The Bell Curve:

The running debate between faith and science, which has increased steadily in intensity this year, has two detours just as harsh but considerably less visible that demand more attention: That would be scientists against other scientists, and pseudoscientists who presume expertise without the credentials. Congressman Dana Rohrabacher’s tirades against global warming offer a sterling example.

The cartoon “Dilbert” captured this succinctly in the Los Angeles Times. When Dilbert brought his pointy-headed boss a “mountain of facts that support my recommended technology strategy,” it was accompanied by “a tiny thimble that holds everything you know about it.”

Most of the people in this country who have turned global warming into a political issue, both pro and con, have no first-hand scientific knowledge in their “thimble.” Only a smattering of facts that will support their thesis while they ignore facts that don’t.

In such a mix, it’s quite possible to find experts to support virtually any facts or position — even the non-existence of the Holocaust during World War II. This makes for serious problems for the ordinary citizen who honestly wants to examine issues in order to come to intelligent — rather than pre-determined — conclusions.

So the question from technical illiterates like me becomes: Who should I believe?

This is a question I asked four decades ago when I found myself briefly in the middle of an impassioned and sometimes angry debate between theoretical physicist Edward Teller and chemist Linus Pauling over the above-ground testing of nuclear weapons.

Pauling, twice a Nobel laureate (for peace and technology), believed strongly that the radioactive fallout from such testing posed a significant public health problem. Teller felt that the contribution of the testing to national defense was much greater than the probability of dangerous fallout.

In the midst of these salvos, I was assigned by Science Year to interview the disputants and translate their arguments into lay terms, apparently on the accurate theory that if I could be made to understand the technology, anyone could.

So I spent a day with each of these scientific giants, Teller in San Francisco and Pauling, a day later at his office on the campus of UC San Diego. And I found the people much more interesting than the technology.

Teller was brusque, impatient, almost curt, which I discovered wasn’t just his reaction to me when we picked up his wife on our way to the airport. He understood what he had agreed to do and set no conditions. But once he discovered I’d done what homework I could, he got almost cordial and less impatient. He was clear in his explanations and didn’t wander off the subject into the personal. He knew nothing about me when we parted.

Pauling was just the opposite on most counts. He hid his impatience under folksiness. When my recorder wouldn’t work, he took it from me and fixed it, then had the grace to laugh when I told him it was the first time I’d ever had a Nobel laureate fix my working equipment. He asked some questions about my work and frequently garnished his thoughts with personal vignettes.

I was both tired and frustrated when I packed up at day’s end. I still hadn’t answered my question, so I said to Pauling: “I’ve just finished two days of interviewing a pair of Nobel laureates on an issue that could have a serious impact on this country, and you disagreed on practically every point. So who in hell am I supposed to believe?”

And Pauling said with an impish smile: “Who did you like the best?”

I’m not sure he meant it as a joke. It seems to me, finally, as rational a way of defining a policy on global warming as the political animus now taking us further and further away from meaningful science.

Instead, we are growing a whole generation of politicians and angry citizens who think that they have become technical experts after reading a couple of magazine articles. Or pieces like the one I wrote from these interviews.

Professionalism, once an accepted earmark of authority, is more and more being brushed off by people who know better. Or think they do.

And this behavior is finding a ready audience because the credibility and integrity of science professionals is being challenged regularly by a broad range of amateurs who are thus providing fertile soil in which faith followers can plant and cultivate their gardens.

JOSEPH N. BELL lives in Newport Beach. His column runs Thursdays.