I'm going to discuss (diatribe?) one of the darkest aspects of Creationism. This one has nothing do with being intellectual, nor is it an analysis of a who are we as a human race. This one is personal as well as being bad business. Please excuse the word "dark"; I'm not saying that people who think that the world is only a few thousand years old are evil. On the contrary, some of them are among the kindest people I know, so I'm asking them, if any are reading, to please continue and understand that I think the world of them, all 4.something billion years of it, if I may hyperbolize and poke the bear. I'm not saying that Creationists are evil, I'm saying that Creationism* is. It's evil because it's inhuman and unwise. The thought processes that make some of us believe in Creationism would fail spectacularly if they were used to run a business or any kind of organization. I submit that the human race likes organization in many ways, and therefore we should dispense with Creationism.
Edit: When I say "Creationism", I'm not talking about the general belief that God created the Universe, all of existence, and set everything in motion. I'm talking about the specific belief, such as the one by Ken Ham, that the Earth is only a few thousand years old, that the earth was created in 6 24-hour days, and that empirically shown data are false.
If you're a Creationist, a Young-Earther, or you think that the planet can't be more than a few dozen tens of thousands of years old ( :-) Playing with words and numbers at the same time is fun... Where else can you get that?), please stop it. There are myriad reasons to acknowledge that our planet is billions of years old, and a simple "How old is the Earth?" googling can give them to you, and many people are far more qualified than I to explain Earth's age. What I've stumbled upon in my ponderings and polite, respectful arguments with my Creationist friends is an angle that I'm not sure that I've heard before (I didn't watch the entire Bill Nye v. Ken Ham debate, so perhaps it was in there), so I'm going to share it with you.
When Dayton Moore took over as the general manager of the Kansas City Royals baseball team some 10 years or so ago, I remember the rhetoric that we fans heard... "We're going to build through the draft. We're going to do better at finding talent on the international scene. We're going to focus on player development." That was all well and good, but, in my true nature that has been nurtured even more in my barbershop director training, GMDM espoused a philosophy that is so fundamental, so considerate and kind, and so generally wise that it seems to me axiomatic: "We're going to hire good baseball people and let them do their jobs." In more generic terms, it'd be rendered, "We're going to do our best to take the advice of people who know what they're doing because... experience."
A basic misunderstanding in American culture these days is that "everyone's entitled to an opinion." While, sure, this is the U.S., and we've decided to give people the right to say what they will as long as it doesn't cause immediate physical harm, this doesn't mean that we should just go around having opinions on absolutely everything. There's a problem with me just saying, "I think that this is how reality is" if there are people who have a much better idea than I do, and wisdom is knowing that I might not have all of the answers. I'm trying to keep up with people who do know what's going on in their various fields (of the subjects that I'm especially interested in) because I don't just want to have opinions; I want to have valid opinions. And valid opinions are based on experience.
Look, supervisors don't always know what's going on in the trenches. We humans need each other, each person filling different roles, in order to get tasks accomplished. If you ask me, our paramount/chief concern should be the survival of our species for as long as possible. This involves us preparing ourselves to leave this planet when the sun expands out. There will hopefully be many thousands of generations of humans to come after the current ones, and it's probably going to take us most of their lifetimes to figure out where we can move to, how to do it, how many we can take, what other species from Earth should come with us, etc. But, none of that will come to fruition unless we learn how to get along. It's time that we started honestly buckling down and figuring out what's really going to stop the violence and asininity. We have got to stop letting students leave high school without solid foundational understanding of the universe and the history of our species. But, I digress. I'll leave the hope-for-the-future speech for another time. Back to why I brought up supervising... When those of us who aren't doing the dirty work put on a pair of boots and go supervise, we don't tell the people that we're supervising that they don't have a clue what they're doing. It makes them not want to work for us. Well, in the United States, we all watch everyone else. But, just because we're watching them doesn't mean that we understand what's going on in their work; but just because we don't yet understand doesn't mean that we couldn't someday. Our general public is, by extension, the "science supervisors". We elect people who decide how much money scientific research gets, which specific types of research get the most funding.
Look, we can choose what to believe, even if it's been shown to be wrong, if it helps us get to sleep at night (if it's just too emotionally difficult to acknowledge that our lives are truly but an instant compared to the length of the existence of our species, life, the planet, or the whole universe or for some other reason in people's heart that I don't know), but at least in the voting booth and the bank account, we should not be giving our money to people who pervert logic and reason to fund pet projects and keep their big desk and light work schedules. Following the people who twist and malign the scientific method and have a pre-teen's understanding of critical and scientific reasoning (I'd guess that mine might be slightly past adolescent black-and-white at this point in my maturation. Please don't think that I see myself as perfect.) is what's really holding our society back. Don't get me wrong; I'm not a "progress for the sake of progress" kinda guy, but I am a "let's not go backwards" kinda guy.
Creationism is wrong because, while it's fine to question scientists about the finer points of their work, like asking which is really the most accurate dating of the Earth, these people were trained on time-honored practices of scientific thought and methodology that have advanced human knowledge so much that it's insulting and shows a complete lack of trust in the people who do this work for a living to tell them that they don't know what they're doing and to let ourselves be led by people who don't understand the first thing about the scientific method or critical reasoning, and, if they do, claim to follow it but actually pervert it. It's fine to ask a painter if that's really the best that she can do, to ask a pilot if he's gotten enough rest, but it's insulting to ask a craftsman if he really knows the difference between wood and metal. When people have seen the truth through their own experience, it's fine to question them, but that questioning should operate off of a basic level of trust. A basketball coach of 20 years knows the difference between zone defense and man-to-man defense. People might openly wonder (or semi-openly wonder as anonymous internet posters) if the coach really knows what he's doing, but, if you got us all talking long enough, we'd still know that even unsuccessful coaches at, say, the college level understand the fundamentals of the game... Heck, that's why network execs hire basketball coaches to be commentators even if the coaches weren't all that remarkable. Science researchers should be given the same respect.
Stop being a Creationist. It's mean.
No comments:
Post a Comment