The bad news for science supporters boils down to a single sentence from a recent report by Yale Psychology professor Paul Bloom: “Some resistance to scientific ideas is a human universal.” This resistance, Bloom reports in the May issue of Science, comes from the tendency for the young human mind to see the world as “designed” and to see the brain as separate from the physical body, both of which are traditional tenets of religion. Science has tried to refute both ideas with the concept of evolution and the argument that the “mind” is a chemical process in the brain.
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Meanwhile, most adults accept scientific beliefs more because of authority figures than understanding. Take electricity. Most people don’t know how electrons, circuits, and alternating currents work, but they “believe” in electricity nevertheless. Electricity turns on the lights. “You can’t know everything, life’s too short,” Bloom said. “There’s nothing wrong with an educated deference [to authority].”
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