…is also called ignorance or, in simpler terms, stupidity. A concept we got to see yesterday on The Daily Show. Hilarious stupidity is of course the entire reason why I’m watching the show in the first place. However, it was quite unexpected to see it happening on the other side of Jon Steward’s table. And I’m talking weapons-grade ignorance. The guest of the day was Marilynne Robinson, who was stopping by to shill for her new book “Absence of Mind”, wherein she attacks the divide between science and religion. Apparently, her sentiment is that science needs religion and vice versa. A sentiment that seems to be shared by Jon Steward and the Daily Show writers.
The way this works is of course by attacking science in the same way creationists do: by starting out with the proposition that science and religion are equally valid viewpoints on the same subject matter. Says Jon Steward: “I’ve always been fascinated that the more you delve into science, the more it appears to rely on faith.” Oh boy, I think I need to put the whole thing on here, it’s just mind-bogglingly full of #fail. So this is how the interview went:
JS: “…and tell me if this is the case: The crux of it is, there’s science and there’s religion. And the idea is that they’re somehow exclusive and at odds. And you’re suggesting that perhaps it’s not as clean-cut…”
MR: “Yes, I think that what has happened in the way the conversation has developed is that people on one side of the argument have claimed the authority of science. But they have not construed an argument that actually satisfies the standards of science.”
I shudder to think what the actual argument is supposed to be, one can only assume that it’s about the perceived denial of religion by science. And here, we’re already at the point where the truth is distorted for the sake of creating controversy where there was none before: science makes no statement about religious concepts. Science is not denying god, because it doesn’t have to. The “attack” on religion, if you will, is merely that supernatural entities are not needed to explain the universe. It’s not that scientists somehow hate god and want him to be gone, deities don’t even show up in scientific theories in the first place. So, from the viewpoint of science, this “back and forth” is not happening. Only religious people think there should be a discussion to begin with. The same tactics were used by creationists to successfully convince a whole nation that religion should be taught in biology class and that both points of view supposedly have merit. They don’t.
MR: “You know, it tends to be part of the history of a certain kind of thinking, that since early in the 20th century, that science for some reason minimized the complexity and the importance of the human mind. And so, for the sake of good atheism, for the sake of good religion…”
JS: “Hrhrhrhr. ‘For the sake of good atheism’ you don’t hear that enough.”
The human brain is only one of the most active areas of ongoing biomedical and informatics research, but hey, feel free to misrepresent that as “minimizing the complexity and importance”. Ah, and a witty oneliner about atheism. Here we go again, same as the paragraph before, only this time the word science is replaced by atheism and then pitted in a faux competition against religion. It might be easier to paint atheism as just another religion instead of doing the same rhetorical trick to the word science, but it’s still a logical fallacy. Atheism does not require belief, in fact it does not have anything to do with belief at all. Atheism is
- not a belief system
- not a moral code
- not a worldview
- not a political statement
- not a movement
- not something you do in your rebellious phase in college to protest against god.
Being an atheist is like being a “non-Mercedes driver”. It wouldn’t even occur to most people to identify themselves as “not driving a Mercedes”. As a method of self-declaration the label only emerges when all other people continually pester everyone who shows up on the street without a German car.
JS: “Tell me about, you know, when you say that it doesn’t take into mind that science is making an argument that discounts religion or faith and that faith may exist in the mind… Science doesn’t take into account magic. The soul. Is that the suggestion?”
I feel a glimmer of intelligence coming on here. Oh no, wait, it’s just nausea. Science is not a tool to destroy religion. It’s a tool to understand the universe. Understanding, by its nature, contradicts faith. That’s why most religions consider knowledge to be the work of the devil.
MR: “Not so much. I don’t think, frankly, that it’s scientific to proceed from the study of ants to a conclusion about the nature of the cosmos.”
Hey, let’s play Logical Fallacy Bingo! I’m gonna go ahead and check off the “Straw Man Argument” box, where a concept is not attacked directly, but first a completely false representation of the concept is created, and then that gets attacked. Needless to point out, that ants are not used in Astronomy nor do they play any role in Astrophysics.
MR: “I don’t think that the argument that is being made is leveraged against anything that actually appropriately ought to be called science. I love science. I think that the new cosmology and so on are amongst the most beautiful things people have conceived. They don’t need to be interpreted as religious or anti-religious. They’re beautiful in their own right.”
