The Enemies of Reason (2007) - full transcript

Science has sent orbiters to Neptune(Mars^_^),
eradicated smallpox

and created a supercomputer that can
do 60 trillion calculations per second

Science frees us from superstition and dogma
and enables us to base our knowledge on evidence

Well, most of us

Previously, I've explored how organized faith and
primitive religious values blight our lives

You take the women and dress them
like whores on the street

I don't dress women, they dress themselves

They do now, but you were aware it as a norm

The fault line runs deeper even than religion

There're two ways of looking at the world:
through faith and superstition

or through the rigours of logic,
observation and evidence, through reason



Yet today, reason has a battle on its hands

I want to confront the epidemic of
irrational superstitious thinking

Would you understand somebody on the
spirit side with the name Charles?

I believe, I did...
You really believe it?

I'm really, actually 100% that is true
Seriously you believe it?

Because it's been proven to me
against my rationality

It's a multimillion-pound industry
that impoverishes our culture

Astrology leads toward the divine and the sacred,
... you don't like very much

And throws up new age gurus who
exhort us to run away from reality

The treeness is the spiritual quality

Or the rockness

As a scientist, I don't think our indulgence
of irrational superstition is harmless

I believe it profoundly undermines civilization

Reason and respect for evidence
are the source of our progress



our safeguard against fundamentalists and
those who profit from obscuring the truth

We live in dangerous times when
superstition is gaining ground and
rational science is under attack

In this program, I want to
take on the enemies of reason

300 years ago, in the age of enlightenment

scientists and philosophers
from Galileo to David Hume

had the courage to stand up for
intellectual principles and reason

The rational science they pioneered
has given us tangible benefits

Everything from antibiotics to electricity,
sewage systems to Sat Nav

And it's not just material progress

Increased life expectancy,
health and leisure provided by modern
medicine and industrial technology

have given more people
more time than ever before

to educate themselves, express their
creativity and ponder existence

And yet, into this better world
that reason has built

primitive darkness has coming back a
disturbing pick'n'mix of superstitions

Where better to start my journey
than a New Age fair?

Hello, what do you do? (Hello, there.)
What kind of readings do you do?

All kinds. I do the tarot and then I also
do the crystal-ball. This is George.

Hello, what can you do for me?

Well, we can take your aura photography
All right. I like that.

Yes. What do I do?
Just sit in the front of that?
Take a seat, please.

Should I take my glasses off?

What we got here?

You know, you have got a couple of
spirit guides around you at the moment

Because I think that something
in your life's changing

I think this is about you as well
being more comfortable with yourself

Now what you have here?
Would you have somebody in
spirits really, really close to you

and he's got the arms around your neck

Well, that's very nice to know

All these people reap the rewards
of science and reason

but many here revel in a foggy suspicion
of scientific thinking

Ok, so you could teach me how
to use my psychic energy?
(Yes) Is that the idea?

Yes. You can rely
Much better than on that,
than on your head

Irrationality is woven into the fabric
of modern life, we unthinkingly
indulge unscientific delusion

I'm the, rather skitty Gemini

Aquarius

Pisces

Astrology is so pervasive that just about
everyone has been indoctrinated with
the alleged character of their star sign

They're fiery, a bit unreliable.
They love traveling

They're very expansive
They're quite spiritual

Loyal, spend too much money

a good leader

They could be a bit mood swing
one way and the other

they could be very upbeat at one minute
and then a bit down

and you'll never know what to get them
as my husband says

A full quarter of the British population
claim to believe in astrology

Day in, day out, astrological horoscopes get
far more newspaper column inches than science

Amusingly, it falls foul of our modern
taboo against lazy stereotyping

How would we react if a newspaper published
a daily column that read something like this?

