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bliumchikIt's been a while since I nattered on about science and religion in this journal, but Nicky linked me to the whole crocoduck kerfuffle (just... just google it) and I couldn't help getting a bit riled up. So uh, this is some rambling.
Quite aside from the brain-twisting existence of a person who can pull out a picture like that with a straight face (I'm half convinced they're trolling. I WISH they were trolling) is the strangeness of the underlying concept behind the recent trend towards Pseudoscientists For Jesus.
They posit that the universe is so weird it can't have just sort of happened, it had to be created by someone. Okay. Let's start with that, let's forget the pertinent question they always seem to weasel out of answering (the one where the being who could create this weird universe has to be pretty weird itself, so if weird things can't just sort of happen who created that being?) - technically you could find a way out of that, given sufficient omniscience, via time travel and god being his own grandfather, not that any of them have given this sufficient though to come up with that because they take it on FAITH. Which is exactly the point. They give you some science-tofu about how the existence of the universe implies that somebody made it. And then when they jump straight into explaining that THEREFORE that somebody must OF COURSE be the same somebody that dictated the bible to his secretary, Moses, and hangs around flinging hurricanes at people. They abandon what little scientific gloss they try to paint on their dogma within ONE LOGICAL STEP of their starting premise. ONE.
How stupid do they- what- just- do these people even understand the concept of science? Are they actually fooling themselves, or are they blatantly lying and trying to manipulate people? It's not even that I have an issue with faith, but if you're going to Believe in something like that, any amount of evidence is completely and totally beside the point, isn't it? Why even bother trying to pretend it's science? Why muddy the waters?
Of course that may be exactly what the Pseudoscientists For Jesus trying to do. They're putting science and theology on the same platform, getting people used to considering them together like they're some sort of rivals, alternatives that occupy the same paradigm, hoping to snare a few extra confused souls into their pool of potential evangelees. And that's dangerous - not only to science, but also to religion. The Slacktivist put it better than I ever could - they are not only introducing the idea that religion makes good science, but also that science is important to religion, that you NEED to be able to prove your religion's stories literally in order to believe in it. Honestly it's a poor, shabby faith these people have, that cannot handle allegory and metaphor, that needs propping up with pseudoscience in order to be valid in their eyes.
But as a non-religious person that is not what bothers me most. Two things bother me about this - the first and most obvious is that they really are branding faith and science as equals in the minds of the public, the masses, the people who don't have the time or the inclination or the education to analyse these things for themselves. And it's not hard to see the logic pathway involved here. After all, we don't test every scientific theory for ourselves, do we? On some level we have faith that a mountain is the height it says on our maps, because we cannot measure all of them in one human lifetime. We have faith that we are not being lied to. We mostly don't check. But this is the difference between science and dogma: we COULD. If we wanted to we could run our own tests on each and every scientific theory out there. The flaws in the system come from the fact that most tests are expensive, and so for example the medical community often lets things slip through the cracks. Even then, you can tell something about the trustworthiness of the people running the tests by checking their biases, their sample sizes, their methodology - the flaws of the scientific system are in people NOT checking, not in people being UNABLE to check.
God is by definition undefinable, religion is based on an entirely different way of thinking to science. Mixing the two is simply not a good idea. And this is why it is dangerous: because if people start to get the idea that both can be approached in the same way, that they somehow occupy the same mental space, one will leak into the other. When you try to apply scientific thought to house-of-cards faith, slapdash, you end up losing it. And when you try to apply religious thinking to science, you get... well, you get obsessed with crop circles. You get touchy about people critiquing your theories. You stagnate. The thing is, science is at its core about curiosity. And the type of religion our friends the Pseudoscientists For Jesus are applying here is characterised by an innate lack of curiousity. "Because the bible tells me so" is enough for them. It shows a kind of laziness, really, an abdication of morality. They are too scared to use their own supposedly godgiven judgement to formulate a personal ethical framework, and so they clutch at their holy books that absolve them of responsibility - now the only decision they ever need to make is "does this fit into the bible?" no gray areas, nothing requiring creative thought, no curiosity.
Intelligent Design is not a scientific theory. Its proponents are not (and I suspect I am preaching to the choir here, but let me get my thoughts in order) in any way scientists. Because if a REAL scientist felt s/he had evidence of life being created by some outside force, they would not stop there. They would immediately begin asking why? How? Where did it come from? and they would answer THOSE questions by the same scientific method, not by waving a completely unrelated book around and saying "obviously it's in here." A real scientist would never just present a concept that can be completely summed up as "stuff is weird, I bet somebody did it on purpose" and leave it there. The scientific method does not depend on the earth being billions of years old and roughly spherical! If we were living in a giant SNOWGLOBE scientists would be right there trying to figure out how big it is, how thick the glass is and who the hell keeps shaking it up like that!
