PZ Myers often posts letters he receives from creationists.. and then shreds them on his blog. Here's a recent one;
Myers mentions critical thinking skills. There are certain professions where this ability is required. It's not optional. If you can't do it, you'll fail and people could get hurt, or worse.
The person that mailed Meyers in unable to distinguish between hard science, and made up bullshit. It is this inability that is required for somebody to be a religious nutjob in the first place. This is why you rarely see highly skilled professionals engaging in that sort of whack-a-loonery.
I'm sure you all know where this is going, but let me get there.
In my job, there is no "faith". There is no considerations for anything that is not directly related and provable. Because I spend my work day doing nothing but logic, I simply cannot be the sort of person that would write "a cell is so complex, it must be designed". You know, one doesn't follow from the other. That's simply making a wholly unsubstantiated assumption.
If engineers reasoned that way.. physicians.. chemists.. airline pilots.. the probability of being wrong skyrockets.
So, the question becomes, why is it that some people, a significant number of people, reason that way?
I think it's due to their inability to draw meaningful connections between related things, and once they are out of their comfort zone.. once they've exceeded their intellectual capacity to solve a problem logically, they simply shift to the supernatural solution. That gives them a reassuring feeling because they've "found the answer", and the answer comports to their hope that something supernatural is at work.
Ultimately, it's all about the fear of death. A giant leap from me, ya? I think it's true. If you look for the essential cause for something as crazy as "Creationism", that road leads directly to the fear that death is the total end of everything for that person.
I'm not bothered in the slightest that a person has a faulty reasoning system. Some people have not been trained in critical thinking. Some are simply incapable. You cannot force capability on someone when they lack the tools. I have no problem with anyone when the answer is "I don't know". That's intellectually honest.
.. and I sometimes answer "I don't know" when faced with a problem that bumps up against my capabilities, but when somebody does know, I try and absorb the methodologies and knowledge behind the solution.
The intellectually dishonest? They latch on to whack-a-loonery that supports their fear of death solution, and convince themselves it's true.. because, if it isn't.. well.. that's unthinkable.
....
And now an illustrative personal story;
Way back when I was in college, I had a part time job teaching labs for introductory programming (OMG FORTRAN), as well as some other computer related courses. The students would attend lectures during the day, get assignments, and then come to the lab to work on the projects. There were a few of us that would guide people and help them with syntax and such, as well as methods of composition, debugging, testing, and so on. This was back when computers were really taking off into the mainstream, and the job markets were promising for professionals. A lot of people wanted to break into the field.
Sometimes, the job was horribly frustrating. Everyone is told from an early age that they can do anything they set their minds to. If they just "work" hard enough, they can be anything. This is not true. A person has to have an aptitude for the work. Technical professions require an extreme degree of critical thinking, and some people just can't do it, no matter how hard you try and help them.
I was faced with these people often.. and I'd show them something, and they simply wouldn't understand, and it sometimes got to the point where I couldn't explain it any other way.. and nothing I could say or do, or anybody else, could turn on the light bulb in their mind. Consider the student's reaction to the realization that they do not have the ability to complete the coursework. Sometimes it's denial and deflection, and that sucked royally. They thought it was my job to magically grant them the skills to solve the problems.
Oddly enough, never, not one time, was one of those people an Asian student.. and there were quite a few on campus.
The point here is, many Conservatives have this problem with critical thinking, and they apply their supernatural solutions to political issues when the logical disconnects start to pile up on them. This is why somebody like Doug will never substantiate his argument with any sort of data at all. The reason is that he simply is incapable of doing it.
Again, I don't disparage Doug for his inability to make reasonable and logical connections in political issues.. I think he's Captain Loon because he doesn't understand the difference between his reasoning ability and mine, and he thinks his supernatural solutions make more sense. Doug could have written that letter to Dr. Myers. It is in his style, nearly word for word.
That is where the extreme friction between the two sides of the political spectrum comes from. Doug rails about "punishing the rich" in Obama's tax proposals, and I gather statistics from the CBO, generate tables and data about historical evidence to support my argument.. and in Doug's mind, his argument is superior. He is convinced he's made a more cogent argument than I. I get "wordy", as if that is a negative trait.
Conversely, I know that I've fleshed out an argument with actual data and Doug simply pulled his argument out of his ass. It's why he's anti-intellectual and distrusts Universities as bastions of Liberal subversion. He's incapable of participating in that environment, and so he disdains it for it's insolence and arrogance.
And.. so you have both sides getting irritated at the other because the other doesn't understand how their methodology is superior. I've tried to show Doug the difference between our styles by asking him to actually support his arguments with evidence.. with data.. and he simply refuses to do it. I've done it over and over, and he simply deletes my comment requesting the evidence.
And that wraps itself back to the frustration I had with students who simply could not learn how to program a computer. Doug doesn't refuse to substantiate his argument. He's incapable of doing it.. and so he works it out in his mind by falling back on the supernatural solution, in order to maintain his delusion that he's making the better argument.
Ultimately, the future of this nation is going to hinge on which style of thinking becomes the predominant one. That worries me.
...
One more revelatory story in honor of Michael Phelps that is related.
I had a Christmas party for the lab geeks.. and I gave the info to my co-workers.. other lab guys. The party was going well, and the doorbell rang. I went to the door with a giant bong in my hand. Opening the door.. one of the professors and his professor wife had shown up.
They had a nice time at the party.
/update
Oh shit.. I remember the professor's name.. and googled him. Those are the texts for some of his courses that I taught labs for.. LOL
Good god.. it's ooolllllddddd
No comments:
Post a Comment