Steven Dutch, Natural and Applied Sciences, University
of Wisconsin - Green Bay
First-time Visitors: Please visit Site Map and Disclaimer. Use
"Back" to return here.
I will respond to questions and comments as time permits, but if you want to take issue with any position expressed here, you first have to answer this question:
What evidence would it take to prove your beliefs wrong?
I simply will not reply to challenges that do not address this question. Refutability is one of the classic determinants of whether a theory can be called scientific. Moreover, I have found it to be a great general-purpose cut-through-the-crap question to determine whether somebody is interested in serious intellectual inquiry or just playing mind games. Note, by the way, that I am assuming the burden of proof here - all you have to do is commit to a criterion for testing. It's easy to criticize science for being "closed-minded". Are you open-minded enough to consider whether your ideas might be wrong?
It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid, or insane (or wicked, but I'd rather not consider that) --Richard Dawkins
I speak several languages but not Japanese. I know very little about Japanese. I'm ignorant about it. Nothing wrong with that. I'm not dismissing the importance of learning Japanese, and after I learn a couple of other languages closer to my needs, I might give Japanese a try. But there are only 24 hours in a day and you can't do everything at once. But if I knew nothing about any foreign language - if I thought everyone instinctively spoke English, say - that would be bad. If I were like the apocryphal person who said "If English was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for me," that would be bad. (No fundamentalist I ever heard of was that ignorant.) That would be ignorance bordering on immoral. To have sources of information readily at hand and not avail yourself of them is immoral.
There's nothing wrong about being ignorant of what a hadron or a crossopterygian is, either. People who didn't choose science for a career have their own priorities. But knowing nothing about science after the taxpayers have spent a great deal of money informing you is immoral. It's not the fault of the educational system. It's your fault. I don't care how boring or mean your teachers were - you decided not to learn what was put in front of you.
Now let's say that, not content with merely not knowing Japanese, I decide to ridicule it because it sounds funny, and they don't use our alphabet. Furthermore, I get some garbled information about Japanese from somewhere and decide that I do know Japanese. (There was an article in the satirical newspaper The Onion called "I Bet I can speak Spanish," where the speaker made up Spanish sounding gibberish like "Ellaquanto burritos! Grande baloobos! El hoolio!") And I ridicule real Japanese speakers when they try to correct me. I accuse them of having ulterior motives for dismissing my ideas on how they should speak. I still don't know Japanese, so I'm still ignorant. But now I'm also misinformed, and arrogantly, militantly misinformed at that. I refuse to correct my errors in the face of information from people who are informed, and I refuse to learn anything new. That crosses the line into stupid.
Let's say instead that, not content with merely not knowing about evolution, I decide to ridicule it because it conflicts with my own preferences. Furthermore, I get some garbled information about evolution from somewhere and decide that I do know all about it. And I ridicule real biologists when they try to correct me. I accuse them of having ulterior motives for dismissing my ideas about what evolution is. I still don't know evolution, so I'm still ignorant. But now I'm also misinformed, and arrogantly, militantly misinformed at that. I refuse to correct my errors in the face of information from people who are informed, and I refuse to learn anything new. This also crosses the line into stupid.
xx
Dawkins is being polite. I don't do that meme. Grass roots anti-evolutionists are mostly ignorant in the sense of being uninformed, but it's not wholly innocent. Some get militant enough to cross the line into stupid. But I have been following the anti-evolution movement from raw religious opposition to scientific creationism to intelligent design, and I have no compunction whatsoever about saying that the people who are keeping this movement going and feeding misinformation to others to keep them angry and frightened are desperately wicked. They are evil.
I just watched the "Science" episode of The Truth project and saw wickedness in action. The narrator, by tone of voice and what he says, exudes slime. If this were a TV drama, he'd be the lawyer who uses every dirty trick in the book to spring a serial pedophile on a technicality, all the while posturing about holding the moral high ground.
Return to Pseudoscience Index
Return to Professor Dutch's Home Page
Created 6 September 2009; Last Update 18 January, 2020
Not an official UW Green Bay site