From the Easy Chair

Science

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 30-214

Genre: Speech

Track:

Dictation Name: RR161AP76

Year: 1980s and 1990s

Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161AP76, Science from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.

[Rushdoony] This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 182, November the fourth, 1988.

This evening Otto Scott and I are going to discuss science. Now the subject of science is a curious one, because the word science has changed its meaning over the centuries. It comes from a Latin word which means to know. And in time it came to refer to knowledge. Over the centuries, therefore, science primarily meant knowledge. And in the medieval era and for some time thereafter theology was called the queen of the sciences, the key to all learning. And the basic curriculum was called the arts and sciences curriculum, because the sciences represented organized knowledge and the arts various efforts of human endeavor and achievement.

However, what has happened fairly recently in the modern era is that the sphere of science known as natural science beginning especially with mathematics, physics and chemistry began to claim that only they represented true science. Subsequently, those fields were dethroned by biology, particularly with Charles Darwin. And as a result, we now have a very different definition of what constitutes science and it is basically that modern definition that we are going to deal with tonight.

But I would like to begin, before I turn the platform, as it were, over to Otto, with a comment or two about scientists. I believe that that is one of the most misused terms imaginable. I commented on it some years ago in my Mythology of Science, but very briefly it is this. We talk today about scientists when what we really mean are theoreticians, not men who are practical scientists, not, for example, geologists who are working with oil companies, the men who applied their knowledge and whose ideas will be very different most of the time from the men who call themselves geologists and teach in universities.

In other words, we have equated the ideas with reality. Or, rather, we have taken ideas and supplanted reality with the ideas. The most conspicuous example of this, of course, is the dogma of evolution. It is not provable. There is virtually no realm of hard fact. But it is regarded as science and the professors, not scientists, because the teachers are called scientists today rather than the practical working scientists, rule that anyone who disagrees with them is not a scientist.

Now today we received a letter, Dorothy and I, from Phil Spielman, an outstanding letter, but there was a sentence in it which is very, very appropriate in this context. Phil wrote, and I quote:

“When nothing is real, but ideas, then no evidence is required,” Unquote.

And is what you have in evolutionary thinking. Nothing is real except the idea and therefore no evidence is required and if you question it or produce any evidence that militates against evolutionary thinking, somehow you are ignorant and therefore unscientific and a fair target for abuse.

Well, Otto, what would you like to say by way of general introductory statement?

[Scott] Well I agree with you. I think the ... the whole term... you began with a definition of science and I listened to it with a great deal of interest. Actually, it is a word that doesn’t make any sense to me whatever, because it covers all sorts of things. And I recall as a boy reading constant references in 19th century literature to the scientific method, scientific history, scientific everything, but never, used as an adjective, has it ever been defined. I have heard a great deal, read a great deal about the scientific method and I have yet to discover what it consists of. We are told that science experiments, that the successful experiment is something that is repeatable. But when I was writing the book on the rubber industry, we had a lot of patriots from the {?} division of the American Chemical Society. We generally got the second run of papers that the society itself and its journals would publish the first level. And then I would be inundated by the second level of these papers. And I found, as a lot of other people have discovered, that chemistry is in a gray area. You are dealing with forms of life as in biology.

It is not fixed. These forms of life do not obey the rules that are lay down for them because they have always some what they call free radicals that refuse to obey the general rule. Chemistry rules on the probability theory. But I would call up the writers on some of these papers that would describe various experiments and say, “Why did you do it? What did you expect to find? What were you looking for? All you have given me is ... is the record of an experiment to... which there is no particular conclusion. So that means it calls for another experiment along a similar, but slightly different lines. And I found that they couldn’t explain why they had done it. They wanted to be published even though the experiment didn’t get anywhere. It was almost as a proof of effort.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] But effort doesn’t mean anything. It is only results that count. Effort is a meaningless thing. We have run into this in the world of work where somebody will say, “Well, I tried very hard and I spent a lot of time on this. But that is not really the point. The point is what did you produce? What good is it?

So science then becomes a sort of disembodied abstraction like the word progress. Somebody described progress as an invisible phantom beating her wings in the vanguard of human activity. Nobody could ever figure out what she looked like, who she was and so forth. And we are dealing then with a superstition in the name of science. As long as that particular label is placed upon something, anything is acceptable. And you run into a religious attitude of indignation when you differ.

