Slashdot Mirror
Is The U.S. Becoming Anti-Science?
smooth wombat writes "As a follow-up to a recently posted Slashdot article, Reuters UK has an article which poses the question: is the U.S. becoming hostile to science? From the article: 'Among the most significant forces is the rising tide of anti-science sentiment that seems to have its nucleus in Washington but which extends throughout the nation,' said Stanford's Philip Pizzo in a letter posted on the school Web site on October 3. Cornell acting President Hunter Rawlings, in his state of the university address last week, spoke about the challenge to science represented by intelligent design which holds that the theory of evolution accepted by the vast majority of scientists is fatally flawed. Rawlings said the dispute was widening political, social, religious and philosophical rifts in U.S. society. 'When ideological division replaces informed exchange, dogma is the result and education suffers,' he said." What is your take?
Supposedly Britian has a somewhat separated office of science within their government to make decisions that impact circumstances on environment, wildlife and global warming... much of these decisions take more than four years to measure for results, so they're obviously going to be ignored by any U.S. president whose voters believe otherwise. The British government appoints the person in charge of that much like we do the supreme court and federal reserve chairman, which is supposed to keep it relatively non-partisan.
I say we follow the British lead on matters like this. Of course it would have no effect on creationism/ abortion/ etc regulation, but its a start. As far as science in general, the United States is by far the leaders for scientific paper production, measured by citations. However, this number taken per capita or divided by the GDP of the country in question has always put the U.S. far behind in research, primarily to European countries. I'm not sure if this number has declined in the past few years having had a strong religious president.
Mostly, I think, the scientists just keep quiet and do their job of saving lives and advancing technology and let the naysayers bicker on the internet...
+1 insightful, -1 Troll, +1 underrated, -1 flamebait, and +5 right (unfortunately).
-nB
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Yes, there is a large, vocal, and frighteningly powerful group in the USA ignoring science for ideological reasons. Is there anything to learn by having a discussion on Slashdot about this?
Shouldn't we be asking Slashdot something like, "How do we stop the insanity?"
Seems like that could be more productive.
I think it goes beyond just anti-science. The way things have been going lately I'd contend that there's a general anti-education theme at play. It's not cool to be smart here, and it's definitely not high on anyone's funding list, no matter what the politicians may say. I've spoken a lot with my Father-in-law (he's Taiwanese) and we've come to the agreement that Americans in general are becoming increasingly complacent when it comes to education. Everyone's fat, happy and enjoying "Pimp my Ride" too much to care about the long-term impact of drastic education underfunding and a general lack of good teachers. I have two hopes: that the influx of educated foreigners in search of a better life here don't get completely blocked out by the xenophobes at home, and that the small percentage of Americans who are determined to get a good education are able to hold the line until people realize that education is a good long-term investment.
Derek
Don't Panic...
Let's face it, there's always been an anti-intellectual streak in the US, and now, these Bible-thumping ignoramuses are strengthening it.
These are the people who want to bring back Old Testament style theocracy, and think that it jibes with the Constitution. Check out the Christian Reconstructionist article on Wikipedia. Ultramontanes of the highest order.
Although I live in DC, I don't worry about Islamist terrorists as much as these folks taking over. Islamist terrorists could cause nasty infrastructural and personal damage, but these people, given a chance, will do everything they can to ensure nothing that conflicts with their interpretation of the Bible gets taught, women have no reproductive rights, gay people are executed for something they can't help being, etc., etc. They'll warp the laws to a viewpoint no one's held in 2,000 years - there's been progress since then, but they don't want it.
If they had their way, the only science that would go on would be to prove absurd things, like Moses really parted the Red Sea, instead of say, forensic ethnobotany to show how people ate.
I didn't think the house band in Hell would play this badly.
>
> As opposed to hundreds of millions non-americans fighting for reason..?
Group A: A fundamentalist theocracy of 237,500,000 people who reject the physics underlying radioactive decay, and who also reject the notion that DNA can, with suitable cleverness, be manipulated into new and useful forms.
Group B: A technologically-advanced splinter group consisting of 12,500,000 potential nuclear and biogenic weapons engineers.
When push comes to shove, Side A may have 20 times as many rifles, pointy sticks, and fists, but my money's still on Side B.
Note to the folks in Group A: If you think I'm only making fun of you, there's also...
Group C: A different fundamentalist theocracy whose population ranges from around 500,000,000 to 1,500,000,000 people, most of whom think the world would be a better place if everyone in both "Group A" and" Group B" were either assimilated or exterminated.
