> This [The fact that science is a human-driven, human-invented process] is hard to explain to K-8 science teachers, who think that science is a new religion with new truths to be learned. They think it's their job to dispense these catechisms. [emphasis added]
I think viewers of TED talks are looking to be told what to believe. I'm not at all moralizing--I sometimes watch TED talks--but I do think science-as-religion (a bunch of facts or truths to be memorized or internalized) is a distortion that "opiates the people," so to speak.
I think that in science there is an inherent tension between what scientists know and what what the public knows.
Scientific knowledge is covered in asterisks. To read and understand science typically requires an extensive amount of background knowledge; without that it is very easy to misinterpret the strength, significance, or applicability of a scientific finding. Many of the asterisks are themselves scientific conclusions with their own set of asterisks.
The public, at least in areas which are not immediately relevant to daily life, cannot be assumed to have that background knowledge. Therefore, the tension is essentially this: How can scientists make people aware of (or interested in) scientific knowledge if they have to strip out all the asterisks when talking to them?
Making science into a catechism is simply one solution to the above problem. Ignore the asterisks and turn the fundamental findings of physics and chemistry into dogma and dispense it as gospel truth. I actually am somewhat o.k. with this. Sure, Joe Public might come away with an over-simplified and over-confident knowledge about what science says, but I think that a clumsy knowledge of scientific facts is better than the impression that scientific knowledge is arcane and out of reach. After all, it is highly unlikely that Joey P. will find himself in a situation where it is very important for him to really understand all the subtleties behind his k-8 scientific knowledge, but that knowledge is likely to come in handy.
The only problems with the science-as-religion solution are a potential "loss of faith" and the perception of arbitrarity with regards to scientific findings. The first can easily happen when someone learns about a new finding which contradicts the dogmatic version of science but is entirely consistent with the heavily asterisked actual scientific consensus. The second problem is basically "rejectability;" if people think that science is a set of arbitrary rules, then they are free to reject them the same way they would reject other religions.
> This [The fact that science is a human-driven, human-invented process] is hard to explain to K-8 science teachers, who think that science is a new religion with new truths to be learned. They think it's their job to dispense these catechisms. [emphasis added]
I think viewers of TED talks are looking to be told what to believe. I'm not at all moralizing--I sometimes watch TED talks--but I do think science-as-religion (a bunch of facts or truths to be memorized or internalized) is a distortion that "opiates the people," so to speak.
[0] Is it really complex? Or did we just make it complicated? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubaX1Smg6pY