Knowles: Science Is Fake

The following was adapted from remarks delivered at Franciscan University of Steubenville on Tuesday, November 29, 2022.

When I speak on campus, the libs call me all sorts of names: “racist,” “sexist,” “-phobic.” But the charge they hurl at me most often these days is “anti-science.” It doesn’t matter what I’m talking about: the coronavirus, gender, global warming, etc. The most frequent accusation these days, tantamount to a charge of blasphemy, is that I’m “anti-science.” And to that accusation, I say, “Guilty as charged.”

Many conservatives hate being called “anti-science.” It makes them feel foolish and ignorant. That is why they try to ground all of their arguments in scientific-sounding jargon. When the liberals call us “anti-science” for denying their alleged “breakthroughs” in the science of sex and gender, conservatives hurl the insult right back at them. We accuse them of being “anti-science” for denying the scientific reality of sex. We refer to “biological males,” “biological females” — as if biology were the only thing that mattered.

When the libs accuse us of being “anti-science” for objecting to their taking away all of our rights and freedoms and way of life for over two years, conservatives return the very same insult. We say, “We’re not anti-science! You’re anti-science!” And then we recite a litany of scientific arguments for why hankies on our faces wouldn’t stop a pandemic. As if there were no other reason other than “science” not to give all of our political power to a diminutive technocrat in a lab coat and all of his lackeys.

When the liberals call us “anti-science” for doubting that the world will end in 10 years if we don’t destroy our economy and radically alter the way to eat, work, get around, heat our homes, and do pretty much everything else that we do, what do we say? We say, “Nuh-uh, you’re anti-science!” And then we cite our own statistics on sea levels and storms and temperatures or whatever, as though “science” were the ultimate — nay, the only — authority when it comes to ascertaining truth.

I’m sick of it. I don’t care if the libs call me foolish, or ignorant, or a knuckle-dragging troglodyte. I will not play their game. I will not worship their false god. I will not take their epistemological bait. “Science” is fake. Conservatives may not be “anti-science,” but we should be. We should at least be much more skeptical of the pretenses of science than we are right now.

For starters, as a purely historical matter, science has been wrong about pretty much everything. I refer not only to the past couple of years of COVID incoherence. I’m not just talking about the World Health Organization and the CDC and the NIH and our old pal Dr. Fauci, all of whom made mistakes and told outright lies about COVID, its origins, the masks, the “social distancing,” the vaccines, the lockdowns, and most everything else. I’m not even talking about relatively recent scientific flubs — moments such as occurred in 1949, when the neurologist Antonio Egas Moniz won the Nobel Prize for inventing the lobotomy.

I mean to look more broadly at the category of “science” as a whole. Because virtually every single scientific theory about every single thing has been at some point disproven, upended, or replaced.

There was, for example, the theory of the spontaneous generation of life — widely accepted for millennia that complex life springs from inanimate objects. That was knocked down in the 19th century by Louis Pasteur, who proved “biogenesis,” the notion that life is generated only from other life,” the diversity of which, it was held for millennia, derives from a single act of creation, a theory that was replaced according to scientists of the 17th century by a theory of transmutation and the “genealogical ascent of species,” a theory replaced in the following century by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s theory that organisms pass on traits acquired during their lifetimes to their offspring, a theory in turn disproven and replaced in the following century by Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection combined with Mendelian inheritance, which in turn has been complicated if not contradicted by the observation of epigenetics and a return to the formerly discredited views of Lamarck — all of which has been questioned in recent years not only by kooks and cranks but by serious scholars with top academic credentials, such as David Berlinski of Princeton and David Gelernter of Yale, who have argued that the theory of evolution is no longer mathematically tenable.

I do not mention any of these theories of life to endorse one over another but merely to show that “science” is a fickle lady. Yet, though the scientists are frequently wrong, they are almost never in doubt. Which is why today, scientists and their disciples insist that we accept their current consensus