“Mike Pence literally does not believe in science. It is utterly irresponsible to put him in charge of US coronavirus response as the world sits on the cusp of a pandemic.”
Believe the Bible? Then shut your deplorable, science denying mouth! That’s what our friends on the progressive left think. Of course, these also are the same folks who will tell you with a straight face that men can become women, that women can become men, and that there are more genders than Heinz has varieties of ketchup, all which flies in the face of science, the very thing they claim as their source of truth. But in the minds of the Marxists like Ocasio-Cortez, Christians are science denying Luddites, while they are paragons of scientific rigor.
Not that the secular left’s intolerance is at all surprising. They’ve made clear their hatred of Christians for years, decades really. Maybe even longer.
But while one would expect those whose god is government to dislike and hate those who worship the Lord, what this author finds somewhat surprising is the crushing confidence they have in the rightness, and righteousness, of their arguments.
In the quote above, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez makes it very clear that she thinks Mike Pence, and by extension, Evangelicals in general have no place in making decisions that involve science. This isn’t the only time she’s made an assertion of this sort either.
In a recent Twitter exchange with Senator Ted Cruz, Ocasio-Cortez had this to say, “I’m surprised you’re asking about chromosomes given that you don’t even believe in evolution.”
Now she certainly is confident in her reply to Ted Cruz. But coming from someone who confidently claimed to have read the works of famed economist Milton Keynes – she conflated John Maynard Keynes with Milton Friedman – perhaps her argument isn’t as airtight as she’d like you to believe.
In truth, her argument is far from airtight. In the first place, Ted Cruz asked her a question, which she completely ignored, preferring instead to make irrelevant comments about some science fair award she won and then erroneously supposing that one must believe in evolution to ask a question about chromosomes.
But it doesn’t follow that one must be a Christ-denying Darwinist to ask a question about chromosomes or to understand the scientific opinion concerning them. As a Christian one is well positioned to do this. In fact, believing the Bible, and specifically that God made all things of nothing, by the Word of his power, in the space of six days, and all very good, is the only intellectually defensible basis for doing real science, for it presupposes the existence of a logical universe created by a logical God. Christians do not deny science, but they do deny scientism, the idea that science discovers truth.
Given her mindset, it should come as no surprise that Ocasio-Cortez also opposes President Trump’s appointment of Vice President Mike Pence to head up the administration’s coronavirus response. In the Tweet quoted at the top of this post, she wrote in full, “Mike Pence literally does not believe in science. It is utterly irresponsible to put him in charge of U.S. coronavirus response as the world sits on the cusp of a pandemic. This decision could cost people their lives. Pence’s past decisions already have.”
Now this is certainly a curious argument. In the first place, she claims that Mike Pence “literally does not believe in science.” It’s not clear to this author what she means by this. Is she saying that Mike Pence sees science as having no value? If so, she has made a blunder common among unbelievers in supposing that one cannot, at the same time, believe the Word of God and have any appreciation for science. This author knows not one single Christian who denies that science has contributed much toward making our lives better. Everything from electricity, to the internet to modern dentistry, has helped mankind carry out what some call the cultural mandate, God’s command to Adam and Eve to “be fruitful and multiply, to fill the earth and subdue it.” In that sense, not only do Christians “literally believe” in science, but they themselves often have been at the forefront of scientific and technological development.
But while Christians value science and the benefits it can bring, they do not believe that science discovers truth. Science is all about opinion. Noted philosopher of science Karl Popper considered science to be a matter of conjectures – conjecture is Latin for “guess” – and refutations of conjectures. And while some scientific guesses are useful, this is not the same thing as truth. Knowledge is justified true belief. But science, based as it is on a logical fallacy, never furnishes us with knowledge. The best a scientist can do is to develop useful opinions, which likely will be overturned in the future by new scientific opinions. Contrary to what the apostles of climate change would like you to believe, the science is never settled.
It may come as a surprise to some to hear that science does not furnish us with truth, but with opinion only. Yet even philosophers of science will tell you that. Karl Popper, cited above, is one such individual. Another well-known figure from the 20th century, Bertrand Russell, made a similar point. Russell, in fact, pointed out two logical errors in the scientific method. One was the fallacy of induction.
