Readers Letter:Fending off Furtive Strategists
BackR. Brooks Hanson and Floyd E. Bloom: "Fending off Furtive Strategists" (American Association for the Advancement of Science, 17.09.1999, Vol. 285, No. 5435, p. 1847)
The Kansas shock is shaking Europe, too. Europeans also lived a long-standing history of conflicts between the probable but rather comfortably reliable truth of science on the one hand and a series of absolute truths (lies) on the other. The story did neither start nor end with Copernicus / Galilei.
The creationists are chasing me through the Bible and I put my anchor on Ecclesiastes 1, 15 : "..es stultorum infinitus est numerus". The number of idiots is infinite. Itís in the Bible and you have to believe it. So Kansas is at the end of the line now.
But to which extent do the humanities , philosophers, sociologists, theologians and borderline "scientists" (Grenzwissenschaftler), such as astrologers, occultists, creationists and the like, get a grasp of the facts of the universe when they use the term "Creation"? Mathematically, Ecclestiastes 1, 15 comprises this camp of culture, too.
2500 years ago, Greek colonists in Ionia and Southern Italy started to ask questions about the facts of the universe as it was then apparent and known. When Presocratic philosophy was exported to the homeland, the first exporter, Anaxagoras, had considerable problems with Athensí theocrats. When philosophy went to Athens downtown with Plato, a tremendous subset of the facts of the universe was left outside of their horizons. Sokrates to Phaidros : »I am very eager to learn, but only man can teach me something, not the fields and the trees here outside of town ». Philosophy and religion put a cleavage on the facts of the universe ; the immaterial, which they labelled « very noble » and their domaine, and the material, which was the dirt of Creation and left to the engineers and scientists. Plotinos was ashamed to have a body, but man was made the Crown of Creation, and now ecologists can tell a lot of stories about the consequences of such arrogance. But ask these noble scientists in the other camp of culture, what matter is or how ideas come about in the human brain, they canít tell you, and yet they produce floods of prose on materialism and idealism.
Copernicus worked on a mandate (Leo X, The Lateran Council) to "consider the problem of reforming the ecclesiastical calender" and he incredibly precisely foresaw the case of Galilei. Quote (Edward Rosen): "Perhaps there will be babblers who claim to be judges of astronomy although completely ignorant of the subject and, badly distorting some passage (singular!) of Scripture to their purpose, will dare to find fault with my undertaking and censure it."
Directly and indirectly (Prowe), Copernicus was the basis of the Gregorian calender reform in 1582. March 5, 1616 his work was put on the index: the Vatican had forgotten his merits, but the calender reform remained enforced and gave a splendid aura of modernism to the Vatican.
Generations of babblers in the Vatican (Copernicus used a Greek word, mattaeologi /scatterbrains),popes and cardinals needed much more than a century to grasp creation with the solar system and to stop putting Copernicus and Galilei on the index. This understanding is poor, it is below the level of auxiliary schools.
Horkheimer coined two terms, embarrassing for scientists and engineers in our epoch: "enlightenment is totalitarian", putting science, working for the enlightenment of mankind, close to Hitler and Stalin, and the « instrumental reason » of scientists and engineers does not take over the responsibility for the consequences of the inventions produced by that instrumental reason (bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki).
What about the instrumental reason and its workings in the brains of sociologists, theologians, astrologers.. and their inventions?
Based on the law against witches(Vatican), one million German women were burnt, and catholic Bavarians as well as protestant Prussians alike stopped only a few years before the French Revolution with that Girls’ Grill".
There is matter of ethics with teaching rubbish to ignorants. The case is not limited to astrology.
Fortunately, science has to be an attack on many a belief, because setting belief there where nowadays science provides a more serious and reliable knowledge, means a lack of culture, of responsibility.
Who has been searching more seriously, honestly and dynamically than the physicists after the fundamental forces which work the universe ? Certainly not the humanities and the borderline scientists.
When there is cancer or aids in the other camp, operators forget about prayers, bush magic, horoscopes and the like, and popes, cardinals, Horkheimer, astrologers and creationists all mobilized and mobilize most modern science with most modern medicine with their fruit of evolution.
Isn't that nice and giving comfort?
Creationists' attitudes may be a blow to the US economy, but it is in the first place a blow to US culture.
I apologize for the length of the letter but there is a lot to say.
Brussels, 19.09.1999