Why indeed? Please read this excellent article by Johann Hari at the Independent, detailing the tragic hijacking of the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights by religious bigots. Here's a taste: Starting in 1999, a coalition of Islamist tyrants, led by Saudi Arabia, demanded the rules be rewritten. The demand for everyone to…
Science isn't about a particular batch of results. Science is special because of the way in which it gets those results. The following is from a well-written essay in the NYT entitled, "Elevating Science, Elevating Democracy":
Science is not a monument of received Truth but something that people do to look for truth.
That endeavor, which has transformed the world in the last few centuries, does indeed teach values. Those values, among others, are honesty, doubt, respect for evidence, openness, accountability and tolerance and indeed hunger for opposing points of view.
I attended Catholic grade school, so I was highly trained to diagram sentences. Truly, at least six years of spending an hour each day to diagram sentences. A very sophisticated method of warehousing students, I now realize. The silver lining is that this ground-in urge to create diagrams has spilled over into many other areas of my life. For instance, I was thinking about those un-curious website commenters who so often frustrate me with their entirely predictable thought processes. How would that thought process look on a diagram? Would it look as simple as it so often sounds?
Provoked by a persistent fellow who has been haunting this site and who constantly downplays the scope, value and accuracy of science in his comments, some of us have been increasingly trying to express what it is, exactly, that makes science valuable and more "truthful" than pseudoscience. While considering this issue, I decided to reread Carl Sagan's inspired book: The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (1996). Sagan's ideas reminded me of the value of Ann Druyan's suggestion that we eliminate the term "supernatural" from our vocabulary and substitute "sub-natural." I believe that this approach would quite often put things in better perspective. I will quote here, at length, various passages from The Demon-Haunted World bearing on the definition and value of bona fide science. Sagan so often said it so very well: Superstition and pseudoscience keep getting in the way, distracting [believers in pseudoscience], providing easy answers, dodging skeptical scrutiny, casually pressing our awe buttons and cheapening the experience, making us routine and comfortable practitioners as well as victims of credulity. Yes, the world would be a more interesting place if there were UFOs lurking in the deep waters off Bermuda and eating ships and planes, or if dead people could take control of our hands and writers messages. It would be fascinating if adolescents were able to make telephone handsets rocket off their cradles just by thinking at them or if our dreams could, more often than can be explained by chance and our knowledge of the world, actually foretell the future. These are all instances of pseudoscience. They purport to use the methods and findings of science, while in fact they are faithless to its nature-often because they are based on insufficient evidence or because they ignore clues that point the other way. They ripple with gullibility. (Page 13) [more . . . ]
Richard Dawkins once wrote a letter to his ten-year old daughter, explaining the difference between belief based on evidence versus authority. This letter addresses the appropriateness of extrapolating from evidence in making solid scientific conclusions. The title of this article from a book of Dawkins' essays entitled "A Devil's Chaplin," is "Good and Bad Reasons for Believing." And I do believe that any reasonable ten year old who keeps an open mind can see the difference. After all, we do informal science all day every day. The problem for some of us is when we start discussing the undeniable reality of humans as animals, thus highlighting our kinship with "lower" animals and suggesting that our creation was natural (and is ongoing). Understanding this basic point made by Dawkins doesn't require great intelligence. It requires intellectual courage. It requires that one quits screwing around with the burden of proof when testing propositions.