New Scientist on Fundamentalism
Oct. 22nd, 2005 06:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dreamer_easyNew Scientist recently (8 October 2005) ran a series of articles about Fundamentalist* religious belief. The articles were courteous about those beliefs and their adherents (and one piece discussed scientists' tendency to overestimate their omniscience), while still strongly challenging moves from some Fundamentalist quarters to get rid of science. I want to summarise a few key points here.
Three crucial things to know and my suggestions:
- Studies find few differences between Fundamentalists and the rest of us. They are no less sane, smart, sincere, and happy than the average person. Many of them hold comparatively "liberal" political views. Treat them with basic courtesy.
- Fundamentalist theology is not accepted by mainstream religions. Don't equate "religion" or "Christianity" with Fundamentalism or Creationism.
- There is a well-organised, well-funded political Fundamentalist movement, trying to have Intelligent Design taught as science and climate change dismissed as "superstition", with the ultimate goal of replacing science with "faith-based reasoning". Religion should be respected and taught - but not in science classrooms.
Fundamentalist believers are not a faceless bloc of crazy right-wing arseholes. One survey of Christian fundamentalists in the US found that nearly half opposed banning stem cell research, and their opinions on abortion and homosexuality were about the same as the general population. Studies have shown that Fundamentalists are not insane or stupid. They're not more likely than the rest of us to worship or obey authority figures. They're not more likely to be racist ("homophobic is a different matter"). Their thinking is no more simplistic than anyone else's. They're well-balanced, with little depression and anxiety and high scores for marital happines, optimism, and self-control. Now it's a cinch to Google up examples of vicious, illogical, unpleasant, loopy, money-grubbing Fundamentalists - but the thing to remember is that for the most part they are "happy, sincere, and healthy". They are no more devils than those of us in the "reality-based community".
One expert suggests that Fundamentalism arises out of "small group dynamics rather than personal psychology or indoctrination": a group of fellow believers become a "family" and it becomes enormously important to maintain and protect that family.
Another expert noted that "traditional religions... are geared to the needs of people in traditional agrarian societies... They see life as cyclical, not progressive..." This alarmed me a little, because it made me think at once of Paganism, with its emphasis on seasonal cycles and ideas of a golden age of agriculture and peace. OTOH, Neo-Paganism is very much a product of the "modernity" with which those traditional beliefs painfully collide: "pluralism and tolerance of other faiths, non-traditional gender roles and sexual behaviour, reliance on human reason rather than divine revelation, and democracy, which grants power to people rather than God." That collision must seem like the world has turned upside down.
Why claim a scientific basis for Fundamentalist beliefs? Because it's the dominant world view. "... a certain level of evidence is required in order for knowledge to count... they 'science-up' their faith, framing it in a way that they think ought to make sense to a scientific culture." But Fundamentalists have "failed to gain intellectual acceptance even within mainstream Christian scholarship" and their beliefs are "widely considered as irrelevant to modern theology as it is to modern science."
For some Fundamentalists, science is also politically inconvenient. George Gilder of the Discovery Institute describes climate change, pollution, and ozone depletion as "chimeras of popular science" - that is, imaginary monsters. A leaked document from the Institute on Religion and Democracy describes discrediting the Kyoto accord as a top priority.
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* A note on terms: some folks prefer to be called evangelical Christians, Bible-believing Christians etc. (There may be Islamic equivalents of which I'm ignorant.) I mean no offence by using the catch-all term "Fundamentalist".
Three crucial things to know and my suggestions:
- Studies find few differences between Fundamentalists and the rest of us. They are no less sane, smart, sincere, and happy than the average person. Many of them hold comparatively "liberal" political views. Treat them with basic courtesy.
- Fundamentalist theology is not accepted by mainstream religions. Don't equate "religion" or "Christianity" with Fundamentalism or Creationism.
- There is a well-organised, well-funded political Fundamentalist movement, trying to have Intelligent Design taught as science and climate change dismissed as "superstition", with the ultimate goal of replacing science with "faith-based reasoning". Religion should be respected and taught - but not in science classrooms.
