If artificial intelligence is a harbinger of the end of truth, then our current state of groupthink may be the end of science.
Riley Gaines is a female All-American collegiate swimmer. She has taken on the unenviable task of having an unpopular opinion. Her offense? She has competed against a male who identifies as a female in NCAA-sanctioned events and insists it is unfair and wrong. On the surface, it would appear that Gaines has science on her side.
But as the All-American swimmer discovered when she gave a talk on a college campus to lobby for women’s rights in women’s sports, not everyone wants to hear the truth in science.
More than 200 people protested her school-sanctioned talk outside the auditorium where she was speaking. Inside the auditorium, Riley also had her opponents. She was challenged by a professor of anthropology who was on the protesters’ side. Riley asked this Ph.D.-possessing anthropologist whether he could differentiate between male and female skeletal remains at an anthropology dig. With absolute certainty, the professor of anthropology said that was not possible.
The students in attendance erupted into laughter, but the professor stood his ground no matter how shaky it was scientifically. It was obviously more important to this man to mold science into the image that furthers a cause rather than guides toward the truth.
The students who laughed made me think of the little boy looking at a naked king and telling everyone the emperor has no clothes. The professor would do well to bone up on his scientific background.
It made me look for some scientific response to this seemingly unscientific declaration, and I found it in an abstract of a peer-reviewed medical paper I found at the National Library of Medicine (I know, I need a hobby).
The paper was a compilation of data collected from mass graves discovered in Serbia in the aftermath of that region’s bloody civil war. The artifacts of this horror were 262 pelvic bones and 180 skulls of individuals from these graves.
“The material was examined separately by experienced and inexperienced physical anthropologists. Sex was correctly estimated by the experienced anthropologist in 100% of individuals using all of the 16 pelvic and cranial criteria. Sex differences in pelvic morphology were large enough to allow sexing the individuals with 100% accuracy.”
The “inexperienced” anthropologists in the study had a 94% accuracy rate, so maybe the professor who challenged Riley Gaines can be numbered within that 6%. I hope that is the case. If it’s not the case, this professor’s logical and scientific mind knows the truth, but his allegiance to some other agenda takes precedence over that truth.
The Church is routinely attacked as being anti-science. Famous men of science like biologist Richard Dawkins and astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson get plenty of approving applause and laughs on late-night talk shows when they dismiss religion as anathema to science, even as both these men stand on the shoulders of Catholic giants. Richard Dawkins’ field of biology took a giant step into the truth thanks to the work in genetics by Father Gregor Mendel. The heliocentric understanding of our solar system was first pondered by Copernicus under the patronage of the pope.
Separating Church and State may make political sense, but separating Church from science is impossible since science is about observing the natural world, which is God’s handiwork. Faith can never threaten true science and true science can never cause harm to faith.
The biggest threat to Darwinian theories of evolution has not come from Bible-wielding zealots but from many esteemed and lettered scientists in disciplines ranging from mathematics, biology, and microbiology.
The science that can determine with 100% accuracy what is male and what is female is the science being denied at NCAA swim meets and other athletic events around the world.
Although scientific knowledge is fluid and there are developments of doctrine within the teaching tradition of the Church, in neither case do fundamental truths get contradicted. Two hydrogen molecules combined with one oxygen molecule will always get you wet, and God’s word as recorded in Scripture will always say that God made them male and female.
