Looking Out To Sea

Recently PZ Myers from the Pharyngula blog was involved in a couple of debates, both interesting in their way. The first was an on-air debate with Gene Simmons, a medical doctor and supporter of the Intelligent Design movement. (If you’re still in the dark on the ID front, I wrote a post about it a long time ago which should give you the background.) Dr Simmons was soundly beaten on every point. Apparently the big Intelligent Design blog, Uncommon Descent, noted that their player was shown to be a complete fool. (That is, before they deleted the thread in a bout of PR-friendly revisionism.)

In the end Dr Simmons had to take umbrage at Myers’ language in order to claw back some dignity. After demonstrating that he was happy to talk about the lack of transitional whale fossils without having done any research into the large body of knowledge on whale evolution, he was called “ignorant of whale evolution”. This seems only right and proper: he knew nothing about his chosen topic but was happily spreading lies and nonsense. But Simmons got angry at being insulted and deflected the point that he really didn’t know what he was talking about. Personally, I think that being offended by such a statement is a really cheap trick — and instead of warning PZ Myers about his language, the hosts should have ticked off Gene Simmons for trying to derail the conversation with further untruths and emotional appeals.

You might have expected that kind of petty ill-will from the start anyway. Especially as they changed the topic of the debate at the last minute at Dr Simmons’ request. That’s not cricket, chaps. You can download the whole debate from the radio station’s website — though it might disappear sooner or later. The station itself has creationist leanings and invited Dr Simmons back for another session on his own a few days later. It’s much easier to seem knowledgeable when you don’t have people poking holes in your arguments, don’t you find?

The other debate was a bit gentler, by all accounts. It hasn’t appeared online yet, so I don’t know what was actually said. But the atmosphere was apparently less confrontational than before. The debate was something about the place of science and religion (and science in religion). The other speaker, Loyal Rue, seems to have been arguing that modern religions will continue to be (for want of a better word) tempered by new scientific knowledge. To the point that we end up with what a commenter called “religion as art”:

My father pretty much approaches his faith that way. He attends a couple of ceremonies a year at a very traditional episcopal church because he:

• likes the music
• enjoys being in a room full of people singing together
• digs the incense and the ritual
• finds it very relaxing
• enjoys supporting the choir
• likes to support the parish because the church building itself is beautiful and needs repair

So for him it’s got very little to do with the great sky daddy and a whole lot to do with the music and the company and celebrating a shared idea.

Of course this has really been happening for a long time. When these opinions become institutionalised we recognise them as “schisms” or similar. It’s interesting to note that the Quakers — ostensibly a denomination of Christianity — has a significant proportion of members who consider themselves ‘nontheist’, ‘atheist’ or similar. But the nature of schism is that one group takes all the progressive believers and the other group takes the regressive believers. The schism may not have come about along these lines — for example, the Disruption that brought about the split into the Kirk and the Free Kirk was about state control of the church, but the eventual end is the Wee Frees (and the Wee Wee Frees), a church of a distinctly different flavour.

So for every church that accepts some aspect of modern science, there may be another that doesn’t — just like Gene Simmons’ lot up above, the creationists. Despite being intelligent people, they seem hell bent on dismantling what scientific understanding we have. It seems obvious that these people will only have an effect on the education of the average American. Universities are not going to stop studying evolutionary biology no matter how much a certain segment of society dislikes it. What, then, is the purpose? To purposefully diminish the number of high-school graduates who are capable of taking a science degree¹ without considerable remedial education?

There are few explanations, and none that truly satisfy. They are either entirely ignorant of what the sciences do know, and unwilling to find out more. There could be a certain element of seige mentality there, if they see all outsiders as working for Satan or what-have-you. I think this explanation most likely for people who believe in quack medicines. They have no ability to see that their strange beliefs contradict hundreds of years of basic medicine (bacteria cause disease! shocker!). And there’s the feeling that anything that is stated by Big Pharma is inherently evil, just because Big Pharma mostly are evil.

That’s an explanation of stupidity. And there is the maxim, “do not attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity”. But let’s suppose it’s malice anyway. The Wedge Document (the ‘secret’ manifesto of the Intelligent Design movement) certainly proves that they’re not above subterfuge. They’re willing to lie to the media and parents and the general populace for their ultimate aims. But this explanation doesn’t hold water, because their ultimate aims seem to be so lofty — the complete eradication of ‘secular’ life: in their own words, they seek “nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies”. Which can only suppose they think it an inherently bad idea.

Which brings us, finally, to the idea that they really do believe what they say. That science — “scientific materialism” — really is the greatest source of immorality in the history of humanity. Of course, this brings us right back to the original explanation: to believe that a removal of “scientific materialism” from society is a good thing requires the belief that science hasn’t actually done anything for us.

I end up running in circles, but I always do. To think that these people honestly believe everything they say is almost impossible for me. And yet to believe they are doing so out of malice or manipulation is just as incredible. And until someone can really explain this mentality (held by educated people as well as the stereotypical Bible Belters) it will be unlikely we’ll be able to change it.

Trackback URI | Comments RSS