By Colby Malsbury

In more than one respect, the centuries-old Christian culture war suffered a major setback in the little town of Dayton, TN, in the summer of 1925.

Oh, sure, John Scopes might have been found guilty of teaching evolution and charged a nominal fine – that was later overturned – but that was hardly the point of what would go on to constitute the most infamous misdemeanor trial in all of history. Nay, as almost all of the trial’s participants would later admit – including those local power-brokers who found it politic to align themselves with the prosecution – the whole spectacle was a bit of theater designed, in best 1920s small-town ‘booster’ fashion, to put their economically dwindling whistle stop on the map and reap a few out-of-county bucks from the proceedings.¹ And if the money’s talking loud and clear…why, sure, those nominal Christians would have had no problem allowing magistrate-with-a-mission Clarence Darrow to get on his soapbox and deliver his trademark militant atheistic (‘agnostic’, my ass) rhetoric to a print media already mesmerized by rationalism in all its hideous glory:

I think this case will be remembered because it is the first case of this sort since we stopped trying people in America for witchcraft, because here we have done our best to turn back the tide that has sought to force itself upon this modern world, of testing every fact in science by a religious dictum.

Thus the self-casting of this notorious publicity hack into a role envied by Antifa acolytes of several generations later: the lone pine on the mountaintop standing steadfast against the overbearing typhoon of ‘reaction’ and fighting for every child’s right to visit the observatory, or look in a microscope, or something. Pity William Jennings Bryan. Ground down by the oppressive TN heat, facing constant jeers over his assumed bumptiousness from the same enlightened crew who doubtless supported him a quarter century previously, and fated to pass on mere days after the show trial had ground to its conclusion – and granting that he didn’t do himself any favors by leaving the door open for the ‘possibility’ of some form of theistic evolution divorced from Darwin’s theories – his unceasing efforts to uphold Biblical inerrancy when well outside the prime of his life can only be regarded as a valiant last stand by one of the faithful. Darrow’s ‘besting’ of Bryan on that one afternoon comes off in retrospect as a decidedly lopsided affair, but when has that ever stopped the Left from claiming total victory before?

There is no denying that socialism was on the ascendancy in the US in the Roaring 20s, the vaunted ‘boom’ of that decade notwithstanding, and in fact contributing in no small part to the development of that diseased mindset. And wherever you have creeping socialism, you have galloping faith in the rationalism of SCIENCE leading the way into an apparently better and more empirical world. And never mind if the ‘science’ is decidedly of the Lysenkoist variety. What matters truth if it gets in the way of doctrinaire good ju-ju?

And on that happy note, let us prepare to usher in the Slough of Despond that will be the administration of always-president-elect-never-president Joe Biden, who has taken great pains to insist that his tenure will be one in which ‘science and truth’ will reign supreme – unlike that conjuring superstitious wretch Donald Trump. Sure, Jeremiad Joe secured the potent Wiccan and pantheist vote by wide margins, but c’mon man! That’s like way beside the point!! In the midst of the worst pandemic in the history of the world, not to mention the continuing threat of global warming, don’t you want someone in the Oval Office who will at least pretend to understand what the likes of Bill Nye and Neil deGrasse Tyson are talking about when they start talking about heady egghead concepts like ‘elements’, ‘comets’, and ‘federal grant money’?

It will be left up to Kamala to don the ubiquitous ‘I F***ING LOVE SCIENCE’ t-shirt, doubtless when she’s twerking to celebrate the opening of the world’s largest transgender bathroom in the Pentagon or something. After all, isn’t she on the ticket to class up the joint a bit?

All Western revolutions of the modern era, from the American to the ‘gender identity’, have felt compelled to extol the supremacy of science as a justification for their existence. After all, the same empirical thought process that makes use of the scientific method in the laboratory via observation can also be put to use in garnering legitimacy for an uprising. If the ends wind up justifying the means, the hypothetical can be rendered conclusive, the thinking goes.

And as the Left is in a chronic revolutionary state of mind, tis little wonder that they make a religion out of the seemingly immutable creed of rib-rocked ‘science’ and turn it into one of the myriad of their religions in the form of ‘scientism’. It is impossible to make a case against unnecessary gender-reassignment surgery when scientific studies show…..this and that benefit. It is the height of folly to call for any easing of existing lockdowns when scientific studies show….this and that onerous consequence. All written in stone like some intractable Decalogue, end of story, period.

