I agree that kids need to be taught first to think, but it's important to recognize that Creationism, as a movement, did not come out of nowhere but has been intentionally promoted, and funders have underwritten the generation of pseudoscientific arguments to back creationist claims.

In 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 ?

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. 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.

I have some reservations about teaching children to be skeptical - I think prior to that children need to be taught what skepticism is, because unbridled, pure skepticism can breed a paranoid culture and ethos of Know-nothingism that is fertile ground for crank theories both ridiculous, vicious, and corrosive to democracy. Democracy presumes a certain degree of common assumptions on the nature of reality. So millions of Americans believe the Earth was created 6,000 years ago, so what ?  Does it matter ? Well, both yes and no. Such beliefs aren't any great hindrance to getting along in modern life unless one happens to be a paleontologist, geologist, or perhaps a public school teacher. But the widespread acceptance of such ideas feeds a conspiratorial cultural miasma in which large swaths of Americans feel they are being deceived, and while it is not unreasonable, given the well documented existence of a huge "black budget" area of federal spending that's not open to democratic scrutiny or even the scrutiny of most of the US Congress, for Americans to assume a certain level of government deception.

But skeptical and conspiratorial thinking has polluted American belief in science itself and in what scientists tell us. Americans in the 1950's probably had far greater respect for, and empathy with, scientists and the scientific venture. But over the course of the latter 20th Century many seem to have drifted away from or trust in science. Where do beliefs such as belief in Geocentrism or the notion that Global Warming is an elaborate conspiracy to advance a 'satanic', secular humanist "one world order" come from ?

One answer to that question is that in the intervening decades since the 1950's, Christian fundamentalists who felt threatened by secularism and the Enlightenment itself turned methods of modern PR towards the problem of undermining the ethos of the Enlightenment that, some historians would assert, underlay the foundation of America as a nation. The project has been a startling success too : ideas that once circulated on the fringe of the American far right have now moved into the mainstream such that prominent US senators such as John McCain now court the political endorsement of rising Christian right leaders, such as John Hagee, who posit vast, shadowy, satanic conspiracies of "Illuminati" and "international banking grioups" to foist a "one world government" on America through the United Nations.

In the 1950's John Birchers who proposed such ideas mingled, out on the political fringe, with members of the American Nazi Party. In February 2007,  an advocate for such crypto-antisemitic conspiracy theory, Pastor John Hagee, delivered a Washington DC keynote address before close to half of the US Congress. Fringe ideas of the 1950's have been mainstreamed, and that is not just a problem for American Democracy simply because the the voting electorate is splitting into opposing camps holding different and clashing explanations of reality but because the rise of fringe, conspiracist ideology now threatens the world itself ; enough Americans, their views amplified by PR disinformation bought with petrochemical interest dollars, believe Global Warming is at base a "satanic" conspiracy that action to confront the problem has been thwarted, possibly for an entire decade later than action might otherwise have been taken. That's the ugly reality for much of the core ideological opposition to action on Global Warming coming from the American evangelical right - Global Warming is seen as a ruse to advance the diabolical plans of the Antichrist.

In effect, many Americans have advanced much further down the road of unreason than did cargo cultists of the 20th Century, because even a half-assed effort will uncover copious evidence that Global Warming is real ; North America, for example, warmed several degrees during the 20th Century and their is plenty of documentary evidence to prove it. Begrudgingly, all but the most die hard of skeptics have now, finally, conceded the Earth is probably warming. But most of those same critics and skeptics still maintain that the warming is not caused by human activity, and a major part of ideological core to that position is rooted in the conviction that Global Warming, as a theory, was born in the fiery pits of hell and advances, as Evolution is believed to do as well, a satanic agenda.

What religiously driven opposition to action on Global Warming implies is that many Americans do not believe that invisible gases, such as Carbon Dioxide, can have any sort of planetary impact regardless of how much of those gases spews from factories, coal burning electrical generation plants, or the tailpipes of automobiles. That assumption would hold if the Earth were flat and extended forever in two dimensions, as an infinite plane ; if the Earth's atmosphere were infinite it would not matter how much CO2 humans added.  

In effect, religiously based opposition to government action to curb Global Warming can be taken to imply that Americans who hold such positions no longer look to science to tell them about the physical world ; they look to a magical explanation in which scientists are dupes or minions of the devil who seek to con Americans into accepting a world governmental regime that will advance the designs of ultimate evil. Can science tell us how the natural world works ? Millions of Americans no longer believe that, and their numbers might be shrinking but not nearly fast enough and so arises the creepy possibility that evangelical belief that Global Warming is a theory born in hell may be driving humanity to an overheated future that could resemble hell on Earth.

by Bruce Wilson on Sat Apr 07, 2007 at 11:26:13 AM EST
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