Science and The People

I actually find it pretty easy to understand why many people reject science that conflicts with their religious beliefs. One obvious reason is that membership in most religious communities requires accepting, or at least pretending to accept, certain factual propositions. Community membership is valuable to people, emotionally and in many situations for practical and material reasons. It ' s hard, and for many people impossible, to walk away from kith and kin.But there is also a deeper reason. The universe discovered by physicists and the sub-discipline of cosmology is grant, wonderful and astonishing but also very cold and lonely. It makes of humanity a trivial accident. We don ' t mean shit to anybody but ourselves. That we can make meaning in our own right, that we matter to each other, is the essence of humanism, but that isn ' t good enough for lots of people. They need the consolation of a caring universe. Alongside this is the fear of death and inability to accept it.Then there ' s the third reason. Almost nobody actually understands the cosmologists ' universe, how they figured it out and why they are so certain of their conclusions. I have a somewhat better idea than most because I ' ve had a subscription to Scientific American since I was 13 but I actually have never taken a physics course, let alone studied cosmology. Basically it all started when Edwin Hubble discovered that the nebulae are actually entire galaxies in their own right, that the ones that aren ' t s...
Source: Stayin' Alive - Category: American Health Source Type: blogs