Lecture
Science the New Source of Truth
#4Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony
Subject:
Genre: Speech
Track: 07
Dictation Name: RR325D7
Location/Venue: ________
Year: _______
In some of these meetings dealing with the importance of science in modern education. This evening we will conclude the series we have had on science with the scientific method. It has been necessary to give a disproportionate amount of time to science, because science in the modern world is regarded as the source of truth. Unless we recognize that fact and deal with it we will be teaching our children and our classes essentially the same thing. A humanistic perspective in which science has all the answers.
The scientific method has had a tremendous influence on popular culture. People have a picture of the antiseptic objective sciences delivering truths in all its purity. The experimental method, in particular, has attached to it a tremendous aura of authority. The experimental method has been touted for the last couple of centuries as the answer for mans problems. However, most scientists have nothing to do with the experimental method because in all too many of them the experimental method does not work! You cannot have experimentalism in paleontology, geology, nor in astronomy, nor in most sciences. There are very very few sciences outside of chemistry where experimentation has any valid place. But, the experimental method has such a temper for thinking with regard to the scientific method and it is equated with truth.
However, even the experimental method is a very suspect one because again and again it has been determined that apart from the extensive flaws which I spoke about a couple months ago on the sciences with regard to experimentation - even apart from that the experimental method can work to prove what one wants to prove if the experiment is set up in the proper way. Particularly in education this has been true. Supposedly experimentation proved that there was no such things as transfer of training. As a result the idea of subject for discipline, to discipline the mind, such subjects were dropped about a generation and a half ago. Those experiments were not valid! The experimenter was convinced that there was no transfer of training, and it was quite easy when you are convinced to so conduct your experiment so that it will prove what he has determined needs to be proved.
What is science, then? And the scientific method? George Sarton, one scientist, says and I quote: “Science is the whole body of systematized and objective knowledge. It is very incomplete and very imperfect, but it is infinitely perfectible.” Unquote. Now, if you were to ask Sarton, having given so broad a definition, does this include religious matter? Is systematic theology then knowledge because it is a body of systematized knowledge. And he would of course emphatically say no, because, by definition when modern man speaks of the scientific method he excludes the idea of science including anything that speaks of the supernatural. It cannot deal with God. It cannot deal with revelation. By definition, those are not valid areas of knowledge.
I mentioned before and and I think it bears repeating: I have found over the years (and I have lectured the college and universities), we alternate in profanity and obscenity on the campuses to speak the name of Christ or to refer to God, because it’s an academic environment. There is a concern with knowledge, and you’ve left the area of knowledge when you talk about God! So the scientific method, in effect, says is “What my net cannot catch is not fish.” It has a highly prejudicial approach to knowledge.
I was very interested recently to read a book by two very capable man. One a young scholar and researcher, the other an archeologist; they dealt with UFO’s. On the one hand you have all the people who believe that UFO’s are space visitors and go overboard with their {?}. On the other hand you have the scientific analysts who say this cannot be valid knowledge. We cannot consider this. Why, here we have something that appears on a radar screen and then it disappears...therefore we have to rule that out. It doesn’t behave as anything that appears on a radar screen should behave, so it isn’t valid knowledge. Both our humanistic approaches and (boasts?) are invalid. On the one hand there’s humanistic credulity, a romantic humanism; on the other hand there’s scientific humanism and its credulity. The only facts are those it declares to be facts.
Again, W. F. Swann, another scientist, says that the scientist must avoid all theological doctrine as a starting point. His only starting point then can be a humanistic premise - that reality is to be limited to this world, it cannot be supernatural, and the autonomous mind of man is the ultimate judge with regard to all definites.
Now again, this is a part of the scientific method. You have an exclusion of everything the scientific method has said in advance that it will not consider. The only validity is in Humanism.
Van Til has dealt with the premise behind the scientific method. He has written, and I quote as he applies it to the garden of Eden, “In paradise Satan had won the heart of man away from God to himself. He had done so by the cleverest of strategies...he had done so by making Eve and Adam believe that while eating of the tree of good and evil they were engaging in the first really scientific enterprise. It was an experiment far more significant in it’s consequences for human culture that the first trip made recently to the moon! There were two mutually opposing hypothesis with respect to the possible consequences of eating the fruit of that tree. “
There was the theory of the one party who called himself God and who therefore in dogmatic fashion asserted that death would be the only possible consequence of eating the forbidden fruit.