Fundamentalist believers are not a faceless bloc of crazy right-wing arseholes. One survey of Christian fundamentalists in the US found that nearly half opposed banning stem cell research, and their opinions on abortion and homosexuality were about the same as the general population. Studies have shown that Fundamentalists are not insane or stupid. They're not more likely than the rest of us to worship or obey authority figures. They're not more likely to be racist ("homophobic is a different matter"). Their thinking is no more simplistic than anyone else's. They're well-balanced, with little depression and anxiety and high scores for marital happines, optimism, and self-control. Now it's a cinch to Google up examples of vicious, illogical, unpleasant, loopy, money-grubbing Fundamentalists - but the thing to remember is that for the most part they are "happy, sincere, and healthy". They are no more devils than those of us in the "reality-based community".
One expert suggests that Fundamentalism arises out of "small group dynamics rather than personal psychology or indoctrination": a group of fellow believers become a "family" and it becomes enormously important to maintain and protect that family.
Another expert noted that "traditional religions... are geared to the needs of people in traditional agrarian societies... They see life as cyclical, not progressive..." This alarmed me a little, because it made me think at once of Paganism, with its emphasis on seasonal cycles and ideas of a golden age of agriculture and peace. OTOH, Neo-Paganism is very much a product of the "modernity" with which those traditional beliefs painfully collide: "pluralism and tolerance of other faiths, non-traditional gender roles and sexual behaviour, reliance on human reason rather than divine revelation, and democracy, which grants power to people rather than God." That collision must seem like the world has turned upside down.
Why claim a scientific basis for Fundamentalist beliefs? Because it's the dominant world view. "... a certain level of evidence is required in order for knowledge to count... they 'science-up' their faith, framing it in a way that they think ought to make sense to a scientific culture." But Fundamentalists have "failed to gain intellectual acceptance even within mainstream Christian scholarship" and their beliefs are "widely considered as irrelevant to modern theology as it is to modern science."
For some Fundamentalists, science is also politically inconvenient. George Gilder of the Discovery Institute describes climate change, pollution, and ozone depletion as "chimeras of popular science" - that is, imaginary monsters. A leaked document from the Institute on Religion and Democracy describes discrediting the Kyoto accord as a top priority.
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* A note on terms: some folks prefer to be called evangelical Christians, Bible-believing Christians etc. (There may be Islamic equivalents of which I'm ignorant.) I mean no offence by using the catch-all term "Fundamentalist".
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no subject
Date: 2005-10-26 01:33 pm (UTC)Let me address the idea that what happened in the past can only be guessed at. - "Were you there?" as one Creationist puts it. :-) Past events leave evidence which can support or disprove a hypothesis*. A simple example Jon and I have been throwing around is a car crash. My hypothesis: the driver, sadly deceased, was drunk. "Were you there?" No, but my hypothesis can be *tested* by the coroner. Examples of evidence about past life include fossils, "homologies" (similarities in structures), vestigial organs (eg whales' tiny internal leg bones, which I'll bet a buck serve no function!), genetic family trees, and living "missing links" such as monotremes.
I agree, absolutely, that scientists can be pigheads. In fact, the development of science in the former USSR was held back for decades because on powerful state geneticist was an adamant Lamarckian (cut off a mouse's tail, and its offspring will be tailless). However, there's a great quote from Carl Sagan: "They laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown." All "fringe" proponents claim they're being marginalised by the establishment. Ultimately only the evidence can help us sort out the innovators from the nutters.
To the best of my knowledge, no ID proponent has carried out a scientific experiment on ID and published the results, even though some are professional scientists. To show that ID qualifies as science, Michael Behe need only design an experiment to test it - ie, come up with a hypothesis which could be proved wrong. (He need not even run the experiment!) He hasn't, because he can't - it's a philosophical idea, not subject to empirical enquiry.
I am for bed!
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* Technical stuff for those who are interested. Theory = Theorem; the Theory of Evolution is not a single hypothesis (eg "That driver was drunk"), but a huge collection of interlocking evidence and ideas (eg Road Safety). Hypothesis = a guess you can prove is wrong. In science, technically you can never prove anything; your experiment or research can support your hypothesis, or disprove it. When enough evidence supports a hypothesis, it's broadly accepted as a fact - but a single experiment could still disprove it. A sixty-million year old human skull would do nicely!