Postmodern Science and Objective Reality

POSTMODERN SCIENCE AND OBJECTIVE REALITY [Excerpts]

Once-upon-a-time, the word science referred to the scientific process: verifiable propositions, experimental procedures, and reproducible observations. [Observability, testability, repeatability, and falsifiability are the hallmarks of the scientific method.]

And today? Science may still mean that in the dictionary, but in popular culture? Not so much.

Instead, the concept of science stands in for anti-supernaturalism with a political agenda—which I assume has probably always been the case to some extent. But today’s science seems marked by a very unscientific illogical and contradictory nature exceeded only by its own level of dogma.

Some examples: The pro-abortion movement claims that science does not allow it to say that a baby in the womb is human life. Of course the baby is human, and is alive, but simply those observations are deemed “unscientific.” In fact, after Senator Marco Rubio was foolish enough to use the antiquated concept of science in this statement: “Science is settled, human life beings at conception”—the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists released a statement saying that they could not agree with Rubio, because they “approach everything from a scientific perspective.” They were fine saying that pregnancy begins with implantation, but the science is just not settled on if pregnancy and life are the same thing. Its not that they haven’t done the right research, but rather they can’t comment on the connection between human life and pregnancy because they approach everything from a “scientific perspective” (one blogger described this as “being super confused about where babies come from”).

No word on the scientific perspective on this.

Another example: AOL news used this headline: “Global warming likely to cause colder winters." The lead said, of course, that “Scientists now believe that global warming is to blame for extreme cold snaps in North America.” If scientists say so.

Which leads to the news that polar ice is actually increasing, scientists say. Which is good news according to some scientists, but bad news according to others—after all, it could break out into “global cooling” (the actual phrase used, without irony, in the International Science Times, and attributed to “scientists”).

Note the irony that this all comes seven years after “the science was settled” and the polar ice caps would likely disappear by the year 2014. Well then.

Non-Christians I know (and many Christians too) often wonder why pastors who may be otherwise respectable suddenly sound like raving, backwards luddites when it comes to “science.”

One result of our culture’s post-modernism is its entirely modern love affair with its own view of science.

http://www.worldviewweekend.com/news/article/postmodern-science-and-objective-reality

[TBC: A Catholic commentator in an August 1 Washington Post story included a quote which he characterized as containing a “hint of hyperbole.” In other words—not far from the truth. The quote states, “Something unexpected and extraordinary is happening in the Catholic Church. Pope Francis is rescuing the faith from those who hunker down in gilded cathedrals and wield doctrine like a sword. The edifice of fortress Catholicism – in which progressive Catholics, gay Catholics, Catholic women and others who love the church but often feel marginalized by the hierarchy – is starting to crumble."

As Catholicism’s traditions have always kept it from the truth of Scripture, what Francis is doing is simply making their present system more attractive to an unregenerate world. Scripture tells of an endtimes religious system that will serve the cause of the Antichrist. Francis is working to fit Catholicism fully into that role.]