Is US becoming hostile to science?

Reuters ^ | 10/28/5 | Alan Elsner

[kingu]

Fifteen percent of Americans believe that life and humans evolved on this planet with no intervention from another power. Adherents to evolution are not just a minority, but they've slipped to 'cult' status.

The disagreement among Americans is over where the intervention occurred - some believe that God sparked life from nothing, guiding evolution, others believe He created everything wholesale. In any case, this is not an attack on science, it is science ignoring popular belief.

Some may argue that most people once believed that the earth was flat, or that the sun revolved around the earth. The comparison falls flat - whereas it is easily demonstrable that the planet isn't flat, or that the planet revolves around the sun, it is not demonstrable that evolution is an unbroken chain from a primordial soup to humans today; and if you extend it further, scientists have yet to come up with a demonstrable method of explaining what existed prior to the big bang.

The attack here is not on science, it is science attacking modern belief and then modeling themselves as being astounded when everyone doesn't take their word immediately and that proof is demanded.

No wonder so many liberals are attracted to Universities - one can come up with any idea and propound it as being 'the truth' and attack anyone who doesn't immediately fall in line. Socialism at it's best.

[syriacus]

The US is becoming more hostile to science, as it increasingly encourages abortion and euthanasia.

There's less motivation to solve some of the more severe problems people have, when it's easier to just throw the people with the problems on the dung heap.

[Right Wing Professor]

In any case, this is not an attack on science, it is science ignoring popular belief.

The laws of nature don't care what people believe.

[gondramB]

"Guided how? Which physical law would you like to suspend?"

I am saying that you cannot demonstrate that the process has not been guided. To make that statement, which I dont believe you can honestly refute, I don't need to violate any physical law.

[Reactionary]

Oh. Just now the US has become "hostile to science?"

Really? Did the brainy liberals miss post-modernism, post-structuralism, the past 50 years of academic "discourse" in America?

It's obvious they did. Either that, or they're engaged in a little propaganda for the masses.

[Archon of the East]

So all of science rests on whether intelligent design is taught or not? How simple minded and pathetic the world has become. The university engages in perverse science fiction through social sciences and "environmentalism" they have no damn right to criticize anyone.

[Coyoteman]

On the other side, conservative scholar Michael Novak of the American Enterprise Institute, believes the only way to heal the rift between science and religion is to allow the teaching of intelligent design.

If CS/ID is brought into the science classes everything is fair game. Do people actually want science dissecting the believability of particular religious beliefs?

[gondramB]

"The US is becoming more hostile to science, as it increasingly encourages abortion and euthanasia."

Abortion and euthanasia are ethical issues and scientific ones. This is a false argument against science, but not an uncommon one.

[PetroniusMaximus]

***They are entitled to mock or not mock but they cannot say they have proved there is no God.***

They do not need to "prove" anything - they are scientists!

And are they really "entitled" to mock? Seems like if they mocked any other group (racial or sexual) the scientific community would rise up and remove them from their positions.

But it's ok to mock God. The very One who gave you your freedoms and your rights.

[Borges]

Post Modernism is a cultural logic. Post-structuralism is a theory of language. Neither threaten science.

[hosepipe]

[ Is US becoming hostile to science? ]

NO.. the U.S. is becoming hostile to GOD..

And a brain washed electorate (whom are mostly believers of some sort) is fueling it.. Sheeple ain't too smart..

Even Jews whom are mostly democrats could care less the democrat party is on the side of the Jews enemys ALL OF THEM.. with the exception of Nazis and skinheads.. They see nazis and skinheads as with blinders ignoring all others..

NEXT WEEK- the blacks whom are mostly democrats too.. same situation with blinders like a black nag in an Ostrich race.. Would be funny, if it was..

[atomic conspiracy]

Evolution/Creation/ID is a serious issue, but this kind of hyperbole simply plays into the hands of our enemies in the foreign media and their domestic collaborators.

It is also something of a smokescreen. Many skeptics and critical thinking activists, notably Robert Sheaffer of the Debunker's Domain, are aware that much of the real hostility to science comes not from Creationists but from fuzzy-minded New Agers and post-modernists. Many of the latter, for example, assert that science and logic are merely inventions of the white male European hegemony. I have seen the word "logocentric" used in all seriousness in recent years, as though a preference for logic and evidence were merely another prejudice to be condemned and proscribed.

As for the New Age, this is practically the state religion of the institutional media culture. The media culture's commercial and political incentive for undermining rational thought is obvious. Hostility to science, and the triumph of intuition, emotion, and folklore over science, are tiresomely common themes in popular media presentations. This is, of course, the Spock/McCoy meme from Star Trek, repeated in endless permutations over the decades since.

Some years ago, the University of North Texas provided a class in "aura-reading." The instructor was what you might expect, a middle-aged Earth mother type who might otherwise be employed reading tea leaves or bat entrails. She spotted me as a skeptic. Her response was so extraordinary that I wrote it down verbatim and kept the words all these years:

"Intuition and sympathetic magic are part of a nurturing life-centered, worldview that is just as valid as all this white male science of yours."

I responded, "Ok, we'll both fly to Chicago. I'll get on a plane designed by wicked scientists and engineers. You get on one designed by a committee of witch-doctors and aura-readers and we'll see who gets there." Her additional response? I had an "evil aura."

[Fledermaus]

I become hostile to "science" when they shove their global warming lies in my face.

[Borges]

Science doesn't work on proof it works on evdience.

[SeeSalt]

"When you don't know, you don't know. Teach both sides, the truth will someday be known."

Right!

The evolutionism as well as intelligent design are theories in the field of science. And both of them have the same value... the value of a theory. The evolutionism is not a law. What the hec they treat the evolutionism as a law in science?
In the communist countries the official and the only theory accepted was evolutionism. Can anybody tell us one name of communist famous man of science or a Nobel laureate?

[sagar]

Most of the scientific innovations coming today are from American universities and military research. That being said, anti-evolutionists certainly aren't in the driving seat of those innovations.

[PetroniusMaximus]

***The laws of nature don't care what people believe.***

And who will speak for the "laws of nature"?

You?

Atheistic science discards God because it doesn't like the competition.

[FreedomNeocon]

Is Reuters becoming hostile to facts?

[Coyoteman]

Can anybody tell us one name of communist famous man of science

Lysenko.