The Gorilla in the Room of Science
My friend
I like science I always have.
Remember my Dad having a long talk with me one night when I was 6 or 7 about how "nature abhors a vacuum". He had the ideas a bit garbled as I know now but he was basically right and I pondered that for a long time. I was fascinated by astronomy.
By the time I was baptized religion just wasn't an area of 47thinking that I was interested in and it sort of fell away. I've studied and read science all my adult life. I've done experiments and I've done my own research.
Here's the Gorilla in the room of science - no matter how much I may know about science I know essentially nothing compared to what is known.
I may know a lot about Darwinian Evolution and can even go into it to a certain level of detail. That level of detail is completely inadequate to demonstrate from original evidence that Darwinian Evolution is at work. The level of detail that incorporates mixes the knowledge of paleontologists who argue for decades about what sort of creature was THAT bone part of amazingly often coming to consensus with the knowledge of cell chemistry and dna sequencing and taxonomic studies of all of the world over centuries.
It's not just me.
Nobody actually understands even evolution at that level of detail. A person in my position often encounters people who are neither well informed about science and don't want to be. They have other ways of thinking about reality and their own body of information to master. If I try to take a stance that says that my information is RIGHT they smile indulgently and say "Show me." And there is no way I can believe me I've tried often in encyclopedic conversations that go on for years. For instance say I say that vaccination really is an essential public health measure. I can point to the mountain of evidence and the fact that the huge consensus in the health community says vaccination. They just plain disbelieve that they have other sources of information and think I'm arrogant if I say they have to understand my information before they can decide what's right for their kids.
I turn to the Gorilla and smile.
Me and the Gorilla are old friends. See? Here's the way it goes no human knows all of science and all it's evaluations and justifications but the Gorilla knows. Here is why the Gorilla and I are friends I can ask questions and always get useful and trustworthy answers to whatever level of detail I want to go. The Gorilla is a vast network with many aspects and capabilities. Over here we have vast libraries and museums full of information and examples from nature. Over there we have a system of paradigms that trains practitioners to do research. We have fora where people with competing interpretations of something can hash things out. We have people trying to interpret that whole mass in ways that give useful understandings. When I read Ancestor's Tale by Dawkins I'm consulting the Gorilla.
Dawkins is looking at how life evolved over some 4 billion years at every page he cites the work of many authors who themselves work with what others before them have learned. But the Gorilla isn't just a thing that is consulted it is a thing that is provided with a huge amount of information that is manipulated and organized. Scientists get to feed it if they are lucky. Here's a thing we need to always remember about the Gorilla glad as I for the resource it's not a very comfy bedfellow. As people in science know the Gorilla can roll over and squash you like a bedbug. If the Gorilla won't publish your paper you are fucked basically pushed out of your life work that you've devoted years to mastering. And the Gorilla is pretty capricious about some things; how many times have things like coffee of sugar gone from being healthy to unhealthy.
Why do I stick with the Gorilla?
Well here's the thing whether we are scientific or not we all have to consult various sorts of Gorillas. Nobody knows everything or can know everything. So in this context maybe we can generalize to say that God is a particular example of the general category of Gorilla.
Remember that the idea of Gorilla here is an entity that both soaks up information and provides it. People consult God for information. That consultation has many forms there are texts to be consulted, people meditate, they pray. And like with science that consultation has a vast structure of institutions ranging from libraries to seminaries to hospitals and ministers and priests. I like science's Gorilla I must say. I mean so far so good it has never let me down.
I think that the anti-vaxxers are starting to find their Gorilla is letting them down. Their kids are getting sick. More they are facing great opprobrium from the rest of the community because not only do the anti-vaxxers endanger their own kids but everybody else's as well But the anti-vaxxers maybe just bought into a psuedo-Gorilla their's can't be questioned down to the level of quarks.
Mine can.
What do you think?
I present regular philosophy discussions in a virtual reality called Second Life.
I set a topic and people come as avatars and sit around a virtual table to discuss it.
Each week I write a short essay to set the topic.
I show a selection of them here.