Free and Fair Elections

I really enjoy reading articles by Peter Heck. He is a very reasonably minded individual who is very good at keeping things in perspective. That's why I'm unsurprised by his take on the subject of this article, as it is a very level-headed analysis, but I cannot help but disagree with it in part.

I don't disagree with his argument that there has been no professionally produced evidence that Trump actually won the 2020 election. He's obviously right. The grandiose promises of the people who were sure they could produce extraordinary evidence that the election was rigged did not come to fruition. That's obviously true. Is confidence in fair and free elections paramount for our particular governmental system to endure? Yes, I'd say it is. To save from going through every little detail, I agree with most of the arguments as standalone statements. The facts are facts, unless they aren't - to make my stance a little more clear. We couldn't know any differently because no hard evidence has come of it. The election process is innocent until proven guilty, persay. But just as many people have been acquitted under shaky and suspect terms, I'm wholly unconvinced that the "judicial process" has confidently acquitted the 2020 election. We're looking at the Casey Anthony of presidential elections.

So do I disagree that it's dangerous and irresponsible to "continue to peddle" the claim that Trump actually won the 2020? It could be interpreted that way, but it's not so clear cut. It's actually a little strange that Heck makes this argument considering that there is no sanctity of the election process from the leftosphere - especially when this is discussed at length in the article. Confidence in the election process is nonnegotiable for the survival of our country as is. Yet we have been seeing Democrats et. al. contesting the results of elections since George Bush in 2000 and 2004. Suddenly, after Obama won, elections are free and fair again. Trump wins in 2016 and the democratic process is hopelessly corrupt and endangered. It's all okay, though, because Biden won in 2020, so all those glaring issues with the election process that allowed Trump to incorrectly win in 2016 have been fixed and now it's dangerous and irresponsible to believe the elections are anything except the freest and fairest in all the land.

Peter Heck insists, essentially, that it's wrong for Our Side to say that the election process is corrupt to its very core because Their Side is saying it, so we must instill confidence in the populace about the integrity of the process by discontinuing to vocally doubt it. If we stop that, then there can be confidence in our election process once again and everything will somehow be fine.

This premise makes little sense if the democratic process is, in fact corrupted. If our elections are not, in fact, free and fair, then we do nothing but doom ourselves to an accelerated takeover by a one party rule. There appears to be little hard evidence of fraud, whether it's 2000, 2004, 2016, or 2020. Very few people are found guilty for voter fraud every year. The amount of fraud or otherwise tampering of the election process would have had to occur in multiple states and affect many thousands of votes for Trump to have actually had the election stolen from him as he so claims.

Yes, of course, there has been no hard evidence. Every lawsuit was denied processing, so evidence they had was never admitted to court. Events that have long passed, like Georgia's conspicuous burst water pipe that was resolved many hours before they sent people home and "stopped counting" but didn't actually stop counting, and every other state that was an all-but-guaranteed Trump win suddenly stopping votes in the middle of the night, shutting out Republican watchers, barring up windows and blocking all oversight, dumping ballots in through the back doors under cover, some states taking many multiples of days to finish counting and the subsequent gaslighting that "this happens all the time" (it doesn't), and then suddenly multiple states inexplicably turning around for Biden at the very last second, are not things we can really go back and examine, as they were real time events that do not have quantifiable numbers. Multiple YouTubers have been suspended and videos taken down for going to registered voter addresses and finding condemned houses or empty lots. People attest to having received many multiples of mail in ballots to their address. But there is no hard evidence, I'll admit. Nothing was admitted in court because all of the lawsuits were not allowed to proceed, so how could we have the evidence? People who investigate are blocked, silenced, and stifled. The mainstream media would never write dozens of highly amplified articles about canvassers going to registered voter addresses who voted in the 2020 election and finding empty lots, so speaking about it is a "conspiracy theory". There's nothing anyone can do except shrug their shoulders and say, "Well, there's no hard evidence."

What all of these events and this, I suppose, softer evidence points to, however, is absolutely a justifiable suspicion that perhaps our elections are not the freest and fairest elections of all time, and that they may, in fact, be compromised. The confidence in our elections is paramount to a continued functioning democratic republic. Which is why it's such a crying shame that it's entirely justifiable to believe that these elections are in fact not free, nor fair, and have been rigged in various covert and unquantifiable ways. We have articles all but admitting the "shadow government" rigged the election ahead of time by changing election laws and altering as many aspects of our democratic process as possible entirely under the radar, without the people's consent and even admittedly illegally in some cases, and yet we are somehow supposed to believe it's all good. Freest and Fairest Election of All Time. Never mind that many of the events that occurred while votes were being counted that night are the same schemes that are pulled in corrupt third world elections. Claiming it is very important for us to stop questioning the validity of the 2020 election to help instill confidence in the election process ignores that questioning the validity of the 2020 election isn't the problem. The problem is the incredibly suspect validity of the 2020 election.

And that's where Mr. Heck and I will simply have to disagree. I watched these bizarre and highly suspicious situations play out in real time the day and night of Nov 3rd 2020. This isn't a random dossier that showed up from an unknown source with unproven claims that got published by every mainstream media outlet who all declared it simply must be true. This is what I saw with my own eyes. I won't allow the MSM to gaslight me into believing it is very normal for it to take many many days to declare the presidential election winner. I have watched the news coverage for the presidential election in 2004 and 2008, as well as of course 2016. 

