This ignorance of science, flecked with outright hostility, is worth pondering at a moment when three of the nation's most contentious political issues - global warming, stem-cell research and the teaching of intelligent design - are scientific in character. One reason that has been cited for the dislike of science is that it is "irresistible" - that its influence tends to overwhelm and drive out competing values and authorities. But the Bush administration seems all too successful in resisting it. Time after time, critics say, the administration has manipulated and suppressed scientific findings for political reasons.
In rationalizing his opposition to the creation of new embryonic stem-cell lines, for example, the president informed the public that existing lines would be sufficient for medical purposes - a claim that left researchers flabbergasted and proved to be wildly off the mark. On the issue of climate change, American inaction on curbing greenhouse gas emissions is defended on the grounds that there is still some uncertainty about the magnitude and causes of global warming. Administration allies have even maligned the motives of climate researchers, arguing that their "alarmist" predictions are aimed at ensuring a steady flow of scientific grant money - and conveniently overlooking the fact that many global-warming skeptics are themselves financed by the energy industry. (As Richard Posner has observed, the industry with the keenest financial interest in getting climate change right - the insurance industry - is taking global warming very seriously, indeed.)
Are we to conclude that the Bush administration is anti-science? Not necessarily. Its selective aversion to scientific evidence may be more strategic than philosophical. Perhaps the administration accepts the authority of science but has a scheme for reckoning costs and benefits that it is not entirely candid about - a scheme in which, say, the next quarter's corporate profits outweigh rising sea levels or third world drought a half-century hence. When it comes to science, a cynic might remark, there is little point in "speaking truth to power": power already knows the truth.
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Vaclav Havel once observed, in a transport of anti-science afflatus, that "Modern science. . .abolishes as mere fiction the innermost foundations of our natural world: it kills God and takes his place on the vacant throne, so henceforth it would be science that would hold the order of being in its hand as its sole legitimate guardian and so be the legitimate arbiter of all relevant truth." So what are the options for someone who is determined to resist this usurping arbiter? One of them is to insist that science can't possibly tell the whole story: by limiting itself to "natural" explanations, it blinds itself to the supernatural order that gives meaning to the universe. The problem is that no one has ever shown how supernatural causes can be accommodated by the scientific method, which relies on testability to produce consensus.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/11/magazine/11wwln_lead.html