Hooked on Snap

Knowing you're right is a high; even when you're wrong. 

by Lynn Phillips from her Psychology Today blog Dream On

"My mother the corporate lawyer, when I told her I was about to marry a guy whose parents were Catholic, asked, alarmed: "Do they believe in Darwin?" And she wasn't aware that the question was, um, funny.

The Origin of Species was to Mother what The Holy Bible is to so many: she never read the whole thing, but accepted every word of it as true, while looking askance at doubters. ("Looking askance" here means "thoroughly despising.") So I understand why many creationists falsely view evolution as a rival version of fundamentalism: at the lay level it often is.

But even professional stewards of the scientific method share a particular vice with creationists: a secret addiction to certainty. Like crack, certainty is something our minds are designed to enjoy and ill-equipped to resist, even when it leads us down dark paths. Scientific fundamentalism -- certainty addiction at its most paradoxical -- claims that all science is based on solid proofs, on hard facts, or at least on the best available knowledge of the moment. But science itself tells us that this isn't exactly or always true, and is, in the un-fuzzy language of formal logic, "false"..."

Read the article.