Are you Paying Attention?

More people in the United States believe in flying saucers than in evolution, 18 % of Americans think the president is a Muslum, a growing number here do not believe in climate change, I could go on, but why bother.

A long time ago the tobacco industry realized that they didn't have to prove cigarette smoking is safe, just confuse enough people about the research to make them doubt the data saying it isn't. Now big business, big religion and political parties use this technique to convince us to doubt what should be as plain as the noses on our faces. They point out that a few scientists disagree with the majority so the theory must be wrong, whether it be climate change or evolution.

Science does not know what causes gravity, but I'll bet the farm nobody would step off a ten story building because of that.

It's Round??

I was listening to “Good Vibrations” and that got me to thinking about earthquakes, which led to plate techtonic theory, and how everybody thought Wegener was a crackpot for proposing such a loony idea as continents drifting around on giant plates floating on molten rock, and that got me to thinking about the over 150 year old one-sided debate about Evolution. Scary, huh?

Anyway, as we all know this debate is primarily between religion of a certain stripe and science. We’ve had many of these debates before. A monk by the name of Bruno was burned at the stake in 1600 because, among other things, he believed in an infinite number of planets all inhabited by humans. Unfortunately for him the bible didn’t mention that fact.

Copernicus was afraid to publish his discovery, in the 1500’s, that the Earth revolved around the sun instead of vice versa, as scripture revealed, until after his death.

The sun rises, and sets, and returns to its place, from which, reborn, it revolves through the meridian, and is curved toward the North. (Ecclesiastes 1:5).
In the 1633, Galileo, the father of modern science, was tried by the Inquisition for teaching the ‘Theory’ of Copernicus. The Catholic Church finally apologized some 300 years later.

Of course, there was opposition to the dissection of humans for the benefit of medical science, women as men’s inferior and a whole host (no pun intended) of other nutty ideas marching under the banner of religiosity.

Now in the 21st century we have Darwin’s Theory of Evolution kicked around in the name of scripture. (It’s unfortunate that ‘theory’ is tacked on the front as it has a different meaning to scientists than it does to the rest of us, making Darwin’s ‘Theory’ easier to attack).

Hopefully, someday we can accept, what I call, the Law of Evolution with the same rationality we accept that the Earth is not only round, it revolves about the sun.