You differed when you brought up, for instance, the evolutionary theory and that immediately stamps you as an intellectual redneck. You are not supposed to argue with evolution.

So I think... and, of course, you know and... and we both know that some of the most critical letters we get in the Chalcedon Report is when we dare to take up some semi scientific subject which has been ruled out our right to think about.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Now this is a lot of fun. It is... it is great fun and it would be a lot more fun if it didn’t interfere with some very interesting realities and very crucial issues. For instance, on the SDI program. The Union of Concerned Scientists keep telling us that it can’t work. And they really should direct those conclusions to the Kremlin which has spent over 50 billion dollars.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And is making something work in space. So we have here we are really taking a rebellious position when we discuss science.

[Rushdoony] Yes. I would like to call attention to an aspect of modern science that I think is normally neglected. When Darwin’s book first appeared in 1859 it was received with an amazing enthusiasm. Here was a basically dull book and yet it sold out in two days, in 48 hours, the kind of book which normally would take a generation to sell. And the reason it sold out was that it gave people an excuse to dump God, to junk the Bible.

[Scott] So they assumed.

[Rushdoony] Yes. And Bernard Shaw said so. He said people jumped at Darwin’s thesis, because it gave them an excuse to disbelief in God.

[Scott] Yeah.

[Rushdoony] And Queen Victoria, for example, welcomed it also. It made it unnecessary to believe in the Old Testament.

[Scott] Well, it took away the watcher in the sky.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, one of the curious consequences of Darwin’s work was... quickly appeared in Victorian culture was what Eckhart Gillman and Chamberlain have termed just in passing so they are not responsible for what I am going to do with their idea, but what resulted was, and I quote, “The adoration of the artificial,” unquote. This is a curious fact. But it did create a culture in which things more and more artificial became more and more popular. All you have to do is to look at modern styles, for example, especially women, extremely artificial, everything done to do away with what is natural and wholesome looking. But basic to it is the idea that, I think, came out in Gordon Child’s book of some years ago, I believe the 50s and continuously in print since then. The title, Man Makes Himself.

Because man now supposedly has, because of Darwin, gained the power to make himself and to remake the world. So increasingly there is a desire to go against hat which is normal, that which is healthy, abortion, homosexuality, anything which goes against nature because man is going to overrule nature with transplants, with everything that is artificial and contrary to the natural working of God’s order.

[Scott] What you are really talking about was summarized in the title of Andrew Dixon White’s book A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology and Christendom. Now he wrote that, two volumes, in 1896. I have not read the two volumes. I have got them. I keep telling myself I will read them some day, but I have never gotten beyond page eight because I get angry and I put it back on the shelf. And... but I... I think the ... the candor with which he approaches it in his introduction is very interesting. In 1896 Andrew Dixon White who wrote a book about inflation during the revolution in France and a very poor one, I might add, which has been reprinted hundreds of dozens of times. It has been given a great deal of credit. It is one of the two founders of Cornell University, a very aggravating university, too. And he begins in his history of this warfare with jubilating over the fact that the clergy was removed from all the major universities that their particular denominations had created and operated up until the 1880s and 90s.

Now by removing the clergy from the administration of colleges formed by various church ... churches, they took away, you might say, using Freud’s term, the super ego of the college, because it was like a lobotomy. All of the sudden the spiritual significance of education was removed and it left nothing but nuts and bolts.

Now a scientific theory, which you have mentioned here and I went into that and I appreciated your comments on the difference between a petroleum geologist and a fellow in a classroom. After all, the petroleum geologist has to... is... is judged and paid by results. And I talked to one of the winners of the gold medal that is put out every year for scientific achievement in the rubber industry, an English professor or English scientist, rather, industrial scientist, had many, many inventions to his credit. And I said... asked him why it was that an industrialist scientist like himself was held in such disdain by the academics. And their theory of the ivory tower where they theorize and they didn’t have to roll their sleeves up and do anything.

And he said, “Well, I disagree with them entirely,” because the purpose of science, in his view was to improve the living conditions of the human race. So therefore he said it has to be applied. And it has to in some fashion help the world. If it doesn’t help people, then, he said, “I don’t consider it scientific.” He said, “Whatever fantasies are floated are of no particular interest to me.”

