I do not trust peer review, and I do my fair share of it. Last night I packed the work bag for this morning, and in went the work I had not read during the holiday that I have to review: a good two-inch stack of paper.
Peer review, you see, is a proxy. The correct review is to redo the experiment in another place, another team: same methodology, same results. And publishing both. In a less converged time, this is what Master’s students should be working on, or PhD students.
Because research is as much caught as taught: it is an apprenticeship. As such, the beliefs of those who practice the craft of science matter: without a firm belief that there is a truth and a conscious rejection of the Hegelian illogic, Marxism and its bastard child post-modernism, peer review becomes narrative and research a gloss on the accepted dogma of the nanosecond.
Christians must realize that they need science in order to defeat atheism. But, what’s even more true is that science needs Christianity in order to survive. It has to be stated clearly that genuine and productive science cannot exist without Christianity.
The historical truth is that science was born of Christianity. All of the great pioneers in astronomy and physics were devout Christians, because modern science has been based from its beginning on uniquely Christian beliefs and faith. If Christianity had never existed, there would have been no science to lift humankind out of ignorance and barbarity.
Most atheists are not only ignorant of the true history of science; they make up their own history as in the totally false story of the alleged persecution of Galileo. Those few atheists who know and admit the truth about the origins of modern science would undoubtedly argue that science has outgrown its Christian roots. Richard Dawkins and other scientists-turned-professional-atheists argue that science has been liberated from Christianity, which is either a self-serving delusion or an outright lie. The one thing atheists are correct about is that Christianity has become a diminishing factor in science through the last few generations.
The loss of Christian guidance is distressing, because science cannot survive as a source of truth and useful knowledge without the preeminence of Christian values, beliefs, and faith. Individual humanists and other non-Christians can certainly do real science, but only in a Christian intellectual environment that inhibits the natural anti-scientific impulses of the human mind. Secular humanists see science as a human endeavor that must be in constant and unfailing service to humankind, which really means that science must be bent in service of humanist preconceptions of how the world should be.
True science can serve only one purpose — the search for truth. It is up to engineers, entrepreneurs, and others to use the results of science in ways that are beneficial to society. Scientists, however, can have only one guiding concern, and science is corrupted to the degree to which other concerns (wealth, reputation, and political power) motivate them. Christians as a group were never perfectly motivated by the desire for truth, but the Christian scientific community was effectively guided by that ambition. It is difficult for people who really believe that the scientific search for truth is an attempt to learn something about God to disappoint their God by allowing worldly concerns to get in the way of the search for divine truth.
The vitality and trustworthiness of science is in direct proportion to the Christian influence in a discipline and in inverse proportion to the influence of secular humanism.
Stickwick, who wrote this, is an astrophysicist. She notes that the social sciences are among the most converged. True in part. There is a caveat here: theory does not survive dealing with the clinical tasks very well. Medicine, including psychiatry, is relentlessly pragmatic: we look at the trials and meta analyses, then throw them away if what they recommend does not work the people we are seeing. This is why some drugs fail: they may get through the FDA and EU drug licensing trials by the use of statistical trickery, but the drug ws given at too high a dose (risperidone) too low a dose (olanzapine, quetiapine) or the effective dose is after years of experience, unknown (clozapine). It is worse in the talking therapies, because researchers are more invested in something they wrote than a chemical someone else formulated.
But the narrative is being pushed. If there are errors, double down and double down again. Call any who disagree racist, imbeciles, ignoramuses, and remove their platform. Proclaim your policy as a consensus. And, whatever you do, avoid experimental testing, in case it fails, and your narrative collapses.
Translation: Everyone who doesn’t submit to the latest version of the Narrative will be replaced. And once they scent blood, the zharks will swarm. And really, if the safety of the delicate flowers is paramount, wouldn’t it be best for everyone if they just canceled the convention and everyone stayed home, safely ensconced in their blankets and covered with a thin, comforting coating of stale Doritos dust?
I look forward to the first accusations being directed at the Finns running Worldcon 75 and charging them with being secret Castalia operatives seeking to destroy the Hugo Awards.
It is much better to doubt yourself. Have humility. Stickwick looks at stars for a living. When I am in Central Otago, which is a light pollution free place, and I consider the heavens I am driven to the praise of God. Any art we do, any research, any craft will be flawed. We don’t live in a world of Euclidean shapes and Aristotlean Forms. This world has been broken.
But the shards of beauty remaining should stun us with their beauty. And let not the narrative blind us to this.