Confronting GOP Deception - Science, Activism, Networking, Engaging in debate.

I've been trying to do that for a long time, hoping to find some compatriots along the way.  Here's another shot at it.  Starting with a review of key components of our dysfunctional public climate science dialogue, via a selection of past blog posts that serve as a good baseline to what I've learned to date.

After that I intend to continue working the problem and attempting to better express my position, as my circumstances allow.  Should some of this resonate with you, please do something with it.  You could start by leaving a comment.

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The Situation :

    

The disconnected-from-physical-reality GOP attacks on climate science (a.i.) have reached horrifying levels with the Trump Administration.  Yet science loving rationalists, pluralists, progressives, liberals, Democrats still haven’t developed effective messaging for directly confronting the most childish of Republican arguments.  Why?  Seems to me, mainly because rationalists rather sidestep that Me First driven willful ignorance.  This acquiescence to nonsense has been a fatal error for the national dialogue.

Engaging and arguing with contrarians should not be seen as an exercise in futility, since those are teaching opportunity for explaining the simple logical geophysical reasons behind some of the disingenuous arguments to onlookers from our own side, who probably don’t understand the science very well themselves.  Making teaching opportunities out of false claims.

Missing Key to Stephen Gould’s “Nonoverlapping Magisteria”

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The Missing Key to Stephen Gould’s

“Nonoverlapping Magisteria”

“… missing was a much more fundamental division crying out for recognition.  Specifically,                                        

the magisteria of Physical Reality vs the magisteria of our Human Mindscape. …”

© Peter Miesler, August 21, 2018

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The increasingly shrill and disconnected from physical reality attacks on science by faith-based organizations and individuals has me thinking about an essay evolutionary biologist and historian of science Stephen J. Gould wrote some twenty years ago in an attempt to address the tension between scientific truths and religious truths.

His solution was the notion of “Non-overlapping Magisteria” which delineated two teaching “authorities” (magisterium), the “magisteria of science” and the “magisteria of religion.” It wasn’t his original idea, rather a continuation of a centuries old dialogue between scientists and the Catholic Church that I don’t have the space to get into.

In any event, Gould concluded there should be no conflict because each realm has its’ own domain of “teaching authority.” Since these “magisteria” do not overlap, they cannot contradict each other and should be able to exist in mutual respect.

When it first came out