This is based on a comment I wrote weeks ago that languished. I decided it would be better for it to languish in the diaries...
"It's at times like these that I thank God I'm an atheist."
When that joke was made years ago in an Episode of "All in the Family," I laughed. Now I think of it as deadly serious.
I wish it were true that Religion will fade in the face of reason. I wish it were true that we live in a scientific age. But, alas, we do not.
More below the fold...
(You will find the ideas I write about here stated much better in Richard Feynman's excellent
Cargo Cult Science speech. I just choose to extend the idea to some of its political consequences.)
We live in an age of cultural specialization far greater than any in history. The vast majority of people are plenty happy to accept the gifts of technology that science and reason spin off from time to time, but people little appreciate how that cathode ray tube in their TVs helped to spell the doom of determinism. They don't understand that the hiss they hear when they turn their stereo gain way up is audible proof of quantum theory (beta leakage). They don't appreciate the evidence for evolution that is so abundant and grows every time we look at the question.
Why? Because they don't have to.
They don't need to learn about science. To most people, Edison was a scientist (which he was not -- he was at best a technologist, and at worst a crass exploiter of good engineers and scientists). But just who the hell was James Clerk Maxwell? No idea. And forget about Oerstead or Farady. Max Planck? Huh? But Pat Robertson? He's on TV!
We as a society leave science to the specialists. We put ourselves firmly in our artificial environments and our atrificial lives (and yes, our artificial jobs and economies too) and we believe we are the emperors of creation. That if we believe something ardently enough, it must be true. We hardly ever confront stern nature that insists on its own way, whatever our own desires.
I like Science's old name: Nature Philosophy. That's a 19th century moniker, but I'll hereby call for bringing it back. The ignorant mass (and ignorant is the right word -- it's not as big an insult as people think. I didn't say "The stupid mass") of humanity seem to think that science has an agenda, that they want to destroy our cultural and religious identity. That somehow science has decided to align itself against God and Apple Pie. Why do they believe this? Because this is how their own beliefs are arrived at. They don't realize that science didn't decide anything. It kept looking at nature and nature kept telling its story. Scientists don't wish things to be true.
(Well, they do of course. There's Einstien's famous "God does not play dice" remark. And, in a sense, every experiment is constructed to measure what the experimenter expects to find. But this is why Issac Asimov famously said "The most exciting phrase in science is not 'Eureka!' but rather 'That's strange...'")
So, yes, science is an activity pursued by humans who, like all other humans, have primal fears and memories of nightmares in the dark, but their every fancy and theory must pass the relentless test of nature. The recent scandal about Korean stem cell research is good news for science (although it never should have got as far as it did), because the assertion fell before the reality. Human frailty could not overcome the stern obstinance of nature.
Science needs a PR facelift. I think it should go back to the name "Nature Philosophy," because it more clearly explains what it is.
Science is all about observation of nature. That which cannot be observed is, by definition, outside its scope. For this reason, the fearful faithful should not fret about what science does. Their spiritual beliefs lie outside what science can see.
A devout Lutheran friend of mine (who has no problem with science or evolution) once said to me of the fundamentalists "Their God is too small." I thought it was a beautiful expression of the problem.
The mind of man is firmly in what Sagan and Druyan called "The Demon Haunted World". We dream, we fantasize, we fear our own deaths. We have a need for a sort of psychic security in the face of these fears. I'd like to see a world where science is taught, really taught -- students encouraged to observe the world, make theories, and construct experiements. I don't understand why students are taught science as a collection of facts instead of a series of questions. We are told all bodies fall at the same rate. Why not ask those elementary and junior high students which falls faster? A golfball or a bowling ball? How would you measure it? Teach them that they can ask questions about nature and put them to the test. Who cares that Galileo did this hundreds of years ago? Does a new cook start out with complex pastries? No! They start with the basics.
The teaching of science should be about nature philosophy, not a collection of facts.
But this issue is far more serious that mere ignorance about science and the scientific method. By allowing our system of education to not only weaken the teaching of science, but also to essentially do away with statistics and logic, we open our society up to the worst sort of soft-headed thinking.
Remember Reagan's "welfare mom?" Well, it was a complete strawman. Even if it had been true, the case was so far outside the statistical norm of those on AFDC that it would have been largely irrelevant. And how about "Tree Pollution." It is true that decaying leaves put out a tremendous amount of CO2. But, and this is the point, that was always there. It was part of the carbon cycle that has been occurring for millions of years. So the fact that natural carbon "emissions" are larger than those caused by human extraction of deep carbon resources was used to suggest that the worries about man-made emissions were overblown. "Look! Trees are much worse!" Of course, this is completely irrelevant to the question of whether the additional human output is harmful. But because of widely distributed ignorance, however, "tree pollution" sounds plausible. Couple that with our natural wish-fulfillment that we ourselves not be responsible for harming the environment, and this kind of idea is swallowed.
"Wishing makes it so."
The proliferation of polls is another example. "59% of Americans approve of Bush's handling of Iraq!" I like to joke, "Yeah, but 47% of Americans saw Elvis last year!" While it is true that "Argumentum ad Vericundium" is a fallacy, it is still the case that a poll of an informed populace (and I mean informed on the subject of the poll. I'm no more qualified to give an informed opinion on climate change than I am to give an informed opinion on a heart bypass. I'm a software engineer -- what the hell do I know about climatology? And yet people who know no more than I seem to be quite free with opinions on both subjects.) is going to give you different results from a poll of the mass of the American public.
It doesn't matter to the issue of global warming what the general population thinks is happening. No matter how many people think a given way, nature will simply do what it does. The eastern mid-Atlantic (where hurricanes are spawned) doesn't read polls.
The problem is ignorance of scientific methods, numerical methods, and basic logic. We do NOT live in the Age of Reason.
I gravely doubt reason with triumph unless and until we teach children how to reason and make them excited about the natural world...
The sad thing is that this nation was founded by men (and, yes, women, though they didn't get to play in the halls of power) who did believe in reason. They looked at the system of political power that had held sway over the western world for hundreds of years, and they conciously rejected it. They decided to think about how men are governed. They thought about man's natural state, and his natural rights. And the decided to build a state around those ideas, not around tradition or inherited power.
Moreover, they realized that a key to the success of this venture was an educated people. Franklin was an early advocate public libraries, and he chose conciously not to patent his inventions so that ideas that would better people's lives might spread freely. Jefferson chose to list three accomplishments on his tombstone. One was the founding of the University of Virginia. One of them was not being President of the United States.
We are sliding as nation of free-thinkers. We are falling down on intellectual courage. We are becoming uncritical acceptors of ideas. Note that I don't think applies just to the political right. They are simply exploiting this situation most effectively. There are plenty of demogogues on the left engaged in these habits of soft-thinking.
The real problem is that such people are not to blame. The fault lies with us, the willing listeners. The uncritical listeners. I'm no better. I sometimes swallow ideas because they "feel right," not because I've thought the issue through.
The problem is that, like in science, our political ideas will eventually meet a form of nature that won't bend to our flexible patterns of thought. When that day comes, I fear for our Republic.