Trump was declared the winner in 2016 by 2am on Nov 4th 2016. No states suddenly stopped counting, threw out bipartisan vote watchers, had trucks of ballots dumped into the back doors while the vote counters taped poster boards all over the windows, nor had various "counting errors" giving statistically unlikely solid chunks of votes to a single candidate at 4 in the morning. Bipartisan vote watchers were not barred entry despite having been court ordered by a judge to be allowed in. Yet I am to believe no one would have committed any fraud in an election where a significant number of people genuinely believed they were going to "vote out" a literal dictator? Impossible. I contest it is in fact irresponsible to tell people to believe that there was not malicious behavior in the 2020 election. Our democratic republic does not require only confidence in the election process, but actually fair and free elections. The illusion of a properly functioning democratic republic is not an actual properly functioning democratic republic.

I wonder if the real reason Heck insists we should no longer question the integrity of our election process is simply because it's clearly no longer valuable or useful. I don't suspect this is the case, as a man who has written before about the importance of truth. I wonder then if it was not the fruitless endeavor and hopeless doomerism of the burden of knowing the election process is most likely compromised, but there's little any of us can actually do about it which prompted him to simply explain away the problem like this. Simply believing we have fair and free elections will not actually help us have fair and free elections, but it would surely help promote a comforting illusion. 

There is absolutely no reason not to bring up these highly suspicious behaviors by vote counters, the rushed patchwork legislation changes people did not vote for, the non-zero number of registered voter addresses located at empty houses. It is imperative not to simply put our fingers in our ears and sing loudly that we have confidence in the democratic process. We must be able to have dialogue about what kind of behavior is not allowed in order to have that confidence in our elections. Barring watchers, stopping counts at midnight and sending the Other Team's counters home, taping paper over the windows, trucking ballots into backdoors at 4am - these are not behaviors conducive to a fair and free election. Do not bar discussion about these things - and if you believe that casting doubt on the 2020 election while having this discussion does not help the case, then just say that. We can speak objectively about what does not happen when a country's elections are actually fair and free without invoking the alleged "Big Lie". But it's offensive to say that we must simply drop the whole thing and start having confidence in our election process after nothing has changed. 

Listen to Experts

I came across the most astonishing article I have seen in recent memory by far. In this article, the writer implores us to, in summary, simply trust what scientists say and never attempt to come to our own conclusions. To be fair, the article is accurate in its description of "how we come to conclusions". The writer accurately describes the typical method through which we make conclusions, not just about science but about anything, really. Spoiler, it doesn't include "thoughtful and unbiased contemplation of both sides":

 

• formulating an initial opinion the first time we hear about something, 
• evaluating everything we encounter after that through that lens of our gut instinct, 
• finding reasons to think positively about the portions of the narrative that support or justify our initial opinion, 
• and finding reasons to discount or otherwise dismiss the portions that detract from it.
  

The fact of the matter is that we are actually driven first and foremost by our preexisting biases. The good news is that our preexisting biases are usually based on experience, pattern recognition, and survival instincts - these are actually all good things. Without these intuitions, you would make terrible decisions every day about an astonishing number of things. Our logical reasoning process is inseparably tied to our "emotional cognition", which is to say, how things make us feel, which we construct based on living day to day. This might feel icky to you if you regard yourself as an enlightened, rational thinker - which, funnily enough, is a fantastic example of our emotional, preexisting biases influencing our opinions on things. Amazing.

 

The largest flaw that the article has is ironically this exact explanation. The implication it attempts to make is that scientists - either through will power or kung-fu-master-like discipline - suppress their emotional cognition, their "formulation of an initial opinion the first time they hear something" step, as listed above. It may be surprising to you, but scientists are people, too.

As a church-goer, I have long understood that my religious teachers are not exempt from the same plagues of us common rabble. The priests and pastors are not magically more righteous and free from the temptations suffered by the rest of us. It appears that scientism worshipers - those who have made science their religion and scientists their priests - have yet to recognize that. My pastors have always encouraged me to read my bible and check behind them after a sermon, and yet the priests of scientism are doing what anti-theists accused the priests of old of doing to the peasantry - forbidding them from reading the source material, perhaps even hiding it behind a paywall, or at least writing it in a language that is difficult for the peasant class to read. The resemblance is striking, scarily so.

The second implication, then, if the first is that scientists can avoid their gut instincts influencing everything they interpret about a subject from that point forward, is that the peasantry cannot manage to recognize when their initial gut instinct was wrong. Indeed, the main idea here, in any other words, is that people who are not scientists are stupid, illogical, slaves to their biases, incapable of analyzing information like the esteemed scientist caste. Somewhere, in the process of being educated how to use lab tools and publish scientific studies, amongst the scramble to create a dissertation in order to cement your place in the union and continue to receive funding, a steadfast, mental acuity toward bias-rejection is magically instilled into the scientist - the creature who is identical in every way to the plumber or janitor. 