Germans: It is in your nature to
be hard-working and methodical

which should serve you well at work today

In your personal relationships,
especially this evening

you'll need to curb your natural
tendency to obey orders

Chinese: Inscrutability has many advantages,
but it may be your undoing today

British: Your stiff upper lip may
serve you well in business dealings

but try to relax and let yourself go
in your social life

And so on, through 12 national stereotypes

Of course, the astrology columns
are not as offensive as that

but we should ask ourselves exactly
where the difference lies

Both are guilty of facade discrimination
dividing humanity up into exclusive groups
based on no evidence

I always thought that by the 21st
century science and reason would
have long since cleaned up

and yet every day of the week
we're encouraged to retreat into
the fog the superstitious past

Astrology is a primitive belief system
made into elaborate pseudo-science

It arrogantly makes humans
the focal point of the universe

The movement of planets is supposed
to signify petty developments
in our career or love life

It was developed in the 2nd century AD
by the philosopher Claudius Ptolemy
and has not moved on since

Despite the discovery of new planets and
despite a shift in the earth's rotational axis

that has thrown Ptolemy??s zodiac
out by 23 degrees

You could ask a question
You can say, 'Who has stolen my money?'

It never made sense when it was first
invented and it makes even less sense now

Read it off as though, you mean, they get it right?

Didn't an actual physical influence
for planets that somehow beams down
and influences us, people?

I think it's very hard to see that. I think if you
try to understand astrology as a causal agent

I think that's hard to imagine how
that would happen. I think you have
to look at the planets as signifiers

When you look at the movement
of Saturn around the zodiac

it's a very strong signifier of
what's going on in individual lives

I don't even understand how they
could possibly be signifiers, I mean

How could the rise of Saturn possibly
be a signifier of something that's going
on physiologically in a person's body

The position of planets in...

How would it work? This is what
you keep coming back to ask me.

How could it possibly work?
(How would that work? Yes)

And I told you I don't know.
It's a deep dark mystery

What isn't a deep dark mystery is
why the trite vagaries of newspaper
horoscopes seem to chime with readers

Psychologists have identified
what's known as the Barnum Effect

where by people tend to believe statements
are accurate for them personally

while in fact they're general enough
to apply to anyone

We could devise a little experiment
where we take your forecasts

and then give some of them straight,
to some of them randomized

Sometimes give Virgo the Pisces
forecast etc. and then ask people
how accurate they were?

Yes, that would be a perverse
thing to do, is it?

It would be yes, but it isn't,
wouldn't that be a good test?

A test of what?

Well, how accurate you are?

I think your intention there is mischief and
I think what you then get back is mischief

Okay, well, my intention would not be mischief,
my intention would be experimental test

(Okay.) Scientific test
Well, even if it was mischief,
how could that possibly influence it

I think it does influence it
I think whenever you do things with
astrology intentions are strong

I just thought you'll be eager
and I just thought you will...

You see, well, the fact that you're not
makes me think you don't really
in your heart of hearts believe it

I don't think you really are prepared
to put your reputation on the line

I just don't believe in the experiment
which is so simple

Well, you're in a kind of no-lose
situation, don't you believe it?
I hope so.

Regardless of Neil Spencer's concerns,
I wanted to conduct a simple trial

We selected 20 people at random

We asked them to read that week's
horoscope for Capricorn

But as a test, we said it apply
to their own star sign

Not only do you have clever Mercury
and ambitious Mars, fortunes and success

And now the sun is at the same pivotal
mid haven angle of your solar chart

I've no idea what that means?

Put simply, this means that this is your
moment to go that extra miles to become
the person you're dreaming of becoming

Remember however that there will
be others who want what you have
and will stop at nothing to get it

Astrologers say this should fit
just Capricorn and not the rest

but what actually happened?

Yeah, maybe

To be honest I felt there's some
Mercury energy this week

because there's a little arguments
around and there's a lot of bad biles

Yeah, that kind of make sense

What a lame junk!

It could apply to me as much
as to the next person

Yeah, in a way, yeah...

I'm going on a Flamingo course in Spain

That isn't necessarily pertain to me this week
It pertains to me generally

A pile of rubbish!

The same number of people agreed that the
horoscope was accurate for them as disagreed

and similar results are found with
proper large state experiments

Technically all but one of
our group should have disagreed
namely our only Capricorn

Not at this moment, no.

Am I taking this too seriously?

