Jeremy C Kester

It’s getting to be election time again! Exciting right? Not really. For one I am dreading the words that will be tweeted over and over once the Presidential debates between hillary and trump are put into gear:

“What about the debate on science?”

Happens every election.

So?  What about it?

It seems to me that there isn’t a whole lot of room to “debate” science.  There hasn’t been and there seldom will be much room for science in politics either.

Science is about fact.  It isn’t about democrats, or republicans, or fascists, or communists, or whatever other political party one can think of.  Those groups belong lumped into a mass grave doused in whatever flammable material you decide and then set fire.  I’d prefer a nice strong oxidizer, like an organic peroxide (not the diluted stuff like hydrogen peroxide from the pharmacy… the high-concentration blends that will start to ignite once the material comes in contact with organic matter).  Science is just what it is.  It is always right, because it is what is.  There’s no debating it.  Sure, we still call things theories and the like, but it is less to describe fact and more to describe elements still remaining unresolved.

We call it the ‘theory of evolution’ because its characteristics are still being studied and tested.  As it is a theory, it doesn’t indicate that the events didn’t happen, just that we don’t fully understand why or how it happened.

We call Relativity a theory for similar reasons.

We call Newton’s Laws “Laws” because they have been empirically trialed and tested to extensive ends and proven to be beyond theory.

In either scenario there has been rigorous experimental evidence that supports the “theory” or the “law.”

But we in the layman course of language distribution continue to banter the word “theory” around as though it is a guess. We say things like “I have a theory” to mean what the statement: “I have a hypothesis” truly means. It is a guess. It lacks anything more than brief observed happenstance.

Creationism isn’t a theory as some would even suggest. Although they would like to point to Michael Behe’s challenge to Darwinian evolution as scientific evidence, Creationism is a religious belief.

With all this, once politics and religion get involved in science, it is no longer science.  Neither side is interested in fact, only evidence to support cause.  Correlative effects are taken as causative, data is dropped and ignored, studies hidden, etc, etc just because someone doesn’t want to allow fact to get in the way of a good election or even God’s will.

The fact that any candidate would challenge science as a whole automatically boots them from ‘viable candidate’ status. It is a reason I’d be more inclined to vote for hillary over trump as it appears that the vast majority of the grass-roots republican party is steeped in denial over science. For moral reasons, neither candidate is viable. But at least one doesn’t deny science just to satisfy an agenda (although if push came to shove, I am sure she would as well).

So let’s put this debate about science to rest. Because there is no debate. Science will always prove itself.