[00:00:05] Speaker A: ID the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
[00:00:12] Speaker B: Welcome. It's great to be with you. This is Jay Richards of the Discovery Institute, and I'm happy to join you again in id the future. And I'm joined today by a longtime friend and colleague at the Discovery Institute, Wesley J. Smith. Wesley and I, in some ways, we sort of make up the East coast contingent of Discovery Institute. We're both in Washington, DC, and most of you listening will know exactly who Wesley J. Smith is. He is the chair and senior fellow of the center on Human Exceptionalism at Discovery Institute. He's a very frequent contributor to national Review online, and he has recently been publishing more regularly in Epoch Times. And today I want to talk to him about a great piece he had a few weeks ago in the epoch Times. It was responding actually to a tweet from the website physicsastronomy.org. And this is what the tweet said. It said, imagine a world ruled by scientists, not by politicians. Well, Wesley wrote a piece in the epoch times and he said, no, science should not rule the world. And I loved it so much, I thought, I just absolutely have to interview him for this podcast. Wesley, thanks for joining me.
[00:01:27] Speaker C: Jay, thank you very much. Good to talk with you again.
[00:01:29] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. Well, tell me, let's talk a little bit about a tweet that, of course, both of us noticed immediately. Imagine a world ruled by scientists, not by politicians, by this physics and astronomy organization, which, I mean, it sounds smart to people. I mean, the implications that society would be better off if scientists controlled public policy. I mean, scientists are tend to be smart people. You want to have smart people in charge of the country. That makes intuitive sense. But your piece is a great big, don't go there. Why do you think? What's the problem exactly?
[00:02:03] Speaker C: Well, it would be an incredibly dangerous concept because you would actually be having scientism pretending to be science.
And it would require, if you're going to have rule by scientists, it would actually require the establishment of an authoritarian technocracy because you would have the experts decide what to do and when to do it rather than engage in democratic discourse. And of course, democratic discourse requires much more than just the data, let's say scientific facts. It requires balancing competing interests. It is more of a subjective. Governance is more of a subjective approach than an objective approach. Science is an objective approach. Also. Science is a methodological, and it is a method of trying to discern facts in the world. Scientists should not have an ideology that dictates where they go with the science. And that's another problem we're beginning to see increasingly, is that many of the establishment scientific organizations and publications have become very progressive in their politics. And my fear is that if you ever had the kind of situation where scientists were in control, it would actually be ideology pretending to, to be objective data and it would just be a completely dangerous and ridiculous way to try to proceed as a society.
[00:03:28] Speaker B: Well, so is that your idea? You said actually this idea of rule by scientists, it would in fact be anti science because it conflates two different things. What do you mean by that?
[00:03:38] Speaker C: Right. Well, first off, science, of course, is a method, as I mentioned, and it has to be pursued objectively. When you begin to have a rule by scientists, you would have a situation where people would become embedded in their policy desires. And part of the problem, in fact, I think with intelligent design, you see this with regard to its challenge to neo darwinism, is that science is supposed to continually be challenged and continually be questioned.
Competing hypotheses and investigating various claims is part of what science is about.
Governance, on the other hand, is subjective. And if you wanted to pursue governance by scientists, you would actually not be doing science. And if you stop the challenge to science, even the most basic principles should be subjected to challenge to science. If information comes along that justifies it. If you start saying that this cannot be challenged because it's the science which we are seeing increasingly today in our public policy debates, you can't talk about that. Science has already decided, well, that's an anti scientific approach, because the science is never settled. The science is always subject to change based on new information.
[00:05:05] Speaker B: You truly think, obviously, in some sense, public policy people and presidents and governors, they ought to take account of scientific facts, right? I mean, of course, yeah. So clearly you're thinking that science and governing themselves are two different things. But you're not saying governors should not take account of science.
[00:05:29] Speaker C: Obviously, people who are governors are in governance, of course, should take the information obtained from scientists. But that's not all there is to making a decision.
Let's just take a look at COVID.
Scientists can tell us that it's caused by that particular virus.
Science can tell us, and continually is trying to investigate why some people get the disease more seriously than others, who's most at risk and so forth. Science may also be able to tell us the hope for benefit of, say, locking down an economy and forcing people to stay at home, that is, to try to stop the spread. But science can't weigh in balance whether the benefit supposedly obtained therefrom is better or worse. Than the costs that might be attributable to such a lockdown. For example, depression, the inability to be with your loved ones in nursing homes, the potential for suicide and opioid addiction and so forth. Those are policy issues that people who govern must weigh, because there are competing goods and there are competing bads. And you have to find ways to determine which way to go, because if you just based it on data on the virus, you might have everybody living in total isolation for a year and a half, causing incredible harm. But perhaps the virus would be controlled. But again, that's not the only thing to think about. And here's another issue. Abortion. All right, science can tell us that a gestating fetus is a human organism. It can tell us that it is human.