I believe astrology misleads the public,
denies scientific progress
and belittles our universe

There's a far richer way of looking at the cosmos

Astronomy is a triumph of the human intellect

a real science constantly
enriched by new evidence

Forget about the astrologer's charts
with their constellations and planets
move in or out of this house or that house

go into a real observatory
and look at the milky way

or go out into the country
on a moonless night

just lie in your back and
gaze up at the stars

The heart-stopping sight you'd see
is 100 billion stars

spinning through an expanding universe
at a speed of a million miles per day

The light from some of the closest stars
started its journey at the time of the dinosaurs

You're staring into a deep time machine

And yet even as science
unravels these natural wonders

our society is drawn to the slim pickings
of supernatural belief

Half the British population now say
they believe in paranormal phenomena

Over 8 million of us have owned up
to consulting psychic mediums

One way you to do, Richard, pull me,
just pull me out eight of them, please

Simon Goodfellow claims that with these cards
he could use his psychic powers to tune in
to the spirits of dead people around me

These voices from the past can apparently
give him a glimpse of my future

Now, Richard, thank you. Now I feel it's
giving me an initial G with his name

Okay, now I feel with this man as well
I feel he was a family member

and I also feel very strongly with something
to do advertising and it with him, something
to do with newspapers with him as well

Now I do feel with him as well he's
telling me about changes that coming
up in your life for the moment

I see totally changes in how you're working
so I will be working the future

The words Simon seems to be fishing
for is retirement the obvious
next step for most 60-somethings

It won't be as active,
and it won't be as active for you
and I do feel it when it...

This could apply to anyone my age

but can Simon back up
his more precise statements?

What was that male relative with the G
What was that about you said earlier on?

I do, the male relative with the G,
Well, I do feel with him,
I don't feel it was a family member

but I don't feel with him now
it was some connection

I thought you said he was a family member

I did say that he was a family member

I think you did

Right, okay. Let me see if I can feel in him still
Yeah, it's okay

Right, okay, then.
Well, I feel with you now.
I feel he a lot of things.
He was a very strong character

Another feeling he's giving me.
It was very regimented as well

I feel it severed and in some forces
any the forces you someway as well

But can you understand anybody with the
military background was connected to you

Well, I got really nobody military
in my background at all

and actually nobody fitting the G either
Right. Okay

Spirit G has rung no bells
but now another voice comes from the ether

...in which it's given me
the initial E with the name

Now I do feel with her as well as some
things to do, well, I feel a grandparent
and I want to give you an e-sounded name

My grandmother had a name beginning with e

At last something I could identify with

Yes. e something
Tell me more about her, please

The lady I do feel with her... a lot of cats

A lot of cats?

Perhaps not. She never had a cat
She hated cats, matter of fact

All right
She liked dogs, but she hated cats

Well, I can understand, not everybody the way
you've got to so we remember with this as well,

not everybody can relate everything
the readable thing. Not everybody

I mean I've got people like yourself...

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence but here I seem to get extraordinary excuses.

Because now many people come to this vent
for some reason and because they want to
close to you in that direction in the line

And also what you've got to think about
which is as well something's very rare to me

Psychics may believe they
communicate with the dead
but I've seen no evidence for it

My concern is that for some people
this superstitious nonsense
can be far from harmless fun

There's a network of over 500 spiritualist
churches across Britain

Here, Tuesday night is s??ance night

And we ask that we can now build a bridge
between this world and the next

so that we can once again go some
way to proving that we survive death

and the our loved ones in the spirit
are forever with us. Amen

Okay, I expect most of you are familiar
with spiritualism but those that...

Spiritualism makes not to god
then it descends into a darker world

The real droll is when the dead start talking
inside the medium's head

Okay, one of the first link I want to do is
I feel I got somebody give me the name Charles

and I want the gentleman on the spirit side
that passed with chest conditions with this

and something about a name that sounds like,
sounds a bit like Devon

but I thought I could hear and
it could be Dave, Devon or
Davenport something like that

And I feel this site somewhere
Can anybody understand this so far?

