The Layman’s Dilemma
November 17, 2006 by Brendon J. Brewer
Good morning world! The following was originally a post made by a user on the RichardDawkins.net forums, followed by my reply. It’s about the public understanding and impressions of science.
MartinSGill |
Posted: Tue Oct 24, 2006 11:44 am |
|
|
Joined: 17 Oct 2006 Posts: 18 Location: London, UK |
I have no idea if there is such a thing, but it’s a suitable name for what I’m trying to describe. If the name doesn’t exist yet.. the copyright is mine! Since reading The God Delusion I’ve started to read a lot more stuff generally about the arguments for and against creation. Regardless of which side of the arguement you read, they are (selectively) well written, eloquent and written by people claiming significant scientific credentials.
The point I’m making though has little to do with which side of the arguement you are on, but how you are supposed to draw your conclusions.
There is no way I can read all the books out there on evolution, creationism, or any other subject I might be interested in. Therefore I have to rely on reviews and critiques and other such things to form my opinions. That in turn means I need either trust the person writing his review, and/or be aware of any agenda or whatever they might have.
The Scientific Method is supposed to help sort out the good from the bad, but when you have both sides of an arguement claiming the other side has not applied that method you are once again stuck.
What about the number of people that believe in something? If I went back in time a few hundred years and asked 100 learned men if the earth were flat or round 98 may well say that it was flat Therefore collective wisdom is not always the correct answer.
The Layman’s dilema then is… who do I trust? I cannot read it all. I don’t have the time to learn a subject in depth just to make a decision. I suspect this might well be a reason why so many people just don’t care.
In the end what I choose to believe is influenced by my own existing beliefs, the agenda of the author and the style of the writing. Not really all that satisfying a set of criteria by which to judge the quality or validity of a piece of work. |
|
eggplantbren |
Posted: Thu Nov 09, 2006 9:42 am |
|
|
Joined: 11 Oct 2006 Posts: 38 Location: Sydney, Australia |
When I was a child I was the typical protonerd. I loved space and dinosaurs. Of course, this means I read and watched a lot of stuff that would tell me that dinosaurs lived this long ago, etc.
Then, when I was in high school, we had an assignment where we would choose a controversy in biology and give a speech on it. We chose creationism, so I got some Creation magazines from my fundamentalist Nan and started reading them.The things they were saying struck a chord. This probably helped the presentation because I actually believed what I was saying at the time. Anyway, I remember reading in Creation that children are indoctrinated with evolution and long ages as a child. It is simply stated as though it was a fact, or in a storytelling format. In most documentaries and children’s books, people just say “These dinosaurs lived 100 million years ago”, and NEVER mentioned how anyone knew this. So, in a sense, the creation magazine was right.
Most people amongst the general public only get their information on science from sources such as their childhood education and documentaries on TV. It is no wonder that, when a travel show host says some geological feature at a tourist destination is millions of years old, my Nan can scoff. For her, this is how these “facts” are made – someone just says them on TV because they feel like it. And if nobody ever investigates deeply, this is an easy impression to have.
In my opinion, education needs to focus far more on “how do we know that this is true” than “here is a list of things that are true”. While the latter is important, it doesn’t help when you are confronted with what appears to be a debate. When you have Michael Shermer and Kent Hovind both appearing reasonable on stage, and you have never learned “how do we know that fossils are old, or that evolution is true” it is easy to think that really there is no evidence and people just believe whatever they want.
It’s a tragedy to have people thinking like that because it leaves them wide open to believing whatever someone wants to make them believe – as long as they can maintain the appearance of being sensible. |
|
I would urge you that whenever the Big Bang theory or something comes up in a conversation with a nonscientist, and they ask you about it, please do not talk about conclusions from the theory. Start with the observational evidence that provokes the theory in the first place. Hubble’s observations are a good place to start. For this reason the only popular cosmology book worth recommending (in my opinion) is Big Bang by Simon Singh.
