I love Jon Stewart’s work on The Daily Show, which manages to be consistently fresh and intelligent. Their segment on the Large Hadron Collider was sheer brilliance, and I’ve often said that between Stewart and Stephen Colbert, Comedy Central is the best place to go to hear insights from real working scientists on TV these days.
Which is why it was so crushing to listen to this interview he did with Marilynne Robinson, a leader among the movement to reconcile science and religion. I didn’t agree with much of what Robinson said, but then again I didn’t really expect to. Nor did I expect Stewart to challenge her in any way; a “why just can’t we all get along” perspective is very consistent with his way of thinking. But I admit I was hoping he would not misrepresent modern science as thoroughly and lazily as he managed to do here. (It’s a 2010 interview, brought to my attention by Scott Derrickson’s Twitter feed; apologies if these complaints were hashed out elsewhere two years ago.)
| The Daily Show with Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Marilynne Robinson | ||||
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If you skip ahead to 2:50, here’s what Stewart has to say:
I’ve always been fascinated that, the more you delve into science, the more it appears to rely on faith. You know, when they start to speak about the universe they say, well, actually, most of the universe is antimatter. Oh, really, where’s that? Well, you can’t see it. [Robinson: “Yes, exactly.”] Well, where is it? It’s there. Can you measure it? We’re working on it. And it’s a very similar argument to someone who would say God created everything. Well where is he? He’s there. And I’m always struck by the similarity of the arguments at their core.
Obviously he means something like “dark matter,” not “antimatter,” but that’s a minor mixup of jargon. Much worse is that he clearly has absolutely no idea why we believe in dark matter — what the actual evidence for it is in real data. He betrays no understanding that we know how much dark matter there is, have ongoing strategies for detecting it, and spend a lot of time coming up with alternatives and testing them against the data. What kind of misguided “faith” would lead people to believe in dark matter, of all things? (The underlying problem with appeals to faith is that they cannot explain why we should have faith in one set of beliefs rather than some other set … but that’s an argument for a different day.)
In reality, the more you delve into science, the less it appears to rely on faith. When it comes to modern biology there are large parts I accept because of the testimony of experts; but when it comes to physics I actually understand the evidence behind it. There are certainly some good philosophical issues about what assumptions science must make to get off the ground: does it presume naturalism, can it address miracles, does it admit nomological facts, are there a priori truths about the physical world, can it deal with unobservable things? But Stewart isn’t engaging any of these issues; he’s just taking lazy swipes at parts of science he doesn’t understand, which he therefore feels justified in equating with faith. If believers in God spent a tiny fraction of the time that modern cosmologists spend trying to invent alternatives to their favorite ideas and testing them against evidence … well let’s just say the world would be a very different place.
For which I blame us, at least as much as I blame him. Stewart is obviously a smart guy who likes science and is interested in it, and frequently has scientists on his show. And yet, we have clearly completely failed to communicate the reasons why we scientists believe in apparently spooky-sounding things like dark matter.
“Science communication” is a many-faceted thing, and all of its facets are important. We need to do better getting K-12 students excited by science and grounded in the basics. We need to do better educating college students about how the world works, since they’re going to be running it soon. We need to do better in helping policymakers understand the science behind their decisions. We need to do better at encouraging and enabling a lifelong interest in science among the general public. And we clearly need to do a much better job at clearly conveying the foundations of our practice to interested non-specialists. There’s a strong temptation to emphasize the weird and bizarre things that we discover, because after all the natural world is full of surprises. But if we don’t at the same time do a good job at explaining why we believe the bizarre things, it will come back and bite us eventually.
It never ceases to bother me that those involved in academic science bemoan the lack of the general population’s knowledge of science when academic science specifically tries to avoid interacting with the general public in the first place. You’ve said it yourself, one of the worst things you can do it write in a general audience format because it shows a lack of commitment to research. There are certainly exceptions here but unless we break this trend how will we ever get to a point where we can expect anything more from the general public?
If people believe in anything, it’s their television.
Television is the religion. Television rots the brain.
http://www.sustainabilityinstitute.org/dhm_archive/index.php?display_article=vn547cultureed
I would just point out that Stewart’s is a comedy show; it is not about exchanging careful thoughts about science or anything else, I think. It may be true that, as time went by, for reasons that are too long to describe here, his parody of the political absurdities which are common place in tv shows became part of the folklore of political commentary in the public arena. Still, you should realize that a lot of the thoughtful points made in this thread of comments are way too long to be conveyed to a general audience during the five minutes allowed to his guests. It seems to me that he throws provocative jokes, including no-sense ones, just about everything — including science and scientists –, and it does not seem plausible enough to me to take him literally at his words. But, of course, I could be wrong.
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For the layperson or even a scientist in another field, a “belief” in science is exactly that. Yet what we take on faith is backed up by the ferocious self-correction in which science, and scientists, engage. We take it for granted that if there is an error in the current theory, it will be rooted out, sooner or later, by a determined scientific community. Scientists are rewarded for finding the errors of their peers and predecessors. This is not the case for other purveyors of belief. But Stewart makes an excellent point: the basis of our belief in science is not our own analysis of evidence, but a trust in a group of other people who perpetually prove themselves wrong. 🙂
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