Q&A: Keith Parsons encourages people to trust in science

Keith Parsons, professor of philosophy, has taught at UHCL since 1996. Parsons has published in the fields of philosophy of science, history of science, philosophy of religion, and logic and critical thinking. Parsons’ next book, It’s OK To Trust Science, is set to release in 2023, and will discuss the credibility of science. 

The Signal sat down with Parsons to discuss his upcoming book, the inspiration behind it and the current state of scientific trust.

Griffin: Why would you say there is this prominent distrust of science today? 

Parsons: Like anything, it is complexly caused. We’ve seen of course an increasing polarization in society, which means people are divided very strictly along ideological lines. That means people have very passionate and inflexible beliefs about all sorts of things. People who have a passionate adherence to any set of doctrines, dogmas, or ideologies are going to regard anything that seems to undermine that with great distrust. I have a t-shirt that says ‘Science doesn’t care what you believe.” That of course is the way science is. Science doesn’t care what people believe. It doesn’t care about your ideology, your dogmas, your doctrines, your creeds. It doesn’t care at all. Basically, science has its own agenda which is figuring out what nature is like and nature, of course, doesn’t respect our creeds at all. Nature’s just the way it is. So scientists try to employ a methodology that excludes doctrines, ideologies and all these sorts of things. It puts a muzzle on them and tries to give nature the last word. People who have a fixed idea about what they want to exist or want to be real feel threatened by results science may produce that will undermine that, which is inevitably going to happen. The very idea of a creed is that it is a preformed set of beliefs that are taken as authoritative and definitive. It basically says who you are, what you are, what you believe. In church, we used to stand up and say the Apostles Creed. A creed by its very nature is going to sometimes intersect reality, and sometimes it’s not. So when it doesn’t intersect reality, then someone from the reality community – science – says, ‘Well no, you’re wrong with this item of dogma,’ that’s going to be very intimidating and very threatening. We tend to wear our creeds on our sleeves now. 60 years ago when I was a kid, not many people in my neighborhood talked about religion at all because we figured that either you agreed with me or if you didn’t so what? But now, it’s like if you don’t agree with me it’s like ‘You’re a terrible person! You’re going to Hell! You’re awful! You’re one of them!’ Now that we wear these things on our sleeves, anything that challenges us is gonna be threatening. 

Griffin: It sounds like you certainly have thoughts on the current state of science being mistrusted. Could you talk about what inspired you to write a book on why it is okay to trust science? What made you decide you wanted that to be your next book? 

Parsons: This is something that has been a concern and interest of mine all along. I guess having grown up in an age that admired science, accepted science in the early 60s, everyone loved science. We were going to the moon, we had the space program, there was no higher calling than science. I entered first grade just a year after the Soviets launched Sputnik and of course, everyone went crazy because they had this idea the Russians were advanced over us in science. So naturally then, the school curriculum became science heavy and I loved it, I picked up on it so I grew up loving science. Then amazingly, when I was a young adult in 1980, suddenly with the movement of conservatism that arose with the election of Ronald Reagan, all these things started coming out of the woodwork that I had forgotten about like the religious fundamentalism that insists the story of Genesis be taken as exactly inerrant and literally true, ya know six literal days of creation six thousand years ago and people started pushing this stuff. And not only pushing it for themselves but wanting it taught in schools. I said ‘Whoa time out.’ In science class, you have to teach science, not religious doctrine. I was appalled by that. What was even more shocking was that I knew people on the right had always had their problems with science, going all the way back to Charles Darwin, but I always thought people on the left were strongly pro-science but then starting in the eighties and nineties, I started hearing all these things about people on the left who said science was a tool of oppression, a tool white men used to oppress everyone else. I was at a philosophical meeting one time and a young woman said ‘Objectivity is just what a man calls his subjectivity.’ In other words, objectivity in science is just a smokescreen men use to voice their own obsessions on everyone else. I began to hear people saying things like science is not based on any reliable methodology or discernible fact and is just a social construct or a social artifact like fashion. There were people like Thomas Kuhn who said when we change theories it’s not a matter of theories or evidence, we have a psychological shift or switch and things look different. So that’s what appalled me. You had people on the left and right attacking science, trying to undermine its authority and say it was not objective, that it was biased and all these sorts of things. So that’s why being a lover of science, anything you love that you hear people attacking unfairly you’re going to stand up for it. 

