I live in Alabama and I noticed that I’m able to talk about almost every major school subject with ease and comfort. History, English, Math–no problem whatsoever. But when I start to touch the surface of Science, people look at me as if something’s wrong with me.
When I talk about dinosaurs, they want to end the conversation.
When I talk about anything outside of the solar system, they start to deny basic information that is taught in 6th grade.
When I talk about what telescopes have been able to glimpse in the last 60 years, they completely deny the authenticity of those photographs.
When I tell them I watch the Science channel, they almost laugh in my face.
Everything else is perfectly okay to talk about but when I talk about anything scientific, it’s just too much for them. Why? What is the big deal?
I realize there are theories they disagree with but why close their minds to common sense? There is mounting evidence that proves Metaphysics to be a valid branch of Science, there are dinosaur bones buried all of the world, Scientists have been able to use the information they gathered to predict the movements of Stars and planets with near-perfect precision, and some of the world’s best inventions were created as a result of scientific research. We are adults, right? Why persist in showing disdain for these things?
Several religions have set themselves in opposition to science on several specific subjects, and typically don’t bother to mention or stress the parts they agree about (like that radiowaves exist and such). I can see how that sort of reinforcement might cause to a general and complete aversion to science by the members of such churches.
I haven’t seen that, or the behavior you describe, in the religious people in my area (Boise, Idaho) though. They all compartmentalize their beliefs quite efficiently.
Those that do it, do it because it challenges beliefs that are not only dearly-held, but of which they have been convinced are fundamental. For some people, if evolution is true, or if the Earth is more than a few thousand years old, their whole world makes no sense.
In some cases, it’s because they have attained a level of wilful certainty about things, meaning anything that contradicts them can be summarily classified as untrue, possibly maliciously untrue.
ETA: Another reason I just remembered - if scientists can be scorned as wrong over one thing (one that doesn’t really matter to the argument), the false generalisation can be made that they’re wrong about a whole bunch of things, including those that challenge the person’s religious views.
Science and religion are by nature fundamentally hostile. Matter and antimatter. Science is an attempt to discover the nature of the world via reason and the collection of facts; religion is an attempt to declare a fantasy to be the truth, regardless of the facts or of the fantasy’s internal logic. Which means that believers either need to engage in compartmentalization, ignoring the contradictions; or they need to oppose science to preserve their fantasy.
Yes, there have been attempts to reconcile the two, but they always fail both because religion is wrong, and because it’s habits of thought aren’t conducive to good science. In the end, either the science side of such attempts will be perverted into useless pseudoscience, or it will be discarded because it consistently come up with facts that contradict the faith. This is inevitable because, again, religion is wrong.
It’s not just Christians. A lot of my pagan acquaintances view science as having removed meaning from existence, and having separated humans from their natural connection with the earth. They believe in a Vast Conspiracy™ to make us all dependent on pharmaceutical companies. They believe that electromagnetic fields are destroying our cognitive abilities. They view science as a tool of the government to control our behavior and deny us the pleasures of living free and in harmony with our surroundings.
Many of them, and/or their children, have multiple mysterious illnesses that have gone “undiagnosed” or “misdiagnosed” by “Western medicine” and for which they are on handfuls of homeopathic and herbal remedies (interestingly enough, they’re often not getting better, either).
I think in that community it’s a product of seeing themselves as outsiders in one respect (spiritual path), so they go all the way and become outsiders as much as possible.
Mistrust of science is hardly a Christian thing; look at the anti-vaccination mania, so recently in the news again. Look at the mania over silicone breast implants. Kolga mentions homeopathic nonsense. Those phenomena aren’t particularly Christian in origin.
Fundamentalist Christians have their particular bugaboo (evolution, mostly) but people still believe vaccinations cause autism, or that astrology is real, or that space aliens abduct people, so on and so forth.
Part of it is, I suspect, that people want to take the easy path to understanding. To use another example, conspiracy theories are still very popular; JFK was killed by a dozen gunmen, men never landed on the moon, the WTC was destroyed by demolition charges. None of that stuff is religious and a lot of it claims to use science (but always simpleton science) to prop itself up. Such theories are popular, I believe, because they make the world a bit easier to understand. Random horror like JFK being killed by a lunatic or 9/11 being perpetrated by a bunch of jerks is far more emotionally troubling than a Hollywood-type conspiracy.
I think people reject science for a similar reason; because it’s just too hard to grasp. Science is hard. Science does NOT have all the answers; in fact, science is all about not having the answers. Scientists, by definition, examine stuff they don’t yet have the answers for. Physics is hard. Economics is hard. Chemistry is hard. Biology is hard. Psychology is hard. If you go to university for four years and study your ass off you’ll begin to have an introductory professional understanding of those subjects; what you’ll mostly know is just how ignorant you started out as and how ignorant you remain. I mean, evolution is an inconceivably complex process that takes place over spans of time that defy human conception; creationism is simple and does not require any effort to believe in except to say “That’s what Pastor Ted said, so it must be true.”
