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.
"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.
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