Of course, the article continues with some more amazing assumptions, which is to outright say we are all far too stupid to understand scientific data. A nebulous concept of "expertise" is invoked, insisting that scientists who study established scientific facts for awhile in between coaching on the politics and financial workings of actually being a scientist are naturally smarter than any given person. The implication here, of course, is that "professional" education via college makes you an expert. It is, as we all know, actually impossible to research anything online, the place where infinite knowledge is available to everyone who would seek it. Teaching yourself anything is, as we all know, literally impossible, a fevered dream of a madman, a person seeking to be their own teacher. Obviously, teachers are also magically better people, as they also had professional education. Normal, stupid people do not know anything. Indeed, anyone who is smart enough to be a scientist is already a scientist. No one who is smart is not a scientist, so we must assume anyone not a scientist is too stupid to understand things. The magical status of "being a scientist" is truly powerful. 

This particular line from the article is striking: "It’s absolutely foolish to think that you, a non-expert who lacks the very scientific expertise necessary to evaluate the claims of experts, are going to do a better job than the actual, bona fide experts of separating truth from fiction or fraud."

Astounding. The writer makes no attempt to avoid calling you stupid. The average prole is beaten down, an emotion-driven attack on their confidence and trust of their grasp on reality. Here, us peasants are gaslit against every conclusion we have ever come to through a logical analysis. 

The article has more to say, of course, about how misinformation becomes embedded in our minds. It speaks about vaccines and how, as we all know, there are people against vaccines, and thus, people who do not get vaccines. Within a paragraph about this, there is a very, very important line. The author creates a problem that I do not think he knows about. The following sentence reads, emphasis mine:

But if you “do your own research,” you can find a small percentage of online activists, and even a few medical professionals, who rail against the overwhelming science, pushing discredited claims, fear, and often unproven cures or supplements as well. 

 

Ah, but wait, I thought any scientist who dedicated years of their life to college education to acquire that magical scientific expertise was reliable? The problem inherent in the "trust the experts" mantra blares out of this line, a small dependent clause the author likely should have simply left out, but perhaps his own dedication to "appearing unbiased" caused him to reveal this flaw in his argument. The article states outright that people who are scientists have expertise. At no point in the beginning paragraphs does the author shed doubt on the concept that we can "trust the experts" (but not ourselves) because they have that mystical expertise. They, of course, got that expertise from years of scientific study. The medical professionals here, then, surely have the same accredited, respectable expertise as any other given scientist.

Except, clearly, the author does not think that. The author believes that only certain experts are actually reliable, while these "few medical professionals", for some reason, are not trustworthy. Why are they not trustworthy? Where is the difference between the college educated experts who agree with the author and the college educated experts who disagree with the author?

They are not to be considered trustworthy because they have gone against the majority opinion. This is not a conspiracy but an easily logically discernible conclusion. Allow me to lay it out easily for you:

1. There is a "majority opinion" where many scientists agree on Thing X
2. Scientist A says "I don't believe Thing X is true"
3. The majority opinion holders accuse Scientist A of not being a trustworthy expert, because they have said Thing X is wrong, and the majority opinion holders say it is right

Genuinely, no smoke and mirrors, the only thing that is happening here is "appeal to the majority". The author betrays their own assertions from the beginning with this quip here. If scientists can be trusted because they are experts, because they have graduated from college in their field, then we must trust when Scientist A says they don't believe Thing X is true. If we cannot, then, logically, there is no magical aspect of scientists that makes them any more reliable than anyone else. If Scientist A's expertise and scientific training did not magically teach them Thing A is true, then the author must admit, at the very least, that either 1. Thing A could be false, or 2. Being a scientist doesn't make you capable of magically divining the truth. (The trick is that both are true.) 

 

Furthermore, when disagreeing with the majority opinion causes irreparable harm to your career, causes your credentials to be revoked, and permanently brands you as a "dangerous lunatic" whenever your name is mentioned in the public sphere, the validity of the "majority opinion" should rightly be called into question. The entire history of scientific advancement came from the fact that people challenged the status quo. Imagine if we executed the first guy to question humorism. Imagine indeed, as all scientists would then agree unanimously with humorism, since the alternative is execution. We would still practice humorism today, even if a large number of people had a strong suspicion that it wasn't true. It's almost like this is not how science is supposed to be used.

The fact of the matter is that, in every single way, scientists are exactly like everyone else. Scientists are subject to their biases, they are subject to ingroup preference. They can be bought and sold, they will manipulate data to serve their own agendas, they will ignore evidence that goes against their beliefs. Absolutely nothing about being a scientist makes a regular human, subject to all the extensive mental faults that plague every other human, some sort of superhuman power thinker.

You may wonder, then, what are we to do? Surely, even if "expertise" from professionally educated scientists isn't perfect, it's better than nothing, yes? Well, unfortunately, it may be literally impossible to know what to believe. That's just my opinion, anyway. Stay tuned if you'd like to know why.

An article I read several years ago actually tells us exactly how big science is broken. An exact oppositely titled article says science is not broken, but they both actually make the same point. "Science" as a system, as a "corporation" so to speak, is nearly irreparably corrupted. 

 

The first article cites a "replication crisis" (simply view the actual article for details) wherein an overwhelming number of studies have not been or cannot be replicated. Replication, if you know things about the scientific process, is the method through which we confirm that a scientific finding is accurate. If you run a study and get a certain result, but can never get that particular result again, we can be nearly certain that the first result was "a fluke" and not, say, a scientific "rule" of reality. That means an overwhelming number of studies appear by every measure to be flukes. That would be like believing walking under a ladder was bad luck because exactly one time that you did it, you broke your wrist five hours later on the same day. That is, by all accounts, an exact parallel to believing the results of a scientific study that cannot be replicated.

