Science has sent orbiters to Neptune,
eradicated smallpox and created a supercomputer that can
do 60 trillion calculations per second Science frees us from superstition and dogma
and enables us to base our knowledge on evidence Well, most of us Previously, I've explored how organized faith and
primitive religious values blight our lives You take the women and dress them
like whores on the street I don't dress women, they dress themselves They do now, but you were aware it as a norm The fault line runs deeper even than religion There're two ways of looking at the world:
through faith and superstition or through the rigours of logic,
observation and evidence, through reason Yet today, reason has a battle on its hands I want to confront the epidemic of
irrational superstitious thinking Would you understand somebody on the
spirit side with the name Charles? I believe, I did...
You really believe it? I'm really, actually 100% that is true
Seriously you believe it? Because it's been proven to me
against my rationality It's a multimillion-pound industry
that impoverishes our culture Astrology leads toward the divine and the sacred,
... you don't like very much And throws up new age gurus who
exhort us to run away from reality The treeness is the spiritual quality Or the rockness As a scientist, I don't think our indulgence
of irrational superstition is harmless I believe it profoundly undermines civilization Reason and respect for evidence
are the source of our progress our safeguard against fundamentalists and
those who profit from obscuring the truth We live in dangerous times when
superstition is gaining ground and
rational science is under attack In this program, I want to
take on the enemies of reason 300 years ago, in the age of enlightenment scientists and philosophers
from Galileo to David Hume had the courage to stand up for
intellectual principles and reason The rational science they pioneered
has given us tangible benefits Everything from antibiotics to electricity,
sewage systems to Sat Nav And it's not just material progress Increased life expectancy,
health and leisure provided by modern
medicine and industrial technology have given more people
more time than ever before to educate themselves, express their
creativity and ponder existence And yet, into this better world
that reason has built primitive darkness has coming back a
disturbing pick'n'mix of superstitions Where better to start my journey
than a New Age fair? Hello, what do you do? (Hello, there.)
What kind of readings do you do? All kinds. I do the tarot and then I also
do the crystal-ball. This is George. Hello, what can you do for me? Well, we can take your aura photography
All right. I like that. Yes. What do I do?
Just sit in the front of that?
Take a seat, please. Should I take my glasses off? What we got here? You know, you have got a couple of
spirit guides around you at the moment Because I think that something
in your life's changing I think this is about you as well
being more comfortable with yourself Now what you have here?
Would you have somebody in
spirits really, really close to you and he's got the arms around your neck Well, that's very nice to know All these people reap the rewards
of science and reason but many here revel in a foggy suspicion
of scientific thinking Ok, so you could teach me how
to use my psychic energy?
(Yes) Is that the idea? Yes. You can rely
Much better than on that,
than on your head Irrationality is woven into the fabric
of modern life, we unthinkingly
indulge unscientific delusion I'm the, rather skitty Gemini Aquarius Pisces Astrology is so pervasive that just about
everyone has been indoctrinated with
the alleged character of their star sign They're fiery, a bit unreliable.
They love traveling They're very expansive
They're quite spiritual Loyal, spend too much money a good leader They could be a bit mood swing
one way and the other they could be very upbeat at one minute
and then a bit down and you'll never know what to get them
as my husband says A full quarter of the British population
claim to believe in astrology That's more than believe in any
one of the gods touted by religions Day in, day out, astrological horoscopes get
far more newspaper column inches than science Amusingly, it falls foul of our modern
taboo against lazy stereotyping How would we react if a newspaper published
a daily column that read something like this? Germans: It is in your nature to
be hard-working and methodical which should serve you well at work today In your personal relationships,
especially this evening you'll need to curb your natural
tendency to obey orders Chinese: Inscrutability has many advantages,
but it may be your undoing today British: Your stiff upper lip may
serve you well in business dealings but try to relax and let yourself go
in your social life And so on, through 12 national stereotypes Of course, the astrology columns
are not as offensive as that but we should ask ourselves exactly
where the difference lies Both are guilty of facade discrimination
dividing humanity up into exclusive groups
based on no evidence So, now I want to find out how those
who trade in such irrational nonsense
can possibly justify what they do? This is a map of the cosmos
with London in the very center I always thought that by the 21st
century science and reason would
have long since cleaned up and yet every day of the week
we're encouraged to retreat into
the fog the superstitious past Astrology is a primitive belief system
made into elaborate pseudo-science It arrogantly makes humans
the focal point of the universe The movement of planets is supposed
to signify petty developments
in our career or love life It was developed in the 2nd century AD
by the philosopher Claudius Ptolemy
and has not moved on since Despite the discovery of new planets and
despite a shift in the earth's rotational axis that has thrown Ptolemy﹑s zodiac
out by 23 degrees You could ask a question
You can say, 'Who has stolen my money?' It never made sense when it was first
invented and it makes even less sense now Read it off as though, you mean, they get it right? Didn't an actual physical influence
for planets that somehow beams down
and influences us, people? I think it's very hard to see that. I think if you
try to understand astrology as a causal agent I think that's hard to imagine how
that would happen. I think you have
to look at the planets as signifiers When you look at the movement
of Saturn around the zodiac it's a very strong signifier of
what's going on in individual lives I don't even understand how they
could possibly be signifiers, I mean How could the rise of Saturn possibly
be a signifier of something that's going
on physiologically in a person's body The position of planets in... How would it work? This is what
you keep coming back to ask me. How could it possibly work?
