In a recent New Yorker magazine issue (Feb 9) was a quote from John Updike which perfectly frames the problem with science for those who prefer belief over reason:
"The non-scientist's relation to modern science is basically craven: we look to its discoveries and technology to save us from disease, to give us a faster ride and a softer life, and at the same time we shrink from what it has to tell us of our perilous and insignificant place in the cosmos. Not that threats to our safety and significance were absent from the pre-scientific world, or that arguments against a God-bestowed human grandeur were lacking before Darwin. But our century's revelations of unthinkable largeness and unimaginable smallness, of abysmal stretches of geological time when we were nothing, of supernumerary galaxies and indeterminate subatomic behavior, of a kind of mad mathematical violence at the heart of matter have scorched us deeper than we know."
The fundamental needs of the human mind to avoid certain kinds of discordance are so great as to lead it away from itself. It's built in. Humans, in their self-awareness (and, paradoxically, in their lack of it) are able to ask questions the answers to which most simply can't handle. Nor recognize or admit it.
Once again we see the relationship between some kinds of blind belief and a large number of conservatives: they are of a piece. Inquiry is not part of the equation, except as it reinforces the need to believe certain things for one's own comfort, explicitly at the expense of reality. Their leaders are chosen specifically for that trait.
Liberalism is another thing altogether. One can only wonder why they coexist, and which form of human thinking is the more evolved. Given the direction one moves based on one or the other, the answer seems obvious.
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