Doubt Technology Too

One thing I’ve never understood about science-haters is how selective they are. They don’t like evolution, but they love airplanes and computers and microwaves and medicine. I wonder what they would say if someone told them that new drugs are often developed with evolution in mind. They probably wouldn’t believe it.

And why can’t you trust a scientist not to lie when he says that radiological dating proves the earth is about four and a half billion years old, but you can when he says that the shape of a plane’s wing creates lift and enables it to fly? It’s the same people using the same method, so why do they trust some results and not others?

Now, I’m not saying we should believe everything every scientist says because science has been so remarkably good at giving us new toys (everything in the computer I’m writing this with and you’re reading it with was developed by some scientist). For example, String Theory is very quite probably wrong, but thousands of theoretical Physicists line up behind it, declaring it to be the Theory of Everything. It may be, but until there’s good evidence (theoretical or experimental), we should probably reserve judgment.

But doubting evolution is like doubting that planes can fly. We’ve seen it happen in nature, we’ve seen it happen in the lab, we’ve seen it happen in the fossil record, we’ve seen it happen in the genetic record, and we understand much how it happens. If you doubt evolution, you should doubt everything else science had given you, and go live in a cave somewhere. At least then you’d be wrong and consistent. Because as Emerson said, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.”

I’m not holding my breath.