was pretty affirmative I don’t think I
got everybody though how about this the
ones I missed do you believe in science
okay now how about this have you entered
into a personal relationship with
empirical data
okay good yes I’m we’re still nodding
right so we’re like yes I know my data
and my data knows me all right good okay
now back to my original question let’s
see everybody do you believe in science
good okay well this question this
question about whether or not we believe
in science has become one of the most
divisive topics of conversation today
it’s causing horrible political divides
devastating social divides and worse
it’s causing divides and families and
communities we in academia tend to point
our fingers at others we call them anti
intellectual voluntarily ignorant the
enemies of evidence and then when they
turn around and call us elitists we take
it as a compliment not a compliment in
16 days April 22nd belief in science
will take center stage as scientists and
science enthusiasts across the nation
march in a great Earth Day demonstration
I’ll be there I’ve recruited an
extroverted friend to sign me up for
scooping potato salad I figure I can
hide social anxiety behind starch and
mayonnaise
I’ll be there even though I don’t
believe in science and even though I’m
asking you not to believe in it either
oh I know wrong crowd right we don’t
worry it’ll be okay I will be there
because I think that science literacy is
a matter of life and death and I support
anybody who wants to make that easier to
attain I am he
because science literacy needs to start
here with us the science communicators
we need to think about how we
communicate before we go marching down
Main Street and try to come up with
witty chants that will win hearts and
minds I don’t think we’ve been doing a
very good job of winning hearts and
minds lately in fact the opposite I
think we’ve been losing hearts and minds
it happened pretty big ly in November
during the 2016 Democratic National
Convention I believe in science became a
major rallying cry speaking on her
commitment to fight global warming
Hillary Clinton declared I believe in
science an echo of what former Maryland
Governor Martin O’Malley had said about
her in his speech Hillary Clinton like
you and me believes in science it was
O’Malley in fact who said that Donald
Trump doesn’t believe in the science
well to his credit Donald Trump had
never said that he didn’t believe in
science in a conversation with a
Washington Post’s Fred Hiatt he had said
a nota great believer in manmade climate
change and he’d even gone as far as to
say that global warming was a hoax
perpetuated by China these claims were
mislead possibly mendacious to be sure
but what made them particularly
troubling is that they were just
borrowing language that the Democrats
were already using to talk about science
the language of belief which allows us
to ignore that science is a social
process of testing ideas interpreting
data and then coming up with new ideas
to test not this this thing this entity
that tells us what to think and how to
behave because we all know how much the
human species likes to be told what to
think and how to behave the language of
belief suggests that evidence based
conclusions are matters of faith
essentially it turns science into a god
and don’t get me wrong
science is usually benevolent
offering advice that even I and my
colleagues and the humanities can get
behind as in elite Daily’s science says
reading books may actually make you live
longer but the problem is that lately
science has come to dictate things about
our private sacred spaces spaces which
need to be known intuitively as well as
cognitively spaces that have
traditionally been the domain of
religion science has come to dictate
everything from how children should be
raised as in NPR’s how to raise
brilliant children according to science
to how much sex an individual should
have as in medical expresses why science
says you should have more sex it is even
claimed to determine matters of love and
eternity as in the Atlantic’s there’s no
such thing as everlasting love according
to science well that’s inspiring we
might think that this is harmless
rhetorical flair clickbait right but the
problem is that when we turn science
into a god science is going to encounter
the same challenge faced by any deity
why do you do when people stop believing
but you can’t choose not to believe in
science we say science is factual and
evidence-based no actually that’s where
we’ve been wrong and this I think is
where our conversation is breaking down
science here is personification it gives
a name a voice and an intelligence to
data or to the natural forces governing
those data but actually data doesn’t
speak it can’t interpret itself it
requires people researchers
communicators to interpret it and so
when you say science says actually you
probably mean that a researcher has
interpreted his or her data to mean
whatever it is you’re about to tell me
and that a peer review board has
accepted that conclude
as plausible so when we personify
science then we’re allowed to forget
that actually we’re talking about human
beings here men and women who are
involved in rich vibrant conversations
and we’re allowed to imagine instead
that this great ethereal entity has
spoken from the realm of natural law to
tell us things like cockroach milk is