Griffin: You talked about this resurgence of creationists who are some of the many people who deny science. In this long history of not trusting and understanding science, one common thing many still do not believe in or understand is evolution. There was a viral video that depicted the evolution of whales over millions of years. If you looked at the comments, you really saw the lack of understanding of evolution and demonstrated a lack of certain scientific topics. Why do you think so many are unable to understand or accept the concept of evolution? 

Parsons: Well there’s two reasons, one passive and one active. The passive one is the fact that people don’t get instructed in science the way they should. In the post-Sputnik days that I came along, they were really strong on science but since then it’s been de-emphasized so people don’t get the same education in science. If they do get an education in science, a lot of times it’s a bad education. They get taught a lot of science but they don’t get taught how to think scientifically. So being taught scientific facts without being taught how you came to know or understand those facts is empty. It’s like being told all the facts of history without being told why. That’s one reason. The second reason is an active campaign of misinformation and disinformation that people put out. People don’t like evolution for religious reasons or ideological reasons. It’s not just religious people. Daniel Dennett said Darwinism is universal acid. It eats away at all doctrines. You can get into a fight with the Harvard faculty club supporting evolution because there are people there who don’t like it either. So there are a lot of people who either can’t or won’t understand it for various reasons. The basic idea of evolution is really simple and straightforward but there are people who are either too lazy to think about it or want to think about it but have been so badly misinformed or uninformed that they can’t really think about it. The concepts they have at hand just don’t do them any good. A lot of people are just unmotivated. Bertrand Russell said sometimes a moment’s thought would have shown someone the error of their ways but thinking is a painful process and a moment is a long time. It’s always gotten to me that people will look at the menu at a restaurant for 20 minutes but then if you ask them the most basic questions about life they don’t even think for two seconds about that. So it’s a combination of many things. 

Griffin: The COVID-19 pandemic really showcased just how much people have this distrust of science. You had the anti-vaxxer controversy and even now people do not want to be vaccinated. One thing some people did note is that there have been incidents one might consider scientific blunders like the Tuskegee experiments and things like that where science was used to harm people. What do you say to those who have a mistrust of science because of times it has been used to cause trouble for marginalized groups? 

Parsons: A lot of times the harm science has done has not been just because of the science but because of the lack of moral insight or moral turpitude of some people who have used science for horrific purposes. Of course, we know of the horrific experiments done on Holocaust victims and in this country of course from the 1930s to 1970s you had the infamous Tuskegee experiments in which African American men were left untreated by syphilis and this was done by the CDC and other government agencies so they could observe the progression of the disease. This was a scientific enterprise but was conducted with a methodology that was morally atrocious. Sometimes things happen accidentally. Science being conducted by human beings is going to be fallible. There is nothing humans do that is infallible. As I see it, of course, science is your best bet in trying to determine what’s going on in the world. It doesn’t mean it’s perfect. One of the great things about science is that it’s self-correcting. Skepticism is built into the scientific process. You can’t maintain a scientific hypothesis without expecting other scientists to jump on it and tear it to pieces. Science has a very effective error detection device in which we try to find out what does not work and what is not true. Of course, science sometimes gets in a rut. Science has its blindspots and that sort of thing. Like I said, nothing done by humans is infallible but when it comes to questions of what nature is like and what we can learn and expect about how the world behaves, there simply is no rational choice but to listen to science. That does not mean we turn everything over to the scientists. Take climate change. We have realized increasingly over the past several decades that its real and the predicted effects are going to be dire. At first many of the predictions and conclusions of climate scientists were uncertain. There were wide margins of error but as time goes on we’ve become increasingly certain. But it’s still up to us to decide how we react to that information. What is going to be the pace of our changes and how quickly are we going to attempt to shift from fossil fuels to renewables? You have some people of the Green New Deal who say we need to do it right now. Then you have people with the fossil fuel companies who say we need to do it wink wink nudge nudge but let’s not set any strict timelines. We have to somehow figure out what’s the wise thing to do. We can’t let the scientists do all the thinking for us. We have to get scientific information then decide what we are going to do about it.