Bertrand Russell was an English mathematician and philosopher, and he also understood some of the limitations of scientific method. By limitations I do not mean to imply that science is capable of discovering some truths but not others, that through science we can discover truths of astronomy, physics, or botany, but that we must rely on the Bible for theology. That is a fundamentally wrong view of the limitations of science, and Russell had no such delusions about science. Science is based on observation and experiment. But induction, Russell admitted a little reluctantly, “remains an unsolved problem of logic.” Put more bluntly, induction is a logical fallacy. Just because one observes a thousand white swans, one cannot conclude that all swans are white. Number 1001 may be black. Just because the Sun has come up every morning for the past one hundred years does not imply that it will come up tomorrow. Or, to give you a more theological example, non-Christian archaeologists used to claim that there was no evidence whatsoever for the existence of the Hittite nation, and therefore the Bible must be mistaken. Today there are more Hittite documents in our museums than the archaeologists have had time to translate. Induction is always fallacious, yet science is based on induction (John W. Robbins, “The Scientist as Evangelist,” 1986).
A second logical fallacy of science is that of asserting the consequent.
A second problem with science that Russell saw is the problem of experimentation. Science proceeds by testing hypotheses through experiments. From a hypothesis a scientist deduces that if X is done, Y will occur. He then proceeds to perform an experiment; Y occurs; and therefore, he concludes, the hypothesis is confirmed. This form of argument is another logical fallacy, and all laboratory experimentation commits this fallacy. Its formal name is asserting the consequent: If p, then q; q; therefore p. If Einstein’s theory of relativity is true, then light will bend in the presence of massive objects; light bends passing the Sun; therefore Einstein’s theory of relativity is true. Or to put it less scientifically, if it is raining, the streets are wet; the streets are wet; therefore, it is raining. Russell wrote:
All inductive arguments in the last resort reduce themselves to the following form: “If this is true, that is true: now that is true, therefore this is true.” This argument is, of course, formally fallacious. Suppose I were to say: “If bread is a stone and stones are nourishing, then this bread will nourish me; now this bread does nourish me; therefore it is a stone, and stones are nourishing.” If I were to advance such an argument, I should certainly be thought foolish, yet it would not be fundamentally different from the arguments upon which all scientific laws are based (Robbins).
Perhaps the best retort Christians can make to Ocasio-Cortez is to call her and others of her ilk “logic deniers.”
Another recent attack on Christians in public office came from Libertarian writer Eric Margolis. Mr. Margolis took umbrage that Mike Pence was charged by Donald Trump with heading up the federal government’s response to the coronavirus outbreak, arguing that Vice-President Pence was unqualified for this position because he believes the Bible. As Margolis put it, “VP Mike Pence, who believes in Adam and Eve and Noah’s Ark, was put in charge of combating the new virus.” So for Margolis, if you take God at this word, then you have no place heading up a virus task force. Given that one could use this same argument to oppose Christians in any sort of governmental position – Why, Mike Pence believes in the Ten Commandments, which colors his view of the law, therefore, he has no business serving in Congress, as a governor, or as a Vice-President, all which positions require him to make or to execute laws! – one wonders whether Margolis sees any appropriate role at all for Christians in government service.
This is a curious mindset. After all, it’s not Christians who were responsible for the mass murders by government in the 20th century. It was the communists and fascists who sacrificed hecatombs of innocent men, women and children on the altars of their false gods. It is not Christian hands that are bloodied with millions of murders of the unborn, but those of unbelieving progressives, feminists and socialists.
It was the widespread preaching of, and belief in, the Gospel of Jesus Christ by the Reformation that put an end to the injustice and oppression in the countries to which it came and created a whole new civilization which we call the West. It wasn’t unbelievers, socialists and progressives who did these works, it was Christians. And yet Ocasio-Cortez and Margolis think them stupid and unfit for public office?
Remarkable.
Lux Lucet 
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