Karl Giberson has been rather quiet since he left both BioLogos and Eastern Nazarene College, but it looks as though he’s been pondering the downside of the evangelical Christianity to which he adheres. In his new post at PuffHo, he offers his theory of “Why evangelicals are fooled into accepting pseudoscience.”
Giberson wonders why so many of his fellow Christians dismiss the idea of human-caused global warming despite the massive evidence in its favor. Garden-variety accommodationists like Chris Mooney or Josh Rosenau would, of course, blame atheist scientists like Dawkins, whose stridency, they argue, drives people away from science and into the arms of Jesus.
But not Uncle Karl! He blames the evangelicals themselves. What a concept!
I want to suggest that the reason has nothing to do with climate science per se, but derives from the generally dim view that many evangelicals have of science and scientists — views that make it hard to distinguish credible science from fake challengers.
One of the strategies employed most effectively by evangelicals in their crusade against evolution, which does pose real, although soluble, biblical and theological problems, has been to undermine the entire scientific enterprise. If science is a deeply flawed, ideologically driven, philosophically suspect enterprise, then why should anyone care if almost every scientist supports the theory of evolution? If the scientific community is just a bunch of self-serving ideologues with Ivy League appointments, then we can ignore anything it says that we don’t like.
Giberson then relates how the creationist Discovery Institute used a study of the scientific peer-review process to suggest that the entire process—and hence science itself—is corrupt and untrustworthy.
The relentless assaults on the integrity of science by groups like the Discovery Institute have made it impossible for many people to understand the significance of a “scientific consensus.”
He’s right, of course. As science relentlessly nibbles at the borders of faith, ingesting things like free will, the history of life, and morality—things that used to be the purview of religion but now yield to the levers of empiricism—the evangelicals fight back the only way they can: by impugning science itself. That’s why we hear all this bunk from both accommodationists and the faithful about the dangers of philosophical naturalism and scientism, as well as about the errors and dangers inherent in science. It’s not atheists who are responsible for Christian opposition to science; it’s the Christians themselves.
But if only Karl had gone one step further! For when he says this—
In their eagerness to dismantle scientific objections to intelligent design the Discovery Institute drives yet another wedge between evangelicals and the scientific community, making it harder for religious believers to distinguish science from pseudoscience, in particular, and real knowledge claims from fake ones in general.
—he doesn’t seem to realize that it’s the business of religion itself to blur the boundaries between real and fake knowledge. If you swallow things like Adam and Eve, the Resurrection, or transubstantiation, then you’re already halfway to denying global warming and evolution. For the faithful, truth is not what’s supported by evidence, but simply what they want to be true.
h/t: Ray
Karl Giberson is acting like Sisyphus. He almost got that rock up the hill, but not quite. Push a little harder, Karl, then you will join the people who try to use reason in most everything they do.
Come to the dark side, Uncle Karl!
We have kittehs, and you can sleep in on Sunday mornings. And you can stop worrying about whether or not Jesus wants you to stick your fingers in his side and fondle his intestines when you get to Heaven.
But mostly it’s about the kittehs.
Cheers,
b&
P.S. You also get to stop contorting yourself to adapt this “faith” nonsense to reality. Reality is plenty all by itself. b&
Darth Science: Obi-Collins never told you what happened to your facts.
Karl Giberson: He told me enough! He told me you killed them!
Darth Science: No. I am your facts.
Karl Giberson: No… that’s not true! That’s impossible!
Darth Science: “Search your Textbooks, you know it to be true!”
I plan to steal this bit.
Karl Giberson seems to understand why atheists are so worried about creationism – not because they want to protect the establishment or something, but because their activities undermine the credibility of the entirety of science.
I’d say, however, that in the case of anthropogenic global warming, there is another factor. Many conservative and libertarian pundits like to suggest that global warming is some sort of socialist plot to destroy the free market. It wouldn’t surprise me if many evangelicals are quite willing to accept this argument. After all, as they see it, there’s already a socialist plot out to destroy Christianity.
Or to put it another way, the Republicans (particularly the Tea Party kind) are spending a lot of effort on profiling themselves as the party for conservative Christians, as well as the party for climate change denialists. No wonder then if many people who identify as Republicans because of their religion will also accept the Republican position on climate change.
What we need is an honest man:
http://cdn.svcs.c2.uclick.com/c2/358c9980b794012e2f8f00163e41dd5b
I’d settle for an honest rebubbacan !
but, I’m not holding my breath !
A third important factor is the broad evangelical agreement that the end of the world is near and therefore a fight against global warming is wasted energy.
The end of the world has been three months away for the past 1980 years +/-. Perhaps a possible trend is beginning to appear.
