#inspirement

The question now is...are you still eating it?

My usual test audiences actually took bets on how long it would take for someone who missed the point of my post to call me, a Jewish scientist who is publicly critical of past Christian wrongs, a Christian apologist.

The answer is ten minutes!  Collect your winnings at the ticket window.

Science needs to exist in a constant realm of self-doubt, contextualized by fact.  This has been a central tenet of Philosophy of Science since Francis Bacon.  When people who purport to be scientists or science supporters come to spurious conclusions based on dubious fact, the appropriate response is not to say “well, fundamentalism is a problem today, so we shouldn’t criticize the people who decry it.”

In fact, anti-Science fundamentalism as we know it today, namely as a mainstream view in Christian religious culture, was not a fact of the past.  Being religious in the past did not necessarily mean being anti-Science, and attacking the religions of the past for the sins of today’s religious people isn’t helping in the fight to defeat modern dogmatics.

It’s just wasting everyone’s time, because it’s easy to demonstrate why these arguments are ignorant of history and context.  Since it is unlikely that any of the people responsible for that fundamentalism will ever read those words, what it amounts to is not actually anything beyond historiographic auto-fellatio on the part of people who seek to use science as validation for the insecurities they feel about their beliefs.

If the true goal is to advocate for science, then the people doing this would not start off by violating a central scientific tenet.  Sadly, the goal here is not actually to advocate for science, but to vilify religion, which I find utterly tedious.  Vilifying religion is not helping with the problem you’re stating; in fact it makes it harder for science educators to reach modern religious people.

It is you who are being an apologist by defending behavior that is counterproductive to the goal of science advocacy as if somehow unscientific perspectives are a “necessary” evil in a “fight” against fundamentalism.  That view is reminiscent of the Christian view that Satan is constantly at war with God.  I don’t recognize it as logical thinking, because it isn’t.

We need to stop caring what people think about God, and start caring what they know about science.  In order to achieve that goal, we need to stop the association between science and the vilification of religion.

Since religion is untestable at present, the proper scientific attitude towards it should be indifference, not anger or counter-advocacy. Scientists need to respond to challenges from modern religious fundamentalists, without anger or condemnation, but instead with indifference and apathy.