The New Question Of Faith

June 3, 2016

A few years ago the water level on East Grand Traverse Bay was so low our community dock went out 200 feet to get past the muck and weeds into open water. We were told that because of global warming, Lake Michigan was evaporating too fast and these low lake levels were the result. Those experts were smug; lake levels were evidence of their solid conclusions, and pretty much everyone treated that conclusion as “common knowledge.” The experts had spoken.

Today the lake level on the same shore is up four feet. The bottom step of our stairway to the beach is underwater. We could install 10 feet of dock and comfortably moor a boat with a three-foot draft. Someone was wrong, and not a little bit wrong; completely wrong. This is not an isolated incident. Science has become a matter of faith, the new religion where improvable human theories and ideas are treated as infallible.

In real science, facts can be confirmed objectively. You don’t need a consensus to show that H2O turns to a solid at 32ºF. If you deprive a plant of CO2 it will die. If you drop an apple it will fall to the ground. Knowledge of real science improves our lives. But we’ve lost real science, even in the classroom, where political movements, veiled in science, are taught as facts.

It’s difficult to discern when it happened, but in the early twentieth century the economy became more urban and people were distanced from their food sources. The government got into the science business with the establishment of the FDA, Theodore Roosevelt’s effort to control the growing trend of fillers and additives in mass-produced foods. People began to assume that the hand of government was protecting them from deception. Marketers learned that science claims were excellent sales tools, as long as they could get away with it; soft science flourished. Tobacco advertising suggested smoking was healthy and would prevent colds. People believed it. The political influence of tobacco farmers was strong enough to keep government away. During World War II, the FDA issued its first recommendation for nutrition: “The Basic 7” food groups people should eat every day. One of the groups contained only “butter and fortified margarine,” demonstrating the political power of the midwest’s dairy and farm lobby. Health claims, even some that defy common sense, became the backbone of food marketing. In the 1950, “research” showed infant formula was healthier than breast milk. Until very recently, the medical community recommended oleo, a block of engineered trans fat, as the healthy alternative to butter.

In 1962 the Kerfauver-Harris Amendment to the original FDA act put the federal government in charge of not just food, but nearly all of medical science. Doctors were told what they could and could not prescribe for various illnesses. Procedures needed to be approved. It was so accepted by our culture that to this day many people believe that politicians are better suited to make general health decisions than medical professionals, and have willingly turned over medicine to government.

Scientists don’t have to do experiments anymore; what masquerades as science today is often nothing more than data mining. A group or individual will look at population studies, trends, and computer models and draw statistical conclusions from their analysis, but their ideas are theories at best. There was a time when theory was the beginning of science, and a theory needed to be tested in a way that was repeatable. Now a group can create statistical conclusions and send out a press release. If that claim is enticing enough, the media, Internet chatter, and popular culture will assume facts have been discovered.

The Center for Science in the Public Interest is an advocate organization that publishes a newsletter widely read by the media. They do no original research. They are not scientists at all. In the early 1990s they proclaimed coconut oils among the most deadly things you could eat. Today coconut oil is sold at a premium, presented as healthy oil that will solve many of your problems. Somebody is wrong.

A few years ago every kid who was a little bit awkward had Asperger’s syndrome. Asperger’s was a scientific fact. Except now it isn’t; the recently published DSM 5 has removed Asperger’s as a diagnosis. Whoops.

Gluten, a true gastro-intestinal nightmare for the less than one percent of people in the world who have celiac disease, is today’s fashionable evil. Well-meaning young mothers throughout our community keep their children away from gluten and have created a boom in the gluten-free business. The fad is not benign: Allergists are concerned that keeping gluten out of children’s diets could cause them to develop food intolerance. The anti-gluten “researcher”— who came to his conclusion through data mining — has said he was wrong, that his results were not supported by further study.

We need to be suspicious of those who hide behind science to promote their agendas. Bill Nye “The Science Guy” is an actor. The closest anyone could come to calling him a scientist is that he has a BS degree in mechanical engineering earned in the 1970s. His children’s TV show ended in 1998. It hasn’t stopped him from proclaiming himself an expert on climate science.

It’s time to take back science. We need to each use our own common sense to see if claims make sense. When the Atkins diet tells you carrots or fruit will make you fat, you should be suspicious. When meteorologists, who can’t reliably say whether or not it will rain next week, make climate predictions about 2090, it’s time to think for yourself.

Thomas Kachadurian is a photographer, designer and author. He lives on Old Mission with his wife and two children. He is a member and past president of the Traverse Area District Library Board of Trustees.