CRS
Chandler, Arizona, United States

There's an old saying. If you don't want someone to join a crowd, you ask them, "If everyone were jumping off of a cliff, would you?" Well, I have. So my answer would be "Yes". True story.
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The Rejection of Intellectualism

Friday, August 14, 2009

this entry brought to you by radiohead, "i am a wicked child"


When one talks about the rejection of intellectualism in America, one of the key components of that is actually a rejection of specifically science. That is to say, for lack of a better term, unsophisticated people have a fundamental misunderstanding of what science is.

For example, they will watch the news and they will see an interesting scientific finding. Say the headline is "Science confirms that there is life on Mars." And then, a little while later, there's another headline that says "Science debunks the 'Life on Mars' study." They take this to mean that science does not work. If these eggheads knew what they were talking about, then they would've gotten it right in the first place. Who understands anything these idiots say, they're full of hooey.

As frustrating as it is to hear something fascinating like "There's life on Mars" and then hear that the whole thing was, in fact, a bunch of hooey, this doesn't mean that science doesn't work. In fact, any time scientists debunk the work of a previous scientist, it is actually a confirmation that science works. It is frustrating, and it is filled with false hopes, but science works because it is a series of trial and error. We only progress because we can prove each other wrong.

It sounds backwards to someone who has no interest in it, but consider the other alternative: Religion. In the case of religion, there is constant argument over what means what, but fundamentally, the facts do not change, only interpretations of those facts. In the philosophy of religion we already have everything we need to know. There is never a day, when it comes to God, where suddenly we know more than we did before. The Bible is God's infallible word.

So really when the rules of religion changes, it has nothing to do with a discovery that was previously unavailable. No one discovers new text in the Bible that had previously never been seen before. Religion changes because society changes. Things that are practiced by religion no longer become acceptable, and people simply choose to no longer believe those parts to be necessary.

In essence, the debate within the religious philosophy comes down to semantics, or how one interprets the exact same information. This is acceptable for the unsophisticated person, because the unsophisticated person wants answers, full and complete. Does man come from apes? The answer is, according to religion, emphatically no. And that is that. Does man come from apes? The answer, according to science, well... It's not that simple. We all come from similar ancestry that goes back a long line, and on and on until a person who cares nothing for sophistication has tuned out. Whatever you say, egghead. I just want a yes or no.

But the problem with this mindset is nothing is this simple. Even supposed moral choices where one is "good" and the other is "evil" and there is no in between. Deep down, every single person who exists on the planet knows that nothing in the universe is as simple as "good" and "evil", yet the unsophisticated person chooses to ignore this because, well, it's a lot to think about.

Science seems ass-backwards sometimes, and counter-productive. The whole art of science is merely to deconstruct and attempt to prove everything wrong. It is the sort of opposite version of our court system. In the court of law, you are innocent until proven guilty. In the court of science, you are false until you are proven not false, by every single angle imaginable.

With science, there are no easy answers, and to the unsophisticated, it all seems like hooey. We're not just talking about a rejection of intellectualism, or a rejection of science. We're talking about a rejection of all things that aren't simple and easily swallowed. The unfortunate part for people like this is that, as it turns out, almost nothing is simple and easily swallowed.
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with love from CRS @ 7:04 AM 

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