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Unchaining the Human Heart
— A Revolutionary Manifesto
A Book by J. Neil Schulman
Chapter 13: Science versus Omniscience

Let’s start by getting one thing straight.

No real scientist would ever, ever, ever — under any circumstances — declare that a question has been answered finally and that a scientific debate is over, once and for all. Ever.

That’s just not how real scientists think, or talk.

Science is a process — a set of tools to test knowledge for validity — and whenever you hear someone declare that scientific debate is over and a particular conclusion is unquestionable, not only has he given strong evidence that he never grasped the scientific method, there’s a good chance he has identified himself not as a scientist but as a political operative, an ad man, a religious fanatic, a con man, and possibly a gangster in a lab coat.

The scientific method always gives its conclusions as provisional and always subject to correction by additional facts, better observations, later experiments, newer theories, more relevant paradigms, and — every once in a while — a genius turning everything we thought we knew upside down by asking a question nobody until then had thought to ask.

In his very first published short story, “Lifeline,” in 1939, Robert A. Heinlein — always considered one of the most scientifically literate of science-fiction writers — put these words in the mouth of a scientist: “One can judge from experiment, or one can blindly accept authority. To the scientific mind, experimental proof is all important and theory is merely a convenience in description, to be junked when it no longer fits. To the academic mind, authority is everything and facts are junked when they do not fit theory laid down by authority.”
–J. Neil Schulman, “Exposing The Warm Mongers
J. Neil Schulman @ Rational Review, November 27, 2009

I wrote the above as my introduction to a discussion on global warming, a week after whistle blowers released onto the Internet thousands of emails from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. These emails revealed not only massive fraud being committed by scientists claiming proof of global warming but the deliberate silencing and marginalization of scientists who declined to agree that human-caused increases in carbon dioxide and methane threaten catastrophic global warming.

But the established United Nations’ political consensus on global warming is only one of many subjects where my above words are applicable.

Today, no less than in the time of Galileo, there are those megalomaniacs who attempt to speak with Divine Omniscience to tell us what we are allowed to believe.

In a December 18, 2009 address to the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, U.S. President Barack Obama declared that “This is not fiction, this is science. Unchecked, climate change will pose unacceptable risks to our security, our economies, and our planet. That much we know.” The President was speaking not out of a Science that — even as he spoke — was being called into question because of reliance upon fraudulent data, but using his political office to speak ex cathedra, like the Pope, out of a grandiose entitlement to Omniscience.

No scientist claims to be a Know-It-All.

Anyone claiming to be a Know-It-All on any subject is no scientist.

Omniscience today is as much the enemy of free thinking as it was when the Inquisition convicted Galileo Galilei for heresy because he dared champion the Copernican view that the earth orbited the sun and therefore the earth was not the center of the universe. At the time the idea that the earth was the center of creation was established Church doctrine. Galileo was forced to recant, and spent the rest of his life under house arrest. It took three-and-a half centuries before Pope John Paul II admitted the Church might have been too rough on him. Excuse me for thinking that’s a day late and a dollar short.

The persecution of independent scientists continues today. Today, however, as many persecutors are driven by secular ideology as religious faith.

The passionate mind longs for knowledge about what we are — as a species and as individuals — in what we know to be a tiny oasis of life in an inconceivably large but possibly dead universe. If we truly are alone on this planet — the only observers in a vast desert — we want to know it, because it tells us how special we are. If we are one of a community of intelligent species in the universe, we want to know that, too … because it means the human race does not have to be celestially lonely.

If we came into existence by an unlikely series of meaningless accidents then we who think are the gods of the universe.

If we were created by an uncreated and eternal Designer then we have traded our notion of godhood for the comfort of not being orphans.

Omniscience: Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution has been proven to account for the beginnings of life and the natural selection of genetic traits for simpler life forms to evolve into more-complex life forms — including the human species.

Science: No scientist has yet performed an experiment that can demonstrate how a living cell can come into existence out of non-living matter. Nor is the fossil record conclusive in showing more complex life forms arising out of less complex life forms. Evolution remains what it was when Charles Darwin’s book On the Origin of Species first proposed it on November 24, 1859 as the explanation for the origins of species — an unproved theory.

