Several posts at Salon lately about “Cosmos”, Neil deGrasse Tyson, science, and conservative denialism.<\/p>\n
5 Most Important Lessons from \u201cCosmos\u201d<\/a> Another list article: Five \u201cCosmos\u201d moments that made creationists\u2019 heads explode<\/a><\/p>\n These concern the age of the universe, the age of the Earth, the origins of Christmas, anything about evolution, climate change, and\u2026 basically the entire series.<\/p>\n And a third article compares Tyson\u2019s frank defense of science and reality with Thomas Piketty\u2019s book Capital in the 21st Century<\/b>, which is getting a lot of (world-wide) attention for its challenges to conservative denial that rising inequality is not something to worry about (and undermining the dogma of trickle-down economics): Rise of the myth busters: Why Piketty and Tyson are the icons America needs<\/a>. Here are a couple nice passages — not about Piketty, but about how Tyson’s worldview unsettles conservatives.<\/p>\n \nAnd that\u2019s really the deepest terror that conservatives have when encountering Tyson, and the whole sweep of scientific discovery he articulates. (William James, who was a graduate student when Darwin\u2019s \u201cOrigin of Species\u201d was published, had a similar view of our place in the universe. Consequently, he reframed the analytical truths of math and philosophy as a sort of backdoor empiricism: What our brains perceive as necessary truths reflects the empirical influence of how they evolved.) It\u2019s one thing if science confirms our predetermined religious dogmas, but quite another if it challenges them. Yet, it\u2019s worst of all for religious dogmatists if it threatens to replace those dogmas by providing its own sense of meaning, order and purpose in the universe. And that\u2019s just what Tyson is suggesting.<\/p>\n …<\/p>\n Here [Piketty says], specifically, as is generally the case, openness is a requirement for the advancement of knowledge.<\/p>\n This reflects back onto one of the broadest findings in political psychology, as discussed by Chris Mooney in \u201cThe Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science\u2014And Reality.\u201d Namely: Liberalism is correlated with the \u201cbig five\u201d personality trait of openness to experience. The exploration of novelty is a recurrent theme linking liberalism and science to one another, just as the veneration of tradition is a recurrent theme linking conservatism and religion. Yet, several centuries on, science and liberalism have their own venerable traditions as well, and this has been a recurrent theme in Tyson\u2019s \u201cCosmos\u201d series. \u201cScience is a cooperative enterprise, spanning the generations,\u201d he said in one \u201cCosmos\u201d segment. \u201cIt\u2019s the passing of a torch from teacher, to student, to teacher. A community of minds reaching back to antiquity and forward to the stars.\u201d One can even go so far as to say that Tyson preaches a kind of scientific faith: a faith in doubt, in a philosophy \u201cunsettled daily,\u201d as he put it. In another \u201cCosmos\u201d segment, he said<\/a>:<\/p>\n \n There seems to be a mysterious force in the universe, one that overwhelms gravity on the grandest scale, to push the cosmos apart. Most of the energy in the universe is bound up in this unknown force. We call it \u2018dark energy\u2019, but that name, like \u2018dark matter\u2019, is merely a code-word for our ignorance. It\u2019s OK not to know all the answers. It\u2019s better to admit our ignorance than to believe answers that might be wrong. Pretending to know everything closes the door to finding out what\u2019s really there.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n This evokes the conservative discomfort with science, which some seem to think that, because science doesn’t (claim to) have all the answers, and some current scientific conclusions are subject to change, it therefore can’t be trusted at all. As Andrew Sullivan mentioned last week<\/a>,<\/p>\n \nA figure as respected on the right as Charles Krauthammer has been reduced<\/a> to claiming that no reigning scientific theory should be taken seriously because it might one day be adjusted in light of new data or new experiments.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n A curiously backwards route to thinking that only unchanging faith can be trusted. Such arguments, of course, do not bear up to reality-check scrutiny for a moment.<\/p>\n A fourth article is 5 demented conservative attempts to hijack and discredit science<\/a>:<\/p>\n The last item addresses, yet again, the discredited Regnerus study, commissioned by conservative groups specifically to create evidence to use in court cases against same-sex marriage.<\/p>\n One more: a long book excerpt which I have so far only skimmed: Science can\u2019t tell us everything: Faith, physics and the origin of the universe<\/a>, from a book by Marcelo Gleiser called The Island of Knowledge: The Limits of Science and the Search for Meaning<\/b>. Salon\u2019s subtitle is, \u201cRecognizing the limits of science doesn’t mean surrendering to religion, but being free to understand ourselves\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Several posts at Salon lately about “Cosmos”, Neil deGrasse Tyson, science, and conservative denialism. 5 Most Important Lessons from \u201cCosmos\u201d Which are: It\u2019s OK to not know all the answers Climate change is happening, and it\u2019s made-made. Evolution: How did … Continue reading
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