If that weren't enough, there is evidence that scientists regularly engage in outright lying, or fraud as it were. This was done via a survey where they simply asked scientists if they had engaged in unethical acts, such as selectively choosing results that supported their beliefs, or straight up fabricating data. Considering such admissions mean that the scientists are admitting to doing things that are bad we can only assume the number is actually higher, as we can safely assume not everyone was keen to admit wrongdoing, even if the survey is anonymous.

Finally, the icing on the cake, the peer-review process that is supposed to weed out faulty data before studies get published? It's compromised, too. Even when scientists knew they were being tested via faulty studies, they still rubber stamped them for approval. The social-aspect failures continue, with an explanation that older scientists are as superstitiously embroiled into whatever their original biases were as any irrational religious zealot, resulting in younger scientists needing to submit to whatever the more established scientists say, or risk losing their union membership. There are even more articles about how peer-review is abused, citing new and exciting ways scientists are ruining science, including the practice of letting scientists choose the people who will peer-review their work. To believe this wouldn't be abused would be to quite literally put scientists on a pedestal, above any other given human, assuming all scientists are naturally, unwaveringly ethical and working from a mindset of advancing scientific progress rather than their own paychecks and status (or that it's not possible for them to convince themselves they're doing both).

There are plenty more astonishing facts about the state of "big science" in that article, but I'd like to move onto the second article. Herein we find a new sort of excuse for the absolutely destitute state of modern science, and that is - and bear with me - that science is very hard.

The article makes an excellent point - and supplies an interactive little chart, even! - that shows how easy it is to manipulate data to say whatever you want. Given we know that some scientists admit to fudging data to support their claims via a voluntary survey, it should not be surprising that it is as easy as the interactive data chart makes it appear. And that's the part that this article claims is "hard" - it's hard to work with such small numbers, such small differences, and not only find valuable, useful data, but interpret it responsibly. In fact, the only way to recognize if the conclusions pushed by scientists are merely borderline-statistically-insignificant manipulated data is to, phew, do our own research.

But wait, I'm not even done. Here is an article that discusses how a "phantom reference" infiltrated hundreds of otherwise real scientific papers. The reference in question is from a paper that is not real but was still managed to be cited 480 times. It goes on to discuss how most scientists who write papers and make citations do not even read the cited works, they simply cite works other scientists have cited, almost a game of "citation telephone" wherein you wind up with papers making claims and citing sources wherein the claim made is not written. Later in the article we find the approximation that "only about 20% of citers read the original". 

 

This means that those scientists we are supposed to essentially trust with our very lives are possibly manipulating data, lying, simply kowtowing to majority opinion for brownie points, or referencing studies they have not even read - or are reading papers that reference other studies that are nonexistent.

So what are we to do? It is, frankly, a bit much to expect the everyday person, the average Joe, to do painstaking research about so many things. The fact of the matter is that many people do simply "trust the experts", as the alternative is much more difficult. We often do not want to take our lives into our own hands, hoping a confident, trustworthy authority figure, looking out for our best interests, will simply tell us what is best. The fact of the matter is that there is no one looking out for our best interests. The experts do not care about us, they do not even care about the truth. I have been let down by doctors, people paid to care for my health, multiple times. Many people report doctors dismissing their problems and people have even died for it. Medical malpractice is an incredible killer. Those same pompous, educated "experts" in the form of scientists are no more interested in your health and well being. Scientists are bought and sold like anyone else, dissenting views are suppressed and attacked regardless of the validity of their methods. The only way to truly get a grasp on things is to explicitly do our own research.

Unfortunately, it will be pretty difficult to do even that. If the data is compromised, that means any research your look at could be compromised. This includes dissenting opinions. Yes, what I'm saying is all scientific research is suspect and it's nearly impossible to know which scientists lied or manipulated their data for their own ends. Regarding things we could not possibly hope to research ourselves, like whether the arctic is shrinking, we truly can have no idea what is the honest truth. 

 

In fact, a very interesting tweet I came across explained this problem well, but maybe without realizing it. The OP laments that it's nearly impossible to do research because there's conflicting data everywhere with no way of telling who is "trustworthy" or not. They ignorantly - but innocently enough - "miss the days of Encylopedia Brittanica". The ending sentence of the tweet shows that they miss the point - there was likely always dissenting science by any number of opponents to the majority consensus, but because all of our information was compiled into name brand books which were then the main staple of libraries across the country, no one knew about it. Now any dissenting scientist can publish their work and get noticed. This seems like a new problem, but it actually discounts the fact that dissenting scientific opinions could be right, and thus, the majority opinion in Encyclopedia Brittanica, may actually not reflect reality, but a misled majority opinion based in nepotism and brown-nosing. If we only had "majority opinion enforced" encyclopedias today, I can only imagine how much worse the status-and-money-grabbing state of science would be. In a way, allowing dissenting scientists a platform may actually be healthier for truth-seeking than it is unhealthy, though I'm not sure it's salvageable at all at this point, frankly.