Now evolution was a very mischievous fantasy. Now they have backed off it, as you know. They don’t any longer think that one species transmutes itself into another. What they are talking about now is that there are certain sudden jumps. They don’t talk much about the extinction of species, although they subtitled it The Survival of Favored Races in the Struggle for Existence, Struggle for Life. They don’t like to talk about the ones that lose.

[Rushdoony] Yes. And they don’t like to talk about the fact that racism is a product of Darwinism.

[Scott] Well, Hitler.

[Rushdoony] It was implicit in the book as you have often pointed out.

[Scott] Hitler was an heir to the Darwinian theory.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ...of the struggle of survival of the fittest. He, in fact, used to regale his dinner companions with this over and again. Certain races, he felt, based on the Darwinian approach, were innately superior to others.

[Rushdoony] Earlier you mentioned Andrew Dixon White and the fact that you hadn't gotten beyond page eight. Well, I had the misfortune of reading him when I was rather young and here was a great classic. So I read him through and years later I found that he was hardly accurate recorder of things. In fact, someone made a study of his famous passage indicting Calvin and Luther for their rejection of Copernicus and quoting statements from Luther and Calvin against Copernicus. Whereas the truth was that neither one had ever heard of Copernicus.

So much for Andrew Dixon White’s great scholarship. But he is still very widely regarded and at least once in recent years was reprinted.

[Scott] Well, yes. His Dover Press, as you know, reprints a lot of the things that are in the public domain. They have reprinted him. And he stands in my mind at the epitome of a certain type of individual, a certain type of mentality that takes great pride in intellectual superiority. This is a very dangerous thing for any man to assume.

We have all sorts of mysteries. Electricity is a mystery. We don’t know what it is and we don’t know its source. We can tap into it, but we don’t know a darn thing about it. It is never described as such. And just before I came over this evening I jotted down titles of various... two or three or four different books that I have looked into at various times that would fit this topic. And I noticed The Case of the Midwife Toad by Arthur Kessler. Now Kessler, of course, was a man of parts, some of them, disparate, but at any... in any event, an interesting man. And The Case of the Midwife Toad is a series of experiments that were conducted by a scientist, if you like the term, a technician, I would say, a technician in middle Europe, Hungary, Bulgaria, one of those countries. And he dissected certain type of worm and also gave them electric shock, little electric impulses.

If they went in a certain path they got a shock. If they avoided certain places they did not get a shock. And then he found successive generations began to avoid the shock areas. So he wrote a paper describing these experiments and his results. And, of course, what he was talking about was the transmittability of experience in a species.

I have... I have several times brought up the business of the cattle and the barbed wire.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Where in a cattle...

[Rushdoony] Very telling...

[Scott] ...in... in just a few years the cattle stop injuring themselves by running into barbed wire. They avoid barbed wire. And this happened all the cattle everywhere. Nobody... I don’t know how this was transmitted. The experiment by the European chap was repeated in London and with not the same conclusions. So they branded him a fake. And he was immediately—and is was a different period. We are talking now about that 20s. Today he would probably get a special award. But in those days it meant that the money stopped. He was disgraced and he committed suicide.

And Kessler used this as a jumping off place. I believe he found in some of his experiments later, that the man had been perfectly valid and that there had been some situational reason that the people in London, perhaps a different species of whatever, didn’t get he same results. But it brings up the whole question of results that don’t fit the paradigm which science will not accept. And theoretically any exception to a scientific rule disproves the rule. But, in fact, exceptions are customarily brushed aside or under the rug. In other words, science does not obey its own rules.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, we have a problem today because science has been worshipped. It is a very important fact that is commonly forgotten that the man who most haled Darwin’s book was Karl Marx. He wanted to dedicate a work to Darwin and Darwin didn’t feel it would be expedient to have such a dedication...

[Scott] Well...

[Rushdoony] Well...

[Scott] He... wouldn’t... wouldn’t grant him that amount of intimacy.

[Rushdoony] No. But what Marx and Engels recognized as this. That given the survival of the fittest, the universe of chance, then conflict in society was inherent in the whole universe. If you had a creation made by a sovereign God then there was an ultimate harmony in all creation. Everything moved in terms of an overall purpose. But without that purpose, total warfare, total conflict. Hence the Marxist thesis was validated by Darwin.

