Steven Dutch, Natural and Applied Sciences, Universityof Wisconsin - Green Bay
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I will respond to questions and comments as time permits, but if you want to take issuewith 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. Refutabilityis 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 determinewhether 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 youhave to do is commit to a criterion for testing.It's easy to criticize science for being "closed-minded". Are you open-mindedenough to consider whether your ideas might be wrong?
[I am actually a co-author with Weinberg. Really. Sort of. It all started when the National Center for Science Education launched Project Steve (also Esteban, Stephanie, etc.), a petition to be signed only by scientists named Steve who supported evolution. It's named in honor of the late Stephen Jay Gould and is a parody of all the creationist lists of "famous scientists" who supposedly doubt evolution. So I signed, and later received notice of the following paper:
Scott, E.C., Matzke, N. J., Branch, G., Dutch, S. I., and others (439 others, to be exact); The Morphology of Steve, Annals of Improbable Research, July-August 2004, p. 24-29.
All the signatories of project Steve were listed as co-authors. This paper now makes me a co-author with Stephen Hawking and Nobel Laureates Stephen Chu and Steven Weinberg. Amazingly enough, this paper does not set a record for co-authors. A paper with 972 co-authors won an Ig Nobel Prize in 1993. This paper required the optimum amount of effort on my part (zero). ]
Anyway, Steven Weinberg is a Nobel laureate in physics who once said:
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. (New York Times, April 20, 1999)
Actually, what it takes for good people to do evil things is something that allows them to rationalize that the evil is precursor to a greater good, or convince themselves that the action is somehow not evil. And there is no shortage of non-religious pretexts for evil.
Foremost among these is the family. It sounds wonderful to have a big, close-knit family where generations mingle and you have a huge network of people to come to your aid. And it can be. But it doesn't take long, talking to people raised in extended family settings, to realize how often it is a cruel, autocratic and stultifying system. I would hazard a guess, even with the resurgence of religiously inspired violence, that far more people are killed every year in the name of protecting a family's honor status than die in religious violence. The most tragic of these victims are women who suffer the humiliation of rape, then are ostracized and often killed by their families because they brought shame on the family.
The clan, the tribe, and finally the nation are larger extensions of the family. Until recently, say within the last few hundred years, it was more or less impossible to mobilize people in the name of the State. The State was too remote and abstract, and political boundaries were drawn with scant regard for ethnic and local loyalties. People can be inspired to rally in defense of their homeland against invaders, but what could motivate people to participate in wars, invasions and massacres? Probably the second leading non-religious cause of evil: someone in authority gave me permission.
Once the Enlightenment was under way, people began thinking that societies were organized for the benefit of all their members. This is good, right? No longer do we have kings ruling by divine right and justifying cruelty as being the will of God. No, now we have mass movements invoking absolute authority in the name of the people, and justifying cruelty in the name of equality, or justice, or perhaps the environment.. After all, you can't have an omelet without breaking a few eggs. So at the very dawn of the Enlightenment, France overthrew the King, closed churches, built temples to Reason, and commited full-blown genocide against resistance in the devoutly Catholic Vendee region of western France, killing anywhere from 100,000 to 400,000 people. In the final year of the Revolution, progressively more paranoid revolutionary factions guillotined up to 40,000 people. The radical leader Robespierre justified the reign of terror, saying "it is supported by the most holy of all laws: the Salvation of the People," and "Terror is nothing else than justice, prompt, secure and inflexible."
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