 

There is good news, though it may not seem like it at first. Most things do not actually matter. It actually, despite the outcry and controversy, doesn't matter if you think the earth is flat. What difference does it truly make to you, the average person, if pluto is a planet? It is not important. I think, however, for the things that matter, we can get a pretty good idea of what is right. Unfortunately, one of the kinds of things that is very important to the average person is notoriously one of the most difficult things to research, and that is nutrition science. If you are going to dedicate hours of research into anything, don't worry about planets and icebergs - figure out what the food you are putting into your own body every day is doing to you. What is most amazing about this type of research isn't simply that it is applicable, but due to your very close, personal relationship with yourself, nutrition science is something you can easily study with the consent of the subject. You can, in fact, employ bona fide, grade-A science to your own life by making alterations to your diet and paying attention to the results! Amazing. In a real way, the science that truly matters to us is the most accessible, as it is personally testable.

It may never be possible for us to know particular things for certain, as science as an institution has been compromised. The things that personally affect us the most, however, we can figure out ourselves by utilizing the actual scientific process that professional scientists have left behind in favor of social status and wealth accumulation. You can lie about climate science all day and the average person cannot actually contest you with data of their own, only the data from other scientists. You cannot lie to someone about what certain foods are doing to them - they will find out on their own. What's important is not "listening to experts" but learning the mechanisms and functions behind what "science" actually is and applying them where it matters in your own life.

It's important to recognize that we do have biases, but it's also important to understand that our gut instincts are there for a reason. In this day and age, with the complete degradation of trust in "expert opinion", I would argue that you are better off trusting your gut instincts and your own judgements. Both systems are flawed, but at least you have your best interests in mind, where we cannot say as much for "the experts".

Does Religion Hold Science Back?

The argument that "religion is holding science back," is common and firmly rooted in ignorance and misunderstanding. Along with the claim that religion is somehow restraining us from a deeper understanding of something that God Himself created normally comes the declaration that "religion is unscientific".

There are two important points to make here. Well, three. The first and foremost important point to make is "science" is an incredibly broad term, as it can refer to many, separate things. Following that, as I've discussed before, science (as the general concept that is generally meant in this context) and religion exist side by side - they are not and have never been 'at war'. The third one is that science itself is what holds science back.

Or should I say, scientists. Or even "scientism," a phrase coined to refer to the those who commit to 'worship' of science. I can do things in whatever order I choose.

I have a few links here, the first is an article about science being broken. It goes into the failures of the scientific community to properly peer-review studies, even when being told that they are participating in a study that is studying the effectiveness of peer review, and other things highlighting the problems that science faces from within its own ranks.

While the first one was titled "Big Science is Broken," this article is titled "Science isn't broken." Well, gee, why would I link two articles of opposite views to make my point?

Because the title of the first article is wrong. The meat of the article is correct, but "science" isn't broken. People are. We are broken, we are fallen, we are finite, biased, and flawed creatures. A perfectly designed system can still fail when subjected to the natural flaws of humanity. It was one of the first things that ever happened.

But what the second article attempts to say is that science isn't broken, it's just that the systems in place make it hard for scientists to... science things, without "cheating". This, however, is an unsatisfying conclusion. We can't accept self-admittedly flawed science because "it's just really really hard, guys!".

I.e., science is too hard for scientists. It's too hard for them to be unbiased, for them to really think critically, to really care about what they're studying, and to care to try and find out what is true rather than getting the results that they want.

The fact of the matter is that as long as science is performed by flawed people, we cannot place our unwavering faith in it. And what's being shown now is not only that is this conclusion completely true, but it's more true than it's ever been. People are terrible at science, in this "progressive and enlightened" future moreso than they were in the past. Science used to by and large be carried out for the sake of it, funded by people who had few if any ulterior motives, while nowadays many people are just trying to get as many government payouts as they can. Science is so expensive that people cannot do it without getting donations, and people do not donate to the research of causes they don't like.

Science doesn't do or say anything. Science is a limited tool that is utilized by people for us to try and better understand the world around us. But what happened is that we started to worship science - and therefore, scientists. Everyone wanted to be a scientist because they wanted the respect, they wanted to be one of those "smart people". We can see this day to day by the amount of people who act like they're scientists when they aren't, from Bill Nye (engineer, not scientist) to your common every day 16 year old on Facebook posting edgy anti-theism memes.

Where before we perhaps had scientists who were genuinely interested in scientific progression, who genuinely wanted to understand how the world around them worked, we now have a wider pool of scientists - which includes a great number of people who don't intend to use the tool for its pure and truth-seeking powers, but to make people believe the things they want them to believe by forcing studies through that may not actually prove anything, or may actually be distinctly opposite from the truth.

Now, I'm not saying every scientist doesn't care about scientific progression and is actually just using their status to promote their own agendas, nor am I saying that never happened before these recent times. What I am saying is that the information and data being compiled and analyzed by scientists is just as likely to be flawed, misinterpreted, or purposefully manipulated as any other kind of thing. Because scientists are people, and people are flawed.

We see reckless numbers of studies on the same subjects that promote different results. In the same breath we'll see a study that definitely proves that homosexual parents are 100% the same as heterosexual couples and another one that shows that homosexual parents are worse than heterosexual ones. Whatever your personal belief is, know that you can definitely manipulate scientific results to prove that you're right!

So who do we believe? Well, the average person will simply believe the study that coincides with their beliefs, just like the scientist who possibly fabricated the study in the first place made sure that their interpretations of the results showed the things they wanted it to show.