[Scott] Yes. By force, really. Darwin is really talking about force.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Now we go back on to Marx. Marx, of course, considered himself a scientist. Socialism was hailed as a science. And Marxism was supposedly the scientific answer to the problems that arose out of Capitalism and {?} demolished that pretty thoroughly, I think, because Marx was a bad historian. In fact, he... he didn’t try to find out whether his theory was correct or not. But we go back to this Thomas Kuhn, I have got down here, who wrote The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in which he talked about the paradigm and the fact that when the exceptions begin to pile up then, of course, the paradigm falls apart, but it is retained until the new paradigm is devised by society.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] This is where evolution is. The exceptions and the objections are mounting but they haven’t found a substitute. So this will go along, I guess, until somebody comes up with some plausible substitute and then we will suddenly be told that there is a new scientific genius on the horizon and a new paradigm and a new explanation for creation. And this brings me to, I think, the last book I would mention and that is a book which came out about 10 years ago called This Wild Abyss: The Story of the Men who Made Astronomy, by Gail E. Chesterton, Free Press MacMillan, 1978.

Christianson’s book is really a rehash of the biographies and the struggles of the astronomers including Copernicus and so forth and to that extent it is a sort of a student’s book. But in his introduction he hit a first class bell. He said, “The problem with teaching the hard sciences in universities today is the fact that they are not taught historically.” They are taught as state of the art without reference to how the state of the art was achieved and without reference to the detours, the wild guesses, the errors of the past and then in some cases the discoveries of the past which led to the latest state of the art, so that a person who is educated scientifically or educated in a scientific following has no idea of how this came about.

[Rushdoony] Yes. And the scientist tends to believe, that is, those who are called scientists, that they represent true wisdom and true rationality. And therefore they pontificate on virtually any and every subject even though when they know nothing about it.

[Scott] Well, when you are taught ahistorically, it gives our the misleading impression of certainty.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] You don't realize the uncertainty of life or the uncertainty of science or the uncertainty of any other human activity.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, I believe that is a very, very important point and one of the key points in understanding why science is so destructive, because it is rootless. It has no sense of history. And having no sense of history it is unable to see cause and effect in human affairs.

[Scott] Well, they have great difficulty accepting Heisenberg who said that the observer changes what he observes.

[Rushdoony] Otto, you mentioned the non historical character of scientific thinking. I think the most devastating critique of that was given, oh, about 50 years or more ago by Ortega y Gasset in his book The Revolt of the Masses. And he said the true barbarians of our time were the scientists, because they treat things which are a product of 20 centuries of Christianity as though they were like the atmosphere. They are just there, part of the given of the world. And therefore they lay waste all the wealth of the past, the intellectual wealth, unable to appreciate the fact that it is not a given. It is not a part of the atmosphere like the air or the water.

Since Ortega y Gasset wrote that, of course, we have seen precisely that triumph of barbarism, scientific barbarism and with more university educated people than ever before, our streets have become a jungle. Crime has increased. We have savages with degrees running around and Ortega y Gasset has been vindicated.

[Scott] Yes. Well, of course, when education is divorced from culture is it education?

[Murray] When it is divorced from religious faith, of course, it quickly deteriorates.

[Scott] Yes. Well, this is all of a piece. Your religion which is the fundaments of your culture and then the workings out of your religion in a cultural pattern. I mean, courtesy is more than manners. Courtesy is an attitude toward others and the attitude has to be based on something besides ordinary... ordinary grace. The whole question of the technician is an ... a very awesome one. The Soviet Union, I understand has very many more engineers than we have. They can’t apply their skill outside of the munitions industry, because the country is not dedicated to consumer products. And I really question whether they can apply their skill in a really creative way anywhere, because I remember reading a biography by Mr. Porsche, the automobile manufacturer in Germany. Now the Porsche automobiles, as we all know, is a world wide recognized as a very good car. The factory was in existence before Hitler came into office and Hitler came through the plant and talked to Mr. Porsche. And Porsche was surprised by the quickness with which Hitler picked up what he heard and, of course, he had plans for the automobile manufacturers to take part in various vehicles of war.

But he... Porsche soon found out that the Hitler regime, which was willing to give him all sorts of money, was a very bad regime for a manufacturer, because, first of all, the plans had to be submitted or approval. And, second of all, no deviations were allowed, which took away from the whole business of trying not get the most efficient method. And it was very dangerous to tell the Hitler regime that you expected to meet a certain quota or a certain production at a certain time, because you were held to that. Nothing could happen. No excuses were allowed.