You will always have people who will choose easy over hard.
What blows me away is that a lot of basic science can be independently verified, such a basic astronomy or the basic science behind vaccinations. Yet, these are rejected out of hand; while their counterparts, astrology and faith healing, are accepted without the slightest effort made to verify them.
It’s obviously not limited to Christianity, not even to religion. It has to do with the fact that science demands uncompromising rationality, and a focus on what is real and provable . . . or at least reasonably hypothetical. But our educations system, both parochial and public, would rather teach kids *what *to think than *how *to think. Not having been taught any differently, a lot of people are content to believe things on faith, rather than thinking. So when they encounter someone who actually does have a respect for reality and science, it all seems very alien to them. They feel more comfortable in their own little world of make-believe.
Remember that woman who was all upset because she saw a rainbow in her sprinkler water, “where it didn’t belong”? (Sorry, I can’t find the link.) It was a lot easier for her to *blame *science, than to *understand *it.
I think a better question should be: Why are so many American Christians opposed to science? Here most people are practicing Catholics and have no problem believing in or learning about science.
Is the south really as different from the north as questions like this would imply? Most people I’ve met are some flavor of believer (most being Christian, and others Jewish or Wiccan), and I’ve yet to meet anyone whose objections to science extend an inch beyond disliking the fact that evolution is taught without mentioning creationism; most science topics are highly compatable with believing in God. In fact, I know several Christians who have science degrees.
I was at the Boston Museum of Science last weekend, and I’m willing to bet a trillion dollars that the majority of the hundreds of people there to see and interact with exibits were theists just as I am…is this something that wouldn’t happen where the OP is from?
Please don’t take offence, but the key word here may not be “Christian”, but “Alabama”.
This does seem to be a problem specifically for (some) American Christians, and to some extent for American-influenced versions of Christianity elsewhere in the world. European Christians may have had a somewhat similar problem in the seventeenth century (Galilieo, and all that) but they largely seem to have got past it.
So the question that occurs to me is, why is this such a big issue for American Christians?
IMHO this is not a “Christian” thing but a “general people” thing. I think one of the problems is that science is becoming necessarily more complex, and as such even a basic understanding of it is becoming evermore out of reach of the average person. I am a scientist myself who works in academic research, and while I understand my own field well, I fully acknowledge that I am shockingly ignorant on many others. Indeed I think my education in my own field makes me appreciate just how complex most things are, and therefore how little I really understand about their fields.
This means though that science, as an institution, is becoming like the pre-reformation Catholic church. While in principle people can repeat any experiment they like, practically most can’t. Doing science today requires:-
Access to (since nearly all are copyrighted and not freely available) and ability to comprehend science journals.
Access to specialised equipment.
Lots of money and free time to perform experiments, analyse results, ect.
None of these resources the average person on the street has. One could draw an analogy with the Catholic church maintaining all of it’s teaching in Latin, which apart from scholars and nobility was a dead language. It keeps the power associated with it in the hands of the select few and makes the masses dependant upon them for knowledge.
So basically the teaching of science becomes an authoritarian exercise where the “priests of the faith” tell you the way it is, and you have to just accept it without question. The result I think is a counter-cultural backlash against this sort epistemological empirialism. People want to think for themselves, and since they cannot do so within the scientific framework they reject it and look for other ways to understand the world around them.
This is why I think you find a correlation between counter-cultural groups and the denial of science. A good example is Wiccans, who are both counter-cultural and also have a relatively high low opinion of science.
This is not of course to say that science is wrong, or that it even necessarily has to be this way. I am just saying how I think it is and what the causes are.
Secondly I think another problem is that the scientific worldview is really stuck in 19th century modernism. Scientific empiricism does not play well with 20th century post-modernism, and so if people accept post-modernism they typically have a lower view of science. Perhaps if some philosophers of science were able to create a view of science that answers postmodernism and it into the 21st century (whatever that may look like) than that may help matters.
Thirdly there are people, some on the religious side but I fear far more on the atheist side proclaiming that science and religion are necessarily incompatable. I think that is absurd. One can view both highly and the conflict is really a false dilemma. However people proclaiming that you need to pick one or the other, particularly athiest scientists such as Richard Dawkins, push people towards either science or religion and quite unhelpfully polarise the debate.
I couldn’t disagree more. There has never been such good access to a wide variety of information oriented for both the layman and the professional. It’s not that hard to find fossils (I have found plenty), or go to the Grand Canyon and look at the layers of rock. Rejecting science is an act of wilful stupidity.