THE WORSHIP OF SCIENCE GONE AWRY
. By Yonoson Rosenblum | MARCH 3, 2021The current pandemic is likely the result of science gone mad
WE LIVE in a science-driven society, and all educated people profess to "believe" in science. The most reassuring four words in English are, "Science says, 'Do this.' " But what happens when scientists are contradicting themselves or other scientists? Since the beginning of the pandemic, WHO first told us the fatality rate was 3.4 percent, which turned out to be 0.4 percent. It advised against shutting off air travel from Wuhan, even as China had done so internally. It proclaimed masks to be pointless, even as it was contradicting itself by saying that they must be saved for emergency medical personnel. It strongly advocated for lockdowns, until changing course, upon recognizing that they might well lead to a doubling of world poverty and child malnutrition.
It is no exaggeration to suggest that tens of thousands of lives in the
US alone might have been lost because Dr. Fauci dismissed as worthless
all early intervention treatments — hydroxychloroquine, Ivermectin,
blood plasma extracted from healed patients — as not supported by RCTs.
As a result, physicians were left with nothing to treat early stages of
the disease, even when the proposed remedies were cheap, repurposed
generic drugs, whose safety record had been studied for decades in
millions of patients....
http://www.jewishmediaresources.com/2096/the-worship-of-science-gone-awry
Science: The Gold Standard of Truth
What is truth? You can speak of moral truths and aesthetic truths, but I’m not concerned with those here, important as they may be. By truth I shall mean the kind of truth that a commission of inquiry or a jury trial is designed to establish. I hold the view that scientific truth is of this commonsense kind, although the methods of science may depart from common sense, and its truths may even offend it.
Commissions of inquiry may fail, but we assume a truth is lurking there even if we don’t have enough evidence. Juries sometimes get it wrong, and falsehoods are often sincerely believed. Scientists, too, can make mistakes and publish erroneous conclusions. That’s all regrettable but not deeply sinister. What is profoundly troubling, however, is any wanton attack on truth itself: the value of truth, the very existence of truth. This is what concerns me here.
Some of what I have claimed here about scientific truth may come across
as arrogant. So might my disparagement of certain schools of philosophy.
Science really does know a lot about what is true, and we do have
methods in place for finding out a lot more. We should not be reticent
about that. But science is also humble. We may know what we know, but we
also know what we don’t know. Scientists love not knowing because they
can go to work on it. The history of science’s increasing knowledge,
especially during the past four centuries, is a spectacular cascade of
truths following one on the other. We may choose to call it a cumulative
increase in the number of truths that we know. Or we can tip our hat to
(a better class of) philosophers and talk of successive approximations
toward yet-to-be-falsified provisional truths. Either way, science can
properly claim to be the gold standard of truth....