(How would that work? Yes) And I told you I don't know.
It's a deep dark mystery What isn't a deep dark mystery is
why the trite vagaries of newspaper
horoscopes seem to chime with readers Psychologists have identified
what's known as the Barnum Effect where by people tend to believe statements
are accurate for them personally while in fact they're general enough
to apply to anyone We could devise a little experiment
where we take your forecasts and then give some of them straight,
to some of them randomized Sometimes give Virgo the Pisces
forecast etc. and then ask people
how accurate they were? Yes, that would be a perverse
thing to do, is it? It would be yes, but it isn't,
wouldn't that be a good test? A test of what? Well, how accurate you are? I think your intention there is mischief and
I think what you then get back is mischief Okay, well, my intention would not be mischief,
my intention would be experimental test (Okay.) Scientific test
Well, even if it was mischief,
how could that possibly influence it I think it does influence it
I think whenever you do things with
astrology intentions are strong I just thought you'll be eager
and I just thought you will... You see, well, the fact that you're not
makes me think you don't really
in your heart of hearts believe it I don't think you really are prepared
to put your reputation on the line I just don't believe in the experiment
which is so simple Well, you're in a kind of no-lose
situation, don't you believe it?
I hope so. Regardless of Neil Spencer's concerns,
I wanted to conduct a simple trial We selected 20 people at random We asked them to read that week's
horoscope for Capricorn But as a test, we said it apply
to their own star sign Not only do you have clever Mercury
and ambitious Mars, fortunes and success And now the sun is at the same pivotal
mid haven angle of your solar chart I've no idea what that means? Put simply, this means that this is your
moment to go that extra miles to become
the person you're dreaming of becoming Remember however that there will
be others who want what you have
and will stop at nothing to get it Astrologers say this should fit
just Capricorn and not the rest but what actually happened? Yeah, maybe To be honest I felt there's some
Mercury energy this week because there's a little arguments
around and there's a lot of bad biles Yeah, that kind of make sense What a lame junk! It could apply to me as much
as to the next person Yeah, in a way, yeah... I'm going on a Flamingo course in Spain That isn't necessarily pertain to me this week
It pertains to me generally A pile of rubbish! The same number of people agreed that the
horoscope was accurate for them as disagreed and similar results are found with
proper large state experiments Technically all but one of
our group should have disagreed
namely our only Capricorn Not at this moment, no. Am I taking this too seriously? I believe astrology misleads the public,
denies scientific progress
and belittles our universe There's a far richer way of looking at the cosmos Astronomy is a triumph of the human intellect a real science constantly
enriched by new evidence Forget about the astrologer's charts
with their constellations and planets
move in or out of this house or that house go into a real observatory
and look at the milky way or go out into the country
on a moonless night just lie in your back and
gaze up at the stars The heart-stopping sight you'd see
is 100 billion stars spinning through an expanding universe
at a speed of a million miles per day The light from some of the closest stars
started its journey at the time of the dinosaurs You're staring into a deep time machine And yet even as science
unravels these natural wonders our society is drawn to the slim pickings
of supernatural belief Half the British population now say
they believe in paranormal phenomena Over 8 million of us have owned up
to consulting psychic mediums One way you to do, Richard, pull me,
just pull me out eight of them, please Simon Goodfellow claims that with these cards
he could use his psychic powers to tune in
to the spirits of dead people around me These voices from the past can apparently
give him a glimpse of my future Now, Richard, thank you. Now I feel it's
giving me an initial G with his name Okay, now I feel with this man as well
I feel he was a family member and I also feel very strongly with something
to do advertising and it with him, something
to do with newspapers with him as well Now I do feel with him as well he's
telling me about changes that coming
up in your life for the moment I see totally changes in how you're working
so I will be working the future The words Simon seems to be fishing
for is retirement the obvious
next step for most 60-somethings It won't be as active,
and it won't be as active for you
and I do feel it when it... This could apply to anyone my age but can Simon back up
his more precise statements? What was that male relative with the G
What was that about you said earlier on? I do, the male relative with the G,
Well, I do feel with him,
I don't feel it was a family member but I don't feel with him now
it was some connection I thought you said he was a family member I did say that he was a family member I think you did Right, okay. Let me see if I can feel in him still
Yeah, it's okay Right, okay, then.
