PSEUDOSCIENCE vs. SCIENCE by ALICIA VAN COUVERING

I’d like to start this essay with the following sentence:

“Never in the history of the world have so many humans been so willing to accept “weird things.”

It would start my essay off with a bang; it would make the whole thing seem dramatic and relevant and would smooth out the thesis I would like the present.

But the rest of my essay would suffer; my premise would be completely wrong. Probably fewer people believe in “weird things” (i.e., the paranormal, the superstitious, the religious, magical and scientifically untrue) today than ever before; there is more science today than there ever has been. It is true that Religions, myths, superstitions, mysticisms, cults, New Age ideas, and nonsense of all sorts have penetrated every nook and cranny of both popular and high culture. Beliefs in things like Big Foot, the Loch Ness Monster, clairvoyance, fairies, emotions in plants, pyramid power and the Bermuda Triangle abound, and no

t just on a lunatic fringe. A 1990 Gallup poll of 1,236 adult Americans showed that, for example, 52% of those polled believed in astrology, 19% believed in Witches, 22% said that Aliens had landed on earth and 41% that humans and dinosaurs had lived simultaneously. Yet there are over 100,000 scientific journals currently in publication. Certainly there are more atheists now than there were even fifty years ago, and supernatural explanations for nature have largely – at least officially – been replaced by scientific conclusions.

While this could be considered harmless in a few isolated examples, a huge majority of Creationists would close us off to scientific understanding and slow down our progress as a species. As Bertrand Russel wrote, “…all faiths do harm. We may define 'faith' as a firm belief in something for which there is no evidence. When there is evidence, no one speaks of 'faith.' We do not speak of faith that two and two are four or that the earth is round. We only speak of faith when we wish to substitute emotion for evidence.”(H.S.E.P.p215)

As Michael Shermer discusses in his book, “Why People Believe Weird Things”, there is a difficult line to walk when separating pseudoscience from actual science. Believing in psychics makes us feel better; there is scientific proof of the psychologically placating (and therefore healing) effect of prayer. Believing in science makes scientists feel better. Science is a system of explanation; myths and religion are a system of explanation. What harm – indeed, what difference – is there between the two, if all truths are relative to the believer?

Science is unique in that, being objective, it is also cumulative. Supernatural beliefs are not cumulative. They don’t go anywhere. It ends at God, because God cannot be revised or disproved or tested; you can’t accurately predict in any functional way what God or ghosts or crop circles might do. You’re not allowed to give up tree spirits once you read about ecology. Science never presumes to know more than the people that create it. It is constantly improved and revised until it can most accurately predict our environment and therefore help us survive. If we can’t question the beliefs handed down to us, we can’t grow up. If the system of explanations are testable, progress can be made.

There is no way to test the existence of ghosts, psychic phenomena or crop circles. The only testable, concrete evidence for them (for instance, smudgy photographs) can be doubted as doctored; they cannot be reproduced or observed in any testable context. Testaments to their formation are almost exclusively without any documentation or instrument readings – just visual reports from a distance. A commonly held scientific belief is that the simplest explanation is usually the truest one. In the case of the supernatural/superstitious, the simplest is dismissed with as little consideration as the most complicated explanation is accepte

Some topics in this essay:
Bertrand Russel, Barry O'Toole, Carl Sagan, Science Shermer, God God, Weird Things”, COUVERING I’d, Bermuda Triangle, Unintelligible Physics, Science God, start essay, one’s life, makes feel, believing science, tree spirits, basing conclusions, unlike religion, people believe, evolved ability, testing doubt,