10.13.12

The anti-science menace

Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Extremism at 1:50 pm by George Smith

Paul Broun: God’s word is true. I’ve come to understand that. All that stuff I was taught about evolution and embryology and the Big Bang Theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of Hell. And it’s lies to try to keep me and all the folks who were taught that from understanding that they need a savior. You see, there are a lot of scientific data that I’ve found out as a scientist that actually show that this is really a young Earth. I don’t believe that the Earth’s but about 9,000 years old. I believe it was created in six days as we know them. That’s what the Bible says.

As previously said, if you count the number of Republicans who are profoundly anti-science, they now stack up like cord wood. And the Republican Party, in an affront to everything rational, puts such men on the House Committee responsible for oversight of science.

It’s no longer mildly amusing in a “look at the heevahava” way. It constitutes a menace, a conscious effort to overturn rational leadership.

When I was at Lehigh a man named Michael Behe was hired by the chemistry department. My thesis advisor was part of the search committee.

After Behe got tenure, he was able to get a book published on creationism. He called it intelligent design and the GOP right seized on Behe as a standard bearer for debunking evolution.

Here was a tenured academic in the science faculty at a respectable school who had allegedly disproved Darwin. Lehigh’s science professors had paid Behe no mind although quite a few people on the ground knew what he was pushing.

This became a disaster for Lehigh when Behe subsequently moved to the biology department. Today, Lehigh’s biology division publishes a disclaimer bluntly stating his creationism ideas have no basis in science.

But the damage had been done.

While Behe was hardly the only person to attack evolution, his legacy has played a substantial role in the GOP’s war on science, epitomized by its success in getting many Americans to question basic biology in the mistaken belief that their faith is under attack by science.

During the lengthy years of my education I never ran across a shortage of scientists who held belief in God. And I could write an essay about the way they occasionally expressed it.

Science is not capable of testing for whether there is God or not despite what people who don’t know anything about science may think. Science neither can prove nor disprove the existence of a deity yet much of the GOP antagonism toward science comes from fanning the idea in its base that science is an attack on religion.

I’m going to take a moment to relate a moment that has stayed with me all my life, taken as a freshman in a chemistry class during my undergraduate years.

One of my chemistry professors, now long gone, was discussing the characteristics of water. And I will convey the nut of it without going into the fine details of molecular structure.

Water, he said to the class, was a substance that was different from most, in that when it turns to solid, it expands.

Ice takes up more room than liquid water, is less dense — and so it floats; liquid water is not compressible as is ice, which turns back to liquid when you squeeze it. It’s why, among many things, we have the pleasure of ice-skating.

And since water is the solvent in which life’s chemical reactions occur, my chem prof said, this feature was one of the unique things that is important to life. It is why lakes and rivers do not freeze from the bottom up and become one entire block of ice during winter, and that’s essential.

So he added that this was something that affirmed his faith in a God because it is such a special thing. And he left it at that, not questioning anything else or trying to weave some complex explanation for an intelligent designer that other people should be persuaded to accept (although not being there and lacking a true science union card, others may miss such a distinction).

It was an expression of his faith.

God’s role, if it exists in water, cannot be tested for. It cannot be proven. And it cannot be rejected.

So my experience was that many scientists do have faith and it is not incongruent with their rationality.

On the other hand, this is why the modern GOP has become so contemptible. It takes ignorance of the way things are and wields it as a weapon to attack that which is scientific fact.

So if many in our country think that putting a modern Republican in power is a way to move the place forward, to help it deal with the very complex global problems with which it is currently faced, they’re one with entropy, which is the falling apart of everything, from order to disorder, until there is nothing left. That’s a tragedy and we should not delude ourselves that such actions, behaviors or opinions defend anything worthwhile.

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