How Government Corrupts Science
By Arthur Robinson, Ph.D.
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/commentaries/how_govt...
Isaac Newton was the greatest scientist who has ever lived, or in Albert Einstein's words, the
most "privileged" of all scientists because of the discoveries that Newton was permitted to
make. Einstein describes Newton as "this brilliant genius, who determined the course of
Western thought, research and practice to an extent that nobody before or since his time
can touch."[1]
Yet, near the end of his life, Newton said of himself:
I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have
been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and
then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, while the
great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.
In the second edition of the "Principia," in which he published most of his discoveries in
physics, Newton writes:
The true God is a living, intelligent, and powerful being. His duration reaches
from eternity to eternity; His presence from infinity to infinity. He governs all
things.
Newton wrote only three books – the "Optics," the "Principia," and "Observations upon the
Prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse of St. John."[2] Averaged over the course of his life,
he divided his time equally between his physics and his Bible, believing that his physics was a
biblical ministry. To Dr. Bently he wrote, "When I wrote my Treatise about our System [the
"Principia"], I had an Eye upon such Principles as might work with considering Men, for the
belief of a Deity, and nothing can rejoice me more than to find it useful for that Purpose."
Science is a search for truth among the things that man can see. The Bible teaches that there
are things that man can see and those that he cannot see – "faith is the substance of things
hoped for, the evidence of things not seen" and "we see through a glass darkly." It teaches
that "the truth shall make you free" – the truth about both things seen and things not seen.
During most of its history, when it housed and sponsored the work of many of the greatest
scientists of the 20th century, the California Institute of Technology proudly displayed its
motto:
The Truth Shall Make You Free.
....