Michael Moore recently published this pledge in the Los Angeles Times. I applaud each of these twelve points: 1) We will always respect you. We will never, ever, call you "unpatriotic" simply because you disagree with us. In fact, we encourage you to dissent and disagree with us. 2) We…
This is more about history of science than about modern answers. Some of the latest methods for calculating how old the Earth is are succinctly summarized here at www.talkorigins.org.
One of the more readable of the many innumerate and unscientific rebuttals to a few of the dating methods can be found at http://www.allaboutcreation.org.
In brief, before the 18th century scholars generally accepted that the Earth was created shortly before man began keeping records. But then came “the Enlightenment”, and systematic record keepers began turning up (correlating) all sorts of things that could only make sense if the world were older than previously assumed.
For example, fossils were already a problem for a Young Earth outlook in the 1700’s. Given the predictably small percentage of any animal population that gets caught in the conditions that allow fossilization (one big flood lasting for weeks won’t result in fossilization), and the number of different fossil species found, there isn’t room on the planet for them all to have had living populations in the same few thousand years! Fortunately, different fossils are found in specific layers, the same layer for a given fossil type anywhere on the planet, allowing them to be spread out over a few hundred different epochs. Of course, this stretches the world time into at least millions of years.
Another example:
Go ask one of those opponents of stem cell research why it’s OK to donate a kidney. They’ll look at you like you’re nuts. They’ll tell there’s a person who’s about to die and another person with an extra kidney, and it’s all that simple.
In 2006 you won’t hear any protest that kidney donation is something Frankenstein would do. Stem cell research opponents won’t assert that the extra kidney constitutes a “human life” even though it is alive and human. They won’t tell you that kidney transplants are morally wrong. They won’t claim that a kidney has an invisible soul.
Instead, they will reassure you that a spare kidney is not a unique human being. They will tell you that kidney cells are only “potential” human beings (reproductive cloning, illegal in most countries, could accomplish this). As icing on the cake, they will assert that kidneys don’t feel any pain.
At that point you’ll need to jump in. For starters, you might remind the stem cell research opponents that blastocysts (from which stem cells are harvested) are clumps of about 150 cells small enough to fit inside Roosevelt’s eye on a U.S. dime.
You might then add that blastocysts are only five days old when the stem cells are harvested. At this point in time, the stem cells are pluripotent: they can develop into all the different cell types in the body (except the placenta), but they have not yet developed into any specialized type of cell. …
I am only through the first chapter of A Mind of Its Own: How Your Brain Distorts and Deceives (2006). Nonetheless, this is a delightful and insightful work by experimental psychologist Cordelia Fine. So much so that the first chapter of the book, “The Vain Brain,” is well worth the price of the entire book.
Fine is a witty yet precise digester of cognition research. The main point of “The Vain Brain” is that we work exceedingly hard to interpret reality in a way that is kind and gentle to our egos. We do this constantly, often to an extent that is often comedic.
In one experiment, subjects were arbitrarily told that they did well on a test. They were happy to take credit for their “success.” Those who were told they did badly tended to blame their “poor performance” on conditions other than their abilities. Whenever we fail, we dig hard to find lots of “reasons” other than blaming the person we so often see in the mirror. Researchers have dubbed this strategy “retroactive pessimism.” According to Fine, it “makes your failures easier to digest.”
We have two big allies to help us in our “retroactive pessimism”: manipulative memory and manipulative of reasoning. Who is doing the manipulating? We do it.
With regard to memory, we are terrifically talented at forgetting evidence that embarrasses us. “It seems that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for negative feedback to …
Who does more damage, A) mean-spirited people or B) "normal" people acting thoughtlessly? According to Hannah Arendt, the answer is clearly B. I would agree. Why? Because we serve as our own gate-keeper as to what what aspects of the world are relevant, usually oblivious to the fact that the "gate-keeper" of the flow of "relevant" facts is our sycophantic enabler, and that the gatekeeper is often willing to help us express our deepest darkest instincts. How is it that “normal” people so often behave (and vote) as moral monsters? In Eichmann in Jerusalem (discussed below), Arendt has written that the "banality of evil," the failure to think, leads to monstrous deeds--the road to hell is mostly paved with a lack of intentions. I largely concur with Arendt, but I would explain the source of most evil in terms of the psychological concept of attention: human animals have limited attentional capacities, and ghastly things can happen when this scarce human resource (the ability to attend) is diverted (often self-diverted). Moral monsters self-train themselves to pre-filter their sensory perceptions so that they don't need to attend to anything in the world that challenges their preferred viewpoints. The trick to becoming a banally evil person is to allow yourself to dwell on limited viewpoints and experience. To grow your evilness, stop being self-critical, stop being skeptical and stop exposing yourself to viewpoints that challenge the way you currently live your life. When you become a professional at selectively attending to the "things" of the world, you can feel the rush of becoming a self-certain--you'll become so certain of your beliefs that you won't hesitate to impose your narrow intellect onto everything and everyone you encounter. And even when you are incredibly wrong-headed, you won't realize it, thanks to the Dunning-Kruger effect. That is the great power of the ability to selectively attend to one's favorite parts of the world. It takes courage to expose one’s self to information that challenges one’s pre-existing beliefs. Humans are intrinsically able to be self-manipulative--being skeptical requires much more work than running with the types of believes and conclusions that have pleased us in the past. That is also the nature of the confirmation bias. Most of us, most of the time, sub-consciously (or semi-consciously) selectively expose ourselves mainly to the types of information that will substantiate our preconceived notions and motives. We’ve all seen this with the many dysfunctional people who use the Internet selectively. They seek out only web sites that are compatible with their pre-existing bigoted, consumerist or shallow life-styles. If you put on blinders that allow you to see only a limited slice of the world around you, you can spare yourself the need of emotionally reacting to desperate needs of humans around you. Most of us constantly blind ourselves to the plight of starving children in Africa. Out of sight, out of mind. It’s merely a matter of diverting our attention to something else, something not so disturbing.