Skip to main content

The Root of Reluctance about Science

The Jewish, Christian and Islamic traditions (an extended family of religions) maintain that there is revealed truth.  They don't completely agree on what is revealed, but both have holy books.

Revealed truth is not something that human beings achieve.  It is given to them by God; perhaps Moses, or Jesus, or Muhammad.  The truth is there to be learned, parsed, praised, and perfected.

It is a pretty extensive body of material.  You can learn about the creation of the universe, how human beings came to be, our ethical duties, how to organize families, what to eat and wear, how to talk nicely, which god to pledge allegiance to, and even how the world will end with a bloody war, and not a whimper.

If you believe that some truth about things has been revealed to you by God, you had darned well better believe it.  It doesn't matter what anyone else says or thinks.  That makes it rather hard to do curious, critical, scientific thinking.  The easiest example of that is evolution.  If, as is obviously the case, scientists conclude that the universe is billions of years old, and that all life forms evolved over the course of at least millions of years, that immediately conflicts with (especially) conservative and fundamentalist versions of the Holy Books tradition.

Most of the opposition to science--not just evolution--comes from Christian/Islamic traditions and territories.  Anything that conflicts with what the Holy Books reveal obviously has to be rejected.  That is the logic of absolute truth.

That means that we, in Europe, the Americas, the Middle East, and Africa have a serious problem with science and anything else that conflicts with what the Books say.  It, frankly, makes us primitive.  It binds us to an understanding of the world and human life that is several thousand years out of date:  a worldview that no longer makes sense.

A Garden of Eden, anyone?  A six-thousand-year-old universe?  No Big Bang?  No evolution?  Miracles?  Heaven and Hell and Demon possession?  Women as secondary, inferior humans?

Something has to give!
.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard
1 comment
Read more

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer.  We do have an answer.  We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there...
Post a Comment
Read more

On Watching a Formerly Sane Man Descend into Abject Religion

If you read the previous post, you know the apparatus, pictured here, is a torture machine. There are ten of them in our house, purportedly to circulate air to dry out all the problems caused by a water leak. We live in Tucson:  it has not rained in Tucson since the Gadsden Purchase. A mudslide the size of the one in Washington State could course through our neighborhood and it would be bone-dry and stone-hard before it quit moving. I suspect it is the CIA, and probably the Border Patrol! We are, after all, only about a hundred miles from the border. I fully expect a large suburban assault vehicle to pull up to the house, and for lots of people with UPPER CASE LETTERS on their shirts to interrogate us, and I will have to explain that all the drugs I use come from Walgreens and Total Wine. But it won't work.  Our minds are going. We are getting short with each other and, if they promise to turn off the fans, I will confess to having invented the Arab...
Post a Comment
Read more