Glen Davidson
Posts: 1100
Joined: May 2006
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Perhaps to be expected?
| Quote | | Highly religious readers, the study revealed, were more likely to see nanotechnology as risky when exposed to rude comments compared to less religious readers, Brossard notes. |
Trolls win: Rude blog comments dim the allure of science online
You'd think that the web would diminish creationism, since it provides an abundance of evidence for evolution, plus fisking of creationist rot. But, the religious often don't understand science, and they don't see the rudeness of their side, only the rudeness of the evilutionists who can't constantly abide the endless stream of lies, especially when they're repeated despite having been well-answered.
So we should pull back? It's not that simple, for the fact is that all it takes is something like 10% of a group to be irrevocably devoted to a belief in order for them to win out. Islam and Xianity, for a variety of reasons, ended up with such devotees, and thus won out in many societies (although clearly Islam has won over Xianity and vice versa, and even Buddhism managed to oust Islam from advances Islam had made in the east). That, above all, is why creationism doesn't disappear, for it never goes below the threshold where they're just dismissed as the cranks that they are. So they'll win--unless at least 10% of society is as implacably opposed to lies being treated as truths as creationists favor lies being treated as truths.
I think that in the end there has to be a place for Biologos, the NCSE, and other "middle grounds," to try to persuade any open-minded sorts toward science, though, because calling the liars "liars" (de facto liars, even if they're ignoramuses able to say that they're not "intentionally misleading" anybody) tends to scare off people who already buy into conspiracies of Satan and appalling evil-doers controlling science.
The way in which implacable devotees win in society means that implacable creationists need to be opposed by implacable believers in honest methods in science. Yet the way that religious believers tend to react to opposition to "controversy" existing between "trolls" on both sides means that their fears are going to be stoked by the incivility. Like the poor, we'll always have the uncommonly dense.
Glen Davidson
ETA, I don't know how well the 10% figure eventually winning out in a group holds up in much larger groups, like the US as a whole. But the principle seems to hold to some degree, at least, judging from how shifts in opinion have occurred through history.
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Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of coincidence---ID philosophy
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