What do we end up with? We end up with a situation in which we had something we thought we could trust being shown to be just as untrustworthy as any other given thing. Leave it to people to ruin things for people.

Should we dismiss the merits of science? Of course not. Science, when utilized properly, is a very useful tool for us to understand the world around us. The problem is that we are unlikely to be able to find a disclosure on each scientific study stating "the scientist or scientists who put this study together were purposefully studying this topic because they wanted to prove [x/y/z] thing, so it's possible that these results are biased."

What options are we left with, then? Well, don't get too optimistic. We can definitely take some steps in the right direction, for instance reading past the title of an article proclaiming that a new study has just definitively proven [thing that supports your beliefs], and actually taking a look at the study in question. Many an article has been written proclaiming a result that's completely different from the study it's citing. The articles written about scientific studies are more or less a second-hand source, which opens it up to even more biased re-interpretation.

We can learn more about what makes good science and what makes bad science. As we can see (if you read both of those articles), one of the biggest problems is that you can manipulate which data and what kind of data you use for your study and still have it be "legitimate." So, really get into the meat of the study. Look at the sample sizes, the populations involved, and we can probably get some good insight into the biases that might be present if we look at the study itself in context of what current popular beliefs are and what sorts of things people are trying to prove. It would be unlikely that a study about chipmunks is being biased by political agendas (though I suppose it's possible).

So... science is not broken, it's just easily manipulated, and frequently is. Scientists tend to get in the way of science moreso than anyone else. Pseudo-scientists who are really just college kids who aren't even majoring in any field of science also help to degrade the reputation of science. Furthermore, since the government can fund scientific studies and then subsequently demand that the results of those studies aren't published when they don't prove what they wanted, we can see that politics probably gets in the way of science far more than religion does.

So what about "religion hindering the advancement of science" that we talked about?

As mentioned many times before, science and religion go hand in hand. If there is a Creator of all things, then He created... science. He created everything, thus, science is really just the discovery of the world that the Creator created.

How, then, could religion ever get in the way of science? Well, it's important to understand what people mean by this.

Generally speaking, religion "gets in the way" of science when scientists attempt to do immoral things in the name of science. For example, psychologists used to do tons of terrible studies on people that would have violated any compassionate person's moral standards. A code of ethics was installed so that psychologists couldn't emotionally scar (or physically damage) people anymore. This is easily something that "got in the way" of science.

Anti-theists also tend to believe that religion is "getting in the way" when religious people debate, contest, or deny scientific findings. There are obviously religious people who have been tricked into thinking that science is an enemy of God who will very unscientifically deny and argue against scientific advancement, but my biggest question here is how they are actually stopping anyone. If some misled religious devotees are hellbent on believing something that science "said," that doesn't... actually... stop anything. Go on. Continue. You are not restricted by the beliefs of people who disagree with you.

The problem of course starts when religious people debate, contest, or deny the implied conclusions of certain scientific findings. A straight forward example is the argument of common descent that is derived from the fact that all living things are made up of DNA and the more similar looking and operating two life forms are, the more similar their DNA. Darwinists have used this indisputable scientific fact - that we all have DNA and share similarities and what not - as proof of a common ancestor.

Apparently, I'm standing in the way of science when I say "Well, wait a moment, how exactly does this not make complete sense in the context of a Creator? If I make a sculpture of an ape and a sculpture of a human being both out of clay, how many differences do I really have to make?"

See, similar DNA among similar creatures doesn't prove anything one way or another. What happened is that scientists, due to their preexisting biases, concluded that similar DNA is clearly evidence of a common ancestor! When I point out the logically obvious reality that it could easily be evidence of a common Creator, I'm "standing in the way of science!" Brilliant.

"But wait!" the atheist shouts, "What about Galileo and the early Catholic Church? That's our best and most used example of the church getting in the way of science!"

Galileo is a good example of a distorted truth being repeated so many times that everyone now believes it. The real story of Galileo, summarized, involves being told not to proclaim things without evidence, still doing so, and then being put on house arrest with all the comforts of living, including a servant, for insulting the Pope who invited you to prove your claims in the first place.

See, Galileo actually didn't prove that the earth revolved around the sun the way that we understand it now. People back then already had evidence that the earth revolved around the sun, and a lot of that information was found around - wait for it - churches. Copernicus, a Catholic monk, actually did the studies about the earth revolving around the sun. He was just sort of a meek and socially awkward person who didn't want to go public with his findings. Galileo took Copernicus' findings and ran with them, because he was actually sort of an unapologetically brash man. He also stated several times that God had actually given him divine power over the discernment of astronomy. Yeah, so, what the Catholic church had an issue with was that - Galileo running around proclaiming that God made him an astrology-prophet.

Some of Galileo's claims were actually disproven, as Copernicus was actually the one who did all the leg work, while Galileo took it and ran around proclaiming himself something of a genius - and that everyone who disagreed with him was an idiot, including the Pope, which Galileo astonishingly basically told him to his face. Since the Pope was also basically the king, he put Galileo on house arrest for heresy - not for saying the earth revolved around the sun, but because he declared to have divine powers and also called the Pope stupid.

Sources? Here, here, and this book.

