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The "what science writing owes to its religious origins" alt proposal

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https://www.americanscientist.org/blog/m...us-origins

EXCERPTS: Science disinformation has been around for a long time. But the scope and aims of it have evolved over the past few years. [...] science communication as a field began to seriously push back against what’s been called the knowledge deficit model, sometimes just called the “deficit model.” (See “The Trust Fallacy,” July–August 2021.)

[...] By the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s, around the time that the deficit model was first named and criticized, science communication researchers began to point out that the deficit model paradigm wasn’t working as well as desired. ... lingering in the minds of many American scientists at the time was the stunned realization that creationism was still widespread in the United States...

[...] In the wake of this time of change came what we might call a science engagement model. (I take this term from former AAAS CEO Alan Leshner’s recent advice to scientists: “Don’t just explain: engage.” ... This engagement model is probably the most common way of thinking about science communication at the moment. It emphasizes sustained relationship-building between scientists and their publics rather than the one-way flow of information from experts to audience. (See “How Climate Science Could Lead to Action,” January-February 2020.)

[...] five years ago ... science-themed protests ...developed ... and ... debates over whether science could be separated from politics. It has come to a rapid boil in the world of COVID-19. ... This controversial time for science can’t be blamed on the deficit model. So why isn’t the engagement model working?

[...] It might help to recall that professional science communication didn’t start with the deficit model. It didn’t even start with scientists. Science popularization has several antecedents [...] But what perhaps played the most central role in creating science writing as a kind of literary genre (in English, at least) is a source that may surprise many scientists today: theology.

Not long after the era of [...those...] associated with the Scientific Revolution, debates about religion in the English-speaking world began to focus heavily on discussions of nature. ... By the 1700s, this discussion had evolved into a literary genre we often call natural theology.

Unlike theological arguments that focused primarily on the Bible, natural theology looked at examples of parsimony and providence in nature to draw religious conclusions about the divine forces that its writers presumed created and ordered the world around us. Some fans of the history of science may be familiar with William Paley [...] Paley is most often remembered (not entirely fairly) as the anti-Darwin, the personification of religious thinking that stood in the way of the theory of evolution...

What’s usually overlooked about Paley’s Natural Theology is that two-thirds of the book’s text consists of detailed descriptions of various plants, animals, astronomy, geology, and chemistry. These chapters didn’t often make explicit references to God, but they did reflect a sense of a moral order to the world. In the decades that followed, works of natural theology continued this pattern...

[...] Over time, works derived from natural theology and the literary conventions of naturalistic description came to be seen as useful ... That religious legacy helped this new genre of popular science to gain acceptance and be seen as respectable for mainstream audiences.

The first professional science popularizers were not deficit modelers, nor were they engagement-minded in the way we think of today. Natural theology had always contained a mixture of logical argumentation and appeals to the readers’ sense of awe and wonder.

Religious authors knew that reason alone may not inspire belief, but that a sense of amazement at the natural world could reinforce such religious feeling. Even the more secular among these [...] the invocation of emotion and the sense of nature as majestic in their colorful descriptions ... was both expected by their readers and created emotional attachment to the world.

One thing that didn’t change for much of the 19th century was that to the natural theologians, and the science writers who inherited their legacy, nature itself was unabashedly political. To Paley, nature showed a multitude of examples that minimized suffering and mostly balanced the well-being of creatures. (Paley was opposed to the violence and upheaval of the French Revolution, like many British conservatives, but also advocated for the abolition of slavery and more equitable distribution of wealth to maintain social order.)

Paley thought that nature was one way God illustrated how human societies should live. [...] At a moment when science writing seems to be asking what it will be going forward, it’s worth thinking about what science writing owes to its religious origins. As Yong himself pointed out in another recent piece on public health, sometimes scientists abandon the sense of political activism and efforts to make moral recommendations out of a fear of being seen as too “political” or insufficiently objective.

[...] whether scientists want it or not, politics will come for them if they don’t come to it. (See “Science Communication Lessons from ‘Kofta-Gate,’” July–August 2019.) The same is true of science writing, and it may be part of why the engagement model of the last few decades has lost efficacy against new kinds of disinformation. It turns out that pseudoscience and bad-faith actors can engage too and are less reticent about evoking emotional responses and drawing moral prescriptions from nature.

I don’t mean that science writing needs to go back to church. But this moment may be a time to reflect on why and how so much science engagement derives from a paradigm that helped scientists build relationships with the public but has left them reluctant to express true feelings... (MORE - missing details)
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