This tweet is a good reminder…
…that scientists are human too.
And if you argue that somehow the scientific method is “self-healing,” thus impervious to a systemic level of corruption, you are creating a new priestly class, ignoring the impact of outside influences, and ignoring the obvious lessons of the evidence otherwise.
“Science” (or the scientific method) itself may be “pure,” but its practitioners are not. “Christianity,” I would argue, itself is “pure.” But, how long did it take for children abused by priests (its practitioners) to get some modicum of justice? Did Christianity’s purity result in self-healing, or was protecting those evildoers institutionalized? Would anything significant have happened if outside forces hadn’t pushed the Catholic Church, ultimately in court?
You cannot tell me that a system whose practitioners often deny God is somehow more immune to humankind’s evil than one that supposedly was based on listening to a loving, Absolute Moral Authority.
Especially when current “science” appears to embrace one of the most effective corrupting forces ever created by mankind:
Politics.
Update:
Leighton Akira Woodhouse’s article, which I just found, is more eloquent and comprehensive than mine:
The New Clerisy
Faith in science is an oxymoron.
A small excerpt:
“I believe in science” has come to mean, “I do not question expert authority,” which is as antithetical to the scientific spirit as you can get. The more gravely the line is intoned, the more Orwellian it becomes.
Okay, now a longer one… 🙂
The scientific establishment, like the political establishment, is a human institution. It’s not an impartial supercomputer, or a transcendent consciousness. It’s a bunch of people subject to the same incentives and disincentives the rest of us are subject to: economic self-interest, careerism, pride and vanity, the thirst for power, fame and influence, embarrassment at admitting mistakes, intellectual laziness, inertia, and ad-hoc ethical rationalization, as well as altruism, moral purpose, and heroic inspiration. Scientific experts deserve the respect due to them by dint of their education and experience, and they deserve the skepticism due to them by dint of their existence as imperfect actors functioning in complicated and deeply flawed human networks and organizations. If you “believe in science,” you don’t bow to their authority.