While that last part there is more or less correct (discounting for a minute the fact that Astrophysics directly contradicts the creation story of any known religion), Robinson wants us to gloss over the fact that she attacked cosmology just one sentence before! What’s even more fascinating though: she gently slips in that cosmological science is somehow “conceived”, instead of being researched. It’s a subtle hint to let you know that physicists are somehow inventing stuff freely as they go along, or at least she implies here that scientific results are revealed to researchers in the same way religious content is revealed to prophets.
MR: (still referring to the concepts of cosmology) “Another demonstration of what the human mind is, you know.”
Let me make it abundantly clear: the human mind is not in any capacity a component in cosmology. Granted, there was a time when quack scientists invoked the concept of consciousness as a phenomenon necessary for the occurrence of a quantum waveform collapse, but that time has passed and hopefully will never be spoken of again. Neither did the human mind somehow invent the cosmos. The cosmos doesn’t have the capacity to care about or even recognize a mind.
The universe is made up of different layers of complexity. While each layer exhibits behavior imparted on it by the layers below, that doesn’t mean the lower layer “knows” anything about the things happening above it. Such is the beauty of complex systems theory. For example, quarks are below atoms are below molecules are below organisms. The nature of the quarks does have an impact on the existence and nature of the organisms, but that does not mean they are directly and purposefully interacting. Their connection is causal, not semantic – and what’s more, their connection is hierarchical. Quarks do not require organisms in order to exist, nor is the nature of organisms somehow encoded on the subatomic level.
JS: “Who do you think is more afraid. Do you think science fears religion more than religion fears science? Or is there equal mistrust to go around?”
Nice one. I cannot think of one reason why science should be afraid of religion. Again, this is falsely represented as some kind of struggle between equal opponents. Other than perhaps witch trials and terrorism possibly having a direct impact on the lifespan of researchers, science simply does not care what religion does. It’s not as if religion will one day yield a fundamental insight that is going to nullify science. It cannot, by its very nature, ever do that. On the other hand, religion continues to be encroached by the results of scientific research, because the areas of the universe where science cannot reach are getting smaller and god is simply running out of places to hide.
MR: “I’m really not sure about the nature of the controversy. Because I know lots of religious people who love science. And I know lots of scientists who are completely at ease with religion. It’s the quality of science and the quality of religion that determines the nature of the conversation.”
Sigh, there is no conversation. Like a Cantonese speaker trying to explain the finer points of Peruvian pottery culture to an Eskimo from Greenland, they don’t have the same language. And even if they had, they would not be interested in the same concepts. Also, “religious people who love science” are either ignorant when it comes to their own belief system or don’t have a clue about the nature of science (quite possibly both). And “scientists at ease with religion” are very special people who choose to ignore religion when it comes to their specific areas of expertise, and then choose to ignore science in all other aspects of life.
JS: “I’ve always been fascinated that the more you delve into science, the more it appears to rely on faith.”
No, it doesn’t.
JS: “When they start to speak of the universe, it’s ‘well, most of the universe is antimatter‘…”
Most of the universe is, in fact, not antimatter.
JS: “Oh really? Where is that? – ‘Well, you can’t see it.‘ – Well, where is it? – ‘It’s there.‘”
Another gross misrepresentation, nice job Jon. The truth is, nobody in the science community is actually taking the stance he parodied there. The universe is not mostly antimatter. Science is not about blind faith in things that you cannot see. I can only guess that this poor ignorant man actually meant to talk about Dark Matter, because it really is a “substance” that makes up most of the universe and you technically cannot see it.
The argument that humans only know what they can see with the naked eye is also a logical fallacy most often used by religious fundamentalists and the people they already indoctrinated. Meanwhile, in the real world, we accept how we cannot directly see most things that are in fact really there. Electricity, micro organisms, thermodynamics, Newton’s mechanical laws, relativity, far galaxies, they all have one thing in common: while they are observable, they cannot be seen with the naked eye. We need tools and observations to recognize them. The same is true for Dark Matter. While you cannot see it when looking out of the window, you can perceive its existence by looking at the movement of galaxies through a telescope. Just as you cannot see the wind blowing, but you can observe it by looking at how it blows over a cornfield.
I have to stop obsessing about this now. Let me just close with the statement that I expect stupidity like this from Fox. Or talk radio. But never from you guys, I didn’t see that coming.
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Marilynne Robinson | ||||
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