I don’t care! My intuition was that New Guinea was a country, and I’m not listening to you “experts” with your “maps”, I think we should teach that New Guinea is a country in our geography classes.
But what if the priest tells you that scientists agree with him? That there’s a debate? What if there are a bunch of science-looking websites and books that support creationism? Then is their ignorance excusable? What if I compound that confusion with the fact that for most people, the truth about evolution is about as important as the capital of New Guinea?
On one hand, I’ve got a teacher telling me that the Great Barrier Reef is shrinking. How do we know that? Because scientists say so. On the other hand, my uncle tells me that the earth is 4000 years old and that dinosaurs had saddles. How do we know that? Because scientists dug up dinosaur footprints alongside human ones.
In both cases, I’ve got someone I trust telling me that scientists believe in X. And in both cases, it’s not terribly important if they’re right (because, hey, I’m just a farmer!). So it’s not shocking if I buy into X, is it?
Then he’s bypassing his own authority, and deferring to science. Go look at the science.
If you actually cared about the truth you’d find out if they were real science. A simple look at the sites and their content should demonstrate that they obviously aren’t. Someone who doesn’t actually care about the truth is perfectly happy to rely on priests & ministers & rabbis & imams & kannushis & gurus for answers on evolution.
Their ignorance is willful, and is based on the obviously flawed idea that a religious leader is a better expert on evolution than an evolutionary biologist. It is not excusable.
This would be fine, if evolution wasn’t such a controversial topic. People who try to get laws passed to force the teaching of creationism because they don’t belive in evolution, etc, clearly care more about the subject than about the capital of New Guinea.
Why do you trust the second source as much as you trust the first? Does the second source have the same track record as the first? Or do they base their assertions on belief rather than fact? The only shocking thing here is that you would think that someone who’s basing their knowledge of science on a 2000+ year old book written by desert nomads more than on the findings of 1000s of scientists working today.
Would the guy who believes what the priest says about science and the creationist websites also believe some web page saying Jesus was an alien, or that there was proof that he never got crucified and the whole thing was a hoax? He probably wouldn’t, because he knows that priests aren’t pulled off the streets and put into pulpits, but have had training in theology and have been certified. If he used the same criteria for accepting science, he might be in good shape. It is no accident that the guy who started the modern creationist movement had nothing to do with biology.
As has already been mentioned, science has the advantage of predictive power, something lacking in religion. (When is Jesus coming back again?) You can look up the predictions, like for CBR, published before it was found. Ditto for inflation. For evolution, we predict what fossils we can expect to find, and we find them. We also can predict how our DNA should match that of other animals, and that came through also.
Most people need popularizers to translate the actual papers into things they can understand - but most people can’t read Latin, Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic either.
You didn’t hear Ike or Nixon spouting it either. I have some DVDs with old ads, and some of them were Eisenhower campaign ads from 1956, with average everyday people saying why they liked Ike. A few said how important god was, but none were anywhere close to being fundamentalists or anti-science. (Pre-Sputnik, of course.)
Creationism was limited to a few backwaters, mostly laughed at. You think Hollywood would have been brave enough to film Inherit the Wind as a major production if there was a wide creationist movement? That plumber Morris started it up again long after 1957 - when I was growing up in the '50s and '60s it was not an issue in most of the country.
There are plenty of books around to make this accessible to any reasonably intelligent person. I’ve read a bunch, and anyone doubting their accuracy can look up reviews by people with proven expertise in the area.
My only direct involvement was that I designed some circuitry for a very ground based VLBI for my bachelor’s thesis (and probably held the field back) and I’ve given some talks to Penzias, who isn’t nearly as smart as you’d think.
Why exactly should I “believe in” the Big Bang? It’s a speculative cosmology extrapolation! Does favoring an oscillating or steady-state paradigm make me stupid?
I’m offended here!
This image made me cackle maniacally. Now I want to build a high-speed fairy collider. Eee! Ow! Faith and begorra!
(Sorry for the hijack – just had to share.)
Done!
No, it’s more than just someone’s word. The faith I have that my chair will hold me up is one grounded in a lot more than the faith some other guy has in the supernatural being of his choice. Faith based on something (long-established, shared experiences of chairs holding people up around the world) is not the same as faith based on nothing but stories about outlandish supernatural events.
Not in the western world in the 21st century it isn’t. Not to me.
“Faith and begorra”? You appear to be colliding a specific subset of faerions: the lepretons.
Not in the 20th either.
People who don’t think evolution is real are stupid. No excuses.
Do you seriously think anyone who would answer that the Sun orbits the Earth knows what the hell an inertial frame is?
Besides, you have to pick one. I can throw one of those hyper bouncy rubber balls around in a room and either say the ball is bouncing around or say the ball is static and the entire universe is rapidly shifting from side to side. It’s just way, way easier to model the Earth orbiting the sun. The center of gravity of the Earth-Sun system is inside the Sun, and the abberation of light and parallax back in the 1700s nailed it.
After my kids watched Peter Pan for the 20th time slamming Tinkerbelle into a cinder block wall at relativistic velocities would have been pretty cool.
Religion doesn’t necessarily have to be anti-scientific, but many religions do end up that way.
It’s true that Europe is generally less religious than the US, but it’s also differently religious. For a lot of people who self-identify as christian here, it might mean something completely different from what people in a different culture take it to mean.
Someone might consider himself a christian, if he goes to church once a year on christmas eve to listen to christmas songs, gets his children baptized, gets married by a priest, and buried on a church cemetary. But if you ask them if they believe that Jesus died for mankinds sins, they’ll say no. They might not even believe in God, but say that they are spiritual or believe in some general force. This has a certain distorting effect on statistics when reporting religiousity.
In that way being a christian for a large part of the population is more about the culture than the beliefs. Not that there aren’t plenty of real believers here too. However, being very open with your personal religious beliefs to strangers is considered to be somewhat rude.
I don’t have a lot of personal experience with the US, but I understand the situation is different there. You also seem to be much more open to displays of patriotism. For example using the Finnish flag outside official circumstances or sport events is considered a sign of right wing extremism.
To add to the asshattery of this whole thing, I was just listening to a podcast yesterday that mentioned that this section was actually stricken from the official NSF report (as part of a more general report on american education and attitude towards science). We’re only seeing this data because it was leaked. Apparently they went super chicken shit and wanted to avoid offending retards by publishing this or something.
This exchange made me giggle.