Battacharya’s article (see Part One) pushes a policy of governmental interference, which is a bad direction, though I applaud his acumen in addressing the public. His view of how science can be fostered, however, is the real problem. Without recognizing the foundation that caused science to blossom after the Reformation, all hopes of reviving the scientific vigor of the West are doomed, whether the government gets involved or not (but particularly if it gets involved). Just funding the experts more and making sure more experts are funded will not solve the fundamental problem: man, without God, stops doing good science.

What Changed Again

The Reformation brought scientific revolution because it combined an objective, God-guaranteed universe with men who could truly come to understand that universe and then gave those men a purpose of dominion, of beauty and industry. The industrial revolution came from similar roots, aided by the paucity of slave labor or its equivalent (for historic (the Black Death) and cultural reasons, the lower classes became significantly less subservient leading up to and during the Reformation). Slave labor made an industrial revolution uninteresting in the ancient world, as slaves were much more efficient than the first few decades of industrialization and already integrated into the societal system, but northern Europe didn’t have slaves, not in sufficient numbers. Instead, it had millions of free men, men who were trained by their Bible to desire vocation, the pursuit of Godly industry, men trained to seek God for themselves in all of life, though not to the exclusion of their relationships with others.

Not that the Reformation was pure and undefiled, in history. The desire for autonomy is endemic in man on this earth, and so the renaissance did not stay in Italy or southern Europe. It can north, bringing the ‘Enlightenment,’ enlivening the occult, and corrupting, aided by the flaws already present in the Reformation, which had its own strain of rationalism and rebellion. Yet the great vigor of the Reformation persisted for centuries, through revival and re-reformation (such as the First Great Awakening and the work of men like Wilberforce, which turned England’s course back towards God for a while). The desire for autonomy, as it came north, borrowed many of the ideas of the Reformation, stripping God out but keeping the shells, at least for a time.

Only for a time, because without the foundation the house eventually collapses; we live in the middle of that collapse.

Modernity despairs of truth. Modernity has abandoned their faith in God, and so modernity has no real faith that the world is objectively true. Science has become power and a means thereto. Rather than being a pursuit of God and His glory, its only higher purpose is to empower men, to bolster his autonomy, to discover the magic, the mechanism, which will make reality do what he likes. AI, drugs, DNA, everything is a potential way to omnipotence (a fantasy our fiction demonstrates, alongside the dim realization that to create a deity is to be a slave to what not ought to rule you).

Moreover, when science is merely a means to power, two motives combine to prefer the short-term thinking Battacharya sees the outworking of, the preference for a set of results that may not be questioned, only used. First, man without God is a short-lived thing, selfish, with eyes only for the near future. Most men and therefore most human institutions will choose the short term benefit of a big result over the long term benefit of checking, re-checking, revising, and partially discarding that same result. Second, because science is now human-directed, the scientist must be right, or he is pointless; he cannot merely be incomplete or developing. He is incentivized and guided to discard ‘epistemic humility,’ the thing Battacharya points to as necessary; why should the man for whom science is made be humble? What is above him? Being wrong would get him in trouble; being wrong would hurt his ego. So he refuses to be wrong or to let others find him wrong.

Moreover, with the denial of God and the doubt of the objective, the scientist and his purveyors have little reason to prioritize truth. Why not lie on a result? Why not refuse to second-guess oneself? Why not fudge the numbers? Why not plagiarize without checking? The pretense of science is to search for truth, but a society whose heart asks, ‘What is truth?’ is a society incapable of maintaining that search in the long term.

The Answer

Battacharya’s answer, while likely not intended as the only part of the solution, is actually only a stopgap, worsening the decay in the long run by holding off the collapse a little. Spreading out the funding to more people to get more results and prevent over-institutionalization is helpful, no doubt, in many individual cases. But it does not help at all with the root problem that afflicts Western science, which is the hollowing out of its ethical and metaphysical foundation. While the West lacks God, it cannot have the certainty of the objective, the confidence in revelation, or the sanctifying motivation which were fundamental to the ‘scientific revolution.’

The medieval world, with mutilated versions of those three, managed a relatively slow growth; we, having denied them, are unlikely to match that pace except by brute force of just having more people go at it, perpetually sabotaged by the openness to falsehood and deception which comes with lying about God (Ps. 53:1; Rom. 1:18-20) (the problem with plagiarism, faked or fudged or manufactured results, and similar academic dishonesty are only growing). A culture which hates God will not long keep the truth. Nor may we console ourselves with the reflection that we have a society trained in individual assessment of reality, even ignoring that we are destroying this, both intentionally and incidentally (by diminishing the importance of Scripture, the metal which sharpens man’s mind towards truth). 

The medieval world struggled with an over-trust on institution which the Reformation started to remedy by recognizing the fundamental relationship between man and God in Scripture and the impermissibility of raising a human or a human institution to the level of Scripture by making it Scripture’s interpreter. The fruit of that release from human autonomy to human reliance on God was not just a theological purification or a scientific revolution; it was the constitutional ethic on which the United States are based, for all we deny it, for all it was and is polluted.

In modernity, science is once again worshipful of human autonomy. We have a hundred popes in white labcoats; we have a complex of institutions which together constitute ‘the cathedral,’ the scientific orthodoxy. Battacharya proposes to break apart this institution and empower its dissidents, but the solution to the Papacy was not state churches or heresies. The solution was a return to God’s authority. Merely diversifying the scientific voices will only defer the problem a little longer, using error to hold back error, to counterweight. Eventually the weight and counterweight will together weigh too much for their foundation to survive. So long as modern science continues to trust in man and man’s authority and man’s science as a means to control, rather than to steward within His law, for that long the West’s science will decline. The only way out is to turn to God.

God bless.