Amen to that.
I’m certainly happy to see Karl coming to sensible conclusions.
I have no problem with a person of faith working within the scientific community with this kind of context. Keep your Jesus, keep the resurrection, keep free will (which I still think exists anyway, but let’s not derail the train).
The problem isn’t with this form of theist, it’s with the 40% of Americans who really and truly believe — at the peril of their immortal souls not to — that the Universe is 6,000 years old, poofed into existence whole and intact by magic words.
The so-called ‘liberal’ religions have no problem with reconciling the latest scientific findings with their belief systems. Until Hawking or Guth proves that the universe could not have been brought into existence by a supernatural force (and infinitely regress that proof to the multiverse), there’s always the tiniest gap for a theist to squeeze their god.
The issue, then, becomes the demands that their particular god places on humans, and the ability of people of one form of faith to enforce their peculiarly specific behavioral code on people of other faiths (or none). A god who says “thou shalt not” is way different from a god who says “judge not”.
FWIW, you are mixing areas here.
Hawking and other physicists can’t “prove” a natural cosmology, they can show that it is valid; perhaps the only valid one. Infinite regress wouldn’t be part of such a theory, but natural objects such as eternal time and mathematical methods such as iteration may be.
And even such a theory, after validation, will leave “gaps” for uncertainty. Just not reasonable gaps for doubt.
Whether we should entertain the notion that religion has reasonable gaps as of today is another question. Dawkins seems to think, and I would agree, that in the absence of evidence for such (not extraordinary but preposterous) claims of supernatural agency we should deem them unreasonable already.
I’ve posted the following to my blog within the last day: I think it is relevant, because it identifies what religious people must fear:
“The expanding scope of science; the shrinking scope of religion”
“indefensible knowledge claims. ”
I have to laugh. What about indefensible knowledge claims such as “God exists”? He’s probably in favor of that one.
As if this hasn’t been an active, intentional campaign on the part of religious cons for 150 years. Blame the evangelicals, sure – but the mendacity of the clergy is an infamy of historic proportions.
Come on, Karl!
That other shoe has to be feeling pretty heavy!
“…the evangelicals fight back the only way they can: impugning science itself.”
Or they claim there’s a reliable *non-scientific* guide to some parts of reality: http://www.naturalism.org/epistemology.htm#alternatives
What’s scary is that accomodationists – supposedly science-minded empiricists – state publicly that theists are right in this claim, when in fact there’s no basis for it.
Re the Discovery Institute, seems like they are at least nominally on board about the virtues of science, it’s just that their conception of what counts as science doesn’t square with actual scientific practice.
seems like they are at least nominally on board about the virtues of science
then you haven’t looked very closely.
Correct, I’ll have another look.
start with this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wedge_strategy#Wedge_Document
and then follow where the money to fund them has come from.
Right, I was aware of the wedge strategy, and take your point about the money trail. Looking at the DI site, I see that they present themselves as a science-based organization, http://www.discovery.org/csc/aboutCSC.php , hence “*nominally* on board about the virtues of science.” This buys them a tad of (merely) surface legitimacy. But of course their idea of intelligent design being good science (“the scientific theory known as intelligent design” as they say on their web site) is totally off the mark, as critiqued at http://www.naturalism.org/science.htm#truescience
Or better yet, if you have the time pick up a copy of Creationism’s Trojan Horse.
The DI is like the Catholic Priest who’s all nicely dressed up and has this great air of legitimacy, but is really raping children in the back room.
The war on science is a two-fer for the politically conservative religious fundamentalist. If science can be (selectively*) refuted then all the evidence supporting AGW and all the evidence agsinst a biblical/koranic worldview can be ignored.
BTW FWIW IMHO YMMV I hear Mooney reminding the skeptical community that telling the Republican Christian Free-market Capitalists they are not only wrong but stupid not only doesn’t change their minds it drives them further into their belief system.
*Small “s” science still comes in handy when you’re trying to build a missile shield or cool tools for the GWOT.
Telling the world that a subject is wrong is not telling whose who may have believed it they are stupid.
Telling the world that telling on a subject that it is wrong amounts to telling whose who may have believed it they are stupid, is stupid.
Moreover, telling the world that telling on a subject that it is wrong amounts to telling whose who may have believed it they are stupid, tells the audience that _you_ think they are stupid!
What strident arrogance.
But more importantly as Rosenhause pointed out, and what later empirical studies supports, is that political science was trumped by empirical psychological research. Hammering a subject and putting up front why is more convincing than “framing” can ever be.
And it convinces the third parties too. So it is a win-win-win. (Since in addition telling the truth makes more people happy than the rare sociopath that lies for kicks.)