The lady close to the bookshelf there

would you understand somebody on the
spirit side with the name Charles

No, but I have a home in Davenport

You have a home in Davenport? Okay

Isn't what you're doing cold reading?

Well, it depends on what you call cold
reading or something got a lot of the

rations that come up saying that
what you do or you say something
can people basically make it fit

Now, see if I can find the Charles
in a minute but let me... give you
a few things I can feel about you

Has that been a few problems with
the stomach condition around you

Because I feel as if I want to go to your
stomach and I feel uncomfortable there

Does that make nonsense to you whatsoever

What would you understand then a lady that
I want to connect with on the spirit side

that would suffer with the stomach condition
because I'm being given the stomach condition
Okay?

And I feel with this lady I want someone
that's a fairly comfortable build I would say

a bigger build lady not the slight build lady
that's given me this, Yes?

I think when you really examine the
evidence of myself or other mediums do

you'll find a large, large proportion
could never be explained the way
by something called cold reading

because there're sometimes such
specific details that come through

I'm saying like a painting or print would be,
of a painting looks like a Stubbs painting,

you know the ones in the horses
in the pigs and things like that

The lady in the white sits back there
I'm not around you, am I?

I hate you when I can't find the link
Let me see if...

I think if I were talking to someone
in the spirit world

I'd say things like
'what's it like being dead?'

'Can you see the whole of the universe?'

Why do you ask them such banal questions?

Yeah, good point
but I think what happens is that

mediumship comes from the non-rational,
nonverbal thought parts the brain
of the subject thing

I believe it's a blending of thoughts between
myself and the spirit communicator

but if only it could be just
like a telephone line

Let me just say what we can get a little
more information from her first

If you've convinced the person
that as their grandmother

to the point that they're actually crying

I mean surely those tears enough are perhaps
proof that they had proved that really is their
grandmother that's making the communication

It could indicate just desperate
wishful thinking perhaps

Now, I don't fit on with a Steve Bennet

for I've got those things I want to bring
together somehow with particularly a car crash

My friend Ben died in a car crash
and he's ... on school's day

Your friend Ben passes and so there's not
Bennet as I said it was Ben

Let me see if I can describe
Ben to see if we can...

Beyond whether it's true or false
what concerns me as well is
the exploitation of often vulnerable people

Can I say when you were buying the new shoes
have you been on your mind at that time?

It was on my mind, I know I really buy, yeah

Yeah, because this is about this particular
foul around me at that particular time that's
why I felt I've got the connection with that

And you know his messages really in a whiny sorry,
because he can't...

Do you feel it might actually
be damaging to some people

stopping them from letting go after they've
lost somebody that they love very much?

It's a good point a lot people bring up
that but I believe that it does help
people to progress and move forward

He gives me the feeling that...

But do people move forward?

Or do they get addicted to a spiritual hit?

Most of these congregation are regulars

Craig Hamilton-Parker's grass peer seems
impressive until it transpires that he's
already read this bereaved girl before

He actually had a tire on the left hand...
this call change before the accident and the
police thought there was something to do with that

and I had a message from you before saying
there was something to do with this toy

I've given you a message right before?
Okay, well, I can't remember that

But anyway I want to sort feel his,

I believe what I do was absolutely true,
I believe I gave...

You're really believe it?
Seriously you believe it?
I really absolutely 100% is true

Because it's been proven to me
against what I believe
against my rationality

But it's shown me so many, many times that
life continue and personal proved that I've had

as give me proves that father passed
of continuation of spirit

incredible things that I'm, so very personal,
subjective they hard to argue a case for

but for me it's been life transforming and
I believe as I was helped I can help others

Timer again so called psychics...

... science and evidence

I have personal proof it's true to me

but as with religion
if it hangs on private feelings that
can't be proved or disproved by science

then in what way can it be valid
or meaningful to the rest of us?

