You Can’t Get People To Accept Science Until They’re Emotionally Ready

A society is only able to see through science what it is prepared to see emotionally. It was not until a few centuries ago that Europeans were willing to admit that the sun did not rotate around the earth but the other way around. It’s not that they could not figure it out through science, science had shown it a thousand years before then. It was that humans at that point in time were emotionally incapable of seeing themselves as not central to their own story.

And this is not surprising. It’s a hell of a lot to ask of someone to accept that their existence is more or less inconsequential, meaningless. Psychologically speaking, it’s hard to say it’s even healthy to have such an understanding.

We see how people attempt to cope with this even today. Perhaps we’ve accepted the idea that the Earth revolves around the Sun in a galaxy beyond our comprehension which is just a drop in the ocean that is our universe. But we seek out other ways to explain how the universe still revolves around us, if not us as individuals than us as a group. People insist that the world revolves around the United States, insist that it revolves around their own political party, insist that it revolves around their own particular prejudices. The amount of people who can tear themselves away from the notion that they are somehow at the very center of all that is important is quite a small number. To get there, one has to be very open to the universe, feel at one with its awesome and incomprehensible vastness, rather than a fear of it. Those who are able to fully relinquish the emotional need to feel at the center are called saints and prophets. Such an accomplishment, I can’t help feel, can be built upon a rather modest understanding of science, but it requires a great wisdom and emotional development.

So it’s kind of foolish to try to shove science down the mouths of those who are not emotionally prepared for it. You’re only going to trigger their gag reflex. You are only behaving like the class apple polisher who mocks the kid who can’t grasp the math problem the teacher just spent the entire hour explaining to the class. You’re not helping him to learn, you’re just touching all those emotional triggers that are keeping him from learning in the first place. You may be feeling better about yourself but you’re making him feel worse about himself. And what do you think that kid is going to do when you’re out during recess and the teacher’s not around? He’s likely going to try to make you feel bad, too, and I can’t say I don’t understand his motivation for doing so.

If you want people to accept science, it’s not as easy as smugly reciting all the knowledge you learned from reading books and taking courses they did not. Just like you can’t expect a kid to learn at school when he has an aching in his stomach from not having anything for breakfast, you can’t expect an adult with an emotional emptiness within to embrace the facts. Kindness, understanding, and charity are the only things that are going to help that hungry child grasp the facts that science is able to provide him. It really is no different with people who are emotionally lacking. If you don’t figure that out, if you insist on being the obnoxious egghead rather than a compassionate human being, then I believe it is not the person who is resistant to science that is the only one lacking emotionally. You may understand on an intellectual level that the Earth is not at the center of the universe, but you still need to feel that the group to which you belong is.

That attitude is going to lead to a predictable result come recess time. And while I abhor bullying, don’t pretend you’re entirely innocent in the matter.