“Avoid the godless
chatter and contradictions of what is falsely called knowledge.” (1 Timothy 6:20)
Categorical confusion over matters of conscience continues
to this very day. On this morning’s Fox
News Show, Jehmu Green, former president of the “Woman’s Media Center,”
expressed approval for the proposal that the RU-486 (“Morning After”) pill
would be dispensed over-the-counter to girls as young as 15. Beginning her interchange with the other
guest Dr. Manny Alvarez, she praised the FDA for “removing obstacles and barriers to all [by]…choosing science over politics.” By means of the latter part of that
statement she committed the highly-consequential logical fallacy called a “categorical
error” (the confusion of two distinctly different categories such as
parent-child relationships on the one hand and pharmaceutical outcomes on a
bodily system on the other). The weighty
social challenges of our time demand a much higher level of thinking than expressions
of such fundamental confusion. While appeals to science for support of one’s
position is popularly perceived as tying the knot in the argument at hand, “scientific”
knowledge is in fact directly relevant only to specifically scientific challenges. Questions of value judgments and determining
lines of authority in social arrangements are not scientific matters. This means that science has no direct relevance
to the questions of who (the parents or the state) has the authority to determine
when a child is mature enough to weigh consequences of downing a pill that will
impact her reproductive system.
In a different way, I am at least as disappointed in both
Dr. Manny and the interviewer for failing to clarify the distinction between
science, politics, and inter-personal relationships within the family. I repeat that it is urgent for science and
its parameters of authority to be properly understood. Most specifically, Jehmu is throwing around
the word “science” in ignorance of the meaning of that word.
No comments:
Post a Comment