I want to show how scientific reason is
always the best way to look at the world

and explain the dangers of superstition

I'm often asked how I know that there isn't
a spirit world or psychic clairvoyance

Well, I don't

It seems improbable but unlike the
fixed world views of mystical faith
science is always open to new possibilities

Scientists test and retest evidence,
refreshing our understanding of reality

In the 1940s, the American zoologist Donald
Griffin demonstrated experimentally that
bats use sonar echo-location of their cries

Back then, sonar was brandnew military technology
and the theory that it was natural to bats
outraged some of Griffin's colleagues

But the more scientists tested the evidence,
the more robust the theory became

They found out exactly what the bat cries were like
how they work, how the brain works

Everything about it added up to a complete
picture of mutually supporting evidence
that this really was a fact

It's this cumulative build up of corroborating
evidence that distinguishes the discovery of
bat sonar from alleged paranormal effects

The so-called evidence for psychic phenomena
is not robust but will o'the wisp

The more we look at it, the weaker it becomes

The alleged detection of water through dowsing
is not obviously ridiculous it might work

but does it?

The only way to tell
is through a rigorous experiment

How does dowsing work?
that's the No. 1 question
And nobody can answer you

Well I reckon I'm convinced that
something is helping me to dowse

One of the earlier chaps thinks it's god

How do you do it till then?
What??s you principle about it?

I think of the question and I expect god
respond in a way that I understand

I expect the right hand one point
to the camera and the left hand one
straight forward, I wanna...

Yeah, okay.
Look, it finally ramp.
Have you done the test yet in the tent?

Yes, I did.
What was the result?

Oh, I'm gonna 6 right, 100%

Yeah, what happened?
One.

So what do you make that then?
God was having his laugh, isn't he?

He loves a joke, you don't realize

The psychologist Chris French thinks
there may be a simpler explanation

He has devoted his career to
investigating claims of the paranormal

And now he's set up this test for dowsing
-- a properly controlled double-blind trial

In each of these rows just one container
chosen a random holds a bottle of water,
all the rest contain sand

Neither the dowsers nor the tester are
allowed to know where the water is
until the boxes are opened

So there were no unintentional giveaways
Have another go

Safeguards like these make the
double-blind trial one of the crowning
achievements of scientific reason

What you typically find when you talk to
dowsers is they'll give you a lot
and lots of anecdote evidence

a lot stories about how they discovered
a leak there in your neighbor's pipes
and so and so forth

but there're always the possible explanations
there, what we're trying to do it a set of conditions

which rule out any of those explanations
then we get down to
the very fundamental basic issue

can't the dowsers actually do
what they think they can do.

I think it's false

No, I think it's false

So shall we see how are you done?

This is sand.

In that case I can't do this

This is the water in No. 5

Sand again

This time guess was in No. 3
(Correct.) That's water

Final trial, it's sand again
In that case, I'm 100% wrong again

Well, you got one right and, that was 6
which is what we expect by chance

So far, they performing pretty much
in line with mean chance expectation,
in other words, guess work

So no one has scored more than 2 hits out to 6

Three. Three?

The people you've been testing,
do they understand why they're being
put through the double-blind procedure

I don't want to explain it to them then
they appreciate why someone who is perhaps
skeptical or doubtful about their claims

would see that that was necessary.
What's interesting is it doesn't actually
tend to dent their confidence at all

Which you suggest that
they're completely sincere

I think they are completely sincere and
they are typically very, very surprised
when we run them through series of trials

and actually say at the end of the day where
your performance is no better than what we would
expect just on the bases of a guess work

and then what typically happens is
though make a whole kinds of reasons

Some might say excuses as to why they
didn't pass that particular test

I feel the whole test is wrong

I'm shocked on words that this has happened

but I did say from the outset couldn't
we just sort out some grey blocks and
some scaffold boards, so then I can work about it

which is what I would routinely do and
I've done for 40 years

Who knows where or what bottles were in what tubs?
That's the whole point, isn't it?
That's the whole point

If you understand dowsing than I do
you'll understand that everything is an image

This state of denial is extraordinary.
Even when confronted with hard fact

these dowsers prefer not to face up
to truth but retain their delusion

Rather than adapt to evidence,
many of us seems remain trapped in ways of
thinking inherited from our primitive ancestors

