vs.

WARNING: rant ahead.

I have a set of geek podcasts I listen to, one of them being NPR's "Science Friday". They're pretty hit and miss, some are fluff and some are really interesting, depends on the speaker usually.

Anyway, the one I listened to yesterday was about "denialism" of science in our society. Basically, the group of science-oriented people who think that people who ignore science because of some other belief (religion, morality, or just plain ignorance) are stupid and wrong. Just like people who perceive science conflicting with their religious or moral beliefs are stupid and wrong.

Now...I'm not defending a "side" here, and in fact I am really tired of the fact that we have "sides" in the first place. In this particular case, the issue is always portrayed as "science vs. religion" or "science vs. morality", as if they are really two comparable things.

Science, to my understanding, and based on definitions I've found, is basically the process of understanding and explaining how things work. How things "are". Conclusions, theories, postulates, etc. in science can be proven or dis-proven, and to me, a good scientist is always in pursuit of the truth, meaning their goal should be to better understand how the world around them works, functions, etc.

Faith, religion, morality, etc. are essentially a set of beliefs a person has about what's right and wrong, or how the world should be, or in an abstract sense, the "why" behind how the world is.

Scientific understandings can certainly be APPLIED - as a factor in creating and inventing new things, making things work better, and making decisions as a society or government on the laws and policies we make.

Beliefs can also be APPLIED in a similar manner - many of society's laws and rules have a moral as well as practical basis (we all agree that people shouldn't kill other people, that we shouldn't steal from each other, etc.)

The problem is when these two things are equated. It is all too easy to look through history and see where a particular religion or belief system "took offense" to a scientific explanation of how something in the world works. When scientists in the middle ages learned that the sun and planets didn't revolve around the earth, they were made to be religious heretics because that threatened a belief that the earth and its people were somehow "divine".

Did the fact that we now understood something that we didn't understand before actually change the scientific reality of anything? No. Did that have to mean that the people's belief that the earth and its people were special or "divine" really have to change? No - in fact it seems like it should never really be a big stretch for someone who believes in a higher power to believe that maybe the higher power knows more than they do (duh).

Likewise, we see scientists who have turned their science into their belief system - that every scientific conclusion should dictate the way we live, and that if we don't "believe" in this science and do as it "instructs" we are wrong. (NOTE I'm not talking about a person choosing to believe there is no higher power or choosing not to have a belief system, which is an individual choice). The examples that came up in this podcast were genetically modified food, and abortion. This guy's argument was that because no one has gotten "significantly ill" because of genetically modified food (a subjective phrase, not a scientific one), that we should all just be ok with it. And that on abortion, if science were to prove that an unborn fetus less than 3 months old couldn't actually feel the abortion procedure being done, that everyone against abortion should rethink their views and be ok with that and that we're stupid and ignorant if we're not. In effect, creating (ironically) a belief system out of science.

The particular abortion discussion that was going on was between this speaker and a caller who was fairly obviously against abortion - but in this case I felt like she was at least making the distinction between science and her beliefs - basically saying that one of the reasons she BELIEVES abortion is wrong is because of scientific evidence that a fetus can feel what's going on.

I guess the frustration I have really is that everything in our society seems to be geared toward A vs. B, yes or no, up-or-down votes, one-word answers, polarization, where in reality issues are complicated and most people are somewhere in the middle. Politicians are the worst on this, and the media feeds into it as well.

"Either you're pro-life or you're pro-choice."
"For genetically modified food or against it."
"For or against gay marriage."
"Democrat or Republican."
"Creation or Evolution."
and my personal favorite "If you're not a Republican then you must be against God."

That's just a short list. If I look those over, I know that on most of them I have more than one opinion and have a whole range of feelings on them, and some can't even be directly compared.  The creation vs. evolution example is along the same lines as the earlier mention of "heretics" that thought everything revolved around the earth. Just because we now understand something more about the world (that evolution has gone on and is still going on today), does that preclude the existence of God or a higher power? Of course not - in fact I'd say that a higher power designing a planet would probably want to have designed in the capability of things to evolve and adapt if they wanted it to survive a long time. It isn't a big stretch to think the writers of the bible wrote things in terms they understood AT THE TIME - that doesn't make them wrong, it just means we know more about how our world works now than they did then.