Griffin: What do you say to those who are very cynical about human intentions and don’t trust things like the COVID-19 vaccine or the CDC? What is your response to those who have that strong mistrust? 

Parsons: There’s probably nothing you can say to some people. I have a good friend of mine whose daughter is an emergency room nurse. During the pandemic, there were people who came to their hospital with severe cases of COVID, and often they refused to admit they even had COVID when they were dying from it. Their relatives were furious because they said the doctors need to be treating them with ivermectin, that horse dewormer, and hydroxychloroquine and things like that, which of course have no medicinal benefit at all when applied to COVID, but they heard some guy on the Internet or Donald Trump or someone who espoused their particular politics or brand of dogma, and so they become what the Catholic Church used to call invincibly ignorant. When people are dying and refuse to admit they’re dying of COVID, then how can you get through to them? I don’t think there is a way to. What has happened is we have got to this point where we do not even speak to each other anymore. We just scream and shout and point. When you have a breakdown of rational communication, there’s very little hope for communication with some people. I wrote my book in the hopes it will be read by somebody and do some good and not just be preaching to the choir. There’s always the fear when you write something and the people who already agree will be like “Yeah man!” and those who don’t agree just won’t read it. I read a book called Idiot America by Charles Pierce that says we now trust our guts and our guts are our inner idiot. 

Griffin: As someone who works in higher education, what sentiment would you say other philosophers like yourself have about this current lack of trust and understanding of science? 

Parsons: Well I think firstly, we are appalled. We feel a sense of helplessness because the only tool we have is reason and reason can only work if you have grounds for it to flower. Before reason can make any headway at all, there has to be a change of feeling. To really change someone’s mind, if someone is really set in their mind, you can argue until doomsday and they will not change their mind. My experience has been when you are dealing with people living in an alternate reality and alternative facts, if you challenge them they just dig deeper into the rabbit hole. There has to be something that changes how they feel before they will be receptive to reason and to change how people feel, we philosophers aren’t good at that. Scientists are not particularly good at it. I hate to say it but maybe people will wake up to the dangers of climate change when we are knee-deep in it. Actually, we are knee-deep in it, so maybe when we are neck-deep. Donald Trump is not gonna believe in climate change until he has a shark problem in Mar a Lago, when the sea gets so high you got sharks swimming around. Maybe he’ll believe it then. I hate to say it but sometimes you need to have a smack of reality. In the 1950s when the Russians launched Sputnik was a smack of reality. What it will take now, I have no idea. If the hurricanes and record wildfires and thousand-year floods that happen every year, if that won’t wake people up, I don’t know what will.

Griffin: That sounds very dire. 

Parsons: It is! I tell my classes I’m 70 years old. I won’t live to see the worst of it but you will. Your children and their children are gonna live to see the worst of it. Representative Dan Crenshaw recently said we don’t wanna scare our children by telling them they’re gonna burn up. Well, I don’t know anybody who said you’re gonna just ignite like spontaneous human combustion. What we are saying is if the average global temperature increases by three degrees Celsius, there will be catastrophic changes in the Earth’s environment that will lead to all sorts of terrible effects. By 2050 when you have 10 billion human beings and massive droughts offset by massive floods and category 4 and 5 hurricanes, you’re gonna see any number of things that make life difficult for people. It will happen unless we take the steps we need. We certainly won’t if the people in charge keep denying the problem. 

Griffin: I think it’s very telling and interesting how you’re writing this book and you’re a philosopher and not a scientist. What would say is the relationship between science and philosophy? 

