In reference to the New York Times…
A little dated maybe, but this article still raises several good questions about the situation that science finds itself in today. For a society that owes so much to the calculations and calm logic of science, I find it boggling how many people, even in our country alone, still manage to cling to an almost medieval mistrust of scientific advancement.
Even though, as the authors state, science has raised the national life-expectancy 30 years in the past century, developed cures and vaccines for countless diseases, put men on the Moon, machines on Mars, and even made our day-to-day lives more comfortable with everything from the light bulb to digital electronics, significant portions of the population still find it in themselves to doubt or disregard entirely the teachings of the system that has made possible every break-through in our knowledge of the world since the days of the Greeks. Even now opponents of mainstream science are haggling the intellectual community with issues seemingly dragged out of antiquity, such as the practice of astrology, the existence of ghosts or, more recently, the teaching of Darwinism versus Intelligent Design, an argument that we thought buried with the Monkey Trials. Taken as a whole, the evidence provided by authors serves to paint a fairly bleak picture of the current state of rationality in our society.
Granted, the stats cited in the article should be taken with a grain of salt. While, “most Americans believe in miracles,” and, “half believe in ghosts,” this doesn’t directly indicate that a majority of our population believes in magic or has renounced science altogether. Instead, I think it speaks more to the increasingly prominent conflict in our society between science and religion. Not to say that there is an ever-widening gap between the two- on the contrary, the coexistence of science and religion has come a long ways since the days of Galileo and Giordano Bruno. Instead, it seems that as science has advanced and given us increasingly reliable evidence detailing the nature of our universe, it has become more and more tricky for people to reconcile their spiritual beliefs with their scientific ones. While I believe it entirely possible to do, I think that the difficulty of engaging in such an internal philosophical debate turns many away, as it is much easier to give oneself over to the basic, learned tenants of one system than to try to question them in light of new evidence. “Isn’t it incredible that you have so much fundamentalism, retreating back to so much ignorance?” For better or worse, it seems as though religion has always posed a significant speed bump in the road to acceptance and pursuit of scientific progress.
That being said, I do agree that religion or other less-than-scientific belief systems can and do play significant roles in many people’s lives, and I don’t mean to vilify religion or loft science up as the one true goal of society. I do, however, believe that irrational adherence to outdated customs can often impede societal progress. I think that science has been an integral part of our development as a species, and it is because of this that I agree with Dr. John H. Gibbons when he says, “The urgency is to re-establish the fundamental position that science plays in helping devise uses of knowledge to resolve social ills. I hope rationality will triumph. But you can’t count on it. As President Chirac said, we’ve lost the primacy of reason.”
