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Conservatives Losing Trust in Science, Study Finds
- Thread starter futurecurrents
- Start date
"By 1616 the attacks on the ideas of Copernicus had reached a head, and Galileo went to Rome to try to persuade the Catholic Church authorities not to ban Copernicus' ideas. In the end, a decree of the Congregation of the Index was issued, declaring that the ideas that the Sun stood still and that the Earth moved were "false" and "altogether contrary to Holy Scripture", and suspending Copernicus's De Revolutionibus until it could be corrected. Acting on instructions from the Pope before the decree was issued, Cardinal Bellarmine informed Galileo that it was forthcoming, that the ideas it condemned could not be "defended or held", and ordered him to abandon them. "
The very definition of conservative is being slow to accept new knowledge and reluctance to change. Thus conservatives will always be the last to acknowledge new facts. And science is moving faster every year.
Science is also making religion look silly, which really pisses them off. And now science wants to take away the high octane, profligate American capitalism with all this talk of reducing carbon pollution.
And science comes from those liberal terrorist camps called colleges and we all know what happens there. Knowledge and new facts.
The very definition of conservative is being slow to accept new knowledge and reluctance to change. Thus conservatives will always be the last to acknowledge new facts. And science is moving faster every year.
Science is also making religion look silly, which really pisses them off. And now science wants to take away the high octane, profligate American capitalism with all this talk of reducing carbon pollution.
And science comes from those liberal terrorist camps called colleges and we all know what happens there. Knowledge and new facts.
The very definition of conservative is being slow to accept new knowledge and reluctance to change. Thus conservatives will always be the last to acknowledge new facts. And science is moving faster every year.
I'm an economic conservative, it simply means that I'm opposed to liberal social redistributive schemes, which themselves are about as old as people are. There was this new revolutionary thinker that came along once, his name was Marx. He had new ideas, new 'facts', how did that work out?
Science is also making religion look silly, which really pisses them off. And now science wants to take away the high octane, profligate American capitalism with all this talk of reducing carbon pollution.
Science does not want to 'take away capitalism', science is not about policy choices nor does it ever say anything about them. Only liberals like you want to take away capitalism.
And science comes from those liberal terrorist camps called colleges and we all know what happens there. Knowledge and new facts.
and those liberal university terrorists waged war on science in the 90s and lost, read about the Sokal affair. Humanities departments are nothing more than publicly sanctioned liberal churches, and I do mean that liberalism has no more scientific justification than religion.
I am a scientist, obviously you are not. Science is simply a process which aims to uncover nature's secrets, it has nothing to do with liberalism or conservatism although many use it for political purposes. I guess I can let this insult go knowing that you are an ignoramious, sort of a twist from the Hangover movie line- you are too stupid to insult me.
The Sokal Affair, FYI http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair
The Sokal affair, also known as the Sokal hoax,[1] was a publishing hoax perpetrated by Alan Sokal, a physics professor at New York University. In 1996, Sokal submitted an article to Social Text, an academic journal of postmodern cultural studies. The submission was an experiment to test the publication's intellectual rigor and, specifically, to investigate whether such a journal would "publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if it (a) sounded good and (b) flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions."[2]
The article "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity", published in the Social Text Spring/Summer 1996 "Science Wars" issue, proposed that quantum gravity is a social and linguistic construct. At that time, the journal did not practice academic peer review and did not submit the article for outside expert review by a physicist.[3][4] On its date of publication (May 1996), Sokal revealed in Lingua Franca that the article was a hoax, identifying it as "a pastiche of Left-wing cant, fawning references, grandiose quotations, and outright nonsense . . . structured around the silliest quotations [by postmodernist academics] he could find about mathematics and physics".[2]
The resultant academic and public quarrels concerned the scholarly merit, or lack thereof, of humanistic commentary about the physical sciences; the influence of postmodern philosophy on social disciplines in general; academic ethics, including whether Sokal was right or wrong to deceive the editors and readers of Social Text; and whether the journal had exercised the appropriate intellectual rigor before publishing the pseudoscientific article.
In an interview on the NPR program All Things Considered, Sokal said he was inspired to submit the hoax article after reading Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels With Science (1994), by Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt. In their book, Gross and Levitt reported an anti-intellectual trend in university liberal arts departments (especially English departments) which had caused them to become dominated by a "trendy" branch of post-modernist deconstructionism.
Higher Superstition argued that in the 1990s, a group of academics whom the authors referred to collectively as "the Academic Left" was dominated by professors who concentrated on racism, sexism, and other perceived prejudices, and that science was eventually included among their targetsâlater provoking the "Science Wars", which questioned the validity of scientific objectivity. Academic journals in the humanities were publishing articles by writers who, scientists argued, demonstrated little or no knowledge of science. Per the introduction: "A curious fact about the recent left-critique of science is the degree to which its instigators have overcome their former timidity, of indifference towards the subject, not by studying it in detail, but rather by creating a repertoire of rationalizations for avoiding such study."[5]
After analyzing essays from "the academic Left", scientists argued that some of these critical writers were ignorant of the original scientific documents they were criticizing and, therefore, were making a series of nonsensical statements about the nature and intent of science. Gross and Levitt found it especially troubling that academic journals were not judging the intellectual integrity of the scholarship through peer review but were merely judging papers according to their political tilt. Higher Superstition argued that for an article to be published in some academic journals, especially those associated with the humanities, it needed only to display "the proper leftist thought" and to be written byâor to quoteâwell-known leftist authors.[page needed]
Thus, Higher Superstition was an attempt to challenge purportedly uncritical subjectivist thought, the validity of which otherwise went largely uncriticized. Moreover, the book served as an argument from scientists that the Science Wars were primarily fought by non-scientists who were pushing contentious claims about the dubiousness of scientific objectivity...