the next superfood or that the secret to
a happy marriage is drinking together or
that liberals not conservatives are
psychotic or that a childhood vaccine
has been linked to autism okay but look
I’m not here to metaphor shame anybody
we need metaphor in order to communicate
science from time to time researchers
will have a need for language that
signifies things that are too vast or
too complex to be expressed fully Albert
Einstein called that experience and
encounter with the mysterious he said
the most beautiful experience we can
have is the mysterious and that he was
satisfied with the humble attempt to
understand even a tiny portion of the
reason that manifests itself in nature
because scientific inquiry takes for
granted that the universe and its
processes are intelligible interaction
with mysterious feels like interaction
with an intelligent entity so it’s
natural for us to personify that entity
and to give it names like science or as
Einstein has done in his essay nature so
this science says problem is mostly a
problem for popular journalism memes and
phrases tossed around in conversation or
on bumper stickers most scientists are
not going to use science says or
according to science in scholarly
articles I think that’s because
researchers are keenly aware of their
place within a sometimes contentious
conversation and there’s also this
lovely thing called impostor syndrome
scientists will however personify
nature all the dang time think about it
think about this phrase natural
selection
what is selection but the act of
carefully choosing someone or something
over another that’s a human act in order
to select something I need to have some
intelligence and free will and yes
evolutionary biologists have given the
phrase natural selection a new
definition that includes things like
environmental and genetic influences and
something about the thriving of
organisms but that doesn’t change the
fact that this phrase is and has always
been personification not convinced all
right how about this in February of 2016
the open access Medical Journal plus-1
published an article by a team of
Italian researchers led by Simona
giardini called on nature’s strategy for
assigning genetic code multiplicity in
this article the author’s personify
nature as an intelligent agent that
strategizes makes decisions and even
leaves hidden messages for the
researchers to interpret the researchers
said that their purpose was to find the
origins of standard genetic code biased
code on assignment for incorporating all
the amino acids that have survived
nature’s selection notice by the way the
capital letter indicating the proper
noun alright I am I’m not going to ask
you not to believe in nature I don’t
think that nature is as dangerous as
science because it doesn’t give the
impression that the claims of a single
researcher or research team are somehow
the words of them an omniscient deity
but I will ask you to consider that when
you reference nature you are actually
gesturing towards something supernatural
nature is the physical force regarded as
causing and regulating the phenomena of
the world if we follow that through the
nature must have existed before the
phenomena of the world in order to cause
it and it
exist beyond the phenomena of the world
in order to regulate it so therefore it
is supernatural okay so maybe I should
ask you do you believe in nature oh now
we start to get into a bit of a tangle
don’twe right because although I’ve
asked you not to talk about science like
it’s a god but nature for centuries
we’ve toyed with the idea of nature as
divinity we can call that pantheism 17th
century philosopher Baruch Spinoza was a
major proponent of this idea and
Einstein was a fan of Spinoza
so yeah when you’re referencing nature
you are actually gesturing towards
something supernatural and some
philosophies you’re gesturing toward a
kind of divinity okay but what if we say
it in another language what if we say it
in Chinese what if instead of nature we
say Jew and what if when we translate
Jew back into English it becomes creator
oh no absolutely not whack job
humanities professor on the stage who
let her in here no no there with me on
this please because last year something
happens that I’m afraid is going to rock
the relationship between science
communicators and their audience for a
long time if we don’t decide here
together today that we reject this event
and its outcome one month before the
publication of on nature strategy plus
one published an article by team of
researchers led by Ming Jin lu of
china’s was on university of science and
technology it was just a small study
about the link between the hand
structure and its function for two
months nothing happened then in early
March the paper started to go viral plus
one began receiving complaints about
language in the article the complaints
focused
three separate sentences which were
scattered throughout the 16 page report
each of which made reference to a
creator the term appeared in the papers
abstract introduction and conclusion and
it was used similarly each time the
author’s felt that their study indicated
that the hands mechanical architecture
is the proper design by the creator for
dexterous performance okay so the first
comment was posted to the article on
plus-ones website on the 2nd of March by
a reader who identified himself as dr.