In fact it strikes me just now that Pseudoscientists For Jesus really do sort of believe that the scientific method depends on the earth being billions of years old. It's a kind of logical reverse engineering of the sort that you get warned about in the very first seminar on logic or philosophy you could ever attend - I was fourteen when I was taught that A therefore B is not proof of B therefore A. If the scientific method has proven the earth to be billions of years old, these people say, then disproving the latter will invalidate the former so people can replace it with the bible. It's actually eerily similar to the logic that I suddenly realise must have led them to the attempt in the first place:: If disproving one part of the Biblical Literalist house-of-cards disproves all of it, then PROVING one part of the house-of-cards must PROVE all of it - THAT is why they're trying so hard to slather science all over Genesis. They can't directly prove God exists, so they think they can prove it by proxy if they can just prove the earth is six thousand years old! And of course since they're coming at the science/religion mishmash from the religious side rather than the scientific side, for them proving something is basically the same thing as getting large numbers of people to believe it! Man, that's screwed up. I preferred Pascal's Wager!
Anyway, I got offtrack. That's why it sucks from a scientific perspective. And I cannot overstate the importance of that, because I respect science. But I am not a scientist. I am a WRITER. And here is why I, as a writer, am personally extremely pissed off with the proponents of so-called Intelligent Design.
They. STOLE. The ENTIRE creation metaphor.
Nevermind the presumably allegorical intent of most creation myths in the religious field. Anybody who has ever written about science is perfectly aware that it is simply more poetic, not to mention briefer, to use words like "design" and "made" than it is to say "evolutionary adaptation" and "evolved by natural selection." Now that entire swathe of vocabulary is COMPLETELY USELESS to science writers because you simply do not know when somebody will decide to take them literally.
And on a grander scale this kind of literal-mindedness really is the antithesis of everything I stand for. When you cannot use a metaphor, when an allegory cannot simply be an allegory, when you deny the validity of STORIES for their own sake and not as factual records - it seems to me the world they live in is poorer not just of faith but of everything that makes life worth living. No wonder second-generation fundamentalism hemorrhages believers like the European nobility! I wouldn't want to believe in the sort of God that could create something so bland and colourless either.
Quite aside from the brain-twisting existence of a person who can pull out a picture like that with a straight face (I'm half convinced they're trolling. I WISH they were trolling) is the strangeness of the underlying concept behind the recent trend towards Pseudoscientists For Jesus.
They posit that the universe is so weird it can't have just sort of happened, it had to be created by someone. Okay. Let's start with that, let's forget the pertinent question they always seem to weasel out of answering (the one where the being who could create this weird universe has to be pretty weird itself, so if weird things can't just sort of happen who created that being?) - technically you could find a way out of that, given sufficient omniscience, via time travel and god being his own grandfather, not that any of them have given this sufficient though to come up with that because they take it on FAITH. Which is exactly the point. They give you some science-tofu about how the existence of the universe implies that somebody made it. And then when they jump straight into explaining that THEREFORE that somebody must OF COURSE be the same somebody that dictated the bible to his secretary, Moses, and hangs around flinging hurricanes at people. They abandon what little scientific gloss they try to paint on their dogma within ONE LOGICAL STEP of their starting premise. ONE.
How stupid do they- what- just- do these people even understand the concept of science? Are they actually fooling themselves, or are they blatantly lying and trying to manipulate people? It's not even that I have an issue with faith, but if you're going to Believe in something like that, any amount of evidence is completely and totally beside the point, isn't it? Why even bother trying to pretend it's science? Why muddy the waters?
Of course that may be exactly what the Pseudoscientists For Jesus trying to do. They're putting science and theology on the same platform, getting people used to considering them together like they're some sort of rivals, alternatives that occupy the same paradigm, hoping to snare a few extra confused souls into their pool of potential evangelees. And that's dangerous - not only to science, but also to religion. The Slacktivist put it better than I ever could - they are not only introducing the idea that religion makes good science, but also that science is important to religion, that you NEED to be able to prove your religion's stories literally in order to believe in it. Honestly it's a poor, shabby faith these people have, that cannot handle allegory and metaphor, that needs propping up with pseudoscience in order to be valid in their eyes.