Conservatives aren't losing trust in science. They're losing trust in theories.
Atheistic evolution is a theory.
Man-made global warming is a theory.
Over-population is a theory.
Peak oil/food/water is a theory.
All of these theories (the Liberal community reports as scientific "fact") sport holes large enough you could drive a truck through.
Atheistic evolution is a theory.
Man-made global warming is a theory.
Over-population is a theory.
Peak oil/food/water is a theory.
All of these theories (the Liberal community reports as scientific "fact") sport holes large enough you could drive a truck through.
Quote from achilles28:
Conservatives aren't losing trust in science. They're losing trust in theories.
Atheistic evolution is a theory.
Man-made global warming is a theory.
Over-population is a theory.
Peak oil/food/water is a theory.
All of these theories (the Liberal community reports as scientific "fact") sport holes large enough you could drive a truck through.
Evolution is not "atheistic". Come on.
Evolution is in fact, a fact, discovered and confirmed in science.
You start out worse than wrong really, so no reason to consider there's any merit in saying everything else is a so called theory.
Set yourself up as the quintessential demonstration of that lost trust in science from the start.
fyi
Any scientific theory will always contain supporting facts.
this statement pretty much sums it up for him. he doubts everything science has to offer yet he says this "Still, you'll never be able to rattle my cage about religion, because I personally know Christ exists, He is God, and the spiritual realm is very real."achilles28Quote from stu:
Evolution is not "atheistic". Come on.
Evolution is in fact, a fact, discovered and confirmed in science.
You start out worse than wrong really, so no reason to consider there's any merit in saying everything else is a so called theory.
Set yourself up as the quintessential demonstration of that lost trust in science from the start.
fyi
Any scientific theory will always contain supporting facts.
And is god the truck driver? Meanwhile, are you employing the same standard of evidence and evaluation for your god belief, or are you using a handy, self-serving double standard there?Quote from achilles28:
...All of these theories (the Liberal community reports as scientific "fact") sport holes large enough you could drive a truck through.
Conservatives aren't losing trust in science. They're losing trust in theories.
Atheistic evolution is a theory.
All scientific theories will leave god out, or they would not be scientific. God is not testable, nor does it offer predictive power.
Man-made global warming is a theory.
I make a distinction between what we have observed up to now and the predictive models for the future. The noisy temperature measurements indicate we have warmed over the last 100 years so I'm buying it. The predictive models extrapolate to the next 100 years and are at various levels of plausibility, they are not well established causual models such as newtonian mechanics so skepticism is warrented. The problem I have is the societal response to such science, and that this field has been corrupted with leftist political agendas. Liberals seem to think that only they have the 'proper' response, if we keep warming. I have no idea how they hijacked that argument other than the well known fact that the left took over greenpeace, the EPA, and various gov't organs.
Over-population is a theory.
huh? As a matter of practicality, I think there are too many people. My evidence is the world around me.
Peak oil/food/water is a theory.
Never heard of peak water, but anyway the debate seems to center on when oil runs out, not if.
Theories, laws, 'facts' are all terms that are thrown around loosly. The semantics game is a substitution for understanding. Scientific theories have a continuous range of confidence values associated with them. Although all theories are subject to constant review, modification, or even rejection, some have been tested so much they are now accepted as 'fact'. They are so factual that we engineer everyday devices based upon them. I bet you have never thought "I wonder if Maxwell's electromagnetic theory still works?" when you are about to make a cell phone call. I have because it would be interesting, and it shows just how much all people trust certain scientific theories. The 'theory' of special relativity is actually more accurate then Newton's second 'law' since the latter is a slow velocity approximation to the former. Something to keep in mind when using these words.
Great, now enter politics and religion and all the perverse ways people use science to bolster their personal agendas. Some science is so easily corrupted, such as medical drug trials, or any medical study really, that one should always mistrust it until time and more trials have proven something useful. My own doctor told me that some 50% of findings in todays medical journals will be overturned in 10 years.
I think the question itself about losing trust in science is far too unsophisticated and loaded politically. Any prudent scientist themselves should not trust new results, but trusting that the process of skeptical inquiry and experimentation will eventually yield something useful is what it is all about. Not trusting the results of something as politically corrupted and newly evolving as climate science is a wise thing to do.
However evolution is not such a thing, evolution has been under the microscope for quite some time and is well established. The exact mechanisms of evolution are under debate, but the overarching hypothesis is not. It is the same messy process that brought you the cell phone and computer, so I do have high confidence that evolution is on solid ground.