack the philosophical foundations of transgenderism.
The flip side of this coin is that those who disagree with the disguised moral implications of various issues have not been able to separate the science from the ideology. Taking the example of COVID policy again, much of the conservative right’s disagreement with lockdowns has been directed against masks, vaccines, and even the lethality of the virus itself. This is a fatal mistake, for just like those who swallow the ideological pill hidden inside the scientific candy, conservatives have missed the real problem. Not only do conservatives make themselves look foolish for buying into pseudo-science, they fail to recognize that our problem is a failure to understand the human self. If you disagree with lockdowns, do not try to play the epidemiologist; rather go after the core issue of safety and comfort being valued more than community and human interaction.
The solution to this abuse of science is to return the discussion of metaphysics to civil discourse. We should be thinking about teleology, ethics, and theology to give us answers on how to deal with a crisis such as COVID. Given the often spiteful and thoughtless content of our political discourse and intellectually impoverished educational system, I cannot see how this could be achieved on a large scale in the current climate. But perhaps those of us who are thoughtful Christians can begin by placing rightful emphasis on theology and philosophy as the centerpiece of human knowledge in our daily lives. Those of us in STEM fields can take time to read thinkers like Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas and teach our children to value these things as well. Science, for all of its glory, is dependent on metaphysics and should be treated as such. We should not let the ideologues bully us into submission with scientific Trojan horses, but thoughtful expose their assumptions. Let us not strive for mere neutrality, but rather stand boldly for what we know to be true.
The views and opinions expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the values and beliefs of Cogitare Magazine, nor of Grove City College.