Chris Mooney seems to realize why people don’t accept global warming — the massive disinformation campaign — just as he has with his Republican war on science writing. But he falls down and misses the earth when it comes to creationism.
I like Uncle Karl more and more. He seems to be a man of courage in pursuit of truth.
Yep, he’s showing some refreshing intellectual integrity.
/@
This soup need more convincing though.
I am not going to cry “uncle”, yet!
Don’t forget that this anti-science sentiment also favors certain economic interests as well.
There is a long history of money backing anti-science since even before the large tobacco “think tanks” were formed.
Look where people like Koch put their money.
they are self-served by encouraging anti-science sentiment amongst the gullible.
The anti-science sentiment in the US is about far more than just evangelical nonsense.
Until people start realizing this is a well funded enterprise to undercut the importance of science in the decision-making process, then nothing will change. Fundies are as they always were; nothing more than a base that has buttons that easy to manipulate.
IMO, the Discovery Institute is NOT a shill for evangelical interests at all. It is a shill for business and political interests that UTILIZE fundies as a grass-roots base, and works to figure out which buttons to push to best motivate them to be anti-science.
It wouldn’t be the first time such a “think tank” had been put together for such a purpose, and this has been documented by many in tracking how the resistance to AGW has developed.
examples of another famous “think tank”:
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=George_C._Marshall_Institute
and check out the work of Naomi Oreskes:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2T4UF_Rmlio
learn who your real enemy is.
religion is just a tool; it has been for thousands of years now. Removing that tool would be a great way to limit certain interests being able to use it as a fucking hammer, but also attacking the people who want to use it as a tool needs to be focused on too.
Ichthyic, since you posted your link to this video the way you did, now my iPhone 3 OS 4 Safari crashes when loading this page, so my iPhone cannot view this thread, including Jerry’s original post above. I’m not certain what the technical problem is, but I suspect the pixel count is too big horizontally, even when I hold my iPhone horizontally. The interactions between WordPress + YouTube + iPhone are safer if you submit a link to a video like this:
yourtext
where I’m crossing my fingers to guess how what I just wrote might appear after WordPress processes it (since WordPress doesn’t offer a preview), and I meant with my spaces omitted (except to keep the space between the a and href). The quotation marks you would submit would need to be straight up-and-down quotes (not smart quotes leaning left or right).
My apologies for posting off-topic (re Karl vs. the Evangelicals), but I have no contact information to tell you this (and my understanding is that nobody with an iPhone 3 will be offended by my post, since their Safari will crash before they can read this far down this thread).
My fail where my post says as “yourtext”. Posting to WordPress is a pig in a poke.
I keep forgetting Gibberson was with BioLogos; I keep thinking it was the DiscoTute. I don’t see any significant difference between the two.
The difference is philosophical [sic!].
“As science relentlessly nibbles at the borders of faith, ingesting things like free will, the history of life, and morality—things that used to be the purview of religion but now yield to the levers of empiricism—the evangelicals fight back the only way they can: by impugning science itself.”
The idea that evidence-based scientific naturalism is somehow gaining insights into value-based morality is complete fiction. Equally fictitious is that religion somehow has ever had anything to do with morality.
Too much hubris from Jerry Coyne.
So then, what’s Game Theory? Chopped liver?
b&
there was an entire issue of the Journal of Evolutionary Biology devoted to the studies showing how altruism and cooperation have evolved in various species.
In fact, it’s entirely free, and contains dozens of articles you must have “missed” in your oh so exhaustive search of the science literature regarding the evolution of various behavior we term “moral” or “eithical”.
here, try reading for comprehension, and lose your ignorance:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jeb.2006.19.issue-5/issuetoc
all free, all readable, all even perhaps a bit dated at this point!
Too much hubris from Jerry Coyne.
no.
too much ignorance from YOU.
“The idea that evidence-based scientific naturalism is somehow gaining insights into value-based morality is complete fiction.”
Tell that to Sam Harris!
Egbert (or AtheistEgbert) generally doesn’t miss a chance to wax rhapsodic about his disdain for Sam Harris.
“Evolutionary biology?
in my morality?”
It’s more likely than you think!
Good for uncle Karl. Many decades of scientific distrust has been sown into the evangelical church in particular. One issue is just the lack of scientific literacy. But the main problem being the assumption by churchgoinfolk that somehow good scientific enterprise has a faith-bashing agenda (ie global warming, evolution.) Scientific results do not. Now people can create agendas using ‘science’ (and for that matter ‘theology’) for their own purposes.
I’m reading Michael Shermer’s The Believing Brain right now. He goes into much detail about how beliefs come first, then the intellectual justification follows. Interesting stuff.