Lawrence Krauss on the familiar taboo
Lawrence Krauss notes that the NSF does a survey on US science literacy, and always finds that adults in the US tend to say “No! I won’t believe that!” when asked about evolution and the big bang. Until this year, when the NSF fiddled the survey.
the National Science Board, which oversees the foundation, chose to leave the section that discussed these issues out of the 2010 edition, claiming the questions were “flawed indicators of scientific knowledge because responses conflated knowledge and beliefs.” In short, if their religious beliefs require respondents to discard scientific facts, the board doesn’t think it appropriate to expose that truth.
A 2009 Pew survey found that “the most devout are on average least willing to accept the evidence of reality.” Which is the opposite of the “science and religion are compatible” dogma that we’re all supposed to “accept” for no very convincing reason.
I don’t know which is more dangerous, that religious beliefs force some people to choose between knowledge and myth or that pointing out how religion can purvey ignorance is taboo. To do so risks being branded as intolerant of religion.
Oh yes indeed it does. It also risks being branded as a gnu atheist, and then called a witch-hunter, shouted at, run out of town, fired, and kicked out of the tennis club.
Keeping religion immune from criticism is both unwarranted and dangerous. Unless we are willing to expose religious irrationality whenever it arises, we will encourage irrational public policy and promote ignorance over education for our children.
Dear me, he won’t be invited to the Accommodationists’ Picnic.
IIRC correctly, the NSF justified leaving the cosmology and evolutions out of their discussion of overall scientific literacy on the grounds that those issues are unrepresentative of people’s overall level of scientific literacy.
I beg to differ. Those are two of the most important ideas in science. If you don’t get them, you are not scientifically literate—you don’t have a basic understanding of what kind of universe you live in, or what kind of thing you are.
I think there’s an even more basic question that the survey ought to ask: is there a life force that animates living things?
I’ll bet the majority of people in the U.S. are vitalists. They don’t understand the most basic idea in biology: all living things are machines, and life itself is just the operation of those machines.
But of course, they’re not going to ask that question, because for too many people, the ideas of life and souls are intertwined, and the embarrassing resistance to the most basic scientific truth is due mainly to religion.