Re: [asa] Research Reaffirms: No Vaccine-Autism Link

 On 1/8/08, Rich Blinne <rich.blinne@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> The following seem to go together YEC/anti-GW/anti-vaccination/homeopathy.
> They all share a hostility to evidence-based, peer-reviewed science. They
> posit an atheistic conspiracy which persecutes Christians. But, where is the
> persecution here? What about the people who are dying and/or have
> significant reductions in the quality of life because of these hobby horses?
> What about the time wasted on this instead of finding true treatments and
> cure for autism? Is that not persecution, also?
>

Thanks for this post, Rich. I feel your pain -- not because I have a son or
close relative with autism or other such difficult condition but because
nearly every Christian I know here in my town has the mindset that you
bemoan.

I think that all these issues have a couple things in common besides being
anti-science. First, I think that in some ways, they are a form of a
"elementary-science culture" -- a culture that expects there to be ready
scientific explanations for everything. (Pre-science cultures don't expect
there to be easy answers -- or any answers, for that matter). The problem is
that most people cannot appreciate the fact that the real world is much more
complex than our scientific methods to date have been able to discern. It's
mentally and morally simpler to think that autism is caused by mercury than
that it is a genetic condition with possibly any number of subtle
contributing factors. (As an aside, one of Polkinghorne's arguments for
critical realism is that there is no one scientific method that works for
everything; historically, our methods have had to conform to the
peculiarities of nature, not the other way around).

Second, I think these views exist because we are selfish (our concern for
things goes only as far as our immediate circle of family and experience)
and wealthy. As a culture, the evangelical community has too much time and
money at its disposal. Instead of being concerned about the millions of
unseen people who don't have enough food or clean water to live, we spend
all of our anguish and resources addressing our less basic ailments. Not
that cancers, chronic fatigue and other syndromes, genetic disorders, and
the like are not important, but these seem disproportionately aggravating
and devastating to our psyches in our culture than they are in the
developing world. It's a matter of perspective. GW doesn't seem like a big
deal to wealthy inland Americans because we feel like we'll be able to
adjust somehow (we'll manage to obtain enough food, etc.); if we thought
about the millions (billions) of people throughout the rest of the world
whose subsistence way of life will be devastated by erratic weather and
climate patterns, we might have a greater interest in trying to wrap our
minds around the complex problem.

Again, there's nothing wrong with concern for our loved ones, but
when #1 and #2 occur together as they do in our culture, the combination has
some negative results on our worldview.

Doug

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Received on Tue Jan 8 14:03:30 2008