Well, I feel with you now.
I feel he a lot of things.
He was a very strong character Another feeling he's giving me.
It was very regimented as well I feel it severed and in some forces
any the forces you someway as well But can you understand anybody with the
military background was connected to you Well, I got really nobody military
in my background at all and actually nobody fitting the G either
Right. Okay Spirit G has rung no bells
but now another voice comes from the ether ...in which it's given me
the initial E with the name Now I do feel with her as well as some
things to do, well, I feel a grandparent
and I want to give you an e-sounded name My grandmother had a name beginning with e At last something I could identify with Yes. e something
Tell me more about her, please The lady I do feel with her... a lot of cats A lot of cats? Perhaps not. She never had a cat
She hated cats, matter of fact All right
She liked dogs, but she hated cats Well, I can understand, not everybody the way
you've got to so we remember with this as well, not everybody can relate everything
the readable thing. Not everybody I mean I've got people like yourself... Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence Because now many people come to this vent
for some reason and because they want to
close to you in that direction in the line And also what you've got to think about
which is as well something's very rare to me Psychics may believe they
communicate with the dead
but I've seen no evidence for it My concern is that for some people
this superstitious nonsense
can be far from harmless fun If you've lost somebody dear to you and I'm trampling all over the
memories by telling you that
they're here now saying this now I mean, that's not my business,
and if I'm just doing it because
I can earn some money out of it Many cases that people that are,
you know, have lost somebody, lost a child so dear to them then they cannot get out
with the fact of having lost the child
and become addicted to these... Okay, this a lady who is trying to
connect with somebody at the front of... Derren Brown is a celebrated illusionist
but also a skeptic He makes clear his performances
depend simply on mental tricks She looks very, very elegant and there's guilt on her part A feeling of guilt, I think
your father passed when you were
very young as well, is that right? He gives me the inside intelligence
on how a psychic medium might
exploit entirely earthly trade secrets We're using this called 'cold reading'
which is a way of communicating
information with somebody well, it sounds like they know
everything about you and they can reveal facts
seemingly about your life and describe your character in a way
that you'll be amazed by it But in fact, it's a linguistic trick or a set of linguistic tricks. well, the saying
was you're constanly supplying the meaning
yourself but it can be really convincing She asked me about, I want to say Charlie Charles...
The psychic will, it's a group throughout names,
(someone you left behind...) Now that name could refer to
a person you'll interest living or
it could refer to someone that's died or could be a friend of the thing.
You know it really could be anything
so somebody just pick up on it and tell you into what they want to depict Is that another relationship with... sorry
That's my husband's name Because they say yes that was my husband Then really can get yes, that's right.
He's here saying, he's saying
he still loves you or whatever that is and they turn it
back into and make it sounds as if
they were saying... husband, in fact it could be anybody
It could be the name of the person who sat there.
