Scientists are increasingly taking on the role of dictating morality. Academic papers are full of pronouncements about how their touted research improves society. The field of economics is an excellent example. Economists create “utility functions” to study human behavior. A “good” is simply something that makes a person happier, as expressed by a higher utility. However, the devil is in the details.
In economics, a pedophile and a child both have utility functions. Suppose that the pedophile really enjoys abusing a child, while the child is so abused that he hardly notices the abuse anymore. Are we to add their utility together and decide that the overall effect is positive? If not, should we weight their happiness? Perhaps the pedophile should only be given a 30% weight to his feelings while the child gets a 70% weight.
In an organized society, decisions must get made about how to weight one person’s happiness against another’s. However, scientists have no more moral authority to determine those weights than any other member of society. Nevertheless, in a razzle-dazzle of complex and obscure equations and statistical results, they attempt, through sleight of hand, to suggest that their scientific methods qualify them to determine what those weights should be.
GAO) provides a microcosm of this problem. It is tasked with measuring the economic impacts of legislation and not making recommendations about whether legislation should be enacted. Decisions about legislation are supposed to be left to a representative republic to judge before God.
A lack of trust begins when people suspect that the GAO is shading the numbers to promote an agenda. How much worse would that lack of trust be if the GAO also expressed opinions on the merits of legislation?
Not surprisingly, public trust in academia has been plummeting. However, the malaise extends far beyond the hallowed halls of universities. Our society has increasingly turned from Christianity, leaving a terrible void that demands to be filled. The expansion of equations, statistical results, and learned academic prophets to fill that void has left deep dissatisfaction in its wake. How sterile and cold, heartless, and lacking in discernment those equations are.
Many famous scientists were Christians—not because they were pressured to espouse Christianity or because they were too ignorant to know any better. It was because they recognized that while science could study the workings of God, it could not quantify God’s love. Christianity and science work together for the benefit of the whole. Isaac Newton, Blaise Pascal, and Galileo Galilei, just to name a few, submitted themselves to this essential truth.
Even an academic staring at a monitor full of statistics may have a lovely daydream. In it, academics strive to fully measure policy effects without bias or inserting their own moral judgments or opinions in the name of science. Our pluralistic society, fully informed with the facts, then wrestles with those difficult decisions that pit one person’s happiness against another’s. Academics keep their personal opinions out of their research but, otherwise, fully participate in those judgments as equal members of that pluralistic society. God is the ultimate judge of right and wrong and guides his imperfect people towards moral choices.
However, in the world of academia, this daydream is hopeless romanticism.
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