It's kind of unfortunate that the atheist's go-to for the church trying to halt scientific progression is actually all based on a lie. Another one they try to use now is stem-cell research.

We have two points to make here. Our first point is, interestingly, not all stem-cells come from embryos and fetuses:

A third source of stem cells, known as multipotent stem cells, can be found in many types of adult tissue such as bone marrow, adipose tissue (fat), and umbilical cord blood. Adult stem cells are needed every day to replenish a variety of cell types in our body that normally wear out and die in large numbers. Examples of cells that need to be constantly replaced are blood, skin cells, and the lining of our intestinal tract. Areas of the body not previously thought to contain stem cells, such as the brain, have in recent years been discovered to contain these self-renewing cells.

Our second point is that we have not come across religion getting in the way of science, but rather morality and ethics. Just as psychologists who were doing emotionally damaging and sometimes physically and developmentally horrendous ethically irreconcilable things to people "in the name of science," we come across the ethical and moral question of abortion, purposefully creating embryos for science, and a "whose life is more important?" dilemma.

As I've gone into before, stem cell research from unborn little humans is not a question of science but of morality. This isn't a religious question but a moral one. The topic has merely been conflated as being religious in nature, but it exists separate from religion. There are secular organizations against abortion! It's outright false to insist that only religious adherents are against abortion.

So what we come across now is that morality is really what "gets in the way of science." Now the question we have to ask is "is that wrong?"

This question gets pretty deep. Is it okay to "hinder" scientific advancement because of our morals, our humanity, and our respect for people's lives?

I would argue that of course it is. As I went into before about purely logical worldviews, when we ignore our humanity - our emotions and our compassion - we end up with some pretty gruesome results. Morality is more important than science as it is what keeps us human. What good is arguing about the advancement of science if it ends up destroying us?

But we have one more contest about religion hindering science - the idea that a scientist should not hold any religious beliefs. While this is only somewhat related, what we find is that people believe that the religious cannot be scientists, or more generally, scientists should not ever hold any beliefs that are not provable with science.

There is not much really to present here in the form of an argument, as this belief is rooted in personal bias and anti-theism rather than any actual argument. What we see here is that non-religious scientists believe that religious people cannot be good scientists because they believe in the false concept of religion v. science, that religion is anti-science and therefore religious beliefs will hinder a scientist from doing sciencey things.

This is all conjecture. Especially when we see that many prominent scientists in very advanced fields such as astrophysics, physics, and cosmology actually tend to find that science points toward a Creator. As with my example earlier, much of the evidence "for naturalism" is actually simply neutral evidence that proves nothing being imbued by biased scientists with a biased conclusion.

Furthermore, there is no reason to believe that a scientist with a belief in a Creator could possibly be unscientific considering that no one who believes in a Creator doesn't believe that that same Creator created everything - including the very thing they are studying. Scientific advancement doesn't disprove God - you do not disprove a Creator by finding out how the creation operates. If anything, belief in a Creator will simply cause the religious scientist to have a greater appreciation and reverence for that which he is studying - because he knows that it was created with love and care by the same Creator who created him.

Are Logic and Emotion At War?

While I've pondered and discussed this plenty of times before, today the thought has resurfaced in my head due to Neil Degrasse Tyson's proposed "Rationalia," as follows:

Earth needs a virtual country: #Rationalia, with a one-line Constitution: All policy shall be based on the weight of evidence

That tweet was followed in short order by another, a picture of several people holding up signs declaring themselves to be citizens of Rationalia.

I'm not the only person who finds issue with it. It was actually quite interesting to me to see all of the people who called Tyson out on the obvious failures and weaknesses of his proposal - interesting and reassuring.

See, when skeptics, truth seekers, and logical thinkers fall too far into the comforts of evidence and reason, they forget themselves. They forget something important about the world, about humanity. Well, they forget many important things about all of those things, actually.

We'll cut to the chase with the most glaring and devastating issue - the first and foremost, absolutely most important thing that proponents of the "nothing but logic" school of thought seem to forget: there is no logical argument, no evidence to be found, and no scientific case to be made for the value of a human being's life.

Let me make myself clear: there is no non-emotional, non-moral reason to not kill other people for any reason, up to and including no reason.

Even if your moral standards are baseless - i.e., you have no higher power on which to base your moral standards, people generally still have a moral inclination toward not killing other people for no reason. Without a moral standard, we do find people finding excuses and reasons to enact violence upon other people, up to and including murder. Interestingly, those reasons are based on evidence, whether that evidence is good or bad is up for debate, but no one rationalizes killing someone else without a reason. Only the truly sociopathic find themselves on that boat.

Yes, not only is there no logical reason based off of science or evidence that would allow us to conclude that killing other people is wrong, but when you employ cold, unfeeling logical reasoning into the equation, you find yourself with groups of people rationalizing murder. The use of pure, cold logic without an understanding of moral standards or the influence of emotion, and dare I say humanity, will lead people toward murder. Eugenics, genocide, ethnic cleansing - you name it. These ideologies all use "evidence and reason" to justify their immoral behaviors. And we cannot combat these reasonings with evidence - the only objections to murder are moral and emotional.

