Worldviews

Real quick one this time. I know when I say that they turn out long, but:
I watched Jesus Camp the other day. It really got me thinking about worldviews. This is going to be expanded on in a later post, probably, but the religious (especially fundamentalist) worldview really does not understand the scientific one. This is why you get people trying to "refute" evolution by claiming (erroneously, by the way) that Darwin renounced his ideas on his deathbed. Religion is informed by revelation, which is its own evidence; the only quality revelation needs to have to be authentic is to come from a legitimate revelator. The actual content is irrelevant. They believe that the non-religious view the world through the same lens, so to undermine a view they don't like they attack the "source," the person who propagated it. They think this renders it illegitimate.

What they do not understand is that in the secular, scientific world, data is divorced from the discoverer. Darwin was wrong about lots of things. He may (or may not) have held various morally or scientifically questionable beliefs. This does nothing, nothing to undermine the fundamental truth of evolution through natural selection. We don't believe in revelation. A statement is true or false on its own merits and an idea succeeds of fails on its content, not based on the presenter.

There's a lot more I want to say: Religion accepts the unknowable, supports magical thinking, and denies the possibility of understanding fundamental truths. If science had not won out over religion in the field of medicine, we would have no interest in discovering the root causes of ailments. Science believes that the universe is a fundamentally understandable place where effects mostly follow causes (let's avoid quantum for now, folks) and the mechanism by which this occurs, even if it is not currently known, can be studied and understood. It is knowable. This is what sets it apart from the magico-religious view and why science is ultimately triumphant: because it says "Yes, we can understand this."