Counterknowledge

[Ed]

Hi,

I was emailed the following article which for me confirms that they must be getting desparate...

Counterknowledge

In a new book, Damian Thompson blasts our surrender to conspiracy theories, quack medicine, bogus science and fake history

Damian Thompson, National Post Published: Monday, December 15, 2008

The U. S. government knew in advance about the plan to crash passenger jets into the World Trade Center. There is a link between childhood autism and the MMR vaccine. The structure of a cell is too complex to have evolved through natural selection.

All three of these statements have been presented as fact by reputable publishing houses and circulated on the Internet. Tens of millions of people believe them to be true. Yet all four are false.

This is counterknowledge: misinformation packaged to look like fact. Ideas that, in their original form, flourished only on the fringes of society are now being taken seriously by educated people in the West, and are circulating with bewildering speed in the developing world. We are lucky to live in an age in which the techniques available for evaluating the truth of claims about science and history are more reliable than ever. Yet we are witnessing a huge surge in the popularity of propositions that fail basic empirical tests. The essence of counterknowledge is that it purports to be knowledge but is not knowledge. Its claims can be shown to be untrue, either because there are facts that contradict them or because there is no evidence to support them.

Obviously, only claims about the material world can be demolished empirically. Many religious doctrines cannot be tested by the evidence of our senses and therefore do not fit neatly into the category of counterknowledge. Science cannot tell us whether God exists. Religion enters the realm of counterknowledge only when it makes factually incorrect statements. Creationists, for example, spend most of their time dismissing the scientific evidence showing that all life evolved through natural processes of random mutation and selection. But when they do make testable claims of their own they are shown to be utterly false.

Read the full article :

http://www.nationalpost.com/story.html?id=1076842

[ashgarth]

You are right read something similer on ABC we are all mentaly ill.

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/MindMoodNews/story?id=6443988&page=1