Screaming Penguin

Rupert really does it again.. The Sydney Morning Herald -- the orignal "News" in "News Corp" for those keeping score at home -- runs this bit of vitriol:

The violent, incoherent, mouth-frothing fury from greenies to such columns puts me in mind of the insane reaction in the Islamic world to the Danish Muhammad cartoons. Environmentalism is the powerful new secular religion and politically correct scientists are its high priests, rescuing the planet from the apocalypse of climate change, as the Doomsday clock ticks down. Kyoto is the Promised Land and Bush/Howard/capitalism/industry/farmers are Satan. Perth exploration geologist Louis Hissink suspects "politicised science has replaced religion as the arbiter of human affairs ... priesthoods of both organisations are concerned with what happens in the future and that current behaviour is thought to affect that future, hence it needs to be proscribed and prescribed". It used to be men in purple robes who controlled us. Soon it will be men in white lab coats. The geeks shall inherit the earth.

The difference, Ms. Devine (homophonic puns aside), is that this "priesthood" is based not on faith, and not on revelatory truth. Rather it is simply based on what our "lying eyes" are telling us... Honestly, I think there is a real problem with the perception of science in the culture right now and it a great irony is I would even use a similar metaphor to describe it. However, the foppish Machiavellian priest is not the problem, but rather the wizard or the shaman. Too much in the media scientists are presented as miraculous arbiters of truth -- the CSI effect -- or workers of seemingly unlimited feats of technology -- ReGenesis, Star Trek. While these are convenient deus ex machinas for the dramatic world, the fact that the "deus" part of that gets attached to a certain group of people, I think, is problematic. Backlash against this obviously errant social phenomena leads to the kind of ignorant screed demonstrated above, and the kind of uninformed "debate" that surrounds the intelligent design adherents (and, well, perhaps the entire Murdoch media empire).