> Why is it that [...] so many people intentionally choose to "hate on" science?
My impression is that people miss the Devil. You know, the horny guy with the pitchfork: something well identified, to hate personally, almost anthropomorphically, for everything that goes wrong with their lives, with the world, and with their lack of control and understanding of it.
Disclaimers:
1) the ravings that follow are grounded in anecdotal and mostly Western-European observations. They only partially and imperfectly apply to the USA, but that you'll find significant similarities.
2) I'm intentionally caricaturing to get my point across. Just keep the grain of truth deep inside.
Consider the caricature of the homeopathic believer: ecologist, liberal, anti-vaccine, anti-big-corps, who might have graduated in humanities but probably not in sciences, who sort-of believes in astrology, completely believes in every alternative medicine that either uses a couple of greek-sounding big words to explain its "theoretical foundation", or draws from extreme-oriental mysticism. Easily sympathetic to conspiracy theories, especially when it's about big money colluding to destroy the ecosystem or maintain suffering populations into poverty.
This person is typically defiant of organized religions, be it Catholicism or conservative protestantism. But although she--she seems to be majoritarily female--rejected organized religions, she still needs identifiable, if possible anthropomorphic, incarnations of Good and Evil to worship and hate respectively. Ecology is her Pachamama, a thinly veiled reboot of the Mother-Goddess cult. Science, this mysterious and powerful thing that's used by corporations to shape the world and sometimes dehumanize it, is the instrument of Evil. And her reactions to science at large, including medicine, are uncannily similar to her (great-?)grand-mother's reaction to the Devil. First she'll pretend it doesn't work; if it's too obvious that it does, then she'll be convinced that nasty side effects are going to haunt those who use it, and she'll be desperate to believe in any hollier alternative. And when her religious views contradict her obvious immediate interests, she'll use science, but first she's temporarily unplug any part of her intellect that might see the contradictions between her faith and her acts.
This could probably be fixed, by offering less counter-productive ways for people to indulge into their religious feelings. Established mainstream religions don't cut it anymore for most people in Europe, and for increasingly more people in the USA, especially those of liberal inclination. They need a better alternative religion than anti-scientific new-age cults. The difficulty in engineering such an alternative is that in order to work, it must be non-obvious that cults are manufactured by humans...
My impression is that people miss the Devil. You know, the horny guy with the pitchfork: something well identified, to hate personally, almost anthropomorphically, for everything that goes wrong with their lives, with the world, and with their lack of control and understanding of it.
Disclaimers:
1) the ravings that follow are grounded in anecdotal and mostly Western-European observations. They only partially and imperfectly apply to the USA, but that you'll find significant similarities.
2) I'm intentionally caricaturing to get my point across. Just keep the grain of truth deep inside.
Consider the caricature of the homeopathic believer: ecologist, liberal, anti-vaccine, anti-big-corps, who might have graduated in humanities but probably not in sciences, who sort-of believes in astrology, completely believes in every alternative medicine that either uses a couple of greek-sounding big words to explain its "theoretical foundation", or draws from extreme-oriental mysticism. Easily sympathetic to conspiracy theories, especially when it's about big money colluding to destroy the ecosystem or maintain suffering populations into poverty.
This person is typically defiant of organized religions, be it Catholicism or conservative protestantism. But although she--she seems to be majoritarily female--rejected organized religions, she still needs identifiable, if possible anthropomorphic, incarnations of Good and Evil to worship and hate respectively. Ecology is her Pachamama, a thinly veiled reboot of the Mother-Goddess cult. Science, this mysterious and powerful thing that's used by corporations to shape the world and sometimes dehumanize it, is the instrument of Evil. And her reactions to science at large, including medicine, are uncannily similar to her (great-?)grand-mother's reaction to the Devil. First she'll pretend it doesn't work; if it's too obvious that it does, then she'll be convinced that nasty side effects are going to haunt those who use it, and she'll be desperate to believe in any hollier alternative. And when her religious views contradict her obvious immediate interests, she'll use science, but first she's temporarily unplug any part of her intellect that might see the contradictions between her faith and her acts.
This could probably be fixed, by offering less counter-productive ways for people to indulge into their religious feelings. Established mainstream religions don't cut it anymore for most people in Europe, and for increasingly more people in the USA, especially those of liberal inclination. They need a better alternative religion than anti-scientific new-age cults. The difficulty in engineering such an alternative is that in order to work, it must be non-obvious that cults are manufactured by humans...