Consequently, into this atmosphere of inhibitions and fear, the productivity and creativity of the Porsche enterprise under Hitler went down and not up. So you have the same sort of thing, I would imagine, in the Soviet Union and in Totalitarian countries. And I am amused, if you could call it that, by the critics of industry who take the Hitler and... Hitler and Stalin attitude that you are capable if you are an engineer turning out a perfect vehicle. And if you don’t you should be punished. And this is part of the superstition that surrounds scientific and technical and technological effort. It isn’t considered a part of human trial and error. It is considered almost in a religious light as something that is supposed to be perfect. And if it isn’t perfect, there is a search then, for the culprit, for the scoundrel.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, that raises a point that I have referred to again and again, an illustration. About 25 years ago I was in a discussion, three speakers, one from the Hoover Institution, and then myself and the third, I believe, was from the FBI and a state senator was the moderator. And I made a statement with regard to freedom, freedom in education in particular, the write to have Christi schools and so on. And after a very heated discussion period and a packed auditorium, the meeting was terminated and the school teacher made a beeline for me to charge me with being a quack, because, she said, “The necessary and inevitable goal of society has to be scientific. And in a scientifically controlled society freedom is obsolete.”

[Scott] Really?

[Rushdoony] Yes. Because if society is to be an experiment, you cannot allow room for freedom. How can you control an experiment if some of the people in the society are free to go their own way and do as they please? So the modern scientific concept of society which is taught in every state institution and a lot of private universities, virtually all of them, in fact, holds that freedom is obsolete. But they are not as honest as this teacher was. There could be no freedom in a scientific experiment.

[Scott] Well, I think we have all had the experience of talking to scientists who give you a little smile and make it very clear that they are condescending and who also assume that you are against science if you criticize some part of science.

Now this is one of the most prevalent fallacies in our time. If you criticize the welfare system, it is assumed you are against the poor. And if you criticize this or that, you are against the whole thing. Criticize science because science has promised what it cannot deliver.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] It is promising what only God can deliver and that is a complete solution of all the basic problems of our lives. It is the crime of scientists is that they have tried to usurp God. And this is a very serious crime. They lead people into this area. Now we have ... we have, for instance... Would you call medicine a science? Is medicine a science or an art? Is there any difference between science and art? Art is a form of science in my view and science has got many of the elements of art in it, because of the creative aspect, the experimental aspect.

But I don’t know of any artists who are telling you that this particular painting or this particular method of painting or this type of representation is the final answer and no other can be allowed because it would be inartistic. Yet science says this is the answer here and anything else is not scientific.

Of course we have now this is slopped over into biology as you brought up. And treating human beings as biological specimens we now have a parts industry in which we are selling human parts. We are selling human body fluids, human organs, garages, you might say, for human beings. And genetic transformations of one sort or another, hormonal interferences and so on.

But we are now reaching the point of the... I believe it was the Incas who did have an operation that fooled with the pituitary gland and could produce giants or dwarfs. They didn’t go as far as our people are going today. But they were a Totalitarian society. If you recall, one of the most Totalitarian...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ... ever... ever created in which every single aspect of life and diet and movement and activity was regulated.

[Rushdoony] And some have said that to this day the Incas are without a spirit of independence, because it was not tolerated and the deviant were removed.

[Scott] I believe that. Certainly you... you run into two things with the central American Indians and with the Incas, an incredible savagery coupled with incredible docility. You see the same paradox in the Slav and in the Russian particularly.

You remember the book The Holy Fools where the hinter play of savagery... of absolute abandon and absolute austerity...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ...alternating with each other. Now scientifically speaking were are talking here about a whole spectrum of activity that has become technological and divorced from morality. In any kind of human activity that divorces itself from morality is monstrous.

[Rushdoony] Yes. But now we are being told that in the political sphere as well as the scientific sphere, morality has no relevance.

[Scott] By...

[Rushdoony] We have...

[Scott] By the same people who think that Hitler was a monster?

[Rushdoony] Yes. But in hospitals they have now to silence people set up ethics committees so that when there is a bit of surgery that is morally questionable or an experiment that is morally questionable or putting to death someone or allowing them to die, it is referred to the ethics committee which is expected to rubber stamp what is going to be done anyway.

[Scott] Well, Germany had set up ethics committee before Hitler. The German hospitals and the German medical profession was practicing euthanasia before Hitler. It was already established when he came in. In fact much of the machinery of the Nazis was in place when Hitler took over.

