Wisdom in a Cleric’s Garb; Why Not a Lab Coat Too?

[groovedaddy]

There is a warm fuzzy moment near the end of the movie “Angels & Demons,” starring Tom Hanks and directed by Ron Howard.

Mr. Hanks as the Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon has just exposed the archvillain who was threatening to blow up the Vatican with antimatter stolen from a particle collider. A Catholic cardinal who has been giving him a hard time all through the movie and has suddenly turned twinkly-eyed says a small prayer thanking God for sending someone to save them.

Mr. Hanks replies that he doesn’t think he was “sent.”

Of course he was, he just doesn’t know it, the priest says gently. Mr. Hanks, taken aback, smiles in his classic sheepish way. Suddenly he is not so sure.

This may seem like a happy ending. Faith and science reconciled or at least holding their fire in the face of mystery. But for me that moment ruined what had otherwise been a pleasant two hours on a rainy afternoon. It crystallized what is wrong with the entire way that popular culture regards science. Scientists and academics are smart, but religious leaders are wise.

These smart alecks who know how to split atoms and splice genes need to be put in their place by older steadier hands.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/02/science/02essay.html?th&emc=th

[RaleighNCDUer]

1. If the religious leaders were so wise, they would not have started it

all by persecuting the smart people.

[struggle4progress]

2. The unintentional ironies here are astonishing! A cockamamie plot about a "symbologist" who defeats

an evil plot involving "antimatter stolen from a collider," leads the critic to complain about "the age-old conflict between science and religion"

What does our critic fail to notice?

First, the movie critic fails to notice the following irony: a huge edifice of applied science is required to support the mass entertainment industry, but the resulting "entertainment" is largely pseudo-scientific crap!

Second, the critic fails to notice that popular attitudes in the US are largely shaped by the entertainment industry. The average member of the US public is bombarded with idiocy for thousands of hours each year.

Finally -- and this irony is exquisite! -- the movie critic fails to notice that he himself is using a small detail, from scientifically nonsensical plot, as the starting point for his complaint about popular attitudes towards science!

It would be delightful to have a careful analysis of all the social pressures that focus the critic's wrath so entirely on the fictional priest -- as a symbol of everything wrong about our attitudes towards science

[Evoman]

4. Man, I actually agree with you.

Do you remember when the book came out? CERN had to write a special notice on their website to explain the lunacy and scientific illiteracy in the book regarding anti-matter.

[struggle4progress]

8. I mercifully missed all of that. But I've been tearing my hair and gnashing my teeth

over popular pseudo-scientific ideas for decades

As a junior high school kid, I loved science fiction. When I got to high school, I'd become interested in environmental issues, and then I began to realize quite a number people thought that we didn't need to worry about the planet because the space program would enable us to colonize other star systems. I learned, to my dismay, that people had no idea how far away the nearest stars were or how much time and energy would be required to travel there and back, and many were firm believers in Star Trek notions of faster-than-light travel

I've lost count of the arguments I've had with folk about evolution over the years. The challenge that I personally face in dealing with the theory of evolution might be just the opposite of what you expect it to be. I consider Darwin's evolution to be a beautiful synthesis, and at an emotional level I am completely convinced of its correctness. I've had wonderful vivid dreams in which I see and feel myself evolving from a worm-like thing to a vertebrate to a primate -- so it is actually a constant intellectual struggle for me to regard evolution as analogous to a gorgeous sea-chart of the world, credible and very useful for navigation, but a chart nevertheless, whose markings I should be careful not to confuse with the real seas and shoals and coasts and islands. Many people have an emotional reaction exactly opposite to mine and consider evolution a monstrous impossibility: the possibilities for productive discussion of such emotional reactions are quite limited; moreover, the evidence for modern evolutionary theory involves chapters and chapters of physics, biochemistry, paleontology, and morphology -- and the opponents seem to think in sentences, rather than in paragraphs or chapters. Discussions tend to degenerate into flat statements such as This couldn't all be random, the opponents' view thus being determined by some intuitive rebellion against the imagined consequences of "randomness" rather than by the goal of assembling the observed facts with coherent parsimony. The psychology here is complicated and treacherous

The facts matter, of course

[moggie]

3. Dan Brown's writing filtered through Hollywood

That's pretty much guaranteed suckiness squared. Talk about low-hanging fruit!

[charlie]

5. I only read the one

to see what the hoopla was about. I'd never read a Scooby Doo novel before -- every 10 minutes the running and chasing halts in midstride for some fascinating exposition from a cheery character.

Hand that off to Ron Howard and you get double-processed cheese spackle.

Can't wait to see the new one. I'm sure it goes perfect with a bowl of Crunchberries and slept-in Speed Racer jammies.

[moggie]

6. Have you read Dave Barry's parody of the Da Vinci Code?

Google for it, if not: it's excellent:

CHAPTER ONE: Handsome yet unmarried historian Hugh Heckman stood in the National Archives Building in Washington, D.C., squinting through the bulletproof glass at the U.S. Constitution. Suddenly, he made an amazing discovery.

''My God!'' he said, out loud. ``This is incredible! Soon I will say what it is.'

I also enjoyed Language Log's takedown of the DVC. Granted, a linguist isn't necessarily the best person to review trash fiction, but, oh, the snark!

[charlie]

7. Lol

Found the Barry column. Cheeky bastid was having a blast, wasn't he? I loved the bit with the shark -- even in Japan, where I was living at the time, if there was an American about, the book wasn't far away.

(If Dave ever wants a day off, he could repurpose that into a Tom Friedman parody without too many changes)

Whoo, the linguist is not amused. He's every bit right, reading the book is like driving 30 miles of speed bumps.

Funny, funny stuff. Thanks!

[Name removed]

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[rd_kent]

10. How does spewing a yoda like comment make one wise?

It is just more of the same: made up shit to cover the fact they dont know what they are talking about.