The debate on the origins of species is locked in a fight-to-the-death struggle between theists and atheists on whether Intelligent Design is required to cross the chasm between a universe of non-living matter and energy and the one planet we know to contain life — our own. The debate is confused by militant atheists like Richard Dawkins who are willing to admit the possibility that terrestrial life might have been the design of earlier extraterrestrial creators. This only relocates the first appearance of life to another address.

But the search for clues on our origins is annihilated when either side uses force and intimidation to silence their opponents.

It was an evil attack on the free human mind when in 1925 the State of Tennessee put high-school science teacher John Scopes on trial for violating its Butler Act, which made it unlawful “to teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals” in any Tennessee state-funded school and university.

It is as much an evil attack on the free human mind today when teaching Intelligent Design is prohibited by law and even less savory threats are made by academies of higher learning against the academic freedom of researchers and teachers who decline to agree that Darwin’s Theory of Evolution has been demonstrated to account for the existence of life and of the human species.

If you think the extermination of free thought begins and ends with global warming and Darwin, it may well be that your own prejudices are getting in the way of your seeing how universal and dogmatic Omniscience still is today.

Omniscience: All human consciousness can be accounted for as a byproduct of neural activity in the human brain, and ceases when the brain dies. Any supposition that there is a soul or spirit that exists independent of the cerebral organ — and can exist outside it and endure beyond it — isn’t science but superstition. No respectable institution of scientific research or learning should be given a dime to experiment on it. No science degrees should be awarded in these fields of study. Send them to the Schools of Divinity or just call them cranks and let them be published in the Weekly World News.

Science: Conduct experiments in extra-sensory perception, precognition, communication with the dead, and out-of-body travel. Invent double-blind experiments, keep careful records, report what you find.

Omniscience: No artifacts exist from any alien spacecraft and those who claim the Army collected and hid such artifacts are just nut jobs. People who claim they’ve experienced alien colonoscopies are psychotics. The United States Air Force looked into it and found nothing that can’t be explained away by ordinary atmospheric phenomena and previously classified technology.

Science: Interview the thousands of humans who report observations of, and contact with, UFO’s and extraterrestrials, and consider that eyewitness accounts are as much raw data as anything discovered in a laboratory. Men have been sent to the electric chair on less eyewitness testimony than in many UFO cases.

Do you believe in Bigfoot, the Abominable Snowman, or the Loch Ness Monster?

Omniscience: Even though new species are being documented by scientists every day, anyone who believes they’ve observed heretofore uncatalogued anthropoid species or prehistoric sea creatures no older than many species of sharks are just deluding themselves.

Now you’re not going to tell me you believe in prehistoric technological civilizations on this planet like Atlantis or Mu, are you, Neil?

Omniscience: Our current civilization — for which artifacts and documents of any sort can only account for several thousand of the millions of years the human species is supposed to have been in existence on this planet — is the one and only time civilization has reached an industrial technology. The repeated ice ages which have swept clean the surface of the earth every ten thousand or so years — that would be a hundred clean sweeps if the civilization we’re looking for was a million years back — can’t possibly account for archeologists failing to discover a prehistoric microwave oven. There’s no chance we might only find the evidence we’re seeking in the deepest of ocean trenches, locked below the earth’s crust possibly even as far down as the earth’s mantle. And it’s absurd to think we’ll find evidence of a previous human civilization when we finally get a chance to do some digging on Mars.

I write as a lover of science. It was my first passion. It still is.

Don’t tell me what to believe in. Tell me what the facts are. Tell me what you think they mean. I’ll make up my own mind.

When anyone claims the authority to say what is science and what isn’t — when anyone declares a debate is over and tag themselves the winner — it makes me want to put my fist down their mind-killing pie holes.

But if any of them can get over their megalomaniacal sense of Omniscience, I’d much rather just have a lively discussion with them over a beer.

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Next in Unchaining the Human Heart — A Revolutionary Manifesto is Chapter XIV: Sex for Money

Unchaining the Human Heart — A Revolutionary Manifesto is
Copyright © 2010 The J. Neil Schulman Living Trust. All rights reserved.


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