Blinded, Stoned and Excommunicated by Science

Um, Science? Dude, I'm in the wrong class

I saw this T-shirt for sale on the internet the other day: "Science Doesn't Care What You Believe." This got me thinking about the intersection of science and belief throughout human history.  Talk about abusive, dysfunctional relationships! I totally believe that scientists need their own "Me Too" movement for every incident that they have had to endure whenever some ignorant religioids disbelieve scientific shit that is ABSOLUTELY REAL, just because they're pretty sure Jesus would have disapproved.  Like these human bobble heads:

*Editor's Note: after widespread availability of the Covid-19 vaccine, every one of these women

 have died of the disease, except for the one in the upper right who was arrested for storming

the U.S. Capitol without a mask 

Is it un-Christian of me to hope that natural selection, a.k.a. evolution, removes their genes from the gene pool?  Come to think of it, they probably don't believe in that "Evil-lution" in the first place.  The thing that gets me about those dangerously irresponsible Barbies pictured above is that they just don't have any excuses.  They all live in the 21st Century and have the world of human experience at their fingertips, yet they choose to blame vaccines that can SAVE their autistic, learning disabled brats' LIVES for problems that are either genetic (read THEIR FAULT FOR HAVING CHILDREN) or environmental (read SHITTY FOOD ADDITIVES and POLLUTION ).  At least ancient people had a valid excuse: science hadn't quite been invented yet.

If you think about it, religion was really humanity's first attempt at science.  Why does it rain?  No barometers or high altitude cloud particulate gathers around, so let's invent a story: it's because the Corn God is pleased by your sacrifice of 500 prisoners' beating hearts, so he got Tlaloc to rain on the corn crops so that the People can have tacos, tortillas, nacho chips, tamales, burritos and fajitas.

Why is the sky blue? -it's the same color as the sky-goddess' eyes.  Where does lightning come from?  It's Zeus tossing lightning bolts at monsters and evil people.  And so-on.  

This all began to change in a major way during the Golden Age of Athens (AU-en Age for you chemists) when a certain subset of philosophers including but not limited to Archimedes, Aristotle, Euclid, Pythagoras and Eratosthenes began to look beyond the amusing stories of the gods and goddesses they had been brought up on.  Prior to this burst of Greek scientific inquiry, there had been serious scientific progress in such fields as mathematics, astronomy, building engineering, agriculture and animal husbandry, and even civil engineering.  All of these advances yielded practical benefits to the society that invented them.  

Some of these ancient engineers, such as the Chinese hydrologist Li Bing of the firm Li Bing and Son were actually deified- made into a god after they died- because people were so freaking grateful for what they did.  Li Bing's contribution was to control the disastrous floods on the Min River that would regularly rip whole villages from their foundations and kill all the people and animals in its path.  To the Chinese of the Warring States period, it was as if Li Bing had actually vanquished the bloodthirsty river god.

That's him on the left, but he's gotta go- he was just Li Bing, hahaha!

Staying with the Chinese briefly, it really cracks me up that some solid advances came about because of some pretty weird, pseudo-religious reasons.  Take that useful invention, gunpowder.  Chinese emperors and nobles were pretty much concerned with keeping all their money and stuff forever, and also living forever.  To help them with the second item, they hired alchemists to invent an immortality pill, but they accidentally invented shit that blew up.  This was then quickly put to use by Taoist priests who used firecrackers to scare away devils.  At some point, the army got a hold of it, tied some to an arrow, and presto, the world's first exploding missile.

And speaking of immortality? Medical historians are pretty certain that it was the Chinese who isolated mercury, iodine and arsenic from their naturally occurring compounds and used them in medicine.  These elements are great sterilization agents because they're so toxic.  However, they also have the unpleasant side effect of death, so it takes a really careful druggist and doctor to have, emm, healthy patient outcomes.  Weird as all this sounds, mercury was used up until the 20th Century to treat syphilis, which wasn't a problem in ancient China.

That is one seriously big-ass Greek fish

Going back to the Greeks for  a moment, I'd like to take the famous Aristotle down a peg.  As much as historians like to call him the first scientist, Aristotle was more like one of those Victorian gentleman amateur "natural philosophers" who indulged their curiosity about the world by traveling around, observing things and philosophizing about causes for what they observed.  Aristotle even went down to the bottom of the bay in a sort-of submarine called a bathysphere.  While this is very cool, it doesn't actually make him a scientist.  To do that; you need to add the scientific method of inquiry, something that would have to wait for Bacon, Newton and Descartes.