Just a friendly reminder to the "Group A" crowd. Most of us in "Group B" would be pretty happy to coexist with y'all in "Group A", but if y'all actually win your little war and manage to wipe us out (despite your renunciation of nuclear physics, geology, biology, and genetic engineering), you're going to find yourself in a pretty serious vortex of suck when "Group C" comes a-knockin' on your door.
Just sayin'.
It's a funny thing, but with television, radio, imusic, internet, etc. etc. etc. you see people with less time they actually devote to thinking for themselves.
I'm some damn radical because I read books, which stir my imagination and inspire ideas, rather than having my ideas told to me.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Before you learn how to end it, you have to learn why people WANT to believe it.
Why would we want to end it? There's nothing inherently bad about believing in ID. If you want to think God did some stuff, go for it. Knock yourself out, man. Maybe you're right. All we have to do is convince them that teaching religion in science classes is counterproductive. And to that end, it is just as counterproductive to go around saying that we want to convince them that ID isn't true. It makes them cranky.
Unfortunately, the only way I know to teach them that you shouldn't teach religion in science classes is to get them to think that some time in the future it could just as easily be someone else's religion and it's a bad precedent. But Christians feel a little invincible at the moment, so that's not going to work.
. . . and more anti science comes from the Post-Modern left. When Harvard University President, Larry Summers, suggested that innate differences between men and women might have something to do with the underrepresentation of women in the hard sciences, he was reprimanded for expressing a politically incorrect opinion--science be damned. Some scientific perspective on the kerfuffle can be had here.
"One of the fundamental issues is that a lot of christians believe humans have a soul and that animals do not."
I'm a Christian and I believe animals have a soul, too. Only theirs is pure.
"Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead." (John Maynard Keynes)
The real issue is that there needs to be an acknowledgement in a systematic search for truth. I am a firm believer that one needs to treat science as a form of systematic philosophy. After all that is what it is and aside from the uninformed who think that data implies theory, all theory is inherently philosophical in nature (see "Physics and Philosophy" by Werner Heisenberg for more on this link).
But part of the problem is that revealled religions are inherently opposed to such approaches. After all what good is systematic philosophy when the Bible is your ultimate authority? Because of the fact that systematic philosophy, where nothing is beyond questioning/revisiting, will always exist in opposition to authority-based religion, where the basic tenants of the religion are expected to be taken on the basis of faith.
This tension is what most of these arguments about intelligent design, etc. are really about. Science is a darned good methodology as far as it goes, but most of the questions as to the nature of spirituality are really beyond it. This is because science as a general rule, in attempting to ascertain those truths useful in engineering fields, does not admit to the study of the human condition in its entirity. I.e. science does not imply materialism, though such trends are common in our modernistic way of thinking.
The question few people want to have asked is "can systematic processes be used to determine religious or spiritual truth?" People who hold one book (whether the Koran, the Bible, the Torah, or something else) as the unquestionable authority on these matters are threatened by this because they are afraid of being wrong. And yet, throughout some periods in history, such methodologies were used by many in this area.
For example, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Europe (and before that in the Islamic world, though this fell out of fashion there in the 13th century), such attempts were made. The basic framework in both these areas was based on the writings of Plato and commentary of later writers. They sought to find the unifying principles behind all religions (Henry Agrippa discusses Hinduism, Judaism, Islam, Christianity, and Classical beliefs in his De Occulta Philosophia, though most of his Islamic sources were heavily influenced by Classical philosophers such as Aristotle and Plato). The fundamental idea that we are religious beings was so self-evident to them that they didn't bother to question it. Such philosophers of this sort included Theostratus Paracelsus, Jacob Boehme, H.C. Agrippa, Albumassar, and many others.
Personally though I think that they got the model wrong in many areas I think that they did show that it is possible to take such an approach however, and personally I think that such discussion would ultimately help everyone, especially once one makes the leap from the sort of attempt at a universal theology that those such as Agrippa attempted to create to something more along the lines of structuralism in Linguistics.
But in the end, science belongs in science classes, and areas that are beyond science (including intelligent design) could be tought I guess in philosophy or theology classes.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
the "higher creator" introduces additional, unneeded, complexity to the system and simply begs the question of "Where did we come from" because additional complexity must be explained. Just because an individual is smarter than you in one field doesn't mean they're any more or less immune to the mental compartmentalization process required to become religious than you. Religion is a strongly neurochemically addictive entity as it evokes "joyful feelings" which are your positive-reward-neurotransmitters which you are naturally addicted to. Addictive drugs emulate/cause the release of these and that's one of the reasons why they are addictive. Most religious individuals I have argued with follow the same exact pattern of argument as drug addicts in my not-so-small expirience.