Lynn H Snyder cell biologists turned
science journalist should I – wrote that
even if you should not be able to
convince the authors editors and fear of
yours of the study of the non-existence
of a divine creator he wish that they
would consider that humans occasionally
use their hand as a tool of masturbation
one of a multitude of daily tasks
performed in a comfortable way
masturbation is a sinful activity
according to most religions thus the
hands must not have been to Baia created
by a divine creator but in fact possibly
by the devil himself to lead the
humanity and other eights into
temptation yeah within seventy was
intuitive within a few hours about 70
comments had been posted to the article
most of which were nasty disparaging
insulting and downright rude yes folks
trolls wear lab coats to the controversy
spread to sew it to social media with
the creation of two new hashtags hashtag
creator gate and hashtag hand of God Lou
try to explain that the word in his head
was actually Jo which can be translated
as either nature or creator but by the
fourth of March two days after the first
complaints had been posted online +1 had
received such a barrage of criticisms
that the journal issued a retraction of
the article this was a problem this was
a bad thing
because it was a double standard because
although it’s true that science can’t
prove the existence of a divine
intelligent creator it’s also true that
science can’t prove the existence of an
intelligent nature but nobody bats an
eye at the use of the term nature and
scientific discourse and that’s
hypocritical and frankly I’m afraid that
if we allow this one perspective to
dominate the conversation then it’s that
kind of hypocrisy which is going to
further isolate us from our audience who
overwhelmingly and increasingly do
believe in a divine intelligent creator
you may have heard that religious nuns
that is people who are not affiliated
with any particular religion are on the
rise in America but you may be surprised
to hear that they are on the decline
globally by 2050 religious nuns are
expected to decline from 16% of the
population to 13% of the world’s
population and even then religious nuns
does not mean atheists in fact a Pew
study of religious nuns in America found
that over two-thirds of religious nuns
said that they believe in God
more than half said that they feel a
deep connection to nature and the earth
more than 1/3 classified themselves as
spiritual though not religious and one
in five said that they pray every day so
yeah our audience and yes even the
majority of scientists are willing to
accept that a divine intelligence might
be a possibility and yet here we are
publicly mocking references to God in
scientific articles well in the same
breath we’ll talk about science like
it’s a god we call our critics and high
intellectual are we being anti intuitive
anti empathetic astrophysicist Neil
deGrasse Tyson once observed that a
careful reading of older texts shows
that authors invoke divinity only when
they reach the boundaries of their
understanding they appeal to a higher
power
only when staring into the ocean of the
ignorance that’s true but what Tyson
overlooks is that every researcher will
have to encounter the ocean of their own
ignorance and it’s the experience of
that limitation the experience of the
mysterious which sustains the curiosity
that leads to scientific progress Ming
Jin lu encountered it when contemplating
the perfection of the hands design
simona Gherardini encountered it when
contemplating the mystery of genetic
code redundancy to suggest in fact that
there will one day no longer be a need
to reference the mysterious imposes more
limits on the future of scientific
inquiry than does a personification of
that mysterious it suggests that there
will be no need for scientist or
scientific investigation because
everything in the universe will be known
and that fullness of knowledge will be
conceived in the mind of each individual
that’s not going to happen and so I’m
here asking you to give up your belief
in science because I don’t think that
science is a very good name for the
mysterious science is what we do it’s
how we interact with the mysterious we
can’t let that be forgotten but on the
same hand we also have to accept that
references to divinity are not only
normal in scientific discourse sometimes
they’re necessary scientism the belief
in the supremacy of the scientific
method and the rejection of all beliefs
that cannot be proven empirically is an
idea that should be debated in
philosophical discourse not
indiscriminately acted upon within the
pages of the scientific article we have
to stop presenting science as a deity
that wants to dethrone the God of our
audiences faith we need to invite all
faiths into scientific communication we
need to show that science is non
partisan and nondenominational we need
to invite everyone to talk about and
embrace the mysterious it is after all
the most beautiful experience we can
have thank you you