The Demon-Haunted World_ Science as a Candle in the Dark - Carl Sagan [120]
Baloney, bamboozles, careless thinking, flimflam and wishes disguised as facts are not restricted to parlour magic and ambiguous advice on matters of the heart. Unfortunately, they ripple through mainstream political, social, religious and economic issues in every nation.
14
Antiscience
There’s no such thing as objective truth. We make our own truth. There’s no such things as objective reality. We make our own reality. There are spiritual, mystical, or inner ways of knowing that are superior to our ordinary ways of knowing. If an experience seems real, it is real. If an idea feels right to you, it is right. We are incapable of acquiring knowledge of the true nature of reality. Science itself is irrational or mystical. It’s just another faith or belief system or myth, with no more justification than any other. It doesn’t matter whether beliefs are true or not, as long as they’re meaningful to you.
a summary of New Age beliefs,
from Theodore Schick Jr and Lewis Vaughn,
How to Think About Weird Things:
Critical Thinking for a New Age
(Mountain View, CA:
Mayfield Publishing Company, 1995)
If the established framework of science is plausibly in error (or arbitrary, or irrelevant, or unpatriotic, or impious, or mainly serving the interests of the powerful), then perhaps we can save ourselves the trouble of understanding what so many people think of as a complex, difficult, highly mathematical, and counterintuitive body of knowledge. Then all the scientists would have their comeuppance. Science envy could be transcended. Those who have pursued other paths to knowledge, those who have secretly harboured beliefs that science has scorned, could now have their place in the Sun.
The rate of change in science is responsible for some of the fire it draws. Just when we’ve finally understood something the scientists are talking about, they tell us it isn’t any longer true. And even if it is, there’s a slew of new things - things we never heard of, things difficult to believe, things with disquieting implications - that they claim to have discovered recently. Scientists can be perceived as toying with us, as wanting to overturn everything, as socially dangerous.
Edward U. Condon was a distinguished American physicist, a pioneer in quantum mechanics, a participant in the development of radar and nuclear weapons in World War II, research director of Corning Glass, director of the National Bureau of Standards, and president of the American Physical Society (as well as, late in his life, professor of physics at the University of Colorado, where he directed a controversial Air Force-funded scientific study of UFOs). He was one of the physicists whose loyalty to the United States was challenged by members of Congress - including Congressman Richard M. Nixon, who called for the revocation of his security clearance - in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The superpatriotic chairman of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HCUA), Rep. J. Parnell Thomas, would call the physicist ‘Dr Condom’, the ‘weakest link’ in American security, and - at one point - the ‘missing link’. His view on Constitutional guarantees can be gleaned from the following response to a witness’s lawyer: The rights you have are the rights given you by this Committee. We will determine what rights you have and what rights you have not got before the Committee.’
Albert Einstein publicly called on all those summoned before HCUA to refuse to cooperate. In 1948, President Harry Truman at the Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and with Condon sitting beside him, denounced Rep. Thomas and HCUA on the grounds that vital scientific research ‘may be made impossible by the creation of an atmosphere in which no man feels safe against the public airing of unfounded rumors, gossip and vilification’. He called HCUA’s activities ‘the most un-American thing we have to contend