Science is the Belief in the Ignorance of Experts.

We need medicine to be a scientific enterprise. There is a place for faith and a place for science. Medicine is a place for science.

In pagan times, when different groups of people went to war with each other, the winner of the battle was declared to have the more powerful gods. One of the innovations of the ancient Israelites was to claim that when they warred with other people and lost, their God was still more powerful than that of the other people. They insisted that their God had allowed them to lose, either to punish the Israelites or for inscrutable reasons of God‘s own.

Christians took this one step further. One might assume that if God came down in human form and was tortured to death, at a minimum this conclusively demonstrated that this God in human form was not all-powerful.

But the Christians asserted that the crucifixion of Jesus actually demonstrated how much God in human form loved us. He had allowed himself to be tortured and killed because through that sacrifice we humans could be redeemed. Jesus died on purpose so that we could have eternal life.

When a belief (God is all-powerful) is maintained regardless of events, then that belief is a manifestation of faith. No matter what events occur or how they appear, those with faith do not reconsider their belief.

All too many people have faith in the Covid vaccines. No matter what happens to a person or a population subsequent to vaccination, those with faith conclude that the vaccines are a miracle of science.

If you are vaccinated and nonetheless become sick from covid, you would have been hospitalized without the vaccines.

If you are vaccinated and nonetheless hospitalized from covid, you would have died without the vaccines.

If you are vaccinated and nonetheless die from covid, you would have died faster and more painfully without the vaccines.

These are articles of faith. By definition, nothing can disprove articles of faith. That’s what faith means.

I find this religious devotion to the vaccines to be bizarre, inexplicable, and sinister.

What is the basis for this faith? Why do so many who were promised just a few months ago that if they were vaccinated they would not become sick with covid conclude after they do become sick with covid that vaccination kept them out of the hospital? Why do so many who were vaccinated against covid and then subsequently hospitalized because they were sick with covid conclude that vaccination saved their lives?

Don’t they know people who are unvaccinated? Don’t they remember that they were told that the unvaccinated would suffer a holocaust of “severe illness and death”? Don’t they know that 1/3 of Americans have never been vaccinated?

I am unvaccinated and so are my children. My wife has had one shot of the J & J. None of us have ever been sick from covid, let alone died.

Part of what makes faith in the vaccines so sinister is that it is justified by faith in science. But science by definition is a repudiation of faith. That’s what science means.

In science, nothing is taken on faith. Everything must be proven. Saying that one has “faith in science” is not merely an oxymoron, it demonstrates a complete lack of understanding of what science is.

So, when an eminent doctor says "I am the science" it is not only sinister, it is a matter of grave public concern.

When doctors appeal to their own expertise to justify their prescriptions, they are not scientists, but faith-healers.

We need medicine to be a scientific enterprise. There is a place for faith and a place for science. Medicine is a place for science.

As Nobel-prize-winning scientist Richard Feynman famously wrote, “science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.”