Over the last ten years the emphasis of science, in the United States at least, has changed dramatically. Although on the surface it may not seem directly related to the Bible, it does relate since the new science is that to which the Holy Bible refers in 1 Timothy 6:20 as “science falsely so called. In order to illustrate the philosophical underpinnings of the change, I shall start with a personal account.

The college where I teach started an honors program for gifted students about fifteen years ago. The first course in the sequence is called ”Nature” and it was to be a science course in which the student would be exposed to different approaches and points of view, ones which might confuse regular students too lazy to think but which would stimulate bright students. I taught that course two or three times and was able to introduce controversial ideas such as geocentricity and creationism. It was a great course and so was the program all things considered.

About seven years ago a change crept into the honors program. No longer was it concerned with academics. The emphasis fell to social activism and involvement. The “Nature” course changed, too. The main topics now centered on ecology and the saving the world from the disasters which beset the imaginations of the new animists and pantheists. If there was any science at all in the program, it was restricted to the promotion of the myth of evolution.

The above serves as an example of the new face of science. Whereas once men searched for truth and truth had value; today, truth is denigraded from the realm of the absolute to the realm of the relative. Politics is now above science. The queen of the sciences is no longer mathematics but statistics, that branch of mathematics by which lies can be made to look reasonable. Today the chief science is sociology, a field which has always been overwhelmed by adherence to myths and superstitions. If these words seem harsh, so be it. I am writing this on my laptop aboard a DC-10 flying back from Seattle where I attended my first annual meeting of the Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) since 1973. The changes are significant, even though already in 1973 there were hints of the coming changes. That earlier meeting was the one which gave Velikovsky a forum. Some of the attendees resented that, and the Velikovsky sessions were separate from the main sessions, but there was no cry for censorship from the attendees at large. At the same time sessions talked about paradigm shifts and paradigmatology in science. These sessions looked at the future of science and engraffed humanistic, sociological values into it. To these presenters science was purely political. For the most part, though, the 1973 meeting was attended by scientists of the old school, ones for whom science was a search for physical truths more than a quest for political fortunes.

The 1997 meeting was radically different. Oh, the differences were not so much on the surface as just below it. On several occasions I heard speakers and overheard attendees talk hatefully against “religion.” But that's not all.

Twenty-first Century Technology

One of the plenary speakers was MicroSoft's Bill Gates, the richest man in America. He used an interesting word to describe the system which MicroSoft and others are working to develop for the next millennium. Gates used the word only once and I almost missed. He referred to the coming computer system as a “humanist system.” It will have voice recognition, speech recognition, and facial recognition built in. One of the prototype menus was entitled “Social” and consisted of a series of questions: “What should I do this weekend?” “Which car should I buy?” “Teach me about ...,” and a choice called simply “Collaboration.” Gates stressed a purported advantage that the more one uses the social menu, the more the system learned about your likes and dislikes, and the better it could answer your requests and meet your needs and wants. The most critical thing he intimated against it (he said nothing directly against it) was how such knowledge could be used for target advertising.

It is clear to me that the government will ultimately know all about you, too, since it will legislate itself to be the guardian of all this personal knowledge in order to “prevent abuse.” It sounds more and more like George Orwell's 1984 is coming into reality and, indeed, that Orwell didn't know the half of it. Of course, Gates thinks that such a system is still 20 years away. There are some key problems to overcome of which the most serious is bandwidth. To be fully operational such a system needs at least a fiber-optics line into every home, but the government will settle for phone lines for now. Another problem is that of databases and tremendous mass storage. This is where Oracle Corporation's director, Eliason, comes in. He is another billionaire who is rumored to be the darling of the Illuminatti right now. If Gates is right, the computer will play the role of God to Joe Sixpack.

And then there's the technology involved in building machines which learn. Gates mentioned that life might shift from its carbon (biological) base to a silicone (machine) base, although he gave lip service to the hope that such would not happen in our lifetimes. Still, the humanist emphasis in technology, here exemplified by Bill Gates, and science as exemplified in the following comments, is one towards the destruction of freedom and human expression and towards death and intolerance.

Twenty-first Century Science

I ended the above look at technology with an unsupported allusion to intolerance. To hear tell, the old science and the old politics were the epitome of intolerance. The old ways are accused of “legislating morality” and of “book-burning censorship.” But is the new way free of such restrictions. On the contrary, they are worse.