This faith, of course, lies on one of the most erroneous of presuppositions: that science is 100% apolitical. Not exactly a ‘eureka’ moment on their part. Like every other discipline practiced by fallen man, science can be corrupted, and most certainly is when expedient.

Helping measures immeasurably in this corruption is the fact that for the past century, the scientific establishment has been under the overwhelming influence of Marxism – not just in its materialist preconceptions, but increasingly in its entire doctrinaire philosophy. Because, y’know, it bills itself as the ‘scientific’ basis of socialism. This is a cringeworthy intellectual basis. Marxism defines itself by it Hegelian dialectic worldview – wherein nothing remains in a state of stasis, but is constantly re-synthesizing itself out of previous bipolar conflicts and providing a new ‘truth’ to govern man’s affairs until an anti-truth emerges to begin the process anew. Doesn’t sound much like ‘incontrovertible facts and evidence’ to me. After Lysenko fell out of favor, little wonder if the most admired Soviet scientist these days is Ivan Pavlov. Sure, his work on the societal implications of behavioral conditioning may have been undertaken in the soft science of psychology, but its ramifications form the basis for all interaction in the hard science community as well.

Don’t believe me? Just try to get accredited by the scientific mafiosi if you don’t hold to the ‘correct’ views of the theory of evolution and the theory of man-made climate change, to name just two examples. It hardly matters if your expertise is in a completely unrelated field like polymers, acoustics, or MRIs. Either get on board with the leftist narrative or you will be slapped with the dreaded moniker ‘pseudo’, and you can spend your career tracking reported sightings of the Loch Ness Monster. Witness the now-decades long smear campaign waged against James Watson, the co-discoverer of DNA, for daring to presume that genetics bear out the Biblical and historical truth of a racial and sexual hierarchy. But as David Irving can also attest, mastery of one’s subject matter is no guarantee against being scrubbed from the encyclopedia if you don’t toe the mark and walk the line.

And as is the case with every idolater, the purveyors of scientism have zero insight as to the true nature of their misguided faith. Take a gander at this howler from ‘billions and billions of stars’ hack Carl Sagan:

In science it often happens that scientists say, ‘You know that’s a really good argument; my position is mistaken,’ and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn’t happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion. (1987)

I guess logic isn’t a part of the curriculum in your typical post-graduate science program, or else Sagan would have picked up on the incongruity of ‘doesn’t happen as often as it should’ with ‘it happens every day’. But talk about self-congratulatory pap. On what planet do these legions of open-minded scientists dwell? Questioning narratives is not how one secures tenure, either in academia or at some government-funded lab that issues a Red Alert whenever one of its denizens e-mails a politically incorrect meme to other departments in his division. And it is this calcified ‘discipline’ that mainstream politicians and churches follow unquestioningly, that they might appear cosmopolitan rather than Neanderthal. Carl really should have left the set of Nova from time to time and gone out to see how the real world operates.

And just as a medical specialist might know everything about the minutiae of an esophagus but have no idea how to heat up a pizza pop in the microwave, so too do the purveyors of scientism prove themselves to be utterly illiterate when it comes to discussing matters outside their very narrow area of ‘expertise’. As a prime example, witness the Left’s insistence on referring to the global warming scam as an ‘existential’ threat, by which they take the word to mean bare survival of the species. Never mind that existentialism as a philosophy concentrates almost exclusively on the individual and his perception of his own being and form, and that to bother oneself with long-term global phenomena like climate patterns would be considered by existentialists to be so metaphysical as to be meaningless. I’d point out the irony to them, but scientists aren’t renowned for being well versed in that, either.

The Christian view on science was succinctly stated by Gordon H. Clark: it is false, but sometimes useful. No man can perceive God’s truth by any evidence presented before his own eyes, and relying on his own senses to make sense of the data before him. As in all other disciplines, we can only hope to see through its glass darkly. Science has its place. And scientism also has its place – in the dustbin, being the egregious violation of the Second Commandment that it is.

But don’t tell that to the uber-rational and reasonable revolutionaries that make up Antifa, though. In the wake of the recent electoral steal and subsequent farce of an inauguration, their mantra is ‘the political science is settled!!!’

1As documented in Edward J. Larson’s Summer for the Gods – a surprisingly frank admission from an author who has shown himself to be thoroughly Matriced in other books of his. This one, however, is well worth a read.