Skepticism

Is skepticism good? I think so, to a degree. I think the problem is that it is acceptable and even applauded to be skeptical of faith and spirituality, especially in America today, but if anybody is skeptical about science, "Whoa, c'mon. Science is truth."

I think it is funny how so many skeptics of religion point to the example of how Galileo was condemned by the Catholic Church for saying the earth revolved around the sun. This is not to me an example of the church trying to bury science. It is an example of the belief of the day driving social and political policies. Is not this exactly what the global warming scientists are trying to do. They condemn anyone with a different scientific opinion and their position is the norm that is driving the social and political movements of our day. The massive amounts of email from the leading scientists in the Global Warming field is one thing, but recently India has been releasing news that the head of their climate research team has been using weak, at best, data from an interview, not an actual experiment, to drive their political agendas.

So what am I trying to get at? Well, basically science is the observations of men, human beings. Humans can be wrong and this needs to be a starting point for all scientific research. It is called humility. Science is observation and observations can be tainted by so many different factors. This does not mean that science is wrong. Far from it. It just means that if you put your faith in science, and it is a faith, then you are putting your beliefs in the hands of men who screw things up. Men who have political agendas. Men who will condemn others who disagree with them.

I think we do ourselves a disservice by quickly putting people into certain analogous relationships and do not put everything in the proper context. I am not defending those in the church who condemned Galileo, but they were speaking for God. They were speaking from the place of political dominance. The Bible does not speak of whether or not the earth is the center of the universe, or if the sun is the center of the universe, or if there are other planets with life in the universe for one simple reason: it is not important to the message. The message is about how much God loves us, not about how God made us the center of the universe and told us that we are the only thing that matters or that the Pope should be the governor of the World.

So who has the social and political dominance now? Well, that can be a hard thing to tie down, but in the area of climate science it is the Global Warming crowd who say they have a consensus. Why wouldn't they want a Galileo to set them free to the realities of science if theirs was wrong. Maybe they just don't have the correct tools like scientists before Galileo, or maybe they want to maintain their dominance like the Heliocentrists in the 17th century.

Either way, if you are going to be skeptical of religion then you should be equally skeptical of science. Not because of science itself, for it is just an idea, but of the men who use, and abuse, it.