It may be able to tell us whether or not it can tell us that the heart is beating, or it can tell us whether brainwaves have commenced and so forth. But it can't tell us whether abortion is right or wrong. That is beyond the ken of science. That is an issue of philosophy, faith, morality, ethics, and so forth. So science provides properly understood, objective data the best that they can provide. But decisions in terms of these various public policies are often subjective. That is, what is better, what is worse? What should we give priority to? Is abortion. Abortion. You have both sides in the abortion debate. You have one side, the pro choice side, saying that the greatest good is making sure that women are able to do what they want with their bodies. And on the pro life side, you have people saying the greatest good is provided by protecting innocent human life. Well, that's not a contest or an argument that science can settle, other than telling us that, yes, the fetus that is the subject of an abortion is a nascent human life that science can tell us. It can't tell us whether killing that fetus is right or whether it's wrong, because science doesn't get into right and wrong.
[00:08:30] Speaker B: Okay? And so that's the key thing, because, you know, you were saying that, well, those questions are subjective. And I know you don't mean that, but for some people, when they hear that, they would say, well, subjective in the sense that we just sort of make up our own meaning and morality. What I take you to mean is that natural science, at least when it's doing what it's supposed to do and it's staying in its lane, can at best kind of explain and describe the natural world in the way it works. It doesn't tell us right? Like it might be able to tell you this is or is not a human being. It can't tell you whether taking a human life is right or wrong. It doesn't follow that that's not a moral truth. That is, you know, that we shouldn't take innocent human life. It's just that that's not the job of science. But of course, any public policy is going to have to deal with those profound moral questions and weigh in one way or the other.
[00:09:17] Speaker C: And when you engage in science, that's not all you engage in. Science is supposed to be controlled by ethics.
So just as an example for human research, human subject research, we have ethical rules. Now, if we want to define particular cures for particular conditions, we could take, let's just say weak and disabled people and use them as involuntary experimental subjects. We don't do that because we consider it monstrous. It's not monstrous because science says it's monstrous.
[00:09:52] Speaker B: Right.
[00:09:53] Speaker C: It's monstrous because morality says it's monstrous.
[00:09:56] Speaker B: Yeah, the moral law.
[00:09:58] Speaker C: Exactly. And, and so for science, if all you cared about was the science, there would be no reason to stop it because that would probably be the fastest way to find effective.
But we don't do that. If we wanted to drop an atom bomb on the moon, science could, I'm sure, obtain a lot of very interesting information from doing that. But we don't do that. Not because science says it's wrong, because science can't say it's wrong. Science can only say what we might, the infer what we might hope to attain, the information from such an act. Ethics says it's wrong to drop an atom bomb on the moon, but though.
[00:10:35] Speaker B: Surely far less wrong than dropping it on a city somewhere.
[00:10:38] Speaker C: Well, yeah, but science can't even really tell you that.
[00:10:41] Speaker B: No, it can't tell you that. It can tell you that possible damage it could do after the, exactly.
[00:10:46] Speaker C: But it doesnt tell you whether thats something to be a benefit or a detriment. It can just tell you what would happen.
[00:10:53] Speaker B: Well, im going to ask you the question because, of course, as you know, this is very interesting to me. I co authored this book just a few months ago, the price of panic. And the subtitle is how the tyranny of experts turned a pandemic into a catastrophe. And in the book we talk about this thing. Its not that in principle a scientist couldnt also be a politician, but this idea from the tweet that we're talking about a minute ago, imagine a world ruled by scientists, not by politicians.
Part of what worries me about that is the fact that natural science, as it's practiced and by necessity, really has to be a highly specialized discipline. And so when you're talking about scientists ruling the world, you're not talking about these great liberally educated generalists who can make this vast kind of prudential judgments across a wide range of subjects. You're more likely dealing with a hematologist or an immunologist that's going to end up trying to make decisions about public policy over which he has no jurisdiction. I mean, what about that, that kind of false expertise within a narrow subject that for a lot of people, it sort of confers credibility and authority on subjects over which that particular expert, of course, has no expertise, right.
[00:12:04] Speaker C: Well, we see, you know, that kind of expansion of supposed knowledge all the time, where a scientist who might be a great biologist, then, is asked to weigh in on the good or bad of particular issues. But look, here's what we need. We need scientists to inform government leaders, right, accurately about the facts of the natural world and to provide their best objective projections of potential benefits and consequences of pursuing various policy approaches. But the actual work of crafting laws, regulations, guidelines, etcetera, requires more, and it requires applied wisdom, morality, skill of finding compromises over competing policy constituencies and so forth. In other words, once the scientist becomes the governor, that scientist is no longer engaging in science.
