Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look, in an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth.

For the Colson Center, I'm John Stump Street.

The slogan, Trust the Science has been used for years now to push any number of causes, many of them controversial, from COVID policies to transgender medical practices.

Used often in substitution for making an actual argument,

trust the science signals one's intellectual credibility without ever having to prove it,

preempting debate, shutting down opposition. After all, how can you argue with science,

especially capital S science? Now at this point, it should be obvious to us all that those who

most loudly repeat this mantra are also the ones most likely to put ideology before science,

not the other way around. For example, consider the policy and corporate profiteering that was

enabled by claiming scientific consensus about human-caused global warming.

Now, an increasing number of scientists are questioning whether global warming is even happening,

much less as human-caused.

This, despite all of the ways that federal and state policies were reoriented around cutting

carbon emissions.

Though scientists certainly do not have consensus about climate change,

it turns out that they do mostly agree about when life begins. According to a 2021 survey,

96% of over 5,500 biologists that were surveyed from over 1,000 academic institutions agree

that human life begins at conception.

Now that's the kind of consensus activists on many other issues would love to have, but don't.

So shouldn't our laws and public policies reflect this science also?

Wouldn't scientists who agree that life begins at conception also be calling for us all to

trust the science and oppose abortion?

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