But as the amount of material increases, the amount that you have to absorb to get up to speed becomes more as well. I don’t doubt that there are more books explaining it all now, but it is also true that what they have to explain is more complex.
Secondly, just being able to find a fossil tells you very little. Creationists, AFAICT, accept that there are fossils, they just don’t accept they are millions of years old. The only way to tell the age of the fossil is either through radioactive isotope dating, which is impossible to the layman to do, or through placing it in the sedimentary record, which assumes that you already believe that the earth is millions of years old.
Just because someone doesn’t agree with you it doesn’t mean that they are stupid or willfully ignorant. That sort of arrogant “my way or the highway” attitude is why some people have a problem with science in the first place.
Unfortunately, it’s human nature. Most people will close their minds to common sense rather than openly confront evidence which undermines dearly held beliefs.
Of course, you might ask yourself if there are any beams in your own eye.
But people with far less information at their disposal than we have today DID figure out they were millions of years old by looking at the sedimentary record. This is not that hard: if you look at a prticular fossil deposit you see that the types of fossils you find are similar, and that you don’t see mammals mixed in with trilobites. You can look at how species are distributed among the continents and see that it is not compatible with the biblical creation story.
Like the anti-vaccination types, creationists are wilfully rejecting evidence that they do not agree with. If that is not stupidity and ignorance then the words have no meaning.
Out of interest, how hard do you have to look for your fossils? Because where I live I have never heard anyone talk about finding fossils. And where I live there is wide acceptance of evolution. It’s not like people just step outside and trip over fossils of all different types of animals.
Also with vaccinations, what evidence would you present to a lay-person that a vaccination is effective? There is no way to look at some strange liquid in a syrynge and determine that injecting that into you will stop you getting some disease. You may present studies that show the effectiveness of that vaccination, but that approach pre-supposes that the person finds scientists credible. Maybe they believe that the studies were doctored by drug companies to ensure profits, and the data is all false. And given some of the actions of modern drug companies that view is not entirely baseless. When does a skeptic cross over from being intelligent to foolish? Why should we be deeply skeptical of some things but give science and scientists a free pass and just accept them uncritically?
The majority of lay people are either unable or unwilling to evaluate all of the scientific evidence for a position. Most people believe or dis-believe scientific theories because someone they trust tells them to. Is there really that much difference between someone who believes in evolution because Richard Dawkins tells him its correct, and someone who believes say ID is correct because Michael Behe tells him it is correct? Both show the same (low) level of analysis. Why is one ignorant, and the other one intelligent? Both use essentially the same justification for their beliefs. The only difference is the ID guy should have made a better choice.
Aside from evolution and a bit of astronomy…what else do “SO MANY” reject?
Pi?
Chemistry?
The fact that haemoglobin has Iron?
The three laws of motion?
Photsynthesis?
Charles’ law?
Many people live simple lives and the fact the ligth bends in the presence of large gravitational fields is both outside their knowledge and completely irrelevant to their lives. There is also a distrust to the vehemen contempt that a few well known scientist hold about simple people and religion.
and, by the way, just ask Lemaitre why his “Bing Bang” ideas were rejected. (hint: he was a Catholic priest)
Do you think ancient Greek (polytheistic) farmers spent their days cheking logarithm tables.
Damn straight- when a Catholic monk like Gregor Mendel tries to tell you about genetics, shout him down! He cannot tell the truth, ebcause he’s driven by a false creed.
Listen to rationalist atheist geneticists like Troffim Lysenko! THEY have no agenda but the truth.
Fossils are commonly found in limestone deposits. I used to go to road cuts in Ohio to find Ordivican fossils, but when coal use was common you could find fossilized ferns in it easily. In Oregon there are fossils in many areas. Thirty nine US states have official “state fossils” (including Alabama). Where do you live?
Not a good analogy. Science, unlike religion, works. People can see the results of science all around them. No one needs to “accept it without question” because the question is answered every day by science’s accomplishments.
No; it’s because they, just as Christians do, base their worldview on falsehoods, and science is hostile by nature to falsehood.
The debate SHOULD be polarized. And they ARE incompatible. Religion is by nature hostile to everything but itself; science is by nature hostile to delusions and irrationality, which is all religion is. People can only “view both highly” by the exercise of strong compartmentalisation, self delusion, and by carefully avoiding any scientific activity that will force you to confront the reality of how wrong your religion is.
