The Irony of Science

There should be no irony in science...but since humans are involved, I guess it is inevitable. The irony is that science has become the opposite of what many of its practitioners claim. In weird twist of fate, science, and much of the intellectual class, has become the Catholic Church during the Scientific Revolution. Corrupted by ideology, politics, and power, along with a heavy dose of self importance, science has betrayed its own foundation, rejecting the pursuit of objective truth in favor of self serving narrative.

The early Christian church was, in many ways, what it was intended to be. A group of people dedicated to the teachings of Christ and committed to living out those ideals. They were mostly autonomous and had very little concern for power or politics, except for dealing with the constant threat of persecution. That all changed when Constantine embraced Christianity and paved the way for it to become the official religion of the Roman Empire. In a few hundred years, the Christians went from being persecuted by the state, to being the official religion of the state.  One of the first thing Constantine did was to develop a dogmatic orthodoxy that all in Christendom were required to follow. The Council of Nicea, called in 325, established state accepted beliefs in terms of religious thought. Those who didn't accept the Nicene Creed were punished as heretics and expelled from the Christian community, considered a social pariah, or faced physical torture. All of a sudden, Christians, who were once persecuted by a pagan empire, were now under greater threat of the Christianized Roman government. Overtime, the church became the sole arbiter of all knowledge and information, including that of the physical world. Any contrarian ideas were immediately silenced and those who expressed them faced dire consequences.  

Some 1200 years after Rome's hijacking of Christianity, the Scientific Revolution began challenging many church positions. When scientists began to uncover truths about the physical world that did not align with the Church's stated position, persecution and excommunication followed. Amongst the most famous was Galileo who was forced to recant his findings and lie about the truths he discovered. 

The Scientific Revolution planted the seeds to the Enlightenment, a period in which people began apply Scientific reasoning to social, political, and economical issues. Many Enlightenment thinkers saw the church, and religion in general, as a deterrent to knowledge, truth, and progress. To combat this, many promoted the ideas of liberty of thought, speech, and religion. Ultimately, the Enlightenment gave birth to the liberal foundations of western democracy and culture, of which America embraced most effectively and energetically. It also ended the Church's hegemony on the intellectual and temporal thought, forcing the church to recede to matters of faith and the spiritual. 

Some 500 years after the Scientific Revolution, science is now determined to undo all that it has accomplished by embracing an intellectual paradigm that is intolerant, dogmatic, authoritarian, ideological and thus, anti-intellectual. Science and academia does not want discourse, intellectual debates, a market place of ideas. No, it wants a monopolistic control of what is accepted as scientific truth, along with the heavy hand to silence and crush those who stray from the reservation. It aims to recast history by minimizing important figures who don't align with current woke standards and maximize those who have merely deconstructed all that has been built. Instead of rolling up its sleeves and engaging in the competition of ideas with reason, logic, data, and transparency, it would rather burn heretics at the stake (figuratively, of course).

Just like the Church, science was, for many decades, a noble institution committed to its ideals and girded by institutional practices. However, science got tangled up into the political and cultural battles that often were connected to some financial component that incentivized the betrayal of those ideals and standards. Now, science, especially when it comes to gender, race, sexuality, and even climate, no longer prioritizes objective truth and empirical data analysis. Rather it filters much of its findings or its approach through a progressive woke ideology designed to promote an established dogma.

By the 16th century the church realized the need to reform itself or collapse under the weight of its own corruption. Its stench was so great that some, like Luther, left the church entirely and set up another. Those who stayed in the church also attempted to recalibrate and refocus internally by identifying specific toxic practices and committing to change them. Science is facing a similar dillema...Its stench needs addressing.