Leaving Science Behind?

I love science of all sorts.  Physics, chemistry, biology, they all just hold so much appeal to me.  But I have some major issues with the way that modern science is taught and perpetuated through research.  This came home to be roughly two years ago when I read a book called Kicking the Sacred Cow by James P. Hogan.  In it Hogan gives several case studies of how modern science has gone awry.  Everything from the misapplication of science, to the denial of valid scientific theory because it goes against the zeitgeist, to the denial of science because to it admit it would cause the loss of funding.

Most impressive of the case studies he gives, though, is that of Immanuel Velikovsky, an independent scholar who first published in the 1950s.  Velikovsky first started doing research to discover why an event as important as the Biblical Exodus could not be discovered in any Egyptian papyri from the time period.  After exhaustive study he decided that the timeline set out by the scholars of the time was out of whack.  His examinations seemed to indicate that there was plenty of evidence for the Exodus from Egyptian sources, it was just that the papyri that they were in had all been dated much earlier than they really were.  By shifting these papyri back to the time frame of the Exodus and adjusting the subsequent papyri to match, he discovered that the Exodus was described in detail and that historical events mentioned in the Bible matched up with the historical events recorded in the papyri until the time of Solomon.

Velikovsky also became a proponent of catastrophism, which is the belief that the earth is changed and affected not by slow change over eons of time, but by rapid bursts of change brought on by natural catastrophes.  This was all a blatant refusal to believe the accepted scientific thought of the time, and it earned Velikovsky the hatred of his fellow academics.  For the next two decades Velikovsky fought to have his theories expressed and accepted by mainstream science, but he met with unilateral resistance in spite of the fact that many of his theories were proven by science to be true and are currently accepted by scientists today. An example, catastrophism is still not widely accepted, but it has begun to be seen as an acceptable theory in light of evolutionary having to adopt punctuated equilibrium and the scientific study of major catastrophes rapidly changing the world around us (Mount Saint Helens eruption as an example). Or, as another example, Velikovsky predicted that Venus was a hot ball of rock covered by thick cloud cover because of it's hostile atmosphere.  Scientists at the time held that Venus was a habitable planet that was shrouded in clouds because its atmosphere produced massive amounts of rain (as an illustration of this see Ray Bradbury's book The Illustrated Man where he has a short story that deals with this theory).  Guess who's been proven right?

I said all that to get to this point - people are beginning to become distrustful of mainstream science and it's alarming the scientists, but I think it's great.  There was a video recently on a technology blog I frequent that had a scientist expressing his concern that people no longer trust scientists and that it's going to lead to a second dark age because scientific progress will cease.  I cry Bull on that statement!  Lest he forget, modern science was born of men questioning the establishment and seeking to discover the truths behind the universe on their own.  There was a time not that long ago that for a man to blindly accept what was given to him by the leading minds without questioning it would have been unacceptable. 

Fundamentally, it comes back to the fact that we are called to evaluate all doctrines, thoughts, and ideas in light of the Bible and to not blindly accept that which is given to us by the world.  To accept an idea without evaluating it to see how it will effect our worldview is paramount to spiritual suicide and must be guarded against by all means necessary.