Why do people not believe in science?

There are 365 days in a year, and only one day is dedicated to Darwin. However, on the 200th anniversary of his birth, a poll was held and the results were that only 39% of Americans believed in the theory of Evolution…
On December 27, 1831, a 22-year-old young man boarded the HMS Beagle train departing from Plymouth, England, to circumnavigate the world. The train journey took 5 years to come to an end.

During those 5 years, the young man observed plants and animals of many different regions, and one of which was especially important, was that he discovered sparrows in the Galapagos Islands and sparrows living in the Galapagos. deep in the continent, although similar, have evolved different biological characteristics to suit feeding in their particular habitat. Later, that guy wrote the book “On the Origin of Species” and introduced the theory of Evolution that shocked public opinion. That boy is Charles Darwin. There are 365 days in a year, and only one day is dedicated to Darwin. However, on the 200th anniversary of his birth, a poll was held and the results were that only 39% of Americans believed in the theory of evolution. At the same time, in England, home of the scientist, The Guardian reported that half of adults did not believe in Darwin’s theory and of those, 22% believed in God’s Genesis. Sole. Millions of Hindus have joined the festival on the Ganges River in recent days, causing an outbreak of the disease. In the Museum of Creation in Petersburg, Kentucky, there is a painting of Adam and Eve sharing a forest with a dinosaur 10,000 years ago, although we think dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago while humans are now New era appeared from 200,000 years ago is clear as day. The US and UK are the two leading countries in scientific research. I immediately thought of this story when I saw the pictures of the millions of Hindus in India celebrating the Kumbh Mela festival and then paying the price with the burning cities burning the dead. because of COVID-19. “The faith of the pilgrims will overcome the fear of the virus,” the state premier of Uttarakhand told the press ahead of the festival. Indeed, in just a few days, 3 million people jumped into the sacred Ganges River to bathe, the fear of a new virus that appeared more than a year ago that science warns is nothing compared to the power of the government. boss of the gods for thousands of years. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has also proposed to study the hypothesis that Ganges living water can cure COVID. Yet, just a short time ago, Hindu politicians criticized Muslims for holding large prayers in New Delhi. Actually, they are all the same. Why is there such a thing as unscientific in an age that is thought to be very unscientific? Don’t we often read articles complaining about people’s increasing dependence on technology, on phones, on tablets – and technology is a totem of modern science? Even so, the formula for writing innocuous articles in health care categories is “proven science”—the word “science” is so overused that it becomes inert. But, it seems, the dominance of science and technology is just a fragile outer shell that can always be broken. And people rely on science for the comfort and convenience that scientific discoveries bring, not necessarily for truths or facts about the world. To find out about this strange phenomenon, Professor Andrew Shtulman of the Department of Cognitive Sciences Occidental University devised a test as follows. He invited 150 students who had taken science and math classes to read a few hundred scientific conclusions and asked them to mark the correct ones. A rather surprising result was that it took them a little longer to check the box “Earth revolves around the Sun” than the box “The moon revolves around the Earth”. Both of the above conclusions are clearly correct, but if the Moon revolves around the Earth is something that we can easily perceive, then the Earth revolves around the Sun is something that goes against our common sense and is only possible. know through education. This implies that science’s way to awareness is always resisted by a force of instinctual belief. So, sympathize with the old theologians who thought Copernicus was a heretic, because even the well-educated, raised in a 21st-century environment with bright scientific lights If there is a flash of light on the top of your head, somewhere in your mind there are still remnants of the feeling that the Sun revolves around the Earth, also that the ancient people did not have an inch of tools at hand. Painting “A dinosaur in the garden of Eden”. In a similar test run by University of Maryland psychologist Kevin Dunbar, he also observed blood vessels pooling in the prefrontal cortex when participants validated claims they thought were false. naturally in science, this part of the cerebral cortex is responsible for controlling consciousness. According to Dunbar, this is evidence that the acceptance of some scientific knowledge is not actually about absorbing facts but about suppressing myths. The truth is often hard to swallow, and it holds true in many fields, and even more so in the history of scientific research. The great breakthroughs that completely changed the axis of our knowledge, from heliocentric theory to the theory of evolution, from relativity to quantum mechanics, almost all brought up uncomfortable truths and to With scientific achievements, humanity must abandon the abiding realm of intuition to jump into a crater of flesh-burning truths. But not just dance once. Scientific truth is different from religious truth. The basis of religious truth is certainty, and the basis of scientific truth is doubt. Karl Popper, philosopher of science said that “Truth and certainty must be clearly distinguished. Knowledge is the search for truth. Not a search for certainty.” Or in the words of Richard Feynman, the essence of science is “the hard work of proving you wrong”. No need to take great examples of how Einstein proved Newton wrong and how people question Einstein today, just talk about chocolate, sometimes scientists say that This is a dish that is harmful to health, another time they say it helps to beautify the skin and keep it in shape. Compared to betting on a change like the flash pan of science, to many people, in many matters, religion or intuition seem to be more stable and secure “horses”. Science always puts people in such insecurity. Nowhere is our “me” more vulnerable than in science, because we are always faced with the fact that we are wrong. What’s more, there are many different kinds of truths, and scientific facts are not always better than others. But, there are subjective truths that can push people into a dead end. Like prayer can conquer COVID. Like the Ganges that can wash away diseases. Or as climate change is an exaggeration of zealot scientists. Indeed, according to the survey, a quarter of the population of the US – the world’s closest high carbon emitter – considers climate change a negligible threat! But, even more surprising, in a study published in the journal Psychological Science by Matthew Feinberg and Robb Willer of UC Berkeley, most people when reading dire messages about climate change don’t want to believe it. This is because, that “inconvenient” truth threatens the need to see the world as an organized, stable, and just place where honest workers are rewarded and vandals. will be punished. Meanwhile, climate change creates an equal apocalypse for everyone, guilty or not. Yet, the world is such a cruel place, where the origin of man is nothing more than a divine being, but a fish with finfish, where the Earth is never the navel of the universe, where religious ritual cannot save people from the virus, where the environment is being destroyed irreversibly. And in general, as Carl Sagan, one of the most widely known astronomers to the public, once wrote: “Better hard truths, in my opinion, than consoling illusions.”