Then there was the theory of the second party. This party was not dogmatic at all. He only claimed that scientific experimentation requires an open mind! Especially this is true in the case of the first scientific experiment ever to be made. There were no records of what had happened in the past, and to speak of this truant distinction from all other trees as a forbidden tree is to assume that one party along owned all the world.
In his genuine freedom of choice man must therefore decide between these two available hypothesis.” Now there, Van Til has seen the heart of the scientific method. The scientific method refuses to believe that there is a truth declared by God. That there is a hard and fast reality. And therefore, it believed in unlimited potentiality, provided man can define what that potentiality will be! It cannot be anything that denies the autonomy of man, it cannot be anything that challenges his humanistic premises.
Of course, the results of science have been in spite of the scientific method, not because of it. Scientists have assumed a world that God has made even though they had not {?} faith in God. They assume a world not of unlimited possibility, but a world of order, a world of law...a world where valid knowledge is possible because reality is consistent with itself. We don’t have gravity one minute and anti gravity the next, there’s not a war of unlimited potentiality except in the minds of the scientific philosophers.
M. G. Salvadoran, a Colombian mathematician, has made clear what mathematics is from this perspective - that of modern science. And I quote, “Mathematics is a game in which the players set up their own rules and play with no other purpose but to play to the rules. Any player may at any time change any rule provided this change does not lead to contradictory rules. Since, moreover, mathematics may be played by a single individual the player doesn’t even need the consent of one or more partners in order to change a rule. This definition of mathematics will come as a shock to all but the mathematical experts.” Unquote.
Now of course when you have this kind of thing taught on the university level, should we be surprised that the ratters in New York - the losers - decide the rules are what they say they are? Or that politicians feel that the rules of the game are precisely what they determine them to be from moment to moment? Or that our supreme courts, from state to federal, hold to the same premise? Of course, Salvadory is not altogether honest because much later in his study he sneaks in this sentence: “Mathematics is the purest of games. We should not obscure the fact that most of its rules have roots in reality and were originally suggested by practical situations.” Unquote.
Most of them don’t want to admit the roots in reality. To admit them is to admit that they play these games in which they make up the rules moment by moment, but when they get down to the mathematics that counts it has to be rooted in the reality of God’s world. But, consider the implications of teaching what Salvadory has taught...I have talked over the years - back as far as the 50s, when a student first told me he was getting this kind of teaching in his graduate work in math, and in his upper division work. It meant that in math, which to him represented 2 + 2 = 4 and there’s no getting around it, now suddenly he was told 2 + 2 can equal whatever you choose to make it mean because in math man was his own God. He makes the rules, and if he chooses to make 2 + 2 = 1 then it equals 1.
Now what is a student going to conclude from that? He’s going to conclude exactly what a generation of students has concluded. Well, I make the rules with regard to sex, with regard to work, with regard to honesty, with regard to anything. With this kind of mathematics taking over in one area after another, it’s not surprising that we had the student revolution. What were they saying, beginning with some of the earliest ones at Berkeley? Some of them came out of math and related subjects. They must have been applying this premise. Man makes his own rules, whether in mathematics, or in sex, or in politics, and therefore it is our duty to break every existing rule because it represents tyranny....man will not be free until man has the right to make his own rules!
This is the modern scientific method. The biologist Hudson Holgan holds, and I quote: “Only two answers to the question of how life began. It must either have arisen spontaneously from non-living material or have been created by a supernatural means. If we accept the second option, creationism, science has nothing to contribute since the question cannot be resolved by the operational approaches of the sciences.” Unquote.
What is he saying? If God created the world then scientists can’t play God. Man cannot play God in any area. He goes on and on in paragraph after paragraph in involved sentences, but this is the essence of it. There are two views, and we cannot accept the creationists because it shuts the door on us and our ability to play God. So, he says, there is no science if man cannot play God. And man must play God, they declare! (Nera Maskin?) of NYU says that “Man may be”, and I’m quoting, “on his way toward creating a new human species.” Unquote. And that’s the goal.
Why is so much time spent (and a vast amount of your tax funds, let me add) in this DNA research and the attempt to create {?} man. Why, because if man can do this then man is god. And man can turn his nose up at the Creator and say, from now on we make our own humanity, and we don’t need your ways. This is why, of course, the bible is ruled out of school as not knowledge. Unscientific. Because it declares God to be the Lord, not man. But if the Bible is true then it is our basic book of knowledge and without it we have the kind of superstition that Mayor {?}, Hoglan, Salvador, and others represent. We have a belief in spontaneous generation, in evolution, and in the whole mythology of modern man and the environmentalism that created - polluted - whereby you excuse all crime and delight in the criminals because they’re not blame...the more violent they are the more it proves that they are in the game and they are the innocent ones.
