American Conservatives And Science: A Memoir

Gordon Gauchat, a Health Services researcher at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, publishes in The Sociological Review (77:2, 167–187) an article entitled “Politicization of Science in the Public Sphere: A Study of Public Trust in the United States, 1974 to 2010.”

Briefly, his article demonstrates (or rather reinforces previous studies demonstrating) that North American conservatives have become less trustful of science since 1974, in contrast to the rest of the population, whose trust in science has remained more or less stable.

Trust in science of course requires faith that somebody knows what he or she is talking about in some area of specialization.  It’s common for religious and political conservatives these days to talk about science as a form of faith, but I think that it’s worth examining the causes of this belief in science as seen from within the conservative mindset to emphasize the ways in which it is and isn’t like religious faith….

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"Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence"

Carl Sagan: The Spokesmodel For The Scientific MethodCarl Sagan is sometimes credited with coining the term.  He certainly deserves the credit for putting it on television and making it part of the American conversation about religion, aliens, Resurrections, Nostradamus, elves, and so on.

“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” saith the prophet.  ECREE, for short, in Internet debate.

Briefly, the idea here is that the way we sort out what is “real” and “true” is by experience.  Our experience (codified formally by science, but also privately in each human brain) arranges the world so that we know what is possible and probable and unlikely and impossible based on experience.

It is surely the case that we can make mistakes in determining the likelihood of a truth-claim. 

But in the human community, there are things that we agree upon: the habits of gravity and the properties of hydrogen, for instance, and the inadvisability of putting your cat in the microwave.

When someone makes a truth-claim that’s out of the ordinary, naturally, you can adapt it without critical comment.  The farther outside of the fields of what seems possible a thing is, the more difficult it is to reprogram our mental conceptions of the world.

A man who lives forever, or Fairy Giraffes With Butterly Wings, might well exist.  But it would take a considerable readjustment of what we mean by “reality” and “normal.”  And to adapt belief in such a thing represents therefore a tremendous intellectual commitment.

The concept has tremendous importance for Christian apologetics as well as other attempts to persuade people of things that leave slender or no traces in the material world. 

Science, Faith, & Echo Chambers

Sometimes science (not that it's a monolithic institution or anything) takes the fall for our own passionate ditortions.  Like religion, it sets up a truth just because it's true, and the public makes of it what it wants to make.  Unlike religion, it can debunk the distortion.

Well... sort of.

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Conversations With Touchstone: Theists, Scientists, & Fairy Giraffes With Butterfly Wings

Science deals with things that are extended in time and space, and insofar as The Big Questions are supernatural or whatever, they are not approachable by science.

The bare-faced lie that is currently being perpetrated on American evangelicals generally is at least an interesting one.  It's that the Bible is itself a form of science, and simultaneously a "fact" that can be interpreted as reasonable persons interpret other facts. 

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Evangelicals In Science

Rod Dreher, reviewing Elaine Howard Ecklund's book Science vs. Religion: What Scientists Really Think:

Evangelicals are vastly underrepresented among the elite scientist population, relative to their size in the general population, while Jews, Buddhists and Hindus are heavily overrepresented. (Caveat: 75 percent of Jewish scientists call themselves atheists, and see their Jewishness as a cultural and ethnic category). Interestingly, Ecklund found that even when scientists fit the traditional description of an Evangelical, there was "considerable reluctance" among them to use that term as a self-descriptor. That Evangelical scientists don't want to be called Evangelical strikes me as significant.

First, the real issue here is one of discourses, I think.  

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