“Science doesn’t know everything.” That has, especially of late, become a mantra among certain of the public. It is one heard everywhere – television, coffee shop, fast food restaurant, you name it. Anywhere there is someone who is at a loss to say anything cogent concerning the topic – and in a nation as totally dependent upon science as this one, that’s just about every topic – you’ll hear it. Of all the nitwit nostrums to which the public has somehow become addicted, nonsense like “Whatever god wills, has to happen,” “Guns only have one purpose, killing,” the absolutely wondrous, “The only thing that will save America is return to god” (how about OF god?), and on and on and on, this one is probably today’s most popular. Unless, of course, you consider “Math was always my worst subject,” or “Numbers (statistics) can lie, you know.” What I want to ask – and often do – is so what? What does my sagacity seeking (appearance thereof, anyway) sophist friend believe he has accomplished? What does his remark prove? What does he think, what is he arguing, that science is? Science doesn’t know everything. WONDERFUL! Brilliant! Well, does GOD know everything (really – does he know how to make a weight he can’t lift?)? Is the wannabe wise man telling me that HE doesn’t need science? Preposterous! See where he goes when he gets sick. What does he think the car he uses to go there is? Whence does he think the clothing he wears to go there came? The telephone – whichever of a dozen or so kind now available – he used to make the appointment? Did I say preposterous? Try asinine. And it’s a serious matter. It’s now become critical to our very survival as a nation. It was in that regard decades ago that first scholars, then editorialists, began worrying about the then already evident ignorance of the U.S. public. Writers like – and most notably so – like James J. Kilpatrick and Steve Allen wrote editorials, essays, and books about the astonishing ignorance and apparent stupidity (they aren’t the same: one can’t help being stupid, but there isn’t any excuse for ignorance except lack of effort – to say nothing of character) of citizens. What they wrote about then has resulted in a nation FUBAR - and dying of nothing more than its own ignorance and outright stupidity. The fact – one now everywhere evident and thunderously so nationwide – is that innumeracy, the inability to deal rationally with large numbers or with probabilities associated with them, results in not only misinformed government and its policies, but in a republic paralyzed by an electorate so easily hornswoggled that it could (and did) elect a president because he graduated from college and would be the first of his race so favored, that it could believe the mathematically absolutely insane pronouncements and claims concerning the Affordable Health Care Act, that by “quantitative easing” – taxation – taxes upon the middle class are being lessened, and that job creation can proceed apace with higher taxes for small business. To say “NOBODY is that stupid,” however, would be stupid. Did I say this is a serious matter? This is a matter serious enough to mean that unless a sea change occurs, the very few people willing to learn logic, mathematics, physics, and science generally will be obliged to either support the eighty percent of a growing population who believe idiotic nostrums like those I’ve mentioned, or live behind walls and guns necessary to protect themselves from their ignorant fellow citizens. “When the people (those too ignorant to have useful and marketable skills) learn that they can vote themselves money, it will herald the end of the republic.” THAT’s how serious it is. Why Study science? “Science is a way to teach how something gets to be known, what is not known, to what extent things are known (for nothing is known absolutely), how to handle doubt and uncertainty, what the rules of evidence are, how to think about things so that judgments can be made, how to distinguish truth from fraud, and from show.” That quotation was of Richard Feynman, who was among the greatest physicists and most intelligent human beings who ever lived. He didn’t know everything, either.
Posted on: Tue, 13 Aug 2013 19:48:15 +0000
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