Parsons: Well philosophers are not practicing scientists. We don’t perform experiments except thought experiments. But we do our best to make sense and understand the nature of science. We think it’s too important to be left unanalyzed. For instance, a scientist will be out there giving an explanation for something but a philosopher will say ‘What is an explanation? How do we understand the nature of an explanation?’ Scientists will be busy confirming their theories while philosophers will say ‘What is confirmation? What should count as confirming a theory? What kind of evidence should count and how do we understand the process by which theories are confirmed by evidence?’ A long time ago if you asked me the difference between philosophy of science and science I would have said not much because philosophy of science is sort of an armchair profession asking questions that don’t have much to do with science. But I think things have changed for the better because people have recognized you can’t do philosophy of science unless you really know some science. This is why my Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh was not from the philosophy department. It was from the department of history and philosophy of science. Our conviction at the University of Pitt was that you can’t do philosophy of science in any meaningful way unless you understand the history of science, because if you sit in your armchair and make prescriptions about what scientists should do and this means nothing to a scientist, you’re just emitting hot air. So I think what a philosopher has to do is truly understand the history of science and once we understand to some degree the history of science or science as its practiced, a philosopher of biology should have a degree in biology and philosophy. So you need thorough knowledge of both. What a philosopher can then do is what scientists do not have the time to do which is to reflect on the nature of the enterprise itself. Scientists a lot of times are too busy to think ‘what exactly am I doing here?’ Philosophers can come along to say what it really means. Another thing philosophers of science can do is what I am doing which is show people who are attacking and undermining science and show them why they’re wrong. For me, if philosophy had no other purpose other than to debunk the enemies of science, that would be sufficient justification. That’d be fine for me.

Griffin: Do you think philosophy and science are two subjects the younger generation needs more of?

Parsons: Well yeah, universities for years have been talking about critical thinking. I don’t want to cause dispersions but I think it’s just a buzzword they want to give lip service to. Science and philosophy are critical thinking. They are unusually relentless and determined attempts to make sense of things. That’s what we are trying to do. The human mind abhors a vacuum. If we are not given a good way of getting answers we just come up with them. If you aren’t taught to think objectively and rigorously by science and philosophy, you’ll consult your inner idiot. You need philosophy and science to live rationally. If you want to have a decent life individually or collectively, you need philosophy and science. 

Griffin: We have been discussing the mistrust of science. In this age of scientific misunderstanding, one scientific subject that continues to be popular and successful is dinosaurs. People still love dinosaurs and movies like Jurassic World continue to make billions and documentaries continue to be made showcasing the most accurate versions of them. In your opinion, why do dinosaurs continue to be such a popular scientific phenomenon?

Parsons: Well they’re like creatures out of a fairy tale that became real. They’re fantasy creatures that were real. You actually had creatures that were as long as two city buses and weighed as much as a herd of elephants. You actually had a T-Rex which had a skull the size of a bathtub and these ferocious teeth the size of bananas, banana-sized steak knives. You have these creatures of enormous size and strength that actually existed. There’s so much there to appeal to the imagination. Robert Bakker, one of the foremost paleontologists, said dinosaurs are nature’s special effects. There’s just something so tremendously exciting about them. Today’s creatures are simply amazing but the largest land predator today would be something like a grizzly bear or polar bear. Fully grown it weighs like a thousand pounds. But even the smaller carnivorous dinosaurs were bigger than that. Even something like Ceratosaurus and others were bigger than that. The ones that were even smaller were worse. Deinonychus and velociraptor were incredibly fast and had this slashing claw that could disembowel prey. People used to think of dinosaurs as slow, sluggish and stupid but now we know they dominated life on earth for 160 million years and until the dinosaurs went away, our ancestors were about the size of possums and clearing out the dinosaurs cleared out the niches for our ancestors to basically diversify so that by the Eocene there were already early primates. So we were on the way. Dinosaurs, they’ve got it all. Big, fierce, mean, strong, all sorts of physical features like frills and horns and that sort of thing. Everything’s there to appeal to the imagination. 

Griffin: You talked of how you noticed a change in scientific appreciation in the 80s. Could you talk about how the shifting attitudes and appreciation for science were over time when it came to dinosaurs? You also had the Dinosaur Renaissance in the late twentieth century for example. 

