Epistemedia: the Role of Technology & Truth in Fact & Rumor (full text speech)

Or “Just the Facts, Mam!”
 [Full Text]
  
By George Gilder
The Discovery Institute
  
According to widely reported rumors based on largely anonymous
sources close to the presiding authorities, this Mediterranean
neighborhood once attracted a notable visitor. Arriving discreetly in a
small Palestinian town, He attracted attention by his knowledge of a
transcendent order and by his miraculous cures. Some eloquent witnesses
called the visitor “God,” or the “Son of God,” though some two thousand
years later what they meant remains in dispute.
  
In any case, He and his followers established a hierarchical
religion and an apostolic priesthood. Said to be the Creator of the
Cosmos, He was the source of all truth and moral authority. Kings and
scholars bowed before Him. Nearly all of the Great Men of science and
history, from Pascal to Einstein, sought to interpret His laws and
creative powers, which were alleged to be manifest both in nature and
in scripture.
 
Now, as the result of some epistemic plague, He is alleged to have
died. Amid the throes of the Death of God, humans claim new rights and
ordain new laws of pleasure and progress. Without God, everything is
permitted. Priests remove their clothes in public and molest children
on the Internet. At the Harvard Divinity School professors erect
crosses and crèches made entirely of condoms. Theology succumbs to
hedonism. In some contemporary accounts, God came out of the closet,
ordained homosexual marriage, caroused at various World Councils and
Conventions of Churches, and eventually died of AIDS.
 
In God’s majestic stead has emerged a bottom-up regime of Darwinian
materialism as the sole scientifically tenable explanation for human
life and natural diversity. The new regime essentially flattens the
Universe. Replacing the story of creation—the rumored God and
hierarchical cosmos—is an ebullition of accidental and purely physical
fact. All reality is said to be derivable from such physically
ascertainable and testable facts.
 
“Just the facts, Mam!” So can be summed up the new flat cosmos. I
remember that canonical phrase from my childhood. I heard it as I
clutched my new transistor radio—the dazzling new technology of my
youth—to hear tales of tough interrogation by a no-nonsense detective
named Jack Webb on a program called Dragnet. Or was it Joseph Welch at
the Army McCarthy hearings before the US Senate? Through the fogs of
time, the voices all converge but the message remains: “Just the
facts.”