From the perspective of a scientist

Great weather today! As you can see from the photo, we've been on a little backpacking journey across Dover, and it was fantastic!

However, I came home to more and more anger over the blog on reason versus faith (which I perhaps foolishly posted on here as well as on my personal web page). Let me mention, for the record, that NEVER before has any blog I wrote generated this kind of anger and criticism. It is truly amazing. I once again offer sincere apologies to those of you who viewed this blog as a personal attack. Keep in mind that it is just a blog, and it is just one person's opinion and reasoning. I barely scratched the surface of what I hoped to say, and, like I said, it is time to start thinking about why we are reacting the way that we are reacting, and what can be done, if anything, to remedy the sense of hostility and mistrust present in this discussion.

At the moment, I propose, as I mentioned this morning, writing a blog that explains some of the pragmatic social and political concerns related to my how I am looking at this conversation.

Let me start by mentioning that one of the most troubling things I witness in almost every conversation I have with theists is a mistrust of science. There is a tendency to look on science as the enemy to nature and God's world. There is an implicit desire to return to a perceived golden age of simplicity, an age before technology spoiled the idyllic world of nature. Yet, this golden age never existed. I can say that with full confidence, and I can show you the life expectancy rate, the infant mortality rate, and the constant starvation and undernourishment of previous times to prove it.

Like it or not, when you start to attack science in the name of faith, you are biting the hand that (literally) feeds you. Yes, science is not a god. Yes, science can be used for good or for ill, but forgetting what science is doing every minute of every day for your life is foolish. Is it your prayers or medical technology that saves lives? You may believe prayer, but history contradicts you. With all its unideal flaws and failures, with its non-sexy history, science has still transformed and saved countless lives. Maybe, that is why God answers the prayers of someone living in the West more than the prays of the thousands of people dying in Africa every day?

There is so much to do, and religion, among other groups, must stop rejecting science if we hope to do it. In third world countries, such as Africa and India, the green revolution has all but passed them by. These counties are in need of viable solutions for their economies, and in the next fifty years, if we don't solve these problems, far more than the 'mere' 16,000 African children currently dying a day are going to die. While you pray to God for a raise or whatever, these people are dying, and no amount of romanticizing and pretending you live in some sort of halcyon natural world is helping. The answer is genetically modified crops. There is so much evidence in peer-reviewed, third party journals, revealing that in contrast to the media's portrayal (especially in the US), these crops can do countless good for ending world hunger, while also saving the hassle of trying to cross-breed, and thus inheriting the bad genes along with the good.

Christians and other fundamentalists, why is it usurping the role of God to take a gene out of one plant and insert it into another? Why, in relation to this, do you rise up in a fury and outlaw stem cell research? How is it wrong to experiment on a blastocyst? It has, at best, 100 or fewer cells in it. Insects often have 70,000 to 120,000 cells. Don't you realise that by using our research on the blastocyst, we can find a cure for various cancers? How many people, and let's not forget children who are normally considered innocent, must die from a disease that is perfectly preventable? Yet, you fight us every step of the way. This is not a pity party, but, in truth, not only do scientists draw very modest salaries for the endless (often more than 90 hours a week) labour they do for these causes, but they are utterly dependent on research funding, and guess where that comes from? Public and government support! This means we are at the mercy of the public perception of researchers.

Sadly, people have this idea that scientific research is grounded in some sort of eugenics movement. For the record, eugenics and the atrocities committed by the Nazis have an undisputed ideological birth in German Romanticism, and have nothing to do with Natural Selection and Evolution. The very phrase 'blut und boden' (blood and soil) reflects a view of nature that is equivalent not to today's scientists, but to today's religious communities, and those who support the homeopathic, back to nature cures, which favour lack of evidence and willfully disregard evidence.

So, the problem is that while many people of faith might reject an attack on science, and some middle-of-the-roaders even support evolution, as long as you continue to foster and allow the mindsets that are shaping and framing this religious discussion, we are going to end up regressing and moving backwards when we could be moving forwards. It is time that faith--in whatever belief structure--loses its exemption from evidence. I am advocating a return to the Enlightenment values of evidence and empiricism. This is not to say I support a world run by the 'cold,' 'calculating' machines of reason. Quite simply, it means that at the end of the day, just like Natural Selection, it is better to remember that progress is not a romantic, high ideal. It is climbing Mount Everest one step at a time. It is realising that no perfect, or absolutist, dream can dictate what we do, but that it must have concrete, pragmatic grounding in the here and now and in individuals, communities, cities, countries etc.

Faith, especially right now, is, in so many ways, the antithesis to this approach, and as long as it is untouchable by logic, it will continue to sabotage the very macro and micro level organizations that need an infusion of logic and reason most.

So this is a short attempt to give a pragmatic answer for why I feel hostility towards faith, and why I think it is altering adversely the political climate in today's world. Yes, this is just an example. There are many more topics that come to mind, and I do feel that I still need to understand why--what kind of reasoning--is influencing individuals so strongly to reject science, even to the point of marking it off as a faith.