Agenda-Driven science

Recently you have probably heard the swine flu described in terms of deaths in Mexico, followed closely by words like “pandemic” and “quarantine.” Last time I heard, those deaths were in two digits. Any deaths are of course tragic, but for years the average lives lost to flu in the United States alone exceed 36,000. The world’s experience with swine flu hardly qualifies as a “pandemic.” As a matter of fact, people do not normally get swine flu. What people do normally get, however, is hype from the media. They got to keep you watching!
The part that amazes me is that it works. We do not get our medical information from science; we get it from popular media. Unfortunately we don’t even get most of what we call science from science. We believe and make our judgments based on a kind of “politically correct” science. By “politically correct,” I mean facts filtered and presented to the masses based on some group’s agenda. It is emotionally charged for some predetermined conclusion or action. I’m not even sure there is such thing as unbiased science, but I am sure we can do better. Does it matter? How about spending billions on finding a cure for a disease that is behaviorally correctable, while the number one killer, heart disease, receives about one eighth the funding?
Is there an agenda behind most of what we hear on global warming? I’ve seen the markers in Alaska where the glaciers once reached. No one doubts that the world is warmer than it was 200 years ago, but that was during what is now known as the “little ice age.” The earth’s temperature has fluctuated warmer and cooler as far as we can tell for all of recorded history–long before industrial pollution was invented. The cause of climate change is, to say the least, controversial. The leap that man is responsible is vanity. That we are thus able to fix it is arrogance. “You really can’t settle the issue by more heated debate…You need experimental data.”
But it sells newspapers, and it justifies research grants. It doesn’t boost either to point out that 95% of greenhouse gas is water vapor, or that CO2 is harmless to animals and essential for plants.
All my ranting so far is really about one thing: Our lives are so filled with other things, and we are so dependent on the digestion of ideas by other people, that we are suckers for someone else’s agenda. Could it be true of other “science”? Are the masses buying evolution because the evidence is so irrefutable, or could it be that the fit with secularism and research grants is not coincidental? After all, we must discover our self-made roots and whether other life has evolved out there. It’s too coincidental not to be questioned.

This entry was posted on May 7, 2009 at 8:10 am and is filed under Culture & society, Politics, History, Science and faith. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.