Now we know the truth – do we?
We read in our history books that there was a time when the church insisted that the earth was flat and Kopernikus found enough evidence for its round shape. But the people in power refused to even look at the facts, it just couldn’t be in their rigid belief system. It took some time and some heroes in insisting – and today everybody takes it for granted that the earth is a sphere.
Earth seen from the space
Today we think – “ah, this is long ago,now we have good science and we get to know the truth” – REALLY?
Yesterday, at our Thanksgiving Dinner I had the occasion of witnessing how knowledgeable people defend similar stands with a similar vehemence and with a similar refusal to look at the facts and the evidence for what they believe is impossible.
Here the story:
I am following a guy called Dutchsinse, who forecasts earthquakes on Youtube since the day last August when 300 people lost their lives in an earthquake in Italy (where I live) which had been forecasted, but obviously, nobody received the warning. I got really aroused and angry by this missing responsibility towards the population – and even more when I heard that you would be sued when you give out warnings – because of “unjustified arousal of panic”. So they accept hundreds of deaths instead of preparing means for people to stay safe in case of a concrete warning? What a world we are living in! We are forced by law to be ignorant and not to help others. Wow!
Earthquakes cannot be forecasted – that is what official science says!
The professor and a globe behind: how could he see the earth?
The friend I met yesterday had written a private mail to me some time ago, telling me about the illegality of my spreading the word and for inviting people to become knowledgeable of things which can save their lives. And he presented himself as an expert, having studied geology 50 years ago and that would give him the authority to call the serious attempts to understand more in the matter as pure phantasy, as rubbish not worth being considered.
“What cannot be, is not” – the same as when the earth was considered flat despite the evidence. The friend I met yesterday is part of a branch of scientists crystallized in old ways of seeing the world. As if Einstein hadn’t lived yet and many other pioneers of modern physics who, finally, are recognized and have given rise to a different picture of the earth and the Kosmos.
“Pioneers are the ones with the arrows in the back”, a famous quote by Ken Wilber. One of these pioneers is Rupert Sheldrake whose Ted Talk was banned, but he is known enough to not get silenced anymore. He is demonstrating that many scientists today are not doing science but are consolidating their belief system in things which they have studied and learned a long time ago. They are not willing to learn after having climbed up the academic ladder. They are convinced that they know already everything which needs to be known. – Nope.
What science has become today –A Dogmatic Belief System
Curiosity is the basis of science, wanting to know. Proving hypothesis not by finding proves for them (that is the realm of mathematics), but by trying to find proves against them in order to modify the hypothesis and to come nearer and nearer to the truth. Then there are procedures for science, like observation, interpretation, repeatability of experiments etc. Read Sheldrake’s book “The Science Delusion” to understand the difference between real science and dogmatic science. The single points are not really relevant to what I want to say here.
Back to last night:
I expressed my desire to talk a little more about the argument we had about the predictability of earthquakes. No way. I asked for opening just a little the mind to embrace evidence. No evidence there! He says, and he begins again to cite his authority as an academic. Maybe I should have said that I, myself have done Physics in University and graduated in Mathematics, Maybe that would have helped to be considered a little more. For me, it is not a question of having done University or not – whoever has done University knows that you learn there only a certain amount of things – and certainly only the things which are considered mainstream in THAT time. For me, it is a question of if you are willing to be curious again and to do research and look for evidence.
Well, our conversation took only 3 or 4 minutes where he in patriarchal dominance tried to tell me that I was engaged in total rubbish – and I, from my site, was trying to invite him to realize that science has changed A LOT during the last 50 years. And when I pointed out that his position resembles that of the pope saying that the earth is flat, period – well, then he exploded, stood up, went to my husband and said that I was a bitch and ran out of the room.
The unwillingness to become curious again – but being attached to old ideas
What shall I say? I am sorry for his wife who has to endure his rant, yes. And I am sorry for him that he has drawn his identity from an academic grade and of ideas which he believed stable and unchanging, and that he is not able to face reality. He excuses his position with his age – as if older people had an excuse to deliberately become ignorant? So why would we elect leaders of a certain age and not University students? Because we hope that they have gained a certain life experience and a certain wisdom, I guess.
We always have the choice to learn or to be ignorant, from childhood on until old age. Children normally are hungry to learn – when does this change into self-righteousness and the belief to “know already”? It seems to be “normal” when you see the present state of the world: High knowledge in technology – and complete ignorance in other important areas of human existence.
We need to develop multiple intelligences, not only cognitive, but also emotional!
The major Lines of Intelligence
To end this story: I am not responsible for other people’s feelings and emotions but exclusively for my own. In consequence of what has happened yesterday, I felt very concerned about the right way to speak to people who I consider intelligent enough to enter into a serious conversation but obviously are not able to contain their emotions when their ideas are challenged. Walk around them like on egg shells? Give up on them? – where would we be today if Copernicus or Galileo had given up?
Well, I am neither Copernicus, nor Galileo, nor an active scientist. But I am hungry to know and to learn and to help to find a way out of the present dilemma of super-powers driven by ignorant people, in politics, economics, science, well, everywhere you look. Jesus was right when he said: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do”. The only difference to the times of Jesus and today is the fact that some few people on this earth have the power to blow up the whole planet, literally.
As the husband whose wife, I was told, was a bitch (Tua moglia è una stronza!), I have a word to add here. In a sense, Heidi, you were not quite accurate is saying that science has changed in the last 50 years. Yes, the content of theories and of what is accepted as proven has changed indeed! But the way of holding firm to beliefs has changed little, if at all. Here I speak of scientism rather than science. As the “ism” of science, that is a belief system, almost in the religious sense of a belief system. Many scientists themselves are unaware of having become caught up in a dogmatic belief in science as they learned it in school and then came to depend on it professionally. Their allegiance is not necessarily to the truth but to the rules of the science club they have inherited and on which there professional lives – indeed perhaps their personal identities – depend.