pedantic nuthatch

Ben Goldacre's spot-on polemic against woolly-minded popular science writing helps me understand why humanists and people of faith are screaming at each other across a cultural divide. (Readers outside Britain beware: a lot of the article's references to current controversies and scares are very U.K.-centric.)

So how do the media work around their inability to deliver scientific evidence? They use authority figures, the very antithesis of what science is about, as if they were priests, or politicians, or parent figures. "Scientists today said ... scientists revealed ... scientists warned." And if they want balance, you'll get two scientists disagreeing, although with no explanation of why (an approach at its most dangerous with the myth that scientists were "divided" over the safety of MMR). One scientist will "reveal" something, and then another will "challenge" it. A bit like Jedi knights.

(Makes it clear how the silly "teach the controversy in evolution" gimmick gets any traction.)

Now, while I think Goldacre is right to criticize popular media for portraying researchers as nothing more than quibbling authority figures, it is true that people of science do submit to an authority—the authority of empirical fact, of measured, repeated observation of the natural world. While (it seems to me) people who consider themselves fundamentally Christians submit first of all to the authority of personal belief. I'm not trying to be reductivist or trivializing here: I'm only saying that the two camps use two completely different tests to tell them what is real, what is true; and any parlay between them that loses track of that distinction will degenerate into mutual jeering.