Resistance to Science

 
In my previous posting [Do You Trust Scientists] I referred to an article by Paul Bloom and Deena Skolnick Weisberg who discussed the reasons why some adults resist science and opt instead for pseudoscience or religion. Bloom and Weisberg said,

The developmental data suggest that resistance to science will arise in children when scientific claims clash with early emerging, intuitive expectations. This resistance will persist through adulthood if the scientific claims are contested within a society, and will be especially strong if there is a non-scientific alternative that is rooted in common sense and championed by people who are taken as reliable and trustworthy.

Along comes GilDodgen who is exactlythe sort of person we are talking about. He posts a message on the Intelligent Design Creationism blog Uncommon Descent [More Silly Psychobabble About “Resistance to Science”]. Believe it or not, this is what he said.

I’m not quite sure what the “developmental data” are, but I do know something about science, and I am certainly not resistant to it, which is precisely why I am an intelligent-design proponent.

I use the hard sciences all day long in my work as (primarily) a software engineer in the aerospace research and development field. These sciences include: physics, mathematics, electrical and mechanical engineering, computational algorithms, detailed computer program design and debugging, and information processing. The end products of all this highly integrated science must work in the real world, and this is the only measure of success in my professional field. Vague, unsupported philosophical ruminations, like those of psychologists, don’t cut the mustard when it comes to real science and scientific endeavor.

It is precisely because of my knowledge of science, in a number of scientific disciplines, that I reject blind-watchmaker Darwinism and materialist explanations for all that we observe. Psychologists, especially the evolutionary kind, should become more familiar with real, hard science, before they make sweeping, unsupported claims about others’ motivations for rejecting their definition of “science.”

And you wonder why we call them IDiots?