The scientific method, thus, is something that is governed by humanism, and what I’m trying to say and have tried to say is that we stop referring to the scientific method in our science courses as though it represented something that was remarkable and important. It’s an instrumentality of unbelief. The scientific method is anti-Christian to the core. The quotations I have given you state very clearly what the scientific method means to these people: it means that you must rule out God as God and declare man to be God. As a result, as long as this is the scientific method - and it is in modern science - it’s going to produce misinformation. It’s going to distort truth. It will create unbelief.
Do NOT teach children to bow down to the scientific method. Thou shalt have no other God’s before me, saith the Lord. Are there any questions now? Yes?
[audience member speaks unintelligibly]
Well, yes. Very good question. First of all, seminaries - which I’m increasingly coming to believe are an invention of the devil - have professors who are trying to apply the scientific method to Biblical studies. As a result they spend semester after semester teaching about the Bible and teaching very little Bible. Then, too, you have even among men who profess to believe the Bible from cover to cover an implicit evolutionary attitude as they look at the Bible. So that they think, well, Abraham represents man who was somewhat more primitive then we are and we’re more enlightened. So they look at those men in the Old Testament and the apostles in the New and feel, ‘Of course, we’ve come so far beyond them.’ I’ve actually been told that by men who profess to believe the Bible from cover to cover! And they claim to have “the leading of the Holy Spirit’ as they ‘go beyond’ Abraham and David.
Well I think they are rather following another guide than the Lord. We cannot look at the Bible with evolutionary eyes and therefore see a kind of evolutionary development there, as if the saints of old are not on our level. Far from it! Abraham was called the friend of God...and none of us shall ever reach the level of David. A very large portion of the Word of God comes from the mouth of David, whom God very clearly loved. So it leads to a working of our perspective of scriptures. Yes?
[audience member speaks unintelligibly]
We need a theological method. We need to recognize that you begin with the facts of God and his word and then you study all things in terms of that. Now this produces a better scientific method! I mentioned, I think last time or the time before, that one very prominent geneticist who won 11 international prizes in genetics did so because he took the Word of God very seriously and literally. And therefore, unlike other men who as evolutionists believe there is unlimited possibility and potentiality, he wasn’t looking after possibilities in what proved to be dead ends. He knew that when the Bible says each will reproduce in its own kind that he wasn’t going to try to cross the rose with the cabbage.
But other researchers had no such limitations. Now, I think I mentioned last time and it’s worth citing again if some of you missed it, in the science letter section of the saturday review for July 9’th. [audio skips] --human and animal and how they are now going to try to take the genes and cells of both plants and animals and merge them! How’s that for scientific method? Crossing, say, {?} (Smith?) with a carrot or a chicken!
...But they’re seriously trying that! They actually are. They think they’ve had some success, but the more you read about it the less real the experience seems. “In all these cases the human and animal genes are functioning alongside the plant genes in the hybrid nucleus; though no tobacco plant or carrot would as a result sprout a nose or toes, or to recite poetry, the hybrid cells were certainly manufacturing human cells and animal proteins. In these early experiments the animal and human cyto-plasm has so far seemed to disappear, as a consequence we still do not know if chloroplasts and mitochondria could survive and function in the same cell, or what would happen if they could.
But we have clearly entered a new world of possibilities where biology continues apace with its larger fusion of what were formerly two separate kingdoms.” Of course, that’s garbage. But they very seriously believe that they are coming to the point of a breakthrough. Yes?
[audience member speaks unintelligibly]
Yes. One man named Decant has written a book on the ancient engineers. We really don’t know how they moved massive stones that amounted to hundreds and hundreds of tons each. They obviously had instruments and equipment that we don’t know about. They’ve almost concluded that the principle of the rolligon-- does anyone here know what a rolligon is? Well, I’m very poor at explaining anything mechanical, but rolligons are used in places like Northern Canada, in Alaska,..in marshy areas. They are like tractors, only they have huge -oh, massive!- under inflated wheels that are not really wheels but almost more like rollers, which are very mushy and flattened out. So, as they go they can go over all kinds of terrain whether sandy or marshy and tremendous amounts of weight can be carried where normally things couldn’t be transported - where normal wheels would be impossible.
There is some evidence that they had some kind primitive rolligon. That’s one of many operatives. That’s one of many things that they don’t always ever know. Incidentally they do know for example in the ancient Minoan civilization increased. And, did you see the old palace there, Dwight? When you were there, in (Greece?)?