That scientist is now engaging in something different, which he or she may or may not be capable of doing. Of course, many of our elected leaders are doctors. They're not engaging in the practice of medicine when they're in the Senate and voting on various rules or in committees asking questions. They may be doctors that may actually help them, particularly if they sit on a health committee and this kind of thing. But when they're in the act of being a senator or a representative, they're not in the act of practicing medicine. So they're not in the act of being involved in actual participation and application of science.
[00:13:32] Speaker B: That's. I mean, it's a key point, because we often talk about scientism and naturalism, and scientism is sort of treating science as if it is or natural science as if it's the sort of source of all knowledge and should ultimately detest of really good knowledge and expertise, when, in fact, in some ways, it's a lack of appreciation for the fact that democratically elected political leaders have their own vocation. And it is, in some ways, being able to listen to 20 different advisors who have different expertise and specialties and then actually make a prudential judgment based on that.
[00:14:07] Speaker C: That's a real, it's sausage making. Yeah, you know, it's sausage making. And you can't. There are so many various aspects that go into the most important public policies we have that if you just made it just the scientists, you would miss out on three quarters of what we have to consider before deciding which way to go.
[00:14:27] Speaker B: Absolutely. Well, what any kind of final words for. I know a lot of scientists and science professors and science educators listen to this podcast, but just any advice for them for, you know, to way to urge them to avoid this kind of, I don't know what you call it, scienceology or. Yeah, we've called imperialism.
[00:14:44] Speaker C: How about scientific, jurisdictional imperialism.
Have a little humility. I mean, all of us should have some humility when we have those kinds of responsibilities and also realize that sometimes science, what we think is the accurate scientific data, is wrong.
I think a really good example of the difference between science and scientism is the difference between genetics and eugenics.
Genetics is the science of looking at genes, how genes express how genes may affect each other in their expression, and so forth and so on, to create different organisms, and how they might control the different aspects of organismal life. Eugenics, which claimed to be scientific, was actually an ethical, or I would say immoral, but a moral claim that some people were better than other people, the fit versus the unfit. And the eugenicists decided that we should be able to take control of the human herd, if you will, the same way we might. A prized cattle herd, that is, scientists can create better strains of cattle for various purposes using various methods of animal husbandry. And the eugenicists wanted to do the same thing with the human being. They claimed, you must listen to the scientists, because the scientists will tell us that we could have a better society if we had better people. And that led to terrible despotism and authoritarianism and tyranny, the involuntary sterilization of more than 60,000 Americans based on eugenics, which turned out, of course, to be quackery, but at the time, was thought to be science. It wasn't science. So even when we think we're talking about science, oftentimes what turns out to be the general idea or the general belief system or the general expectations and acceptance of what is true in science can change. And also sometimes, as I said earlier, these days, in particular, what is claimed to be science is really ideology. And we have to have a very careful discernment there to distinguish between this is factual data that we have to apply, versus this is actually ideology pretending to be factual data.
[00:17:13] Speaker B: That's right. I like that. I think you used the phrase a minute ago, jurisdictional humility. That part of doing science well is understanding one, what it does and what it's supposed to do and also what its limits are. And I think that's, that's very often the problem, and it's certainly the problem here, this idea that we'd all be better off if, if the world were ruled by scientists rather than politicians. Whereas, you know, the, the first president and co founder of Discovery Institute, Bruce Chapman, has often said, you know, that politicians are the worst people for the jobs of politics, except for everyone else. I mean, the reality, you know, it's a vocation. I think that's important for all of us.
[00:17:48] Speaker C: And we, we also have to understand that we don't want to also reject the valuable contributions that science makes to public policy.
[00:17:57] Speaker B: Sure. Absolutely.
[00:17:58] Speaker C: And obviously, we have to have the humility to accept that sometimes the data that science presents may conflict with what we may want it to be if we're the decision maker in terms of public policy. So we need humility in all sectors, and we need various aspects, society and determining of what is right and wrong, what is true and so forth, to work together as a forest and not just be a bunch of trees standing next to each other.
[00:18:28] Speaker B: Good stuff. Wesley J. Smith of the Discovery Institute. The piece is from the epoch Times. No, science should not rule the world. Wesley, thanks so much for joining me.
[00:18:38] Speaker C: Thank you, jay.
[00:18:39] Speaker B: This is jay Richards for the Discovery Institute. And thank you for, for joining us for this discussion.
[00:18:47] Speaker A: Visit
[email protected] and intelligentdesign.org. This program is copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