Irrational belief from dowsing to
psychic clairvoyance has roots in early
mankind's habit of attributing spirit

and intention to natural phenomena such
as water, the sun, a rock or the sea

The sea has often been thought to be a
malevolent force actively out to get you

In 480 BC, King Xerxes of the Persians
built a pontoon bridge across the Hellespont
and the rough sea came and wrecked it

And King Xerxes was so furious that
he sentenced the sea to 300 lashes

I wonder whether there's something of
King Xerxes and all of us to this day

We don't want to believe that things just happen

we want to believe that there're some kind
of deliberate intention behind everything
even when inanimate objects are concerned

And perhaps that is the key to
humanity's belief in the supernatural

Even in the 21st century,
despite all that science has revealed about
the indifferent vastness of the universe

the human mind remains a wanton storyteller
creating intention in the randomness of reality

The delivery of rewards by a one-armed
bandit is determined at random

but many gamblers want to think that
what they do can increase their chances
of winning the jackpot

They stand on one leg or wear a lucky shirt

Are these superstitious behaviors
a byproduct of our evolution?

All wild animals have to be kind
natural statisticians

looking for patterns in the
apparent randomness of nature

when they're looking food or
trying to avoid predators

There're two kinds of mistakes they can make

they can either fail to detect
pattern when there is some

or they can seem to detect pattern when
there isn't any and that's superstition

60 years ago, the American psychologist B.F.
Skinner investigated the behavior of pigeons

rewarding them with food when they learned
to peck a key in the feeding apparatus

But then Skinner set the apparatus
to reward the birds at random

now the pigeons just have to sit back
and wait, but that isn't what they did

Instead the majority developed what
Skinner called 'superstitious behavior'

When an individual pigeon, for example,
happened to look over its left shoulder

and the reward mechanism just
happened to click in at that point

It would have got the idea that it
was looking over the left shoulder that
it got its reward so it tried it again

By sheer luck as it happened the reward
mechanism delivered food at the same time again

and so the pigeon was reinforced in its
idea that looking over the left shoulder
was what got it the reward

And it went on and on and turned into a maniac
for looking over the left shoulder

Humans can be no better than pigeons

We constantly create false positives
we touch wood for luck

see faces in toasted cheese,
fortunes in tea leaves

These provide a comforting illusion of meaning

This is the human condition we desperately
want to feel there's an organizing force
at work in our bewilderingly complex world

And in the irrational mind set
if you believe in the mystical pattern
you've imposed on reality

you call yourself spiritual

Spirituality is a prized commodity

The media tells us to respect spiritual souls
and there are apparently deep insights

Spiritual self help guides do
a roaring trade in the material world
outnumbering science books by 3-1

But what does spirituality actually mean?

So please take your seat and
please come slowly and gently

and so that we can start the proceeeding
without losing time

So could you please...

Satish Kumar is the editor of Resurgence,
an ecological magazine at the
sandal-wearing end of the green movement

And he counts amongst his many fans
Price Charles and Dalai Lama

I represent the entire history of evolution

I was present in the beginning,
in the first Big Bang

and I'll be here for billions of years to come

But isn't Satish's spirituality just about imposing
yet another superstitious force positive?

World is made of two elements.
One element is visible element,

the other aspect of creation is invisible
dimension, things we cannot see

So what is that element which is invisible?
I call it spiritual

When you go in a room, you say there's a good
feeling here. There's a spirit in the room

Well, now you've changed
to something rather different

There the spirit is very big, and very
holistic, and very inclusive world

It is not defined in a one particular way
So when you go in a room

you can say the tree has a spirit

and a rock has a spirit

It's a living rock for me.
Nature without spirit cannot exist

like tree cannot exist without the sun.
Light, it cannot exist without rain,
... cannot exist without soil

also it cannot exist without a treeness.
The treeness is the spiritual quality

Or the rockness

When you talk about the rockness
or the quality of a rock

I can see as a scientist the rock
has hardness, things like that
but I think it's not quite what you mean

It sounded as if what you do mean is
something imposed by the human observer

A rock is actualism...
But there is a rock quality in the rock

Well, you, that's a matter of assertion,
I mean, you are now simply asserting that

