Invocation

When pundits don’t rely on ordinary argument, their stock in trade, and reach out to Science for their authority, my reflexive expectation, before I know anything more, is that the subject will be a clash of values, the focus on evolution or global warming, and that the sciences involved will be of the softer kind—not those that reach their certainties by experimental demonstration. Precisely such appeals to Authority, but coming from the other side, turned me into an atheist in youth just by reflex—until I had had time to do my own homework.