Silence of the Scientists

Neuroscientist Michael Egnor wonders how it could be that thousands of scientists who knew Jeffrey Epstein and who must've had serious questions about his "lifestyle" with young girls, nevertheless continued to cash his checks and keep their mouths shut.

Egnor concludes that it was because there's enormous pressure in the scientific community not to do anything to cut off the financial spigot and to speak out would be to risk one's career. Maybe that's part of it, but I think there's a deeper reason.

First some excerpts from Egnor:

What didn’t happen is this: there was no dissent in the scientific profession about taking guidance and money from a convicted pedophile who was obviously trafficking children for sex. Not a word.

At every stage of this repellant saga, from Epstein’s early forays into scientific patronage twenty years ago through his conviction for child prostitution in 2008 to his largesse as a patron of elite Darwinists and computer scientists at MIT, Harvard, the Santa Fe Institute, the transhumanist project Humanity Plus, and many others in the decade that followed, there was, from the scientific community, abject silence.

Thousands of elite and pedestrian scientists benefitted from Epstein’s philanthropy and camaraderie. Thousands more knew of Epstein’s courtship rituals — with scientists and with children — and said absolutely nothing.

What happened on the Lolita Express and Pedophile Island, while probably known to many of Epstein’s elite science pals, were known as well (at least in outline) to the thousands of ordinary scientists and administrators who cashed his checks and worked in his labs.

There were whispered questions, undeniably. Obvious questions. There must have been daily whispers in labs and hallways and coffee rooms. ‘Why is Dr. So-and-So taking trips with this guy?” “What do you think is happening with all of those little girls?” “Where does the money come from?”

The answers were in broad daylight. Epstein’s life was an open Internet page. Thousands of scientists and administrators — even those not directly involved with Epstein and the children he trafficked— asked these questions and knew the answers.

No one said a word. Why?

Fear of risking one's career may well be part of the answer, but I think another part can be illustrated with a question: Why should anyone think that what Jeffrey Epstein did in pimping out and sexually exploiting underage girls was wrong? For moderns steeped in a naturalistic, materialistic worldview, as many scientists are, there's really no answer to that question.

On materialistic atheism all moral judgments are merely expressions of one's own subjective and arbitrary feelings. They express a personal preference like a preference for rock rather than classical music. There's no standard by which one can say that any act is morally wrong and no one to hold anyone ultimately accountable for what they do.

"If God is dead," Dostoevsky says several times in The Brothers Karamazov, "everything is permitted."

Philosopher of biology Michael Ruse and biologist E.O. Wilson wrote:

As evolutionists, we see that no justification of the traditional kind is possible. Morality, or more strictly our belief in morality, is merely an adaptation put in place to further our reproductive ends . . . In an important sense, ethics as we understand it is an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes to get us to cooperate. It is without external grounding… Ethics is illusory inasmuch as it persuades us that it has an objective reference. This is the crux of the biological position. Once it is grasped, everything falls into place.

Elsewhere, Ruse has written that,

Morality is just a matter of emotions, like liking ice cream and sex and hating toothaches and marking student papers… Now that you know that morality is an illusion put in place by your genes to make you a social cooperator, what’s to stop you behaving like an ancient Roman [raping and pillaging]? Well, nothing in an objective sense.

In short, if one believes that all of us are here solely as the end product of blind physical processes and forces no behavior is moral or immoral. Thus, naturalists, whether scientists or laymen, simply lack the moral resources to condemn what Epstein was doing with those girls.

It's perplexing to read the expressions of moral outrage around the Epstein case, or, for that matter around any of the cases involving sexual improprieties perpetrated by celebrities and others, when it's clear that many of those expressing that outrage have no objective basis whatsoever for doing so.

They are like people trying to stand on a cloud.