Science and Fear

Science isn’t like religion, where people can just agree to disagree, and nobody has to prove what they believe.

Science is not politics, where people with different perspectives can find common ground, and maybe ‘split the difference’.  

Science, and the scientific method form a way of seeking answers to questions that predate the search.  This search doesn’t bend in order to protect the feelings of people who disagree with established scientific consensus, but who bring no new scientific evidence to back up that disagreement.  Science only yields to better science.  

The Earth is approximately 4.5 billion years old.  For the first billion years or so, it was barren, followed by around 3.5 billion years of evolving life.  It’s fine for people to enjoy folkloric origin stories, but science is not going to split the difference with them.  There is a scientific answer (refer back to the beginning of this paragraph).  

Mythology has not always yielded easily to the advance of science.  Galileo’s insistence that the Earth was not the center of the universe cost him a stretch in the Pope’s jail.  There are people among us who fear that learning how life has evolved, and continues to evolve, might land them an eternal stretch in Hell.  

People who have been taught from childhood to fear and distrust science are easy prey for those who tell them that human industrial activity plays no role in our changing climate, or that vaccines may cause people to become autistic.  

In our current, highly-charged time, the predators are out in force, and thriving, as we face the very real fears of the current pandemic.  They prey on an eclectic range of existing fears (science, government, internationalism), and meld it into belief in an incoherent plot to invent or exaggerate the pandemic itself, for some unclear nefarious reason.  Even some people I know, like, and respect seem to have fallen prey to this narrative.  The predators sound reasonable; they couch their conspiracies in the language of science - and may even enlist a rogue scientist to bolster their story.  But it’s what Richard Feynman called ‘Cargo-Cult Science’, which looks real, but has no substance.   I find myself torn between just saying nothing, to avoid insulting my friends, or attempting to help reintroduce reality - all the while knowing that my ‘retail’ efforts at teaching science may well be quickly countered by a return to the nonstop wholesale torrent of propaganda that introduced the conspiracy theories in the first place, and continues to feed them.