Presenting the Dimbleby Lecture on Tuesday, Sir Paul Nurse, president of the Royal Society, will attack the rise of “anti-science”, driven largely by religious fundamentalism, especially in America, which has also been taken up by many within the Republican party. Nurse fears this movement holds within it the seeds of economic and cultural disaster.
He believes that science is demonstrably the most effective and reliably way of promoting economic growth. Politicians who condone the undermining of science education, or stifle research for whatever reason, are harming our economic future.
He deplores the rise of faith schools and academies and believes that they should be subjected to legal sanctions to prevent the corruption of science by myths such as creationism. I couldn’t agree more.
I couldn’t agree more. I am regularly appalled by reading about how science is being replaced by strange myths and Old Testament interpretations of the world about us. I find it extraordinary that people who one assumes have a generally reasonable grip on reality in their daily lives, can suddenly do an about face and believe all manner of weird ideas written by illiterate and probably more than a little crazed idiots stumbling around in the desert several thousand years ago.
I understand the how and why of politicians espousing such idiocy – they want to get elected after all, and merely reflect the ideas of those they hope will vote for them. One can never accuse politicians of being intelligent or even caring about the future of their countries, the only future that interests most politicians and demagogic religious leaders is their own, as we all know all too well.
What really disturbs me lately, is how this belief in Sky Pixies and strange mathematical distortions of reality has escaped from the red-neck and silly regions of the American South, and begun to appear in Britain, Australia and other areas that I had always believed were populated by reasonably intelligent people – this truly disturbs me.