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Science still losing the battle for America's hearts

By John Steinberg | RAW STORY COLUMNIST

As regular readers (of this website, to be sure, but also regular
readers in the broadest sense) know, science is under attack - in
specific ways like the Administration's dismissal of evidence of
global warming, and in a more general sense, as evidenced by the way
the current administration stacks advisory panels based on religious
belief rather than domain expertise. But if there is a mutual Maginot
Line in this battle, it is the conflict between literal interpretation
of the Bible's account of creation in Genesis and Satan's embodiment
in the form of evolution.

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For those who subscribe to the Darwinian view (and each of us should
smack upside the head all who say they "believe in evolution," a
construction that cedes the high ground at the outset - "belief" has
nothing to do with it), the news from the front is not good. Time and
Newsweek seem to feature so many religious stories that they might as
well have become in-flight magazines for Jesus Air. With rare
exceptions, such as the recent scathing editorial in Scientific
American, discussions of the religion-science collision are notable
primarily for their unwillingness to offend true believers. Network
television shows present End Times dramas without a shred of irony -
the tag line for ads for NBC's "Revelations" series is "Omnium Finis
Imminet." And school boards around the country are backing slowly way
from the idea that public education should include anything not
pre-approved by Jerry Falwell.

In short, science is losing the battle for the hearts and minds of
Americans. A re-evaluation of strategy is therefore in order.

In the traditional long-term view of American politics, periods of
conservatism are balanced by periods of liberalization. By this view,
the pendulum that now gives us George Bush and James Dobson ascendant
will eventually swing back and undo their excesses.

But one of the most important points argued in Thomas Frank's What's
the Matter with Kansas? is that the pendulum may well be broken. The
map of class struggle has been redrawn: cooption of social
conservatism by the economic elite has aligned cynical wealth with
religious poverty. Progressive politics is no longer seen as an ally
of its logical beneficiaries. As a result, the restorative forces that
once limited the extent to which the country has swung from centrist
moorings may no longer apply.

So how do we fight back? Logic remains my weapon of choice, though our
opponents seem largely immune to its effects. But I harbor the hope
that we can still turn the tide with the essentials from the logical
toolkit, such as the reductio ad absurdum: showing that an idea is
probably false by first assuming its truth, and then showing how that
truth leads to absurd conclusions that cannot possibly be true. It is
the formal equivalent of "give them enough rope and they'll
(logically) hang themselves."

I thought I had found the perfect application when I read a recent
OpEd piece about the debate over evolution by Richard Cohen of the
Washington Post. Cohen tees up by noting that, "19 states are
considering proposals that would require schools to question
evolution."

I happen to be a big fan of skepticism. I think it is the most
important skill our schools can teach - not the distrust part,
exactly, but I do think that the ability to disassemble fallacious
arguments and pick out their specific flaws is what separates man from
sheep. (Well, that and Antonin Scalia. But I digress.)

Cohen wonders why the fundamentalist microscope is reserved for
Darwinism. As part of his reductio argument, he asks: "Why not
introduce such skepticism into astronomy and have the sun revolve
around the Earth, or have the Earth stand still?"

I read these words and smiled - exactly, I thought. Unwashed heathen
that I am, I was willing to bet that the Bible, written long before
Copernicus showed otherwise, says that the sun revolves around the
earth. And a quick online search confirmed I would have won the bet.

The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place
where he arose. Ecclesiastes 1, verse 5.

And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed, until the people had
avenged themselves upon their enemies. Is not this written in the book
of Jasher? So the sun stood still in the midst of heaven, and hasted
not to go down about a whole day. Joshua 10:13:

What we need, I mused while stroking my Snidely Whiplash moustache, is
a subversive Yes Men-style program to lead a noisy challenge to
heliocentrism. I saw visions of earnest young men, dressed to look
like Mormon missionaries, spreading through Red State America,
preaching the gospel of geocentrism. Let's help the wingnuts
re-establish God's own cosmology and insist that our schools teach
that the Earth is at the center of the universe. Give the kids two
competing theories and let them decide.

Confronted with such abject silliness, the rubes will have to finally
get the point - the point being that there must be some widely
abandoned pre-modern "fact" in the Bible that is so idea so plainly at
odds even with dumbed-down, man-in-the-street cosmology that the
resulting collision of faith and common sense will wake the neighbors.
Brilliant, if I do say so myself.

And then I woke up.

It turns out there is no need to create this stalking horse - there
are Bible-thumpers out there who actually still believe that the earth
is the center of the universe. Don't take my word for it. Visit
www.geocentricity.com, which is "devoted to the historical
relationship between the Bible and astronomy," and which "assumes that
whenever the two are at variance, it is always astronomy.that is
wrong."

By way of proof, these (literal) flat-earthers cite authorities like
Cardinal Bellarmine, (famous for threatening Galileo with the
Inquisition), who rejected Galileo's heresy thusly: "To assert that
the earth revolves around the sun is as erroneous as to claim that
Jesus Christ was not born of a virgin."

I guess that settles that.

These anti-science crusaders feel no need to explain the mountain of
contrary evidence stretching from Galileo, the 17th century heretic,
to Galileo, the spacecraft that orbited Jupiter in 2003. It should
therefore come as no surprise that their brethren are untroubled by
the geological evidence for natural selection, or by the conundrum
posed by the existence of vestigial organs in their own bodies - the
appendix, the tonsils, the cerebral cortex. They're not quite sure
what any of them are for, they know each of them can make them sick,
and they conclude they would be better off without any of them. For
fundamentalists, the Bible is a closed system, furnishing all relevant
theories, evidence and conclusions.

So perhaps there simply isn't a rope long enough out there for these
folks to hang themselves with. The reductio ad absurdum might as well
be spoken in tongues to people whose relationship with absurdity is
essentially a common law marriage.
--
Election 2004
The Triumph of the Swill
"The National Government will regard it as its first and foremost
duty to revive in the nation the spirit of unity and cooperation.
It will preserve and defend those basic principles on which our
nation has been built. It regards Christianity as the foundation
of our national morality, and the family as the basis of national
life."
Adolph Hitler, My New World Order,
Proclamation to the German Nation
at Berlin, February 1, 1933


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-

Carl M. Forti, a spokesman for the National Republican
Congressional Committee -- "A month from now,
people are not going to remember [Terri Schiavo],"
he said, and 20 months from now, in the 2006
elections, "it will be irrelevant."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/26/politics/26delay.html?


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