[Rushdoony] The liberals had conquered in Germany after World War II with roots prior to World... I mean World War I with roots in the Bismarckian Socialism so that Hitler did not make an innovation. What Hitler did was to apply more rigorously everything that German society had been tending towards, which is exactly what we are doing now.

[Scott] Well, this is what we are talking about, the ethics committee. I saw an item in the paper tonight where they have now decided on the basis of a few experiments that they will undertake liver transplants on alcoholics, because they have discovered that those alcoholics who did undergo the operation and the operation was successful, don't drink anymore.

[Rushdoony] I think it is remarkable how they come up with conclusions which eliminate the moral factor.

[Scott] Yes, well, of course, If you and I were to go ... if... if we were to become very ill and a critical operation of that sort was to be considered and it would involve scarce machinery or medicines or whatever, we would not pass, because we are past the age where we would be considered potentially useful citizens.

[Rushdoony] Isn’t that marvelous, Otto? They won’t bother to experiment with us.

[Scott] That is true.

[Rushdoony] They would kill us, perhaps, if they could, but...

[Scott] Yes. Well, I think so.

[Rushdoony] Only if we put ourselves in their hands.

[Scott] But they call it cutting off life support systems.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And that brings you, you know, to what Hannah Arendt mentioned. She felt that that Nazis had verified what Orwell spoke about in new speak where a new brand of language was devised.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And one of the things she said about Eichmann was that all of his answers to his interrogators both before the trial and during the trial, all of his answers were in the form of a jargon, a bureaucratic jargon. He could not speak precise and traditional German. He could only speak in terms of a solution, a method, a process and so forth.

Now to remove life stupor systems says nothing about the fact that somebody is being done to death.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] He would never use the word death. The Nazis had an entire vocabulary to conceal from themselves and from everybody else the essential nature of what they were doing.

[Rushdoony] Which is, of course, what the bureaucracy in this country is doing. They have a jargon to hide what they are doing, to neutralize it as though their actions have no relevance in the lives of people, moral relevance.

[Scott] That is right. Well, it is not simply there. It is true in... in the media. Why does the press ask some poor widow who has just seen her husband die how she feels? This is the scientific attitude, you might say. At one time in ancient Greece, you recall, I can’t think of his name off hand, the painter whose name survived for centuries up till our time as a monster of depravity because he went to the bedside of a dying man to paint his expression. And that man, that painter was held to off as a symbol of inhumanity and callousness up until our time. Our time we have got so many of them, they... they. They are just doing their job.

[Rushdoony] Perhaps one of these days—or perhaps it has happened—a widow who is asked how she feels in such a fearful situation will say, “Like using my handbag across this... your face.”

[Scott] Sure. Or do it.

[Rushdoony] And do it, yes.

[Scott] Or do it. I mean, why some of these people aren’t belted, I will never know.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, maybe someone will get the idea now.

[Scott] Well, that is a good ... that is... I am all for it. I .... I should think it would be worth paying a fine.

But this is really, I suppose, the nub of our argument with science. Two things. First science has usurped religion. When Andrew Dixon White said the warfare of science against theology in Christendom, he described something that is still going on. And the warfare is ... there are many salvos that come from the scientific side. Now if you recall the German Marxists who came over here fleeing Hitler and who brought with them logical positivism...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] In which nothing that couldn’t be seen or measured was held to be in existence.

[Rushdoony] Yes. And it was that legal positivism that led to the kind of law that made Hitler and his regime possible. Howell traced it back to at least Darwin and pointed out how step by step the liberals by undermining Christianity and the Christian moral world view prepared the way for Hitler and were able to work with him without any feeling of displacement.

[Scott] Well, we have seen societies in which Christianity has been brushed aside. We have seen the Soviet. We have seen the Nazis. We have seen the death camps. We have seen Pol Pot reducing his people by at least a third. We have seen Mao Tse Tung’s China bushing aside all morality and the estimates run from 60 million up of people who were killed in his various purges and so forth.

Yet science sits here and sits in the West. I have yet to see a pronouncement by any concerned scientist or even unconcerned scientist about any of these terrible crimes anywhere in the world. But they will.... they will make... issue statements on our political situation.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Interesting. In Cambodia the first figures released on the basis of conversations at the refugee camps indicated that the Khmer Rouge had killed 50 percent of the people of Cambodia.

[Scott] Oh, it is interesting...

