God and the Folly of Faith: The Incompatibility of Science and Religion (41 page)

A clear tendency exists for evangelicals to be conservative Republicans and nonbelievers to be progressive Democrats. That is not to say that Democratic politicians are all atheists. Hardly. Politicians from both parties profess belief in a higher power in greater proportion than the general public, as a necessity for being elected. At this writing, only one member of Congress is an avowed atheist, and President Obama has continued the unconstitutional faith-based initiative programs instituted by President Bush. We can't count on the heavily Catholic Supreme Court, including the recent liberals appointed by Obama, to strike these programs down.

Nevertheless, the Republican Party today is completely dominated by the Christian Right while the Democrats at least exhibit some cautious independence from Christian ideology. Following is a typical example of religious intrusion in American politics. In 2011, Senator Jim DeMint (Republican from South Carolina) appeared on the Family Research Council's weekly radio show and said:

Some are trying to separate the social, cultural issues from fiscal issues, but you really can't do that. America works, freedom works, when people have that internal gyroscope that comes from a belief in God and biblical faith. Once we push that out, you no longer have the capacity to live as a free person without the external controls of an authoritarian government. I've said it often and I believe it—the bigger government gets, the smaller God gets, as people become more dependent on government and less dependent on God.
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DeMint then added:

We've found we can't set up free societies around the world because they don't have the moral underpinnings that come from biblical faith. I don't think Christians should cower from this debate, should be told that their views and their values should be separate from government policies, because America doesn't work without the faith that created it.

A poll taken by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life in 2004 found that 70 percent of traditional evangelicals were Republican, 20 percent Democratic, and 10 percent independent. On the other hand, 54 percent of atheists and agnostics in the poll were Democratic, 27 percent independent, and only 19 percent Republican.
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A more recent Gallup poll reported that the very religious were 19 percentage points more likely to be Republican than the nonreligious.
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As I write this today, almost every vote in Congress and state legislatures is falling along party lines. And the split is religious as well as political.

Consider the recent phenomenon called the Tea Party. A 2011 poll from the Pew Forum showed a strong religious Right influence on the Tea Party.
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Among registered voters, 69 percent of those who agreed with the religious Right said they also agreed with the Tea Party. Only 4 percent disagreed. Tea Party members support the social agenda of religious conservatives by large fractions: 64 percent oppose same-sex marriage; 59 percent say abortion should be illegal in most or all cases.

The religious beliefs of Americans who consider themselves part of the Tea Party were reported in a survey by Robert P. Jones and Daniel Cox as part of the Third Biennial American Values Survey.
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They found that 47 percent believe the Bible is the literal word of God compared to one-third of the general population and 64 percent of white evangelicals.

An interesting anomaly has developed in the demographics of support for the two major political parties. Since the 1950s, Republicans have increasingly drawn their support from the higher income levels of society while Democrats have obtained theirs from the lower levels. However, when it comes to evangelical Christians and Tea Party members, those of all income levels are solidly Republican.
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In America today we have megachurches with thousands of members who are taught the “prosperity gospel”: God wants everyone to be wealthy.
Since the preacher is obviously the chosen of God, he is entitled to his fleet of Mercedes, private jets, and mansions in Texas and Bermuda.

Still, income disparity in America today is so great as to be almost unbelievable for a nation that prides itself on equality. In a 2010 book titled
Winner-Take-All Politics
, political scientists Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson showed that in the thirty-year period ending in 2006, those among the top 1 percent income group in American took in almost $700,000 a year more than they would have had they not received special treatment over that time. By contrast, those among the bottom fifth had an annual income almost $6,000 lower.
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In 1960, the richest 1 percent of Americans held 10 percent of the nation's income; in 2007 they held 23 percent.
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Extensive statistics on income distribution can also be found in a 2011 report by sociologist G. William Domhoff.
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It is beyond contempt the way the conservative politicians in America bring down their wrath on the low-paid members of our society, such as schoolteachers and janitors, while the CEOs and other top executives of major corporations and Wall Street financial operators receive outrageous salaries and benefits. And it is beyond foolishness that other low-paid members of our society, including many Tea Party members, 19 percent of whom have annual incomes of less than $30,000,
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vote for these monsters because they have been told it is the will of God.

I have thought about what conservatives might have against schoolteachers. I surmise that they want to undermine public schools where students are taught evolution (in some places), tolerance of other races and religions, female equality, the facts of history, and critical thinking. In the theocracy sought by the Far Right, children will be shielded from these dangers in Christian madrassas and home schooling.

In my experience, scientists in the academy line up pretty much on the moderate center of the political spectrum while those working for industry tend to position themselves on the not-too-far Right. There are few anymore on the extreme Left, which is usually associated with socialism. Of course, many academic scientists consult for industry, and they also tend to toe the conservative line. This ideological split would not be serious if it did not have real consequences for issues that affect public health and welfare.

TOBACCO AND POLLUTION

An eye-opening, meticulously documented exposé,
Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming
, written by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, was published in 2010.
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The authors tell the story of prominent senior physicists Frederic Seitz, S. Fred Singer, William Nierenberg, and Robert Jastrow writing and giving “expert” testimony to presidents, congressional committees, and the media on a wide range of issues where they came down hard against the prevailing scientific consensus whenever that consensus threatened the economic interests of their corporate backers.