But as a non-religious person that is not what bothers me most. Two things bother me about this - the first and most obvious is that they really are branding faith and science as equals in the minds of the public, the masses, the people who don't have the time or the inclination or the education to analyse these things for themselves. And it's not hard to see the logic pathway involved here. After all, we don't test every scientific theory for ourselves, do we? On some level we have faith that a mountain is the height it says on our maps, because we cannot measure all of them in one human lifetime. We have faith that we are not being lied to. We mostly don't check. But this is the difference between science and dogma: we COULD. If we wanted to we could run our own tests on each and every scientific theory out there. The flaws in the system come from the fact that most tests are expensive, and so for example the medical community often lets things slip through the cracks. Even then, you can tell something about the trustworthiness of the people running the tests by checking their biases, their sample sizes, their methodology - the flaws of the scientific system are in people NOT checking, not in people being UNABLE to check.
God is by definition undefinable, religion is based on an entirely different way of thinking to science. Mixing the two is simply not a good idea. And this is why it is dangerous: because if people start to get the idea that both can be approached in the same way, that they somehow occupy the same mental space, one will leak into the other. When you try to apply scientific thought to house-of-cards faith, slapdash, you end up losing it. And when you try to apply religious thinking to science, you get... well, you get obsessed with crop circles. You get touchy about people critiquing your theories. You stagnate. The thing is, science is at its core about curiosity. And the type of religion our friends the Pseudoscientists For Jesus are applying here is characterised by an innate lack of curiousity. "Because the bible tells me so" is enough for them. It shows a kind of laziness, really, an abdication of morality. They are too scared to use their own supposedly godgiven judgement to formulate a personal ethical framework, and so they clutch at their holy books that absolve them of responsibility - now the only decision they ever need to make is "does this fit into the bible?" no gray areas, nothing requiring creative thought, no curiosity.
Intelligent Design is not a scientific theory. Its proponents are not (and I suspect I am preaching to the choir here, but let me get my thoughts in order) in any way scientists. Because if a REAL scientist felt s/he had evidence of life being created by some outside force, they would not stop there. They would immediately begin asking why? How? Where did it come from? and they would answer THOSE questions by the same scientific method, not by waving a completely unrelated book around and saying "obviously it's in here." A real scientist would never just present a concept that can be completely summed up as "stuff is weird, I bet somebody did it on purpose" and leave it there. The scientific method does not depend on the earth being billions of years old and roughly spherical! If we were living in a giant SNOWGLOBE scientists would be right there trying to figure out how big it is, how thick the glass is and who the hell keeps shaking it up like that!
In fact it strikes me just now that Pseudoscientists For Jesus really do sort of believe that the scientific method depends on the earth being billions of years old. It's a kind of logical reverse engineering of the sort that you get warned about in the very first seminar on logic or philosophy you could ever attend - I was fourteen when I was taught that A therefore B is not proof of B therefore A. If the scientific method has proven the earth to be billions of years old, these people say, then disproving the latter will invalidate the former so people can replace it with the bible. It's actually eerily similar to the logic that I suddenly realise must have led them to the attempt in the first place:: If disproving one part of the Biblical Literalist house-of-cards disproves all of it, then PROVING one part of the house-of-cards must PROVE all of it - THAT is why they're trying so hard to slather science all over Genesis. They can't directly prove God exists, so they think they can prove it by proxy if they can just prove the earth is six thousand years old! And of course since they're coming at the science/religion mishmash from the religious side rather than the scientific side, for them proving something is basically the same thing as getting large numbers of people to believe it! Man, that's screwed up. I preferred Pascal's Wager!
Anyway, I got offtrack. That's why it sucks from a scientific perspective. And I cannot overstate the importance of that, because I respect science. But I am not a scientist. I am a WRITER. And here is why I, as a writer, am personally extremely pissed off with the proponents of so-called Intelligent Design.
They. STOLE. The ENTIRE creation metaphor.
Nevermind the presumably allegorical intent of most creation myths in the religious field. Anybody who has ever written about science is perfectly aware that it is simply more poetic, not to mention briefer, to use words like "design" and "made" than it is to say "evolutionary adaptation" and "evolved by natural selection." Now that entire swathe of vocabulary is COMPLETELY USELESS to science writers because you simply do not know when somebody will decide to take them literally.
And on a grander scale this kind of literal-mindedness really is the antithesis of everything I stand for. When you cannot use a metaphor, when an allegory cannot simply be an allegory, when you deny the validity of STORIES for their own sake and not as factual records - it seems to me the world they live in is poorer not just of faith but of everything that makes life worth living. No wonder second-generation fundamentalism hemorrhages believers like the European nobility! I wouldn't want to believe in the sort of God that could create something so bland and colourless either.
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no subject
Date: 2009-02-25 08:12 pm (UTC)It's a fundamental misconception, promoted because (I suspect) it allows them to dismiss science instead of their own infallibility.
no subject
Date: 2009-03-01 03:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-01 04:20 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-01 05:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-01 08:19 am (UTC)