Uncle Steve vs Dark Matter

[http://objective.jesussave.us/creationsciencefair.html]

For your amusement and, um, consternation, I present the Baptist Creation Science Fair, in which an elementary school girl presents positive proof (!) of the evolution conspiracy by attempting to feed her Uncle Steve a banana. Steve's refusal of said banana clearly demonstrates his non-simian genome, or something.

And as counterpoint, to dilute the grody hubris of the scientific community, I present the New Scientists' "13 Things that Do Not Make Sense". Which of these 13 "mysteries" will scientists resolve first? Which will never be resolved?
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/space/mg18524911.600

The thing that, for me, ties all of this together and makes it all interesting is the way in which people develop personal criteria for continuing belief in a worldview/methodology/dogma despite clear evidence of that system's inability to explain/resolve/account for the totality of phenomena. I often find lay people (and sometimes scientists - see my last post) marvelling at the way in which cancer patients believe in quack cures or primitive peoples accept the wisdom of the shaman, as if demonstrations of the inadequacy of those "charlatans" were ubiquitous and self-evident. What these people seem to fail to grasp is that skepticism and belief are completely intertwined, and that all belief systems require sustained
psychological resistance against the arguments/proofs/rationales/examples of the inadequacy of that system.

Most of us who believe in Science do not do so because of firsthand experience! Few of us have assembled even one rigorous experiment! So, people who accept scientific proof as valid are not sufficiently distinguished from those who accept creationism by the existence of "evidence" or evidentiary criteria. What's more, discourse exists because no system has a "complete" or totalizing set of evidentiary criteria that make all other kinds of belief impossible or unreasonable. The spectrum of phenomena and experience is simply too varied.

(In this vein, I also recommend reading this amazing tract against democracy called "Democracy is Kufr" http://www.1924.org/books/pdfs/Democracy.pdf from a site called 1924.org, which seeks to support Muslims in their effort to stop western ideas from infiltrating their homes and countries and minds. It is a fascinating site, and the tract in question had me nodding my head when it flatly pointed out that our country is run not by a majority but rather by wealthy business interests, duh, or when it notes repeatedly how much spiritual havoc the separation of church and state wreaks on the individual - a matter which, if you really think about it, is far from settled, as we post-enlightenment secular westerners like to assume.)

Scientists hold many contradictory beliefs and yet many of us continue to believe Science to be a valid and valuable enterprise. Why is this so? It is not so simple a question as we would like it to be, and I frankly tire of the common response to the creationist agenda, which is usually incredulity, mocking, or dismissal. As I recall, these were the same kinds of attitudes that lost the democrats the election. The longer scientists continue to believe that "the evidence speaks for itself" and refuse to acknowledge belief as a cultural process, the more jeopardy they put themselves in. Science, in other words, MUST compete in the marketplace of ideas. It MUST assert itself, not as a replacement for religion or spiritual convinction, but as a set of methods, values, and cultural practices that help us understand our existence and the universe, and which human beings have come to value for their explanatory power, consistency, and breadth. Only through this kind of dialogue can we help more Americans to see the ways in which scientific endeavor truly does and does not present a challenge to the religious believer.

Also, the philosophy of science has advanced far beyond the positvism of the late 19th century, though some scientists have not! And what's perhaps most important is that the public face of the philosophy of science is especially bound up in outdated and invalid assumptions, from a naive belief in the existence of "pure facts" (without any awareness of hermeneutics/theory of interpretation) to a phenomenology that is basically "atomist" in character, where the world is composed of chunklets (since quantum mechanics is mystifying, it is more or less ignored) to a notion of human "uniqueness" that is pre-1920s (human beings have language, animals don't; human beings use tools, animals don't; human beings feel pain, animals don't). This has the effect of making, say, the ethics of Peter Singer, seem unusually cold and alien to average people. And it certainly impoverishes the stem cell and abortion debates. Science can't afford this kind of popular ignorance!