Asserting? I'm understanding it
which is my understanding

Some may understand more fully than others

but it is no imposed, it is there

It all sounds very poetic, but it's not reality
Like priests, mullahs, and rabbis,

new-age mystics ceaselessly attempt
to fill gaps in human understanding
with fabricated meaning

Science and rationality are often
accused to having a cold bleak outlook

but why is it bleak to face up
to the evidence of what we know

The word mundane has come to mean
boring and dull, it really shouldn't,
it should mean the opposite

because it comes from the Latin mundus,
meaning the world,
and the world is anything but dull

The world is wonderful

There's real poetry in the real world.
Science is the poetry of reality

And yet today science is under attack

In the last 50 years,
science has put a man on the moon,
cloned a sheep, decoded the human genome

And yet, sadly, the white heat of the 1970s
seems to be treated as white elephant today

What colorkind do you see girls?
Anything yellow close is okay..

A prejudice against science is evident in schools

Physics A-levels have halved in the last 25 years
Chemistry fallen by more than 1/3

University departments are closing
all around the country

This is a betrayal of the enlightenment

The fundamental problem I think lies with
the fashion throughout our educational system

to teach students to value private feeling
more highly than evidence based reason

This is rooted in the post-modern
relativist agenda

For relativists, scientific truth is
just a patriarchal western orthodoxy that

like the old Roman Catholic church stands in the
way of other equally valid outlooks on the world

With things like paranormal, the drive for
alternative medicine, all these kinds of movements
away from the orthodox in science

I see a lot as approximately reformation
vis a vis catholicism

Internet in a way, is kind of functioning,
is a kind of information source

very much like the printing press
did in the 15th century, 16th century

that is empowering people to sort of
look up stuff for themselves

in terms of different kinds of treatments
and things like that and in a way,
not trusting the experts any more

Look, why do I have to trust, you know, the GP,
Why do I have to trust The Royal Society?

I think you're so close to being right,
but yet you're darn wrong, you're absolutely wrong

I would like to take that ball and
run with it in a different direction

We want to question authority.
We don't want to say

because this person is the president of
Royal Society therefore what he says is right

We've got to go back to the evidence
and find out what is actually true?

The problem is, of course,
people may look at he same evidence and
then reach some more different conclusion

from what the head of Royal Society reached

And so that they would say look,
you know, I look at the evidence too
and I'm not persuaded by this

That's where you start getting
a kind of opening up of science

Steve Fuller is, of course right, that
the internet is revolutionizing
how we use and consume information

But the impersonal algorithms of internet
search engines do not weed out robust evidence
from unsourced, uncorroborated assertion

Wikipedia world presents both
great opportunity and huge danger

Paranoia conspiracy theories
circulate unchallenged

Sometimes they're relatively harmless like
the rumor that NASA faked the moon landings

which is a bit of a joke because the evidence
for going to the moon is so strong

But how about the malicious and
utterly unfounded rumor that 4000 Jews
were tipped off by Israel agents

not to go to work in the
World Trade Center on 9/11

It's one of the nasty lie circulating
as truth in the blog community of
racists and religious fundamentalists

Now such people can find each other
anywhere in the world instantly

whipping up scares and reinforcing
their paranoia and delusions

As evidence is devalued even
medical progress has become a target

...through vomiting. Hundreds of families
blame me. MMR vaccines for autism,
brain damage and meningitis

When one report now widely discredited
wrongly linked MMR vaccine with autism

An innuendo circulated that the establishment
was conspiring to risk our children's health

It led to hundreds of thousands of parents
failing to protect their offspring
from the threat of measles

a serious disease that in Afghanistan
kills 35,000 people a year

This is the world of private hunches
and no respect for evidence

Reason has built the modern world,
it is a precious but also a fragile thing

which can be corroded by apparently
harmless irrationality

We must favor verifiable evidence
over private feeling

otherwise we leave ourselves vulnerable
to those would obscure the truth

Next week, I look at how health has
become one of the fiercest battlegrounds
between reason and superstition

Transcription by Andrew & Hattie