Lily or Lusia, something like that Far from being vague, or saying things
that apply to just everybody
you'll get very specific details He's saying something about a hat that
you used to like or something with the hat One thing I saw was there's a dog He's saying that something to do with
this dog used sleep in the hallway anything else came back and said no And will something in the hall
give you a picture of dog? picture as a, picture of a dog in the hallway?
and he asks me back No, and I just put another picture,
I put a picture in the hallway
of the family or something That's you're saying you doesn﹑t
like the picture in the hallway And the dog with the dog, so dog,
I just saw there were too many dogs There's a network of over 500 spiritualist
churches across Britain Here, Tuesday night is s用ance night And we ask that we can now build a bridge
between this world and the next so that we can once again go some
way to proving that we survive death and the our loved ones in the spirit
are forever with us. Amen Okay, I expect most of you are familiar
with spiritualism but those that... Spiritualism makes not to god
then it descends into a darker world The real droll is when the dead start talking
inside the medium's head Okay, one of the first link I want to do is
I feel I got somebody give me the name Charles and I want the gentleman on the spirit side
that passed with chest conditions with this and something about a name that sounds like,
sounds a bit like Devon but I thought I could hear and
it could be Dave, Devon or
Davenport something like that And I feel this site somewhere
Can anybody understand this so far? The lady close to the bookshelf there would you understand somebody on the
spirit side with the name Charles No, but I have a home in Davenport You have a home in Davenport? Okay Isn't what you're doing cold reading? Well, it depends on what you call cold
reading or something got a lot of the rations that come up saying that
what you do or you say something
can people basically make it fit Now, see if I can find the Charles
in a minute but let me... give you
a few things I can feel about you Has that been a few problems with
the stomach condition around you Because I feel as if I want to go to your
stomach and I feel uncomfortable there Does that make nonsense to you whatsoever What would you understand then a lady that
I want to connect with on the spirit side that would suffer with the stomach condition
because I'm being given the stomach condition
Okay? And I feel with this lady I want someone
that's a fairly comfortable build I would say a bigger build lady not the slight build lady
that's given me this, Yes? I think when you really examine the
evidence of myself or other mediums do you'll find a large, large proportion
could never be explained the way
by something called cold reading because there're sometimes such
specific details that come through I'm saying like a painting or print would be,
of a painting looks like a Stubbs painting, you know the ones in the horses
in the pigs and things like that The lady in the white sits back there
I'm not around you, am I? I hate you when I can't find the link
Let me see if... I think if I were talking to someone
in the spirit world I'd say things like
'what's it like being dead?' 'Can you see the whole of the universe?' Why do you ask them such banal questions? Yeah, good point
but I think what happens is that mediumship comes from the non-rational,
nonverbal thought parts the brain
of the subject thing I believe it's a blending of thoughts between
myself and the spirit communicator but if only it could be just
like a telephone line Let me just say what we can get a little
more information from her first If you've convinced the person
that as their grandmother to the point that they're actually crying I mean surely those tears enough are perhaps
proof that they had proved that really is their
grandmother that's making the communication It could indicate just desperate
wishful thinking perhaps Now, I don't fit on with a Steve Bennet for I've got those things I want to bring
together somehow with particularly a car crash My friend Ben died in a car crash
and he's ... on school's day Your friend Ben passes and so there's not
Bennet as I said it was Ben Let me see if I can describe
Ben to see if we can... Beyond whether it's true or false
what concerns me as well is
the exploitation of often vulnerable people Can I say when you were buying the new shoes
have you been on your mind at that time? It was on my mind, I know I really buy, yeah Yeah, because this is about this particular
foul around me at that particular time that's
why I felt I've got the connection with that And you know his messages really in a whiny sorry,
because he can't... Do you feel it might actually
be damaging to some people stopping them from letting go after they've
lost somebody that they love very much? It's a good point a lot people bring up
that but I believe that it does help
people to progress and move forward He gives me the feeling that... But do people move forward? Or do they get addicted to a spiritual hit? Most of these congregation are regulars Craig Hamilton-Parker's grass peer seems
impressive until it transpires that he's
already read this bereaved girl before He actually had a tire on the left hand...
this call change before the accident and the
police thought there was something to do with that and I had a message from you before saying
there was something to do with this toy I've given you a message right before?
Okay, well, I can't remember that But anyway I want to sort feel his, I believe what I do was absolutely true,
I believe I gave... You're really believe it?
Seriously you believe it?
