[This column has been edited for clarification.]

Science’s chief love is fact. As children, we’re taught that science has no mistresses, that it doesn’t get caught up in fables, ideology or politics. That it courts facts, not personality or power or money. That it bows to empirical, quantifiable evidence, not “ethereal” religious dogma.

“Science is facts,” observed French mathematician and physicist Henri Poincare, and “just as houses are made of stones, so is science made of facts.”

Facts are strong, tangible, pressure-tested, unchangeable building blocks out of which safe, sturdy truths can be established. This is what the scientific method is all about, distilling fact from fiction in search of truth. The process begins with the scientist asking a question. Facts are marshaled. The data is considered, then a hypothesis—an educated guess about the answer to his original question—is constructed.

Using experimentation and analysis, the hypothesis is then scrutinized, every seam pressure-tested, every angle attacked. If the hypothesis emerges uninjured, it becomes a theory, whereupon it is published, then tested and verified further by other scientists. If the hypothesis fails—rendered untrue by fact and experimentation—it is tossed aside.

Because scientists are focused on uncovering the truth, not chaperoning agendas or working for hire, their work is transparent, objective, and always welcoming to criticism and investigation. The scientific method sorts the fallible from the infallible, making science, by nature, an infallible discipline.

Or so we’ve been taught!

Truth is, science can be fallible, very fallible. Want evidence? Consider “Climategate,” the global scandal currently exposing the faulty science behind anthropogenic global warming, or man-made climate change. The scandal erupted last month, when more than 1,000 e-mails and 3,500 additional files were exposed showing high-flying global warming scientists manipulating scientific data, fudging measurements, destroying data and refusing to disclose important, game-changing information.

The information originated from the Climate Research Unit (cru) of the University of East Anglia in England, and incriminated scientists from around the world. Beyond incriminating cru scientists, the scandal calls into question the integrity of the entire cru, which has been a major source of data, research and analysis for scientists and climate-change organizations around the world, including the preeminent UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (ipcc).

You’d be forgiven for forgetting, but the ipcc shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore. The ipcc is widely considered the strongest, most reputable promulgator of anthropogenic global warming. “The ipcc does not do its own research but compiles information relating to climate change,” reported the Wall Street Journal. “It has declared the evidence that the globe is warming to be ‘unequivocal,’ a claim routinely cited by lawmakers in the U.S. and elsewhere as authoritative” (November 29, emphasis mine throughout). And of course, the ipcc get much of its information from the cru.

If it garners the attention it ought to, which it appears to be doing—despite the efforts by the mainstream media, leftist intellectuals and countless politicians to sweep it under the rug—the cru scandal could potentially have a debilitating impact on the ruse of man-made global warming. But that’s not what I want to concentrate on here. As some are observing, the obvious manipulation of science by dishonest, agenda-driven scientists, and the patent lack of transparency and objectivity in this wing of the scientific community, poses a significant threat to the reputation of science.

Climategate has set science in on a “credibility bubble,” observed Wall Street Journal columnist Daniel Henninger: “This isn’t only about the credibility of global warming. For years, global warming and its advocates have been the public face of hard science. Most people could not name three other subjects they would associate with the work of serious scientists. This was it. The public was told repeatedly that something called ‘the scientific community’ had affirmed the science beneath this inquiry. … Global warming enlisted the collective reputation of science” (December 3).

Across the world, masses of believers are convinced that global warming is an imminent threat. While they may have been told this by rock stars, politicians and reputable-appearing organizations like the ipcc, they believe it because it is apparently a scientifically provenfact. Groomed to trust infallible science, says Henninger, the response by millions is to accept that a “vast reordering of human behavior at almost unimaginable financial cost” is needed to save mankind by saving the planet. In essence, that’s what this week’s climate-change conference in Copenhagen is all about—rescuing the planet by agreeing on radical laws and policies that threaten to fundamentally revamp societies and economies, not to mention politics among nations and the global balance of power.

Why? Because the science backs it up!