If you cannot keep politics out of your moderation remove yourself from the Mod Lottery.. NOW!
Science does not disprove God, but it does make God redundant as an explanatory principle. There are also certain physical consequences that one might expect to find if there were a supreme being behind it all--answers to prayers, certain paranormal or supernatural events, etc. All "evidence" of God has been explained via purely naturalistic causes. If there is a God, He has left no trace, and that's pretty odd considering how big He's supposed to be. God is neither verifiable nor falsifiable, but by the criteria of science, that makes God a bad theory. He falls, not by disproof, but by Ockam's Razor. God adds nothing to our understanding of the universe; indeed, the addition of an unknown and unknowable factor in the physical world actually interferes with the progress of knowledge by discouraging further inquiry.
And this is where strident atheists, like Richard Dawkins, take their starting point. Religion now discourages the entire scientific enterprise, and has done so ever since it became abundantly clear that science provides physical explanations with no need of the divine. As a biologist specializing in evolutionary theory, Dawkins has no doubt encountered no end of people who take offense at his work for no other reason than superstitious bias. To any scientist dedicated to free and open enquiry, this is profoundly disturbing.
Carl Sagan called science "a candle in the dark" dispelling the shadows of the "demon haunted world." It is that darkness that gave the Dark Ages their name. The purpose of ID isn't just to challenge evolution, but to initiate a campaign to undermine the materialistic worldview and replace it with a magical worldview. ID proponents call this strategy "The Wedge." Darwin is only the beginning; their goal is nothing less than the destruction of the entire scientific worldview, and they have stated this quite clearly. This is a long term strategy, embarked on decades ago. It is not a response to militant atheists. Militant atheism is a response to an existing offensive.
We simply cannot support this many people on the planet, nor meet the challenges now facing us, without science. The consequences of this flight into fantasy will be the deaths of billions of people, and quite possibly, the extinction of humanity. This attempted retreat into a childlike world of magic and supersition is nothing less than a wholesale attack on truth, and upon the very means by which truth may be discovered.
The prophets and philosophers on whose visions we have built our culture had a word for such an attack on truth. They called it evil.
I've been thinking...
I've decided that if there is this push to "teach the controversy" surrounding ID vs Evolution in Science classes, why aren't people pushing to "teach the controversy" between the Bible and Science in Theology or Religious classes?
I can see it now...
"And then Moses parted the sea. At this point I must mention that there is very little scientific proof that Moses, indeed any man, has the ability to part a sea. In fact it is almost universally accepted that it is not possible for any man, now or ever, to have been able to part any sea without some form of construction works. If you would like any further information on this you can read almost any science book ever written."
We should also push for stickers to be placed on the cover of every bible that reads "There is controversy over the content of this book. For further information see...."
After all, if we don't teach kids the controversy, we are doing them a disservice and failing them in their education.
Shitdrummer
But that's exactly why Catholicism is so close to paganism. Catholicism is, as you say, the original Christian religion that spread across Europe during the declining years of the Empire. In doing so, it co-opted a lot of pagan belief structures into itself. For instance, AFAIK there's no reason to think Jesus was born in December at all - Christmas is a rebranded pagan solstice festival. Easter? Take pagan springtime rituals focussed on the rebirth of the dead world, add the resurrection of Christ, cook at gas mark 8 for forty minutes or until well done. And as for the elevated importance of Mary in Catholicism: well, she combines the traditionally separate roles of nurturing mother goddess and chaste virgin goddess into a single icon.
Not to mention that a lot of Catholics in the English-speaking world are descendants of the Irish. The Church in Ireland went its own way for a long time before Rome finally managed to assert its authority there, and a lot of relics of the old Celtic Christian church still survive.
So your roommate was partly right. Catholicism is very close to paganism, and ironically, the fossils of ancient paganism that survive in Christianised form in Catholicism are probably still more authentic than what passes for paganism among the teenage-witch crowd.
And if one wishes to make a nasty retort to people who point out the Church's pagan heritage and think they've somehow scored points by doing so, it's quite easy to draw up an argument comparing fundamentalists to Pharisees, and literalists (who seem to worship the text more than the deity) to idolaters...
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Unfortunately, in speaking of the design of the human eye you don't actually understand how it works, any nore than the people you got this idea from. It is indeed true that the nerves go across the front of the retina, and the blood vessels are behind. If it were reversed, the huge blood supply needed to keep the eye operating at peak efficiency would block light to the receptors, whereas the nerves are almost transparent. The blind spot is 15 degrees off the focal point, which means that it has no practical effect on our vision. All design is a compromise between different objectives, and the design of the eye is similarly constrained, but it is as close to perfection as can be achieved.
