The Nature of Science 7because maintaining the belief system is more important than allowing any inconvenient
facts to undermine it. Many people find great comfort in such belief systems. That’s fine,
as long as they don’t call these ideas “scientific.” People around the world believe a wide
variety of things, and they are entitled to do so. As long as they don’t endanger themselves
or others, that’s OK.
The main exception, of course, is when a belief system is detrimental to the believers or
to other people. There are cults of “snake handlers” in the Appalachians who caress poison-
ous rattlesnakes and copperheads during their religious ceremonies with the conviction that
God will protect them from snakebite—and they are regularly bitten and killed (70 of these
snake handlers have died from snakebites in the past 80 years, including the founder of the
cult). In Darwinian terms, this belief system is so hazardous to the believers that they will
eventually die out, and a harsh form of natural selection will weed out this self-destructive
religion. There are cults that commit ritual suicide, such as Jim Jones’s Peoples Temple, whose
members drank cyanide-laced Kool-Aid in the Guyana jungle, killing 913 people in 1978, or
the Heaven’s Gate cult, with 39 people committing ritual suicide in 1997 at the urging of their
leader, believing that aliens were about to take them to heaven. Likewise, there are ascetic
monks who starve themselves to death or stare into the sun in search of enlightenment until
they are blind; they, too, are harming themselves and endangering their own survival. Some
would say that religious wars, such as the continual battles among Christians, Muslims, and
Jews that have plagued the Middle East for over 1,000 years, or the Catholic-Protestant war-
fare in Ireland, or over much of Europe since the Reformation, or the horrors of the Inquisi-
tion, or the Muslim-Hindu wars in India since before Pakistan split away, are arguments that
religious belief systems can be murderous and detrimental to the believers.
Many people who have strong belief systems that seem to conflict with science want it
both ways. They accept their belief system in explaining most aspects of the world but still
accept scientific explanations and advances where and when they need them. Some people
in the Western world depend on modern scientific medicine for their improved health and
chances of survival, yet they refuse to accept important aspects of science (fig. 1.3) that are
a part of that great improvement in medicine (such as the rapid evolutionary change that
makes viruses and bacteria dangerous to us each year). As Carl Sagan (1996:30) put it, “If
you want to save your child from polio, you can pray or you can inoculate.” Extreme fun-
damentalists push a strange model of the earth (discussed in chapter 3); they call it “flood
geology”—yet, if they had any firsthand practical experience with real geology and accepted
the results, they would see the absurdity of flood geology. More importantly, they would not
benefit from the oil, coal, and natural gas that modern geology has provided all of us, and
which flood geology would have no chance of discovering.
This is the strange situation in which we find ourselves. The modern world runs on
science and technology, and our future economic and social well-being rely on continuing
to make scientific and technological advances. Yet when extremists learn something from
science that they don’t want to hear (like evolution), they reject the very system that has
made their lives better and that they willingly accept in most other circumstances. As science
educator Bill Nye the Science Guy put it, “The natural world is a package deal; you don’t get
to select the facts which you like and which you don’t.” Or as astrophysicist Neil deGrasse
Tyson said, “When different experiments give you the same result, it is no longer subject to
your opinion. That’s the good thing about science. It’s true, whether or not you believe in it.
That’s why it works.”