– This piece comes from the Talk to Action Blog which I’ve been following for some time. Their focus is, in their own words, “…a platform for reporting on, learning about, and analyzing and discussing the religious right — and what to do about it.”
– For the most part, I try to stay away from religion as a topic here unless the actions of religious people somehow relate to my primary theme, The Perfect Storm. Talk to Action ran a series of articles some months ago that I reported on however because the subject was so over-the-top I couldn’t resist. Those stories had to to with the Left Behind: Eternal Forces Christian video game. See these links: ➡ ➡ ➡
– In the piece, below, Bruce Wilson of Talk to Action, discusses the current growing disrespect for science in America today and analyzes why it is happening. it makes for interesting reading.
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Last October, I listened to United States Senator James Inhofe as he described, before an audience of perhaps one thousand people, his belief that Global Warming was a hoax foisted on Americans by a conspiracy to create a satanic one-world order….
n the end, faith in science is just that – faith. Have you ever seen a nuclear blast ? I haven’t, so how do we know nuclear weapons exist ? We take that on faith in the same way we assume that there’s a scientific reason our microwave ovens heat up our cups of coffee ; how do we know microwave ovens aren’t driven by magic, from elaborate incantations laid on microwave ovens at the factory in which they are made ? How do we know there’s a factory at all ?
Thousands of years ago, the Greek Skeptics demonstrated that it was impossible to really “prove” anything at all due to the facility of the human mind at generating alternative hypotheses for phenomenon. How do we know that there’s a world outside of our doors, really ? Can we prove we’re not brains in a vat ? How do we know we’re not living in The Matrix ? Or, how can we distinguish magical explanations for phenomenon from scientific explanations ? And, what happens to democracy when magical explanations, mystery cults in essence, supplant materialistic explanations of reality ? What does it mean when powerful politicians and religious leaders say scientific warnings about an alleged disaster of unprecedented scale bearing down on humanity and the Earth is really a satanic plot
20th Century Cargo cults believed that rich Western industrialized nations enjoyed a high level of material wealth from possessing special spells or magic that provided access to “cargo”, stuff that is. During the presidency of Lyndon Johnson one Pacific island nation where cargo cult belief was especially strong raised a sum of about $50,000 dollars as a bribe to offer president Johnson for the “secret of cargo”, the special magic that would conjure up cargo and so provide inhabitants of that nation the level of material prosperity enjoyed by Americans.
So, how do I know that “cargo” – consumer goods, the stuff of modern material existence – doesn’t simply pop into existence, conjured by magical spells ? Well, I don’t. I take it on faith. I could research the question by visiting factories where products get assembled and by traveling to mines and oilfields where raw material inputs for products get extracted from the Earth ; I don’t do that because I’m satisfied my explanation is “true”.
But, in the end, how am I different from a cargo cultist ? In the end I can only only give a qualified distinction – I believe in rational explanations rather than magical ones. And how can I demonstrate that my faith in a Heliocentric Solar System is better founded than the belief, by the Chalcedon Institute’s Martin Selbrede, in a Geocentric Solar System ?
In the end the Geocentric model assumes too much ; the theory is not parsimonious at all but posits that hundreds of years of scientific research and discovery, which has made possible such technological marvels as the computer I’m typing on now, nonetheless has gotten wrong a fundamental aspect of our reality. Geocentrism demands its adherents believe that centuries have passed and generations of scientists have been born and then died, yet it has only been in the past one or two decades that a tiny group of amateurs has uncovered the true nature of the Solar System.
I find that claim hard to accept because science is a highly competitive process and works in the end in ways not dissimilar to the way capitalist markets work. In science, better theories – which have more and wider explanatory force – arise in time to displace older theories which explain less. Individual scientists compete to generate the best theories and those who do attain status, favored teaching position, grants, awards, speaking engagements, and so on. Superstar scientists sometimes write bestselling books.
There is, in short, a competitive marketplace for ideas and so the claim that science has gotten the basic nature of the Solar System so wrong, and for so long, seems quite preposterous to me. It might be true, and computer laptops might be conjured, through magical incantations, out of thin air at a secret “cargo” factory inside a vast underground complex, run by aliens and nazis, hidden underneath the South Pole. Possibly. But that’s very unlikely.
More… ➡