[Rushdoony] But...

[Scott] You said Khmer Rouge and that is the way they are reported. Nobody ever says Red Army.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Now increasingly that number is being diminished. Every time you hear a reference to it or read a reference to it in the media, it is coming down more and more so it is going to wind up as being a handful.

[Scott] A large number. It will... it will be like the deaths during the partition of India and Pakistan. Several million, several million. And now they are not even recorded at all. They simply say disorders.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Our encyclopedias are changed just as regularly as the Soviets.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, when you have destroyed any significance to man other than a product of chance variations then it is life doesn’t matter much. And you have a growing depreciation of human life in our society.

[Scott] Well, when you remover morality from activity, then science itself is beginning to run into, as you know, an increasing number of fraudulent reports...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Faked experiments in order to get a large grant. And then we have run into such fantastic things as books that cite authorities either falsely or actually invent authorities. And individuals are maintained in professorial positions even after they have been exposed as fraudulent.

[Rushdoony] Well, and also plagiarism.

[Scott] Yes.

[Rushdoony] Wholesale plagiarism. I saw, to cite one woman, one book in which a chapter was lifted out of one of my writings even to the footnotes and I was not mentioned, of course. The person is constantly getting sizable grants to carry on his work and travels widely and lives a marvelous life.

[Scott] Well, I saw a book on Robespierre that came out after mine which attributed his fall to ridicule and since I was the first one ever to make such an attribution I looked immediately to see if I was listed in the sources and, of course, I wasn’t.

[Rushdoony] Yes, I...

[Scott] But a whole chapter is pretty hard to forgive. I... I... I... I would have ... I would have called him up.

[Rushdoony] No...

[Scott] I ... I would have had a conversation with that chap.

[Rushdoony] Wouldn’t have accomplished anything.

[Scott] Well, it would have been fun.

[Rushdoony] I had a call from a law student saying he had encountered a book recently that this was not too long ago, which was the rewriting of one of mine without any attribution or even a reference to me in the footnotes or the bibliography and it was virtually a verbatim citation by the paragraph. This is becoming so routine and the courts really don't care unless it is something against a Hollywood studio in which case there is big money in it and they will indulge.

[Scott] Well, they have just about destroyed the laws of libel.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] They have destroyed the laws of slander. They have destroyed copyrights. There is a feeling... and I did an article on the copyright business, on the patents, actually. There was an oil extended rubber patent which was filed and obtained by the O’Neill’s, General Tire and Rubber at the end of World War II. Well, during the war there had been a patent pool. You know, nobody filed for patents during the war. The idea was the monopoly laws were suspended during the war so that manufacturers could get together and produce most efficiently in the national interest. And the other rubber companies and oil companies, too, said that O’Neill broke the agreement by filing of this particular patent, but O’Neill’s... the General Tire, that is, said it was developed in their lab after the war.

Well, the patent was cancelled. It was withdrawn by the U. S. patent office. So, of course, the O’Neill’s went to court to get the patent back. I mean, the idea that pressure of this sort could reach inside the patent office was a bit shocking. And I undertook to trace that particular story and I discovered that the patent office is... is amenable to pressure and not only is it amenable to pressure, but the whole theory of patents is no longer subscribed to by the American government.

In the... up to the 19th century if you invented something, our had a monopoly upon it for 28 years and you... after that it was common property. But the patent office decided that that was too selfish. So if you get a patent you have to license others to do it, because it is just too selfish of you to keep it for 28 years.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] So the whole of industrial technology, the whole basis of rewarding invention has been leeched away and yet I have yet to see a single article by a single scientific group on that very interesting topic.

[Rushdoony] Well, if man, as I said earlier, is a product of chance variations and a struggle of survival, then morality is irrelevant. What matters, then?

[Scott] Justice does not matter…

[Rushdoony] No.

[Scott] ...if everything is a matter of chance.

[Rushdoony] Yes. So we have had justice. We have had morality and we have had humanity go out the window as a result of the modern scientific outlook.

Well, our time is just about up. Thank you all for listening. We do appreciate the suggestions you send for topics and we have tried to consider some of them, but remember. A great many very fine subjects we omit because we don’t feel we can talk for an hour on them or we don’t know enough about them. So thank you for listening and thank you for your suggestions.

[Voice] Authorized by the Chalcedon Foundation. Archived by the Mount Olive Tape Library. Digitized by ChristRules.com.