I really absolutely 100% is true Because it's been proven to me
against what I believe
against my rationality But it's shown me so many, many times that
life continue and personal proved that I've had as give me proves that father passed
of continuation of spirit incredible things that I'm, so very personal,
subjective they hard to argue a case for but for me it's been life transforming and
I believe as I was helped I can help others Timer again so called psychics... ... science and evidence I have personal proof it's true to me but as with religion
if it hangs on private feelings that
can't be proved or disproved by science then in what way can it be valid
or meaningful to the rest of us Next I want to find out what happens
when those who claim mysterious powers
do allow themselves to be tested Now, I think it's false
So shall we see how well you have done? I want to show how scientific reason is
always the best way to look at the world and explain the dangers of superstition I'm often asked how I know that there isn't
a spirit world or psychic clairvoyance Well, I don't It seems improbable but unlike the
fixed world views of mystical faith
science is always open to new possibilities Scientists test and retest evidence,
refreshing our understanding of reality Until quite recently scientists didn't
know how bats fly around in total darkness Could they have paranormal
extra-sensory perception? In the 1940s, the American zoologist Donald
Griffin demonstrated experimentally that
bats use sonar echo-location of their cries Back then, sonar was brandnew military technology
and the theory that it was natural to bats
outraged some of Griffin's colleagues But the more scientists tested the evidence,
the more robust the theory became They found out exactly what the bat cries were like
how they work, how the brain works Everything about it added up to a complete
picture of mutually supporting evidence
that this really was a fact It's this cumulative build up of corroborating
evidence that distinguishes the discovery of
bat sonar from alleged paranormal effects The so-called evidence for psychic phenomena
is not robust but will o'the wisp The more we look at it, the weaker it becomes The alleged detection of water through dowsing
is not obviously ridiculous it might work but does it? The only way to tell
is through a rigorous experiment How does dowsing work?
that's the No. 1 question
And nobody can answer you Well I reckon I'm convinced that
something is helping me to dowse One of the earlier chaps thinks it's god How do you do it till then?
What﹑s you principle about it? I think of the question and I expect god
respond in a way that I understand I expect the right hand one point
to the camera and the left hand one
straight forward, I wanna... Yeah, okay.
Look, it finally ramp.
Have you done the test yet in the tent? Yes, I did.
What was the result? Oh, I'm gonna 6 right, 100% Yeah, what happened?
One. So what do you make that then?
God was having his laugh, isn't he? He loves a joke, you don't realize The psychologist Chris French thinks
there may be a simpler explanation He has devoted his career to
investigating claims of the paranormal And now he's set up this test for dowsing
-- a properly controlled double-blind trial In each of these rows just one container
chosen a random holds a bottle of water,
all the rest contain sand Neither the dowsers nor the tester are
allowed to know where the water is
until the boxes are opened So there were no unintentional giveaways
Have another go Safeguards like these make the
double-blind trial one of the crowning
achievements of scientific reason What you typically find when you talk to
dowsers is they'll give you a lot
and lots of anecdote evidence a lot stories about how they discovered
a leak there in your neighbor's pipes
and so and so forth but there're always the possible explanations
there, what we're trying to do it a set of conditions which rule out any of those explanations
then we get down to
the very fundamental basic issue can't the dowsers actually do
what they think they can do. I think it's false No, I think it's false So shall we see how are you done? This is sand. In that case I can't do this This is the water in No. 5 Sand again This time guess was in No. 3
(Correct.) That's water Final trial, it's sand again
In that case, I'm 100% wrong again Well, you got one right and, that was 6
which is what we expect by chance So far, they performing pretty much
in line with mean chance expectation,
in other words, guess work So no one has scored more than 2 hits out to 6 Three. Three? The people you've been testing,
do they understand why they're being
put through the double-blind procedure I don't want to explain it to them then
they appreciate why someone who is perhaps
skeptical or doubtful about their claims would see that that was necessary.
What's interesting is it doesn't actually
tend to dent their confidence at all Which you suggest that
they're completely sincere I think they are completely sincere and
they are typically very, very surprised
when we run them through series of trials and actually say at the end of the day where
your performance is no better than what we would
expect just on the bases of a guess work and then what typically happens is
though make a whole kinds of reasons Some might say excuses as to why they
didn't pass that particular test I feel the whole test is wrong I'm shocked on words that this has happened but I did say from the outset couldn't
we just sort out some grey blocks and
some scaffold boards, so then I can work about it which is what I would routinely do and
I've done for 40 years Who knows where or what bottles were in what tubs?