Parsons: All the noise from the left and right did not get in the way of paleontologists at all. There’s been a dinosaur revolution. One of the chapters of my book talks about this and the tremendous changes we’ve had. We’ve had the development of what they call paleobiology in which we no longer just stick together the bones, but we can reconstruct how the dinosaurs lived. We can reconstruct their biology and their behavior. We have incredible fossils they have found, mummified dinosaurs even. We’ve been able to conceptualize their evolution. When I was a kid, dinosaurs were seen as big sluggish lizards. But now we know many of them were quite possibly warm-blooded or had an intermediate sort of physiology between warm-blooded and cold-blooded. But we know they weren’t slow. They lived fast, died young. We have all sorts of ways to know how they lived with each other and what caused their demise. We know they’re related to birds. They’re not big stupid lizards, they’re smart active birds. The birds of course are dinosaurs. You can eat Kentucky Fried Dinosaur tonight if you want to. So yeah birds are dinosaurs. There’s been a tremendous development and change in our conception of dinosaurs in just the last 60 years. I have a book called The Great Golden Book of Dinosaurs that I got when I was seven. It has magnificent illustrations of dinosaurs but almost all the information has been revised and updated. For example, we no longer think of Brontosaurus as like having to live in the swamp. Now we know it was out stomping on land and it wasn’t this shrinking animal that would run the moment it saw an Allosaurus. It was tough and mean and if Allosaurus got too close, it could knock it into the next county with its tail.  Being hit with Brontosaurus’s tail would be like being beaten by an iron girder wielded by the Hulk. So dinosaurs and science, in general, has continued to pace and that’s the great thing. Science is doing all these jaw-dropping things. But so many people are not listening or don’t care. Everyone wants to know what the Kardashians or Kanye West are doing but astronomers discover galaxies near the beginning of the universe and that gets like one paragraph on page 49. That’s most unfortunate. Science is doing things that are jaw-dropping.

Griffin: It is unfortunate because like you said birds are dinosaurs and you have people who do not understand that and will wonder how a T-Rex led to a small bird. 

Parsons: Well you know, you can’t go from a raptors to a hummingbird in just a thousand years but in 150 million years, over millions of years of accumulating change, you certainly can. I guess that’s one of the scariest things about evolution. Darwin recognized that there is a tendency for descendant population to depart from ancestral populations to an indefinite degree. Evolution is a cumulative process. Changes that work are preserved and changes that don’t are ruthlessly eliminated.  Ancestral populations have cumulative adaptations, and you put this together and you can go from a velociraptor to a hummingbird. 

Griffin: Could you talk a bit about the impact Jurassic Park had on the public’s perspective on dinosaurs? This year alone saw an array of new dinosaur movies and documentaries be released, something that many attribute to Jurassic Park. 

Parsons: I’m normally not a big movie aficionado but I stood in line in 1993 to when the first Jurassic Park was available. I stood to be the first in line and it was like seeing a dinosaur. The CGI effects were like seeing a real dinosaur and its about as close as I think we are gonna get to seeing one. The visual effect of that was stunning. When I was a kid the closest we had was stop-motion animation. The special effect we have now blow away everything that came before and give you an experience that feels more real than anything. That’s the great paradox of our age. People love the products of science and technology but they don’t want to know anything about it. If you wrote a history of the cell phone, you’d have a good idea of the scientific information of our culture. But people don’t want to know that. They want to know the latest app or game. It’s most unfortunate we have people addicted to the products of science and technology but have no interest in actually learning about it. 

Griffin: Do you have any final words about why people should trust science? 

Parsons: As a nerdy kid, science was something that was more than just practically useful. I think the greatest things I ever learned in school were the extent of the universe, how big the universe actually is, the depth of time and world of the small, the world of atoms and subatomic particles. Each of those things was not just something that was an idle curiosity but it was beautiful. There is a horrible misconception that even the best poets have construed which is that if you study science, it takes away the beauty and wonder of the world and that’s absolutely wrong. The more you study the universe the more wonderful it is and more mysterious. Not mysterious in the sense that we can learn more and more about it. Science produces a sense of mystery by producing awe. I would say even religious awe. I dont think its a mistake or wonder that the great scientists of the past have had an almost religious approach towards nature. Einstein referred to the universe as Herr Gott, which means the Lord God. Einstein had his famous saying that the lord God is subtle but not malicious. You have Darwin at the end of the origin of species that I have read to classes alongside the Genesis narrative and both are just magnificent. Darwin obviously had a sense of wonder and awe at the universe being the way that it is. I think the more you know about the universe, the more wonderful it is.