Here is an interviews with Dr George Marshall, Sir Jules Thorn Lecturer in Ophthalmic Science at the University of Strathclyde, demolishing this particular anti-design idea and here is another by a retired consultant opthalmologist. Both these, incidentally, demonstrate that there are top-class scientists who do not accept Darwinism. They also demonstrate that creationists tend to produce facts whereas evolutionists tend to produce rhetoric.
Arguments about the perfection of design are irrelevant to the Intelligent Design theory, which does not attempt to identify the designer. The fact that something is designed does not necessitate that the design is perfect. If you tried to do it, the result would be a lot worse, wouldn't it? Nevertheless, what you produced would still be designed.
For a Christian, the imperfections in the world are the result of the curse that is on the whole creation as a result of sin. So again, problems in nature are not evidence of bad design but of the curse.
As for vitamin C, we are designed to eat fruit (Gen 1:29) and our present omnivorous diet is a later change (Gen 9). Still, no one suffers scurvy unless for some reason they are deprived of greens, either by misfortune or by poor diet, which is usually the result of ignorance or oppression. So this problem is a result of the curse combined with human actions or misfortune.
Finally, there is a huge amount of supporting evidence for creationism. It is just the same data that evolutionists use to support evolution. However, since your world view excludes God you cannot interpret it correctly. There is no profitable argument between world views; all that can be done is to compare them fully and then decide which makes better sense. That is the reason for presenting both sides of the debate in school and elsewhere.
No, I can't possibly know as well what it's like to do science in other places of the world as would someone who's lived in them all. So if you find a scientist on /. who has lived and worked for five years each in the United States, three or four European countries, Japan and China, then I highly recommend you take his opinion more seriously than mine.
/. perhaps because young people might be the loudest and quickest with memorably sharp comments, think again.) Have you not merely assumed that I lack data, since I neither offered any nor admitted to its lack in my post? In which case, should you be making such firm statements about the worth of my opinion "without the data," so to speak?
/. wouldn't be as common in the US as they are. All of the topics discussed here have experts (or "experts"), and very frequently a /. article introducing a discussion is by one of them. The fact that there's a perfect willingness to jump in and question all aspects of any expert's opinion, test them vigorously by our own logic, and vet them against our own experience -- this is a good thing, is it not? Because we believe the truly valuable and correct expert's opinion should be able to "take the heat" but the flimsy opinion will crumple. And usually that's so, but sometimes -- and here's the rub! -- it isn't, because the expert's opinion is contrary to "common sense" and deals in matters far outside common experience. Then amateurism becomes the problem it is when we discuss evolution and global warming. But it is not and I did not say it was an unmixed curse.
I don't want to say that the USA is a bad place for a scientist to live and work in - but I don't want to say that it's a good place, either, because I simply don't have enough experience to compare it with other countries in the world. And without that data, neither should you.
Sound logic, with which I fully agree. Now let's invert it slightly: in fact, you know nothing about me, or on what personal experience ("the data") I might be basing my positive opinion about working as a scientist in the US. I could be a 23-year-old first-year grad student or I could be a 55-year-old ex-chairman of a department spending a year in Washington running a division at NSF. (And if you think only young people read
Your trivia questions are fun! Let me try:
Countries in Africa: Egypt, Libya, Sudan, Morocco, Chad, Kenya, Zaire, Congo, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Nigeria, Mali, Liberia, Niger, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Botswana, Angola, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, South Africa, Lesotho, Guinea, Burkina Faso, Benin, Togo, Swaziland, Uganda, Tanzania, and Rwanda.
Hmm, that's all I can remember right now. Assuming no mistakes, I got 30 out of the 50 you say there are. Do you suppose the generic African can name 30 out of 50 of the United States? Just curious.
Name and title of the head of state of Uraguay. Bzzt. Don't know. Can I use a lifeline?
If I give you a map of the world without any borders etc. drawn on it, would you be able to show me the location and shape of Myanmar? No problem. I had a graduate student who fled Burma after her father was killed in the street by government thugs.
What's really ironic about this, of course, is that you are exhibiting exactly the same kind of behaviour that you decry in other US-Americans...
First of all, duh. I'm American. Second, I didn't decry it. I merely explained it. Like any personality trait, it's got its benefits and drawbacks. American amateurism is a pain when they distrust experts they shouldn't, yes. But it's an advantage when they distrust experts they should.
Look at it this way: if Americans were not as willing to entertain the opinion of reg'lar joes as much as the opinion of "experts," discussion fora like
Think about it...
Dude, not only have I already thought about, but if you read the last line of my post you'll see I made an ironic self-deprecating joke about it. Sheesh.