Consider some recent historical examples. In the mid-fifties the United States Supreme Court started a series of rulings which ran contrary to all precedence. Among the things the Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional were such things as prayer in school, the Ten Commandments, and the freedom to control one's property. Before that the Court had always upheld that religious expression was guaranteed by the Constitution, but after the mid-fifties, that freedom was removed. The Supreme Court in essence “legislated morality,” namely, humanist morality. The Constitution of the United States forbids the establishment of a state religion, but humanism, declared to be a religion by the Supreme Court in the 1930s, is now the only religion tolerated by the U.S. government. In the 1980s the United Nations changed the classification of the United States from a Christian nation to a Humanist nation. The only “Christian” religious institution tolerated in the U.S. is the Roman Catholic Church and that is primarily because two-thirds of the government officials (congressmen, in particular) are nominal Catholics.

In one of the AAAS session I attended there were thinly veiled snide remarks against “religion.” Those were not the first I heard at the meeting. In another session entitled “Scholarly Publishing on the Internet: What Does the Future Hold?” the theme of one of the papers, and this theme was reflected in several questions put to presenters of other papers, was that since computer storage space will be limited, and since data would have to change forms as technology changed, some “archaic” material may not be available in electronic form in the future; it maybe not even be allowed to survive in paper form. The only examples given of doomed documents were (Christian) “religious” documents. (Presumably the “ancient” books may survive, but there'll be no format for them in the new publishing systems.)

Now here is a strange thing, a thing which reflects the utter foolishness of the practitioners of the new censorship: these fools think that document preservation will only be electronic, but at the same time they agonize about how electronic documents are volatile, subject to changes in software and hardware formats. Consider how 3.5-inch floppies replaced 5.25 inch. Documents preserved on these formats are incompatible unless copied from one format to the other. In any case, these documents or files cannot be read by the naked eye. Consider for example that in the early nineties businesses, schools, and libraries transferred a great many documents and photos to CD-ROM, but today, not seven years later, that technology's days are numbered. So if documents are to survive then either the formats have to freeze, such as was attempted by nine track data tape in the fifties and sixties, or technological progress has to stop, or massive reformatting will have to be done from time to time which means that information and data will be lost because someone judges it not worth while to copy into the new technological format. The stupidity exhibited by these people is truly stupendous! ”Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools” (Romans 1:22).

Another of the issues discussed was censorship on the World Wide Web. Whereas on the one hand the attendees did not want censorship, on the other hand they talked about the amount of “garbage” on the web. Gates defended the “garbage” in is speech saying that his friend, Andy Groves, had used it to research his treatment for prostrate cancer. At issue were things like pseudo-science (which Groves followed, I believe). Although little was said overtly, there was a consensus that such freedom should be repressed or, at least, be clearly labeled as “nonsense.” Again, Christian ideas and conservative or constitutional values would be the target of censorship. Would even geocentricity, which most humanists would admit is science, be allowed to survive? After all, several derogatory references were made at the Meeting to the Ptolemaic model.

Methinks that the fears of these representatives of neo-science, as I call it, are well founded. They are frightened to the point of panic by Christianity, for deep down they know that the truth has human form (John 14:6), and that that form is God himself, and that in rejecting him they lose not only the truth, but the way and indeed their very lives. Theirs is the fate of those who love the praise of men more than the praise of God. Let not the reader think that these of all men are most miserable, they are not. These wicked men will not bear the brunt of God's wrath, although they certainly will be damned in their own right. No, the brunt of God's wrath will be borne by the religious leaders from the time of Christ until this very day. Just as the blood of the Old Testament saints will be required of the religious leaders in Christ's day (Luke 11:50-51), so the blood of the New Testament saints will be required of the religious leaders of our day. And what characterizes these most miserable of men? Why they are those which cast doubt on the words of God. They are those which teach men that God depends on them to interpret his words. They are the ones who think that God could not write what he meant to say but needs them, the scholars, to straighten out the mystical mess God left us in with his clumsy old-fashioned words embedded in dead languages (Revelation 22:18-19). Damned though the new technology and false science may be, these critics who array themselves against the very words of God are damned all the more. Fools! (Psalm 14:1.) Do they truly believe that God is a stupid as they, that he is made in their image? Even so, come Lord Jesus!