But when I search for the word "antiscience," I find almost entirely pages where this phrase is used to denigrate Christians and conservatives who are skeptical of evolution's 100% proven status, of the safety of vaccines (although admitting that there are leftist anti vaxxers as well), of the accuracy of claims about COVID19, of climate change, Old Earth.
There are a few others that are not conservative or Christian (we never went to the Moon, flat Earth, and for me a new one: Australia does not exist). This last one is bad: some friends just moved there.
The core of this antiscience claim is that claims that remain controversial (at least to many Americans) or are not proven science (predictability, experimentally verifiable, falsifiable) and often highly politicized are proof of an antiscience movement.
Newtonian mechanics, optics, mathematics, astronomy, engineering, descriptive biology seem pretty well safe in the Christian community.
Now some of these accepted sciences are not accepted on the left. Fire cannot melt steel (from Dr. Rosie O'Donnell); there are more than two sexes; blacks are intellectually and morally superior to whites. But the left never calls these groups antiscience.
Not to mention the science as a methodology, as opposed to random tinkerers, was developed under the Church during the "so-called" dark ages, at the universities also invented by the Church, with academic freedom that was so strong that academics were allowed free passage between warring states.
ReplyDeleteI get annoyed at the bumper stickers of fish with feet. It mocks the Christian fish symbol, and implies that Christians are anti-science, superstition, and specifically don't accept evolution. Many Christians, including the largest denomination - Catholics - have no problem with evolutionary theory.
But others do, and some have been persecuted as a result. I think of Forrest Mims, who was hired to run the excellent Amateur Scientist column, and then fired when they discovered he was a creationist. But Mims had done original research, including in biological areas.
The result of this was that Scientific American dropped that column, and with it, a lot of subscribers.