It’s not “arrogance”; it’s the simple truth. Science has overwhelming evidence on the matter of evolution’; religion has none for it’s fantasies. If someone buys into creationism, they are at best “stupid or willfully ignorant”.
The fact that they have prevented so much disease might be a clue.
No one is saying that we should give science a free pass. But it should be taken far more seriously than religion, because science has a record of success. As opposed to religion, which is relentlessly wrong.
The difference is that one person is making a religious claim, and the other not. Even if you know nothing else, the fact that a claim is religious in nature should be enough tho discredit it, given that religion is so obsessively wrong, and it’s followers so willing to lie for the faith. That’s not scientific evidence of course, but “religion is always wrong in any dispute on a matter of fact” is a principle that will seldom if ever lead you wrong.
Because Christianity is much stronger here both on a personal and social level. So more people feel more strongly obligated to deny reality, and are much less likely to be laughed at for doing so.
Yes, as it happens; the Bible claims that Pi is 3 in one passage. There’s been several attempts to write it into law.
Lysenko was a Communist not a rationalist. And his ideas were a disaster because he did what believers tend to do and rejected science in favor of dogma. As for Gregor Mendel, he told the truth because he didn’t realize he was undercutting his faith. If he had known, he’d quite possibly have lied or burned his results.
It depends on where you live. Also, a lot of the easily found fossils have been picked over. However I’ve been to stores in malls selling them.
Now I absolutely agree with this. Someone “believing” in evolution because of Dawkins is an idiot. Happily, Dawkins would think so also, and his books lay out the logical argument for it, which has zero to do with belief.
Science can be very complicated. Some people who don’t understand it feel inferior, so they adopt a worldview that allows them to fell superior to other people. Christianity and science are two entirely different areas of human interest and not mutually exclusive except to those who chose to make them so.
Basically pretending it is not so allows them to avoid a lot of thinking, which is hard work.
Except that there is a big market now for popular science books, and support for scientists writing for the more average person. When Asimov started writing about science it was viewed reasonably negatively by his department, but I haven’t heard anyone recently complaining about lack of support for popularization. I doubt it gets one tenure, but after that it seems ok.
But there have been tons of books and articles on true controversies. Look at cold fusion. Accepting without question is different from the question having been answered a million times already.
In the early 19th century many progressive religious people were quite positive that advances in science would support their religious views, which was one of the reasons why the clergy was so active in scientific research. One segment of religious thought held that science was dangerous to religion. Partly from geological discoveries showing the earth was much older than Genesis claims, and mostly from the publication of The Origin, the more fundamentalist group were proved to be correct. As long as religion makes claims about the natural world, it has the possibility of conflict with science. It can either choose to accept science, as the Dalai Lama and many branches of Judaism do, restate its positions to be compatible, like the Catholic Church does, or reject science entirely, like the fundamentalists do. It can’t ignore science, not any more.
Australia. Lived in the city and the country and no-one talks about fossils.
Which raises the larger question, why should they care? How will their life improve by spending all this time trawling through scientific tomes, especially if they don’t work in sciences. People only have so much free time. I think it unreasonable to expect people to educate themselves on topics they probably have little interest in. It is possible for people to be intelligent and just not care about sciences.
I’m a Christian and I’m working towards a degree in science. Don’t be quick to generalize people with religion as being ignorant of or distrustful of science. Science and religion do not have to be opposite ends of the spectrum. My faith encourages me to seek truth, and science can let the truth be known. I hear talk of evolution just about every day from a biology professor who lives and breathes Charles Darwin, but it doesn’t make me doubt my faith, or doubt that life was given and created. On the contrary, the more I study (including math, physics and chemistry) the more I see into the master’s toolbox. Science is absolutely fascinating. I don’t have any conflict reconciling religious faith with science.
I’ve heard this theory advanced a couple of times on this board. Maybe by you.
I don’t get it.
I find a secret cabal with puppet strings manipulating every facet of life and injecting violence and mayhem throughout but mainly along the fringes to be far more terrifying than the idea of a random dude going nuts and shooting the President, or a bunch of pissed of Muslims flying airplanes into some buildings.
In all fairness the vaccinations thing hasn’t been debunked and disseminated all that recently. Just because you found something out a bit before everyone else did doesn’t mean it’s paranoic superstition that causes the belief. Some people are quite ok with science and just got fooled that mercury in vaccines causes autism because it was a rumor that spread so widely.
