I’m not sure that the same thing has been done for science – i don’t sense a huge priority on communicating to laypeople, well rewarded by the field. any actual scientists want to chime in on this one?

ps. hiya it’s your former Samuelson Clinic GSR!

(a) Public seminars on scientific topics become unruly & rude. Well, that may be true, but it need not. The tone of discussion has to do with the rules of the format. Church services don’t have Q&A, for example. And people tend to go to church services, not to challenge the message, but to hear it, and to either blindly accept it or to process it privately (or to forget it completely). In this respect, church services and large lecture hall classes typical of undergraduate required classes seem somewhat similar — except that church services are freely and ubiquitously available.

On the other hand, maybe the public seminar on science model (with Q&A) is a better model for conveying information than church services, or maybe it’s better for conveying scientific information.

Really, my point is just that I wish that science information were ubiquitously & freely available. Religious information is, and I suspect that is a major reason that religious institutions and religious beliefs continue to thrive. Here we are facing a crisis in science education and literacy in the US, and yet religion is booming.

(b) Science is complex. That’s for sure. But so are religious doctrines. Complex, confusing, often self-contradictory, embedding and linking to lots of other ideas. A religious services leader might “preach” on an ongoing series of related topics, work her way through an exegesis of a religious text over a series of weeks or months, or tackle the material in any way she wants. Religious service leaders are doing some form of teaching, after all. They may or may not do it in an intellectually honest or rigorous way, but the fundamental pedagogical and organizational problems religious service leaders confront must be in some respects similar to those that other teachers face. I grant that the essentially subjective and frankly made-up nature of religious doctrine gives religious service leaders a flexibilitly that is perhaps more akin to the flexibility experienced by literature teachers than science teachers. But I don’t believe that scientific information is uniquely unsuited for mass distribution in low-interaction, informal, voluntary settings.

In fact, we teach science in serial form in primary school and universities, so the information is certainly able to be packaged in a variety of ways. The problem I see isn’t the packaging, it’s the dissemination: scientific information just simply isn’t nearly as available to people as religious information.

(c) Finding good teachers who are willing to do it must be hard in science as it is in religion.

(d) I really hope that new methods of delivering information, like podcasts, will get rid of some of the imbalances in access to valuable information.

(e) But really I’m not seriously proposing anything, nor seeking to defend a proposal. My point basically is just that religious information is widely available, and I believe that significantly contribures to the enduring popularity and longevity of religious institutions and doctrines. I mean, really, it’s almost a perfect model for distributing and marketing information products: If you look at churches, synagogues, and the like, what are they selling? Completely made-up stuff with an obvious financial interest in selling it. And yet people buy it! When they could buy something else or take the religious information for free. Religious information is given away for free, and it generates its own popularity.

Yes, the story is much more complex: childhood indoctrination, tradition, government coercion, social pressures, blah blah blah. But if we just pull out the information distribution strand, and compare religious information and scientific information — it’s no wonder that in the marketplace of ideas science is losing out. Because markets aren’t just made up of what’s the best product; they’re also comprised of the most available products at the best prices. And if we want to know why religion outcompetes sciences as an explanation for human evolution, then maybe one part of the answer is information distribution.