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"Scientific Disinformation" is the Latest Existential Threat to Humanity (aided by Religion) [1]

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Date: 2025-01-02

There is an article is this month’s Skeptical Inquirer that came, as they say, to my attention: A Triple Threat to Humanity: Climate Change, Pandemics, and Anti-Science

Over the past decade, many of us in the scientific community have come to appreciate the existential threat we face today—a threat unlike any we’ve witnessed since the days of the U.S. and Soviet Cold War in the last half of the twentieth century. While even today the specter of nuclear annihilation remains, especially given the escalation of hot wars in Ukraine-Russia and Israel-Iran, we now face entirely new twenty-first-century forces that place the future of humankind in even greater peril. Our newest and gravest challenge may not feel as acute as the 1980s Cold War threat of mutual assured destruction (MAD). There are no missiles with nuclear warheads crisscrossing the oceans. But it is every bit as real, posing a threat to civilization and our planet. This NextGen MAD consists of three synergistic components.

The authors in no way dismiss the threats of war and the possibility of a nuclear exchange, but they do not want those threats to cause us to lose sight of new ones, specifically:

climate change

pandemics

scientific disinformation

The attacks on climate change have been going on for generations, largely led by industrial titans who have made fortunes from activities and resources that damage our climate and who would rather continue doing so than switch to others that could help the climate but are less certain to help their bottom line. The resistance to vaccines and denial of pandemics is something the authors mention, but don’t explore in depth. So IMO it is something that has lurked beneath the surface — there have always been vaccine deniers — but has lately moved from the fringe to the center. I believe a lot of this has to do with Trump’s inability to handle the Covid crisis plus his refusal to admit that, coupled with his fear that acknowledging it and trying to deal with it rationally would cost him the election. (It is a sad irony that this is in fact what cost him the election.) Trump not only tried to destroy Anthony Fauci for committing the mortal sin of disagreeing with him on the evidence, but now he has chosen RFKJr, whose main claim to fame (aside from choosing the right father) is his nonsensical argument that vaccines are dangerous, to be in charge of the country’s health.

This brings us to the third and perhaps the most insidious component of all: a well-organized, financed, politically motivated, and steadily globalizing campaign of disinformation and attacks against mainstream science that makes it extremely difficult to mount an effective global response to the climate and pandemic threats. . . . Increasingly, we recognize how the forces behind the attacks on climate science and biomedicine (around vaccines and pandemics) have begun to converge.

The authors identify 5 forces they believed are behind this (the “5 ‘P’s”, they call them:

Plutocrats

Petrostates

Pros (“hired guns”)

Propagandists

Press

But there is one important player they missed: Priests (by which I mean religious fundamentalists generally).

I can’t go into this in too much detail, because this diary would turn into a book (besides, I’ve already done that — A God of Our Invention). But, briefly: modern science, which began in the Renaissance and flourished under the Enlightenment, proceeds on the basis of observation and examination, which then gives rise to questions about what we have observed. That leads us to develop hypotheses, which, if tested and sufficiently validated, become theories, such as the theory of gravity and the theory of evolution. However, even a widely accepted theory is subject to reevaluation on the basis of newer evidence and newer understanding that cause us to doubt our conclusions. (Example: The prevailing theory of the universe as the result of a single “big bang” has recently been challenged: A New Theory Says the Universe Is Rebooting Itself.)

In other words, science depends on doubt. Religions, particularly revealed religions such as Christianity, have difficulty tolerating, much less accepting, the possibility of doubt. The New Testament is explicit about this:

But ask in faith, never doubting, for the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea, driven and tossed by the wind. James 1:6 (NRSV translation)

In the fourth century, Augustine warned against scientific inquiry:

From this disease of curiosity are all those strange sights exhibited in the theatre. Hence men go on to search out the hidden powers of nature (which is besides our end), which to know profits not, and wherein men desire nothing but to know. (Confessions, Chapter XXXV)

Scientists did not set out to disempower religion; Descartes tried to use doubt (“I doubt, therefore I think”) to logically prove the existence of God; Newton famously believed in astrology; Einstein, though he didn’t believe in a personal God, objected to quantum physics (perhaps his biggest blunder), saying that “God does not play dice with the universe.”

The existence or non-existence of some sort of divine force in the universe is not something that can be proven or disproven; it must be taken on faith (or not). However, evidence for a particular God — eg, the Bible — can be scientifically examined and evaluated. And in the case of the Bible, found wanting. Floods and famines, diseases and earthquakes, all have been found to have natural causes and are unrelated to human action.

The authors of the Bible, and those who lived through its events, were not scientists and had little if any understanding of nature. Additionally, they found themselves having to explain human actions such as war and crucifixion. It was not acceptable for them to admit that some other entity, whether Babylon or Rome, was simply more powerful than they were; no, these were actions directed by God in order to teach them a lesson.

The explanations and justifications that these ancient peoples developed to cope with the world as they then understood it are no longer viable, given what we know about the world today. And that is what makes science, and also history and other humanities, so dangerous to those whose lives are given meaning by those peoples’ ancient texts.

In saying all this, I am not (despite appearances) attacking religion per se. There are many scientists who hold religious beliefs, and there are many religious authorities who accept the findings of science. (800 years ago, the Jewish scholar Maimonides wrote that those parts of the Bible which do not accord with our observations must be read figuratively rather than literally.) But there are too many Americans who insist that only the Bible is true, that the world must be restricted to their understanding of it (which is based on 10th century BCE thinking overlain with a touch of first century Greece and Rome), and that any challenge to their distorted view of the world is not only wrong but risks the wrath of an angry God.

Trump finds these people useful, though I am sure he himself has no concerns whatever about risking God’s wrath. But Speaker Mike Johnson is a true believer, as is Vance, as are others Trump is surrounding himself with. Musk, though, is almost certainly not one of them, which will start yet another civil war among the Trumpies.

Fundamentalists don’t believe in doing anything about climate change, either because God won’t let it happen, or because God is making it happen as part of the approaching apocalypse. Musk’s attitude toward climate change appears to pivot from time to time. But both groups are insisting that science and scientific evidence yield to whatever their personal mandates and beliefs require.

Which is to say, they want to make decisions about climate, about diseases, about gender, about reality in general not on the basis of observation and evidence but on the basis of their predetermined preconceptions. And that means the promotion of scientific disinformation.

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