That's the whole point, isn't it?
That's the whole point If you understand dowsing than I do
you'll understand that everything is an image This state of denial is extraordinary.
Even when confronted with hard fact these dowsers prefer not to face up
to truth but retain their delusion Rather than adapt to evidence,
many of us seems remain trapped in ways of
thinking inherited from our primitive ancestors Irrational belief from dowsing to
psychic clairvoyance has roots in early
mankind's habit of attributing spirit and intention to natural phenomena such
as water, the sun, a rock or the sea The sea has often been thought to be a
malevolent force actively out to get you In 480 BC, King Xerxes of the Persians
built a pontoon bridge across the Hellespont
and the rough sea came and wrecked it And King Xerxes was so furious that
he sentenced the sea to 300 lashes I wonder whether there's something of
King Xerxes and all of us to this day We don't want to believe that things just happen we want to believe that there're some kind
of deliberate intention behind everything
even when inanimate objects are concerned And perhaps that is the key to
humanity's belief in the supernatural Even in the 21st century,
despite all that science has revealed about
the indifferent vastness of the universe the human mind remains a wanton storyteller
creating intention in the randomness of reality The delivery of rewards by a one-armed
bandit is determined at random but many gamblers want to think that
what they do can increase their chances
of winning the jackpot They stand on one leg or wear a lucky shirt Are these superstitious behaviors
a byproduct of our evolution? All wild animals have to be kind
natural statisticians looking for patterns in the
apparent randomness of nature when they're looking food or
trying to avoid predators There're two kinds of mistakes they can make they can either fail to detect
pattern when there is some or they can seem to detect pattern when
there isn't any and that's superstition 60 years ago, the American psychologist B.F.
Skinner investigated the behavior of pigeons rewarding them with food when they learned
to peck a key in the feeding apparatus But then Skinner set the apparatus
to reward the birds at random now the pigeons just have to sit back
and wait, but that isn't what they did Instead the majority developed what
Skinner called 'superstitious behavior' When an individual pigeon, for example,
happened to look over its left shoulder and the reward mechanism just
happened to click in at that point It would have got the idea that it
was looking over the left shoulder that
it got its reward so it tried it again By sheer luck as it happened the reward
mechanism delivered food at the same time again and so the pigeon was reinforced in its
idea that looking over the left shoulder
was what got it the reward And it went on and on and turned into a maniac
for looking over the left shoulder Humans can be no better than pigeons We constantly create false positives
we touch wood for luck see faces in toasted cheese,
fortunes in tea leaves These provide a comforting illusion of meaning This is the human condition we desperately
want to feel there's an organizing force
at work in our bewilderingly complex world And in the irrational mind set
if you believe in the mystical pattern
you've imposed on reality you call yourself spiritual Spirituality is a prized commodity The media tells us to respect spiritual souls
and there are apparently deep insights Spiritual self help guides do
a roaring trade in the material world
outnumbering science books by 3-1 But what does spirituality actually mean? So please take your seat and
please come slowly and gently and so that we can start the proceeeding
without losing time So could you please... Satish Kumar is the editor of Resurgence,
an ecological magazine at the
sandal-wearing end of the green movement And he counts amongst his many fans
Price Charles and Dalai Lama I represent the entire history of evolution I was present in the beginning,
in the first Big Bang and I'll be here for billions of years to come But isn't Satish's spirituality just about imposing
yet another superstitious force positive? World is made of two elements.
One element is visible element, the other aspect of creation is invisible
dimension, things we cannot see So what is that element which is invisible?
I call it spiritual When you go in a room, you say there's a good
feeling here. There's a spirit in the room Well, now you've changed
to something rather different There the spirit is very big, and very
holistic, and very inclusive world It is not defined in a one particular way
So when you go in a room you can say the tree has a spirit and a rock has a spirit It's a living rock for me.
Nature without spirit cannot exist like tree cannot exist without the sun.
Light, it cannot exist without rain,
... cannot exist without soil also it cannot exist without a treeness.