One of the greatest casualties of Climategate is science itself, the very authority on which global warmists operate. Writing about Climategate and the faulty science behind man-made global warming at American Thinker,J.R. Dunn says: “It is no real exaggeration to state that it was fertilized with fraud, marinated in fraud, stewed in fraud, and at last served up to the world as prime, grade-A fraud with nice side orders of fakery and disingenuousness.” But as unsettling as the cru chicanery and deceit is, Dunn says, it’s only the most recent in what is becoming an exhaustive record of scientific fraud and dishonesty. “The apparent success of the climate hustlers has infected all areas of research,” laments Dunn, from stem-cell research to biology to cloning.

Dunn observes that science is an essential pillar of Western civilization, and is responsible for much of the West’s progression and advancement. “Science is as responsible for making us what we are as any other factor,” he observes.

The technology developed from scientific research has created a world that would be unrecognizable to our forebears of even a century ago. Technology has transformed diet, health, communications and transportation. It has doubled lifespans in advanced countries. Prior to the modern epoch, few ever caught a glimpse of the world past their own farming fields. India, China and Africa were wild myths, the Pacific and Antarctica utterly unknown, the planets and stars merely pretty lights in the sky. Technology opened the world—not just for everyday men and women, but for invalids, the disabled and the subnormal, who once lived lives of almost incomprehensible deprivation. …

He’s right, too. Science, among other things, is undoubtedly responsible for many, if not most, of the countless jaw-dropping accomplishments, innovations and successes of mankind. “It is this, and no less, that scientific fraud threatens,” Dunn concludes. “This is no trivial matter; it involves one of the basic elements of modern Western life. When scientific figures lie, they lie to all of us. If they foment serious distrust of the scientific endeavor—as they are doing—they are creating a schism in the heart of our culture, a wound that in the long run could prove even more deadly than the jihadi terrorists.”

Dunn and others are alarmed by the potential that Climategate has to create a global faith crisis in science!

But wait—is that really a bad thing? Is the recognition of science’s potential fallibility really such a crisis?

The fact is, Climategate actually gives us an opportunity to recognize an important truth!

Consider. Why is science subject to error? Two reasons: First, the scientific method for the acquirement of truth is not founded on absolute knowledge. Second, while science is a powerful and valuable instrument for discovering truth, it is wielded by fallible humans—men and women mired in human nature. The human mind is consumed first and foremost in self-interest, which in the world of science makes it prone to advancing personal agendas, chasing money and supporting science that furthers political ideologies. The chief cause of Climategate is human nature!

Although Climategate exposes the fallibility of science, it ought not cause us to shun science. God loves science, and He intended for mankind to love it too. “God intended for man to produce additional knowledge,” wrote Herbert W. Armstrong in The Missing Dimension in Sex. “He gave us the basis—the foundation—the premise—the concept. But He also provided us with eyes with which to observe. With hands and feet to explore and measure. With means to produce laboratories, test tubes, means of experimentation. He gave us awesome minds with which to think.”

So the problem isn’t with science. The problem is that man has perverted God’s intended role for science in human civilization. In Romans 1, the Apostle Paul explains the role God intended for science: “Ever since the creation of the world his eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things that he has made. So they are without excuse” (verse 20, Revised Standard version).

God intended that men study nature, the “things that he has made.” He wants us to prod and pry our environment, to peer into the universe, to study atoms. Why? So that we can better understand God’s “eternal power and divine nature.”

Science today is more confusing than enlightening. Driven by vain ambition, scientists think science and religion are irreconcilable. Some religious people scorn science, claiming it to be man-devised evil intended to undermine religion. The truth is, God says science and religion are totally reconcilable and that He wants man to embrace and practice science. But He wants it utilized His way, with science being used to prove His existence, and with absolute knowledge as revealed in the Bible being the foundation on which science is practiced.

To learn more about the role God intended for science in human affairs, and the only infallible authority we can ever rely upon, read What Science Can’t Discover About the Human Mind.