Seitz was a solid-state physicist who had won a National Medal of Science and many other awards, including honorary doctorates from thirty-one universities. He was president of the National Academy of Sciences and of Rockefeller University. He died in 2008.

Singer is an Austrian-born atmospheric and space physicist and was a leading figure in early space research. He has held a variety of military, government, and academic positions. Singer received a Gold Medal Award for Distinguished Federal Service in 1954.

Jastrow was an astronomer and physicist who was the first chairman of NASA's Lunar Exploration Committee and founding director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies. He was also a popular author who was quoted in
chapter 7
as claiming that the big bang is evidence for a creator. He died in 2008.

Nierenberg was a physicist whom I remember as the well-liked director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, when I visited there frequently in the 1980s. He served on several important federal panels including the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Advisory Council. He was on Ronald Reagan's transition team. Like the others, Nierenberg was conservative and a cold-war hawk. He died in 2000.

Serious conflict between scientists of differing political views began in 1979 when the tobacco industry launched a massive campaign against the discovery that smoking caused cancer and other deadly ailments. Seitz was particularly
central in spearheading this counterattack by big tobacco. Eventually tobacco lost the battle and the industry was found guilty of hiding facts about the dangers of smoking that it had known about since 1953.

Later, Singer aided the tobacco industry in unsuccessfully challenging the evidence for the dangers of secondhand smoke. In 1994 he coauthored a report attacking the findings of the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that secondhand smoking was hazardous. The report was funded by the Tobacco Institute.
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Today, few people question that smoking is a life-threatening habit, both to the smoker and to those unfortunate enough to be in his or her vicinity.

Despite the tobacco losses, the strategy of throwing doubt on science continued to be applied to prevent government actions to curb atmospheric pollutants. Fred Singer played a key role, questioning the claims of atmospheric scientists that chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) were responsible for the growing ozone hole over Antarctica.
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He also took the lead in arguing that acid rain from burning fossil fuels was not a serious problem.
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Bill Nierenberg chaired the Acid Rain Peer Review Panel, which in 1982 was charged with studying the consequences of acid rain. The panel included Sherwood Rowland, who would share the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with two colleagues for their work in the formation and composition of the ozone hole. The panel concluded 8–1 that acid raid was a serious problem, and it was well documented that acid rain resulted from “man-made sulfur dioxide (SO
₂
).”
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Nierenberg himself is quoted as saying, “You just know in your heart that you can't throw 25 million tons of sulfates into the Northeast and not expect some…consequences.”
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However, the Reagan White House, with Singer's help (the one negative vote and the only one on the committee appointed by Reagan) and Nierenberg's compliance, was able to obfuscate this finding.
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At the time, Singer was working for the conservative Heritage Foundation that vociferously opposes environmental regulation.

Conservative physicists also moved to downplay the “nuclear winter” scenario, developed by Carl Sagan and other scientists, which projected disastrous climate effects that would result from nuclear war. In 1985, Singer wrote an attack on the scenario that was published in the prestigious journal
Science
.
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In a related matter, Jastrow was prominent in supporting Ronald Reagan's
Strategic Defense Initiative (“Star Wars”), which most scientists said would not work and furthermore was destabilizing. All four physicists have been involved in the huge battle over global warming, which continues to this day.

In all these cases, the strategy is to cast doubt on scientific findings that, for the most part, are considered conclusive by a large majority of experts on the subject. The doubters are generally not experts, but men (rarely women) of sufficient stature that they command attention. They are able to take advantage of the way scientists properly avoid claiming “certainty” in any conclusion but always leave the door open a little crack for future developments. The politicians, the media, and the public generally do not appreciate this fine distinction. As we have seen, while scientific conclusions are technically never 100 percent final, they often get close enough for all practical purposes.

A specific example that supports Oreskes and Conway's thesis can be found in a 2007 report issued by the highly respected Union of Concerned Scientists on “How ExxonMobil Uses Big Tobacco Tactics to ‘Manufacture Uncertainty’ on Climate Change.”
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This is from the executive summary:

In an effort to deceive the public about the reality of global warming, ExxonMobil has underwritten the most sophisticated and most successful disinformation campaign since the tobacco industry misled the public about the scientific evidence linking smoking to lung cancer and heart disease. As this report documents, the two disinformation campaigns are strikingly similar. ExxonMobil has drawn upon the tactics and even some of the organizations and actors involved in the callous disinformation campaign the tobacco industry waged for 40 years. Like the tobacco industry, ExxonMobil has:

• Manufactured uncertainty
  by raising doubts about even the most indisputable scientific evidence.
  
• Adopted a strategy of
  information laundering
  by using seemingly independent front organizations to publicly further its desired message and thereby confuse the public.
  
• Promoted scientific spokespeople
  who misrepresent peer-reviewed scientific findings or cherry-pick facts in their attempts to persuade the media and the public that there is still serious debate among scientists that burning fossil fuels has contributed to global warming and that human-caused warming will have serious consequences.
  
• Attempted to shift the focus
  away from meaningful action on global warming with misleading charges about the need for “sound science.”
  
• Used its extraordinary access to the Bush administration
  to block federal policies and shape government communications on global warming.