Consequences of Critical Thinking

Chapter 2 of David Levy’s popular text book warns us that concepts must be judged by their consequences, rather than trying to fit them in to a rigid pigeonhole of true or false.

Sadly, the Republicans have made full use of this theory, but without paying attention to the other tenets of critical thinking: ensuring a relevant and comprehensive frame of reference.

While a few Republicans have started saying “Life” must refer to more than the fetal stage of humanity, Democrats have failed to make hundreds of points about the damage that Trump and Friends have done to the environment and industrial safety, to name just two subjects. Science is only of interest to Trump if it’s related to enhancing the military.

But that isn’t how science works. The whole reason for the strength and power of science is that it gives humans an epistemologically robust way to understand and influence the world.

Science has had beneficial and detrimental effects on humanity over the years. If we include the early technological achievements of humanity, domestication of plants and animals, then civilization, we got complexity, choice, and more chances for expression of our individual potential. But at the cost of the creation of a huge social underclass, deprived, to varying degrees, over the last 10,000 years, of many of the sweet fruits the upper tip of this complex hierarchy enjoy.

Education, and particularly science education, is the basic foundation for any remedy to humanity’s ills.

Teaching illogical faith based “facts” to young children rots the structure to which any future knowledge will be fastened. If Mary was a literal physical virgin when she gave birth to Jesus, then no facts that we can discover or verify for ourselves are ever necessarily relevant. If 3=1, then no facts that we can discover or verify for ourselves are ever necessarily relevant.

Illogical faith based facts corrode any potential for developing knowledge in the absence of a group of similarly brainwashed people.

If God is individually protecting people from CoVid19, why bother with masks? The lessons of the great plagues of 600+ years ago, that even the cardinals were not immune to the bacteria, seem to be lost on the evangelical right. It’s medical science, a PORTION of the web of scientific progress, that has, over many centuries, allowed us to regain the lifespan of our “primitive” ancestors.

Science, more than literature, religion, history, allows humanity to double, and triple (etc.) check, our theories and ideas.

Neils Bohr, the great physicist, taught that the opposite of a fact is a lie, but the opposite of a GREAT TRUTH is ANOTHER GREAT TRUTH.

Values are great truths. But the society that doesn’t base its values on a factual foundation is eventually in for rough going.

I hope that those people who are aligned with a fact based reality can find a way to help the rest of the world clean their glasses. That includes me. It’s been very depressing to hear people saying that they are voting based on their 401k or their friend’s jobs making military equipment so we can sell it to the Saudis to kill starving baby Yeminis. That sure is Pro Life. (The last sentence is sarcastic, for those who are challenged in those matters.)