These three worthies were a bit closer to being scientists than Aristotle.  Unfortunately, they had the bad luck of existing at different times in history.  Bacon came up with the reasoning process known as inductivism, whereby observations lead to a general law to explain it.  Descartes championed rationalism, where reason, not previously philosophized explanations were the measure of human knowledge.  Newton more or less synthesized Bacon and Descartes' approach and created the scientific method, where the scientist makes a hypothesis, then tests it with rigorously careful and controlled experiences, which either confirms or disproves the original hypothesis.  This is then used to further refine the hypothesis until the ultimate is discovered.

Now I ask you, who can argue with that approach?  Apparently quite a lot of people, both then and now.  Although science owes its beginnings to religion, the parents didn't take too long to distance themselves from their smartypants children.  Take astronomy for example.  In China, Babylon, Baghdad and Mezo-America, the real stars were the astrologers, those pseudo-scientists who had the knack of relating what was going on down on the Earth to what was happening in the Heavens and --get this --predicting what was going to happen based on stars doing their thing.  Astronomers were the sleep-deprived, achy necked, math nerds who did the observations and calculations for the astrologers, who brought home the bacon by fixing errors in official calendars or predicting a prosperous reign for the local despot.  

Enter Copernicus, Galileo, Brahe and Kepler.  This quartet figured out: 1) the Sun is the center of the Solar System; that 2) the Earth and all the other planets go around it in; 3) elliptical orbits, and that 4) these other worlds are far from perfect (sunspots, moon craters, etc).  The religions establishment of the day did not waste too much time going after them.  Copernicus published after he died so as to avoid the inevitable shit-storm he knew would result from writing that the Church was all wrong.

I am Johannes Kepler
and these are not chopsticks

 Galileo wasn't as fortunate.  He was sentenced to house arrest instead of being executed because he recanted his view that what he had observed through telescope with his own eyes actually effing existed.  Brahe and Kepler both had run-ins with the theocratic state on their way to discovering the three laws of planetary motion.  These were science's awkward teenage years: breakthroughs followed by repression and charges of witchcraft.

Why were people so afraid of scientific advancement?  Part of the reason lies in the political power structures of the day.  Rule by hereditary monarchs relies on the religious establishment to legitimize their rule.  Attack the irrationality of religion with the logic of science and you'll provoke a response from the state who, quite rightly, sees any attack on religion as an attack on the state.  Another part of the reason is the sheer popular ignorance of the times.  The world would have to wait for free public education and universal literacy.  Science can be hard to get a handle on, and especially hard to believe if it goes against generations of traditional beliefs held by a people.  One final reason may be the generic one that people are usually afraid of change.  Seeing the world through scientific eyes requires a fundamental intellectual and emotional realignment of one's sensibilities.  Society was just not ready.  But what about later, when scientific ideas and technology had had a chance to percolate through the cultural zeitgeist?

Its now the 19th Century and science seems to have come of age.  Evolution explained creation, electricity explained lightning, and psychology provided an alternative to the confession box.  And yet it is in the 19th Century that the germs of scientific resistance begin to coalesce.  Because of the fundamental attack on religion that evolution represented --an attack at the very existence of God in the universe --the creationist narrative was born.  God created everything, including fossils, and evolution is just a theory, an evil one at that.  To the masses, new technology really looked like magic, something which they could somehow understand better than what it actually was.  And the methods psychology used to help people could also be used to shape and control their minds.

Skipping over the 20th Century's bloody wars and genocides, here we are in the 21st Century and science has taken one on the chin.  People have more information today than they did in pre-modern times, but they are no less ignorant.  Today is witnessing the rise of militant state-sponsored religious intolerance and extremist violence, fed by recruiting marginal personalities off of social networks.  We also see the rise of totalitarian dictators who command total allegiance to their word, amplified by the megaphone of social media, which also spreads their lies and disinformation.  Anything critical is branded "fake" or "sacrilegious."  Assaults are arranged on any variety of change, from changing sex roles, gender identification and advances in microbiology.  Medicine and technology are under attack in ways not seen since the days of the witch hunts.

Rigged witch-hunt!  -that's how they caught me :-(

Science is surprisingly ill equipped to deal with this current threat.  Scientists are by training and nature very rational people.  Their opponents are not.  In order to prevail, science won't have to win converts, because the evangelical anti-vaccine pro-life non-gmo crowd has things they believe and things they will never believe.  No, science needs to open up a can o' medieval whuppass on these ignorant dipshits.  Mandate vaccines as a public health measure.  Quarantine them and their dirty kids if they refuse.  Institute anti-propaganda laws and give some teeth back to the libel and slander laws.  Choke off their mega-churches and radicalizing mosques with civil taxes.  And do it pretty soon, or else we take a Great Leap Backwards.