It's not that there are not objections to murder, we simply find that any and all of them are emotional or moral. Attempting to dismiss these types of reasoning as simply not valid due to the idol-worship of the holy and sacred Logic has the same results as the reason we fear an artificially intelligent robotic takeover - nothing but logic will always result in our deaths. The first person to comment on Tyson's tweet makes this point:

This is not the only thing, of course, but it is by far the absolute most important. Indeed, Tyson's proposed Rationalia would devolve in short order into a tyrannical, emotionless murder factory. With no logical reason to not kill other people, we easily find the justification for murder of the physically and mentally disabled. What reason would we have for allowing these logically and rationally inferior people in a purely logical society? When we weigh the pros and cons of allowing those unable or unfit to work and contribute, we will have plenty of evidence showing that their lives are in fact not quite worth as much as the mentally fit and physically capable populace. Surely there would be people opposed to this plan, but unless those people can provide logical evidence that their disabled friends and family could be a benefit to society, they will see them enter the execution room.

There are plenty of reasons to oppose pure emotion in regards to decision making. However, we see that pure logic is in fact deadly. The logic vs. emotion camps have created a false dilemma - these two schools of thought at not at odds with one another. They work in tandem, they exist necessarily side by side. The entire concept of humanity is based on a working relationship between emotion and logic that allows us to see the values of vastly important aspects of life like love and friendship while maintaining the ability to make the best decisions possible - usually for what we hope to be the benefit of our friends and loved ones.

This is what we tend to forget. Even those among us who champion pure logic and reason tend to still find themselves experiencing emotions of all sorts. They have families and loyalties, they create a moral framework for themselves - with or without a higher power to hold them accountable - and they, typically, fall in love. The ones who avoid emotion and relationships tend to come out miserable. The attempts to dislodge emotions from our world and our lives always fail - we either give in or give up.

A world of pure emotion would be chaotic - poor decision making, laws that contradict each other, and rampant and indefensible inequality would result. A world of pure logic would be Hell itself, an utter dystopian nightmare. Any attempts to separate these two aspects of what makes us human is an attempt to sabotage humanity.

People are inclined toward "us vs. them" mentalities. We unconsciously put ourselves into camps, form alliances with those who think like us, and consider those who think the opposite thing to be bad, stupid, or inferior. In its extreme form, you end up with, well, extremists. What happened is that camps of people who thought logic and reason were great further and further separated themselves from everything that wasn't logic and reason. Instead of recognizing the inherent values in both logic and emotion, they saw the damage that pure emotion does and they concluded that emotion is bad. Highly emotional thinkers, valuing their emotional perspectives, were shunned and pushed away from logic by the idea that logic is more important than their emotional conclusions, and found themselves separating further and further from logic. Now we have two extreme camps of people, one who thinks it's okay to disregard emotion and one that thinks it's okay to disregard logic.

They are both dead wrong.

To emphasize, dead wrong.

To further make my point, let's clarify something about evidence based decision making. Here are some straight forward facts about what "evidence" even is:

• Evidence is unbiased.
• Evidence does not make decisions.
• Evidence does not say anything.
• Evidence does not conclude anything.
• Evidence can be incomplete.
• Evidence can be misunderstood.
• Evidence can be misused.
• Evidence can be fabricated.

That's probably enough. Basically, what is being proposed is that people - finite, biased, imperfect and influenceable people - would regard evidence as the only method through which to obtain truth. They would then use that discerned "truth" to make decisions, laws, proposals, changes, and decide who lives and dies.

The problem should be clear, but I'll elaborate. People can misinterpret evidence, indeed, they can even purposefully misrepresent it through sophistical means - as in, purposefully manipulating available evidence to make it appear as they desire, or simply making a compelling enough case for what they want you to believe the evidence shows (when it could easily show otherwise). These "higher thinkers" already do this all the time. A society run by the people specifically showcased in that earlier picture instantly makes this proposed nation sound far more hellish than it does in mere theory.

Furthermore, there is nothing on which to base the conclusions of your evidence without some sort of moral framework. Yes, an evidence-only based system could literally not even exist, as evidential conclusions require bias. People consider bias to be a naughty word, but in reality, our entire world is shaped by biases. We can't conclude anything unless we make inferences - if we had no biases, we could not come to conclusions on anything except for the most basic and obvious of things.

Think of it this way - if you are attempting to discern the likelihood of someone having committed a crime based on the evidence for the crime, unless there is definitive, corroborating video proof, you cannot conclude whether or not they are guilty without bias. You must make that leap from "it is likely/unlikely" to "they are guilty/innocent" using inference - or, biases. If we have an eyewitness testimony, but that person has been shown to lie, has a criminal record or has a strong personal relationship or loyalty to the defense or the prosecution, then we can conclude that their testimony may be biased - it might be fabricated, or simply fake.

We have to use inferences every step of the way through the process of determining the validity of a claim. We prefer witnesses unassociated with the people involved because they are less likely to be biased - this conclusion itself is based off of our biases. A witness associated with the people involved could be unbiased, but due to our own biases, we assume it is likely that they will be biased. If we have evidence showing that the accused was present at the location of the crime, but not necessarily evidence of them committing the crime, we have to use inference to determine whether or not they were just an innocent bystander who was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

So evidence is clearly not the end all be all of decision making - it requires inference, which is biased by the people making the decisions. In a system where decisions are only based on evidence as seen fit by the people in charge, we are left with a situation in which the only reality is the personal biases of the governing rulers.

So, pretty much the same thing we see in government anyway.