The treeness is the spiritual quality Or the rockness When you talk about the rockness
or the quality of a rock I can see as a scientist the rock
has hardness, things like that
but I think it's not quite what you mean It sounded as if what you do mean is
something imposed by the human observer A rock is actualism...
But there is a rock quality in the rock Well, you, that's a matter of assertion,
I mean, you are now simply asserting that Asserting? I'm understanding it
which is my understanding Some may understand more fully than others but it is no imposed, it is there It all sounds very poetic, but it's not reality
Like priests, mullahs, and rabbis, new-age mystics ceaselessly attempt
to fill gaps in human understanding
with fabricated meaning Science and rationality are often
accused to having a cold bleak outlook but why is it bleak to face up
to the evidence of what we know The word mundane has come to mean
boring and dull, it really shouldn't,
it should mean the opposite because it comes from the Latin mundus,
meaning the world,
and the world is anything but dull The world is wonderful There's real poetry in the real world.
Science is the poetry of reality And yet today science is under attack Next I want to look at the dangers that poses Why do I have to trust, you know, the GP,
Why do I have to trust The Royal Society I think you're so close to being right,
but yet you're darn wrong In the last 50 years,
science has put a man on the moon,
cloned a sheep, decoded the human genome And yet, sadly, the white heat of the 1970s
seems to be treated as white elephant today What colorkind do you see girls?
Anything yellow close is okay.. A prejudice against science is evident in schools Physics A-levels have halved in the last 25 years
Chemistry fallen by more than 1/3 University departments are closing
all around the country This is a betrayal of the enlightenment The fundamental problem I think lies with
the fashion throughout our educational system to teach students to value private feeling
more highly than evidence based reason This is rooted in the post-modern
relativist agenda For relativists, scientific truth is
just a patriarchal western orthodoxy that like the old Roman Catholic church stands in the
way of other equally valid outlooks on the world With things like paranormal, the drive for
alternative medicine, all these kinds of movements
away from the orthodox in science I see a lot as approximately reformation
vis a vis catholicism Internet in a way, is kind of functioning,
is a kind of information source very much like the printing press
did in the 15th century, 16th century that is empowering people to sort of
look up stuff for themselves in terms of different kinds of treatments
and things like that and in a way,
not trusting the experts any more Look, why do I have to trust, you know, the GP,
Why do I have to trust The Royal Society? I think you're so close to being right,
but yet you're darn wrong, you're absolutely wrong I would like to take that ball and
run with it in a different direction We want to question authority.
We don't want to say because this person is the president of
Royal Society therefore what he says is right We've got to go back to the evidence
and find out what is actually true? The problem is, of course,
people may look at he same evidence and
then reach some more different conclusion from what the head of Royal Society reached And so that they would say look,
you know, I look at the evidence too
and I'm not persuaded by this That's where you start getting
a kind of opening up of science Steve Fuller is, of course right, that
the internet is revolutionizing
how we use and consume information But the impersonal algorithms of internet
search engines do not weed out robust evidence
from unsourced, uncorroborated assertion Wikipedia world presents both
great opportunity and huge danger Paranoia conspiracy theories
circulate unchallenged Sometimes they're relatively harmless like
the rumor that NASA faked the moon landings which is a bit of a joke because the evidence
for going to the moon is so strong But how about the malicious and
utterly unfounded rumor that 4000 Jews
were tipped off by Israel agents not to go to work in the
World Trade Center on 9/11 It's one of the nasty lie circulating
as truth in the blog community of
racists and religious fundamentalists Now such people can find each other
anywhere in the world instantly whipping up scares and reinforcing
their paranoia and delusions As evidence is devalued even
medical progress has become a target ...through vomiting. Hundreds of families
blame me. MMR vaccines for autism,
brain damage and meningitis When one report now widely discredited
wrongly linked MMR vaccine with autism An innuendo circulated that the establishment
was conspiring to risk our children's health It led to hundreds of thousands of parents
failing to protect their offspring
from the threat of measles a serious disease that in Afghanistan
kills 35,000 people a year This is the world of private hunches
and no respect for evidence Reason has built the modern world,
it is a precious but also a fragile thing which can be corroded by apparently
harmless irrationality We must favor verifiable evidence
over private feeling otherwise we leave ourselves vulnerable
to those would obscure the truth Next week, I look at how health has
become one of the fiercest battlegrounds
between reason and superstition
