An Explaination to the Resistance of Scientific Explaination

by Will

As the world continues to turn, you'll find more and more people resisting scientific explanation and turning to faith based explanations which can be detailed in recent events such as: The Flying Spaghetti Monster, The Virgin Mary Grilled Cheese, perhaps those who are still denying Global Warming or the NY Yankees being the greatest baseball team that ever existed.

An interesting paper created by a Yale Psychologist and a Yale PhD candidate (Paul Bloom and Deena Skolnick Weisberg) states that it's because those of us who do it, think like children. Here's an excerpt:

"The main source of resistance to scientific ideas concerns what children know prior to their exposure to science. The last several decades of developmental psychology has made it abundantly clear that humans do not start off as "blank slates." Rather, even one year-olds possess a rich understanding of both the physical world (a "naïve physics") and the social world (a "naïve psychology"). Babies know that objects are solid, that they persist over time even when they are out of sight, that they fall to the ground if unsupported, and that they do not move unless acted upon. They also understand that people move autonomously in response to social and physical events, that they act and react in accord with their goals, and that they respond with appropriate emotions to different situations.

These intuitions give children a head start when it comes to understanding and learning about objects and people. But these intuitions also sometimes clash with scientific discoveries about the nature of the world, making certain scientific facts difficult to learn... "

You can read more of their thesis here.

| 05/31/07 | Commentary