So I had two thoughts about this in the days after I read it. The first was the organised religion seems to have strong benefits at the community level. The Edinburgh Central Mosque Soup Kitchen is an absolute bargain at 3 quid for a good, full meal, and it’s not just students and homeless people who go there, mark my words.
The other, which I had as I was eating my meal at the Mosque and reading their ‘Brief Illustrated Guide to Understanding Islam’ was that religious canon amounts to willful disinterest in understanding the natural world. Believing forcefully in the literal interpretation of religious texts amounts to a decision to not pursue the features of the Universe further with one’s mind. On the one hand, it’s very humble to say that humanity is beholden to a divine creator, and those you characterise as ‘religous-types’ play this up quite a bit; on the other hand, it’s pretty bloody arrogant to say that the Universe is a solved box, but that we’ll never know the answer!
I don’t think Berian’s point about a literal interpretation of religious texts can be true. It sounds reasonable at first glance, but history is against it.
Isaac Newton: “I have a fundamental belief in the Bible as the Word of God, written by those who were inspired.”
Francis Bacon: “There are two books laid before us to study, to prevent our falling into error; first, the volume of the Scriptures, which reveal the will of God; then the volume of the Creatures, which express His power.”
Robert Boyle: I use the Scriptures, not as an arsenal to be resorted to only for arms and weapons, but as a matchless temple, where I delight to be, to contemplate the beauty, the symmetry, and the magnificence of the structure, and to increase my awe, and excite my devotion to the Deity there preached and adored.
Add to this list Johannes Kepler, Nicolaus Copernicus, Blaise Pascal, Sir William Herschel, Michael Faraday, James Prescott Joule, James Clerk Maxwell and Louis Pasteur. Even Galileo, in his Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina, stated:
“it is very pious to say and prudent to affirm that the holy Bible can never speak untruth-whenever its true meaning is understood. But I believe nobody will deny that it is often very abstruse, and may say things which are quite different from what its bare words signify … I think that in discussions of physical problems we ought to begin not from the authority of scriptural passages but from sense experiences and necessary demonstrations; for the holy Bible and the phenomena of nature proceed alike from the divine Word the former as the dictate of the Holy Ghost and the latter as the observant executrix of God’s commands. It is necessary for the Bible, in order to be accommodated to the understanding of every man, to speak many things which appear to differ from the absolute truth so far as the bare meaning of the words is concerned. But Nature, on the other hand, is inexorable and immutable; she never transgresses the laws imposed upon her, or cares a whit whether her abstruse reasons and methods of operation are understandable to men.”
Galileo is making the point that having an inerrant book does not garentee an inerrant interpretation.
Clearly those mentioned above, who more or less comprise everyone responsible for the scientific revolution, can maintain both a belief in a written revelation and an interest in using science to uncover the features of the universe. Its just not true that science started when people rejected religion.
It’s common (and unhelpfull) belief that the Galileo affair was a battle between embryonic science and mindless dogmatic religion. The whole affair was lot more subtle than that! In particular the change in thinking was more to do with abandoning Aristotelean ideas than abandoning religious dogma. Their were plenty of people at the time on both sides who were, as Luke suggests, religious.
This is hardly surprising however as in that time, everybody was religious. If you were not, you were dead very quickly. In medieval Europe local parishes were the politcal divisions we might think of now as local councils. If you didn’t belong to one then legally you did not exist.
I think it’s impossible for either side in any kind of science vs religion debate to use historical record like this to support a position. The fact that the foundational figures of science were all religious and the fact that the church at times persecuted early scientist says precisely nothing about the relevance and effects of science and religion to modern society and modern issues.
[…] into question all the other items on the list, most of which are outside my area of expertise (the layman’s dilemma!). What we want is a carefully considered, critically compiled collection of well-studied, […]
[…] layman is in an even worse position, as they may not have the training, time and skills to verify the […]