When Life Begins. Scientific "Facts" Where Angels Fear To Tread

Mike Huckabee was on Jon Stewart tonight and the two engaged in a metaphysical and ultimately sophomoric debate about epistemology.

 Huckabee's began things with the assertion that "Life begins at conception. You cannot argue that scientific fact."  

Stewart apparently could not argue it, because he never replied. 

But the Phantom, having gone to college once, rose to his feet and shouted at the screen:  "Science has nothing to say about that 'fact!'"  

Apparently, neither Huckabee nor Stewart know enough about science or theology to know where the two separate.  

Science has to do with a method, the scientific method, whereby a hypothesis is proposed, tested, accepted or rejected until more evidence appears. But science never has and never can define the moment at which life begins. 

In fact, science is hard put to define "life" at all, although it has working diagnoses of "life." But the hard truth is, if the church or the state says life begins when the child draws it's first breath, then the doctor waits, observes and when that happens, he says, "it's alive."  If theology says, life begins at quickening (when the baby first moves in the womb)  then the doctor says, "Oh, it's alive," when the mother reports it or the doctor palpates it. If theology says, life begins when the sperm penetrates the egg, so be it. If theology says, life begins when the DNA strands from the sperm unfurl and wrap around the DNA strands of the egg and amino acids get replicated, well then, that is when life begins.

Point is, it's the theologian, not the scientist who defines when life begins. There is no
"scientific fact" of life.

The second point was about global warming, which Stewart indicated is a scientific fact.  While it may be true there is convincing evidence for global warming, it is not a scientific fact. It may be a convincing argument, but science does not deal in the immutable.  

The phantom has been quoted as saying "Ninety percent of what they taught us in medical school as 'facts' turned out to be wrong," which is a bit of hyperbole, but not much of an exaggeration. 

Forty years ago they were teaching the heart pumps blood to the brain, the pituitary tells the thyroid gland to make thyroid hormone and a handful of other things which seem to be pretty unassailable even today, because you can actually see the heart pump blood when you open the chest and you can measure thyroid hormones, but a great deal of what was taught then, is no longer "fact" today. 

The same may be true for global warming. There are those ice cores from the Arctic, containing carbon dioxide bubbles encased in the Jurassic period and other evidence suggesting true, geologic shifts, but these are only evidence, not irrefutable "truth."

So here we have two men, who may be intelligent in some ways straying into territory where angels fear to tread and nobody on screen to pull them back and slap their faces.

Such is discourse for the masses in America today.

Thank Heaven for the blogosphere.