[audience member speaks unintelligibly]
Oh, well, they excavated the old palace there, it’s a three story building -covering quite a few acres- with flush toilets, hot and cold water, a sewage system, and the fixtures look very modern. That was about 1820, 24th century BC. In fact, the closer you get to the flood the more intelligent men were, the more know how they had. So one theory is that because man lived so long in the age before the flood that he had the time to develop a highly complex civilization! We also know, Wayne, that they had the ability in the early days after the flood to figure out both longitude and latitude. When was it...the 17th, or 18th century, that they rediscovered that?
So there are many skills that man had. Another thing that seemed lost are the skills in painting; we no longer have apprenticed painters. So the ability to blend paints and colors, to have the kind of canvas as the old masters had (which could last indefinitely and the paints really not fade) is now virtually gone. Yes?
[audience member speaks unintelligibly]
There was one man who was an associate of Einstein who actually made the statement that, with the invention of printing scientific knowledge went downhill dramatically. What was the reason for it? He said, men began to despise all the old parchment hand copied books and the knowledge therein because now they had the new invention and only printed works were good and modern. They said, going back now we’re finding they knew far more than we imagined they ever knew.
Well, what this tells us is that evolutionary perspective is all wrong and our history books are written from the evolutionary perspective. Men don’t teach or promote what is the truth, but what suits their ideas.
A friend sent me a book today, written by a professor of medicine and a top medical practitioner and a PHD in the field of medical research, and he says all this business about cholesterol and saturated fats is nonsense. He says the {?} unsaturated fats they’re pushing on us are dangerous! You’re better off eating butter and eggs and cream and that sort of thing then you are with these new products; they’re better for your health. But, he said, they’re now accepted as true even though when they were first published it was immediately pointed out to be totally fallacious. But lies seem to have a longer life, you see, with many many people who choose to lie. What?
[audience member speaks unintelligibly]
Yes.
[audience member speaks unintelligibly]
Right. Yes?
[audience member speaks unintelligibly]
Where do we stand with regard to machines that sustain life. I don’t think we can make a blanket statement because there’s a great deal of difference between what they do. Many of them are worthless and they are the senseless prolongation of life. In other cases, they do some good temporarily to hold a person until he can undergo surgery. But we have two opinions that we today cannot agree with. One: euthanasia, or mercy killing, which is murder. The other: the attitude of people that a human being should be kept going as long as possible even when he is to all practical intents dead and wanted to die - he was ready to go home and be with his Lord - because consider the knowledge science can accumulate just from the observation of somebody who is no more than a human vegetable.
Now, in both places man is playing god. Both are wrong. Yes?
[audience member speaks unintelligibly]
Yes. I believe in that. But it’s not suicide when they’re dying to have an unnatural prolongation of life.
[audience member speaks] What does natural count as?
[Rushdoony] Alright, ah...
[audience member speaks unintelligibly] [audience member speaks] Medicine could be considered unnatural.
[Rushdoony] Well, I’m thinking of a case of a very elderly man who had had a series of strokes. He had been a professor in the sciences..he was a Christian. He felt the stroke coming on; he told his wife, this is a big one and it’s going to kill me. Don’t let me be taken to the hospital. I’m going to die, and I want to die here in my own home, in my own room. Let me go quietly...I’m ready to be with the Lord.
[audience member speaks] Does man have the right to say when and where he should die?
[Rushdoony] All he was saying was - and he knew enough about science and medicine - he knew it was going to be serious and it was going to take him. He was a vegetable within an hour. His daughter, who was a Modernist and really hated Christianity, told her mother ‘Oh, you’ve got to do everything possible for Dad!” He was taken to the hospital. He lasted for five or six weeks with twenty-four hour care with tubes inside of him; he was nothing but a vegetable. His brain was gone, everything was gone, he was being kept artificially alive. A foul stinking mess.
When it was over she didn’t have anything. She lost the home, she had to move in with that Godless daughter. Now that’s exactly what her husband was trying to prevent. He was ready to go home and be with the Lord! It was not suicide.
[audience member speaks unintelligibly]
You and I don’t have the right to say what God’s predetermined plan is...we have to go in terms of what the word of God is. We cannot think into the mind of God.
[audience member speaks] No, we can’t. But we certainly know the will of God in the subject...
[Rushdoony] Yes, well, where was he violating the will of God? He said he was ready to go home - he told me that more than once - and he said, I’m not here long. I had seen him about a week before.
[audience member speak] Why, would he commit suicide?
