Past the Shloshim

I believe we’ve passed the shloshim (thirty days after a demise) of the above mentioned death. Throughout our long history we’ve had to grapple with many and sundry antagonists against Torah and Yiddishkeit. The influence of the Baal (an idol) lasted some 840 years. Aristotelian dogma dictated “truth” to mankind for roughly 1800 years. So science or perhaps better, “scientism,” had a relatively short reign.

A Personal Experience

I myself suffered much from the aura of science. The Seattle of my day had no day school so we went to public school and then had an hour and a half or so of Talmud Torah and then in the high school years – “yeshiva.” In public school we were constantly fed a diet of evolution in the science classes. This did not in and of itself affect me. I thought it to be ridiculous. But as we learned from the Gulf War, one not only has to be in a safe room, but the lintel, threshold and sides must also be sealed well. In my case what was seeping through those cracks was the “invincible” aura of science. Science knows what’s true and not true. It doesn’t matter what I think. They know the truth. And if they say that evolution is true, then it must be true. When I was around sixteen, I remember davening Mincha in my parents’ home when this overpowering thought hit me. (I have it in my mind that it was during the brachah of “v’lamalshinim” which would make it very apropos, but at this point, I’m not sure.) I thank Hashem that I finished davening, so overpowering was this thought. I struggled with this thought for a number of years and even for some time after I was in yeshiva till I was Boruch Hashem (thank G-d) able to get past it. It was not the “science” of evolution, of which there is none, Stephan Jay Gould notwithstanding, but the aura of science.

A Month Ago

What happened a month ago?[3] Hackers got into the computers and released thousands of emails from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, a major proponent and player in the propounding of opinions regarding climate warming due to carbon emissions. They and climate scientists in general stated that “if their recommendations are not adopted immediately, planet earth faces an irreversible, imminent catastrophe. And that is not a matter of conjecture and hypothesis, but settled science, about which there is no serious disagreement.” The release of the emails demonstrated how contrived the claims of scientific unanimity were.

Attempts to Delegitimatize

The emails revealed attempts to delegitimatize those scientists skeptical of the warming theory. “Anyone who expresses any degree of skepticism is by definition not a serious scientist.”[4]

Destruction of Raw Data

“Science depends on a willingness to continually retest hypotheses against the available data. Yet the UEA (University of East Anglia) did everything possible to prevent such testing, including destroying the raw data.” There were “revelations of some of the most prominent proponents (of the warming theory) to distort and short‑circuit the scientific process …” There’s more but this will suffice.

The Aura and the Death

There have always been finaglers in science. That is no chiddush (novelty). These were people who stood to gain fame, fortune or honors for this or that discovery. However they were always (I think) foiled when others tried to reproduce their experiments and they didn’t pan out. That was the aura of science. Nothing can be maintained as a truth unless it can similarly be reproduced with the same results by others. That’s what made science so powerful … until now.

If It Happened Now Then Perhaps …

That’s why this latest episode was such a colossal chillul Hashem, if you will, for science. It shows that indeed there can be a concerted effort and collusion of the chief proponents of a theory to foister a fraudulent and bogus deception by not releasing or destroying “inconvenient” data and to delegitimatize those who question the theory. If this has happened now, it could very well happen again in the future (when they would be more careful with their discarded emails) or in the past (before the email era). In fact it can safely be assumed that this is indeed not an actual first, just a first that was caught.

The Response

The response from this scientific community was, if anything, even more upsetting. One response was that of righteous indignation. The information was gotten through “stealing” private correspondence (through hacking). As if the hoax they were perpetrating was not a “stealing” of an infinitely greater proportion. In any case, it was all besides the point. The question wasn’t who was the boy scout of the week, but rather can the scientific community be relied upon to seek out the truth?

The Second Response

The second “response” was even more frightening. There was none. They still talked the same talk and walked the same walk as if nothing had happened. The world is warming up v’zehu (and that’s it). The whole episode was ignored. What makes this frightening is the underlying assumption that the world will forget that they had been caught with their hands in the till and still rely on them as the trustworthy scientists whom we always rely upon. The scary part is that they may be right. Just this week there was a wild-eyed statement from an “environmental activist” tying together the earthquake in Haiti to global warming!

What is of interest in this case is that there is no seemingly open motive for the falsification of evidence. There have been a number of theories as to the motives, but one has to dig somewhat. How much more so on a theory such as evolution where the motive of freedom to do whatever one wants is so much more blatant.[5]

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