I followed a no-flour/no-sugar diet for the past eight months and lost 20 pounds, dropping from 192 to 172. I was ecstatic — until last week.
Then I learned that federal government scientists had grossly exaggerated the effects of being overweight. For years, the government said 300,000 to 400,000 lives are lost annually to obesity. The real number? About 26,000, meaning the government has been telling us obesity is fourteen times the threat it actually is.
Oh well, the women still dig my new look, and I'm enjoying walking around the yard in my Speedo with Right Said Fred's “I'm Too Sexy” blaring out of my boom box.
But still, what would prompt the scientific researchers to be so wrong?
I suspect it was a bit of wishful thinking, or what might be called a built-in presumption against fat people driving the results.
You see, there's a problem with science that a lot of people don't understand: It's not objective.
Ever since modern science burst on the scene with Francis Bacon's drooling enthusiasm for it, it has purported to be objective. Science, we have been told, looks at things detachedly, with no self-interest. In this, science is different than religion and philosophy, disciplines supposedly filled with emotion and distortion.
This belief still stands strong in our culture's mental landscape.
But it's hokum.
Scientists themselves have made impressive efforts to show that science isn't really objective. The research and analysis of the brilliant chemist-turned-philosopher Michael Polanyi, for instance, “deconstructed” the modern objective/subjective approach to truth and said it's simply not possible to eliminate “passionate, personal, human appraisals or theories” from scientist's efforts.
We also know from biographical facts that scientists let their presumptions color their research. Alfred Kinsey's “sex research,” for instance, was little more than a desire to legitimize his own odd sexual ideas, and his famous Kinsey Institute put forth dishonest and hopelessly flawed research in efforts to normalize Kinsey's leanings.
Perhaps one of the more humorous instances of the subjectivity of scientific research comes from the life of Eugene Dubois. He's the guy who “discovered” Pithecanthropus (a/k/a “Java Man” and “Peking Man”).
Born in 1858, he came of age at a time when European scientists were eager to show that man evolved from apes. The idea inflamed Dubois. A man of immense self-esteem, he abandoned his career and dragged his family to distant Dutch colonies where for five years he endured jungles, dangerous animals, and malaria to search for the missing link. He finally found it — in a skullcap, a molar, a femur, and the imaginary man he constructed with them.
When he triumphantly returned to Europe with Pithecanthropus and the solution to human origins on a leash, he grew angry when other scientists questioned his methods and, worse, his conclusions. Some questioned whether the bones were from the same person (the femur, after all was found ten months after and forty feet away from the skullcap). Some thought the skullcap was a gibbon's. Many disagreed with the spin he put on the bones.
He relentlessly defended his results. When Europe's leading scientists didn't fall into line, he became hypersensitive, paranoid, suspicious, and a little pathological. Frustrated by the academic battles over Pithecanthropus, he hid the ape man's bones from other researchers for over twenty years. In the end, he was a bitter and lonely man. Pithecanthropus had destroyed his family and friendships.
Dubois is a good snapshot of the problem with science in general. Scientists think they're objective, but they're not. Society thinks science gives objective findings, when it doesn't.
And it's not just an issue with science's wrongful pronunciations on things like obesity. Science for hundreds of years has purported to substitute its judgments for that of philosophy and religion. The result has been horrible: an intellectual void in which people trained in things physical (scientists) try their untrained hand at things metaphysical, and the rest of us give credence to their conclusions.
It's time we regained this fundamental truth at the root of St. Thomas Aquinas's thought: “The slenderest knowledge that may be obtained of the highest things is more desirable than the most certain knowledge obtained of lesser things.” Philosophy and religion: highest. Science: lesser.
In other words, scientists shouldn't dictate philosophy and religion. Rather, philosophy and religion should apply the results of science.
If we combine that principle with a little humility, we'd make great strides in reducing science's obese distortions.
© Copyright 2005 Catholic Exchange
Eric Scheske is an attorney, the Editor of The Wednesday Eudemon, a Contributing Editor of Godspy, and the former editor of Gilbert Magazine.