[Rushdoony] No, he was a Christian! He wasn’t going to commit suicide. But he knew that at his age, and the kind of stroke he felt coming on - and he knew enough medically to be able to analyse it - that he was going to be a vegetable in a matter of minutes, and if left alone at home he’d be dead by the next day.
[audience member speaks unintelligibly]
No. But you see, technology is neutral, but if we misapply it what are we doing? What was done in that case except to rob the widow? The doctor knew there was no hope and he said so! There wasn’t a thing they could do for that man. He was artificially kept alive, but he was to all practical intents dead. The brain was completely gone.
[audience member speaks] Do we have the right to say that he is physically alive but mentally dead? Or spiritually dead?
[Rushdoony] Well all I’m saying is, do we have the right to prolong life artificially? Artificially, you see?
[different audience member speaks] I think that God is the author of life-- [becomes unintelligible] --so we should be able to take that person off of the support and him still not be dead, if God wants him in this world, he’ll live.
[previous audience member speaks unintelligibly]
[Rushdoony] That case from start to finish is an artificial thing, because it was state funds and the state wanted the power to say we have the right to pull the plug or to keep her going, and I think they had no right to put her on! They had no right to pull the plug! They had no right. That was one of the most evil cases in the history of this country. The state took over the power from the family, and that is sinning against God. I don’t like to talk about that because that’s one of the things that gets me thoroughly angry; it’s so evil a thing! The state was playing God. Yes?
[audience member speaks unintelligibly]
Well, let’s conclude that. There was nobody there who said that his could be saved. Nobody. No doctor, no nurse, nobody said his life could be saved.
[audience member speaks unintelligibly]
No, no. This man himself was ready to go home and be with the Lord. He didn’t want his wife to be beggared as she was. Was it right that she be beggared?
[audience member speaks] I’m not saying that it was right that she be beggared. Of course it is very sentimentally sad to be, ah--
[Rushdoony] No, no. It’s more than sentimentally sad. It’s an evil! Nothing was going to be accounted and she lost her home, she lost her bank account, the insurance - she had a meager amount.
[audience member speaks] But she would still have the satisfaction of knowing that she did what she could.
[Rushdoony] No. She had bad conscience, because she broke her husbands promise. But, well, lets terminate this. One comment more.
[audience member speaks] Is there theology that would keep us from saying that perhaps he had gone home to be with his Lord-- [audience member becomes unintelligible]
[Rushdoony] I don’t think so, they, he was still legally alive. Now, of course, they’re changing the definition of death - they say when the brain dies. And again, that’s evil! You see, the state now (to get kidneys and other things that transplant) will declare you to be legally dead when you are not (in a serious accident [for example]). So, before you’re dead they will remove your organs and murder you thereby! It’s when you allow outside persons or the state to start determining these things that you get into trouble. Let the individual under God determine it.
Well, let us go to another subject. Any other questions? Our time is almost over. Yes?
[audience member speaks unintelligibly]
We don’t know. They had {?} (crops?) in the ancient world which were sometimes very accurate. But, ah, there’s so much we don’t know as to how they had their accuracy. Yes?
[audience member speaks unintelligibly]
No, I think they were actually moved through technology to, we don’t know anything about that. You see, man has developed technology in the past {?}. One reason why technology was easy to lose was because you had slavery through prisoners of war! Well today we have another means of providing for our labor: machines. What used to take half a dozen full time servants to do we all have in the form of vacuum cleaners and automatic heaters and what not. So, technology developed when we no longer had prisoners of war to be slaves, and you also had sufficient capital and freedom to take the technology that was developed and to apply it. To produce it for a mass market.
There will be, in we continue our decline into controls, a progressive loss in technology because we are creating artificial shortages of energy through government controls. There is more oil underground in the United States than we’ve ever taken out! But it’s on government land and we’re not allowed access to it. The offshore oil is tremendous, but the environmentalists won’t allow us to develop it. And it’s a menace not to develop it, because a serious earthquake offshore would open up those oil seams and it would all flow into the ocean!
So we have an energy shortage, you see. Then by controls on prices, you create problems. To illustrate: There is the available technology today that, say in Los Angeles, both Los Angeles and Orange county could be toll free! We could call anywhere in that neck of {?} area without a toll. Now you have half a dozen toll areas within that area. Why can’t they do it? Well, they would have to be able to raise their rates in order to build the very highly technical plants that would automate and handle this at the one toll area. Then the rates would drop! Subsequently, they could then do it so you could have toll free calls throughout the state of California-- [audio ends abruptl