Soccer Dad: Faith over science

April 6, 2007

Faith over science

As a religious person who, as part of the class of religious people, often finds my beliefs denigrated as being based on faith rather than science, I find these observations about a couple of recent Baltimore Sun editorials ironic.

In the Green Supremes, the Sun hailed a recent Supreme Court decision that declared carbon dioxide a pollutant and thus requires the EPA to regulate carbon dioxide emissions. (Since I emit carbon dioxide every time I breathe, I wonder when the EPA will be required to regulate my breathing. But I digress.)

The recent finding that Mars is experiencing global warming suggests that the phenomenon is solar system wide and may be affected by more than human activity. And two scientists at Duke discovered a year and a half ago that the role of solar activity on globlal warming had been underestimated. (Yes the scientists argued that human activity contributes, but not as much as previous models had indicated.) So when the Sun concluded

Global warming is already having harmful effects - including melting polar ice caps, rising seas and extended droughts. The urgency of remedial action can hardly be overstated. The United States has been dragging its heels for too long.

it was taking a lot for granted. The urgency the Sun urges stems from beliefs that aren't standing up to scientific scrutiny. (Nor is it certain that all the effects of global warming will be bad.)

The causes and effects of global warming are hardly certain. To impose burdensome regulations that may not even reduce global warming, assuming that it is an unmitigated bad, makes no sense. Unless you accept the faith of global warming.

For a legal and political takedown of the ruling read Supreme Court goes Nuclear by Max Schulz.

To justify completely disregarding the express intent of Congress on how to deal with climate change issues, the slim majority on the Court had to perform some legal acrobatics. Namely, it had to find that Massachusetts or any other state had standing to bring the suit in the first place. Earlier efforts by environmental groups to pressure EPA were shot down because they could not prove they had been harmed. Even after adding state governments to their cause, it seemed unlikely that the Court would recognize the standing of a state to sue EPA to enforce regulations that didn't exist. Yet that's just what it did, ruling that global warming's prospects to raise the sea level along the Massachusetts coast presented the risk of catastrophic harm, justifying the state's legal pursuits.
The decision to grant standing to the Bay State involved even more contorted legal arguments. The majority wrote that as a sovereign state, Massachusetts should be afforded special deference. It is an odd assertion. Thus legal observers were treated to the bizarre sight of Justices John Paul Stevens, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and David Souter citing the principle of states' rights in permitting the lawsuit to proceed. In reality, Monday's ruling turns notions of federalism and states' rights on their head. Previous rulings protecting states' sovereignty did so by repealing overreaching federal laws or regulations. Monday's case did no such thing; the plaintiffs argued that the federal government wasn't acting.

The ruling should be viewed as an open invitation for other states to ask the federal courts to reverse policy decisions they don't like but that are arrived at legitimately through the democratic process. That's not federalism or states' rights, but the opposite. Giving states (or activist groups) the ability to subvert legitimately held federal policies, if only they can find judges who sympathize with their cause, in the end does no favors to state officials. It merely increases the power of the unelected judicial class to make the laws our elected representatives at all levels should be making.

In Maryland's Gain the Sun praises the state's stem cell funding program.

Limits on taxpayer-financed embryonic stem cell research imposed by President Bush in 2001 have so hampered federal efforts in this promising field that the director of the National Institutes of Health bluntly told Congress recently his agency was operating "with one hand tied behind our back."
But the federal limits to which Dr. Elias A. Zerhouni referred have helped generate huge interest in a new Maryland stem cell research grant program that takes a more broad-minded approach.

As the editorial explains later, most of the funding went to adult stem cell research, so this didn't address the lack of federal funds available for embryonic stem cell research. So these two paragraphs are simply gratuitous attacks on President Bush's policy.

(Even Maryland's stem cell funding bill couldn't satisfy the most extreme embryonic stem cell zealots, read this letter sent by the delegate representing my area, Samuel "Sandy" Rosenberg.)

The Sun continues

Eighty-six requests totaling $81 million poured in from academic centers and private companies in Maryland, all seeking a share of this year's $15 million in grants. About half the applicants proposed research using more widely available adult stem cells, but the rest would use stem cells extracted from embryos - a process Mr. Bush believes shouldn't be financed with taxpayer money.

"Widely available" is an interesting description of adult stem cells. There's another way to describe them: proven effective.

What those who hold embryonic stem cells to be the holy grail of scientific research don't acknowledge is that adult stem cells regularly produce effective therapies; embryonic stem cells haven't "gotten past first base" in producing a stable therapy for anything.

This isn't a religious argument, as I'm not convinced that Halachah prohibits all stem cell research. But if one type of research has been shown to be effective and the other hasn't, what's the justification for using public funds to promote the latter. (And even for the effective research, what justification is there for using public funds for that? If it's effective won't it encourage sufficient private investment?)

The cynic in me says that those promoting embryonic stem cell research are looking for a way to say "I'm not just pro-choice; I'm pro-life too. (And those pro-lifers really are against life as they seek to prevent this treatment that would save lives.)"

In both these cases the Sun has ignored or distorted science in order to promote the policies it supports. In essence it favors faith over science.

Blogdigger tags: Baltimore Sun, Global Warming, Stem Cell Research.