Rocket Scientist

AKA cutting one’s throat to spite one’s stomach part II

I started to write a comment on Galley Proof’s response to Gumby the Cat’s open letter to creationists. But, it was becoming ridiculously long for a comment.

I’ll let you read both (and encourage you to do so), but, in short, Gumby said that many who were arguing against evolution must know that what they said were lies and that the next generation was getting better at critical thinking and would not be so readily fooled (He said more, but these were the points that were discussed on the response post). GP disagreed, saying that most creationists truly believe what they say and that, sadly, people were becoming more readily misled, not less. In general, I agree with GP on these points, with the caveat that we limit those characterizations to Americans since I don’t have much interaction with non-technical individuals from other countries.

However, as Gumby noted, there are, there must be, people who knowingly distort the truth and don’t believe it.  You can’t manufacture a hoax without knowing it’s a lie. Unlike many other scientific fields, I don’t see the financial benefit in debunking evolution (as opposed to, say, global warming), but people who are conditioned to take at face value what they’re told by certain people are much easier to control than people who regard all information that they’re given critically.  I do think that there are people who deliberately debunk science even though they know better.  But I don’t think they’re the ones we deal with directly most of the time.  It’s the sheep who argue with us.

On GP’s second point, I’d like to add two other reasons besides laziness.  One is fear.  With more of people dependent on technology that most don’t understand, they love the convenience but are uncomfortable with their lack of understanding.  With debunking “ammunition,” they can get a sense they understand reality better than these so called scientists they would otherwise be intimidated by.  They are comforted by their stone-age understanding of reality and don’t see the irony in living in a world shaped by science and technology’s understanding and adaptation of reality.  Hence the smugness that make many of the ignorant accusations irksome to anyone who has taken the trouble to understand science.

But they also fear science showing the mechanisms and processes behind reality.  The more we understand reality, the more we can see how we can and have affected it.  Understanding cause and effect should induce a moral individual to take steps to preclude excessive damage, loss of life, etc; however, doing so requires people to take responsibility for loss and damage that has already occurred and remedial action can be costly and/or uncomfortable.  Pretending that it was “God’s will” and nothing can be done clears one of responsibility or any obligation to preclude a recurrence.  People want to believe that they are powerless to affect their world (I have a hard time understanding why this comforting, but I’m trying) - they expect good things to happen to people who have faith and often think of excuses when innocent people are destroyed.

The unscrupulous, who may or may not have a financial stake in the status quo, but want to keep the populace unquestioning and faithful, take advantage of these tendencies, manipulate them for their own benefit, actively work to quell critical thinking.   In my opinion, that’s a pretty amoral thing to do and I understand Gumby’s disgust.  No self-respecting scientist would do the same thing, no matter how he or she is provoked.  Blind faith (as opposed to thinking faith, which is perfectly possible) is the enemy of critical thinking, the enemy of progress , the enemy of learning lessons from the past to do better in the future.  But GP is right to be concerned because we are at a disadvantage when touting nothing but the truth.  Reality cannot be fooled by propaganda, but people most certainly can.

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