With a pub­lic dis­trust of sci­en­tists comes the idea that “no sci­en­tific evi­dence will ever be com­pelling”. That’s what we can learn from Cre­ation­ism, says Andrew Brown, and to solve this dis­trust we can­not rely on edu­ca­tion to help the next gen­er­a­tion under­stand, but instead we must improve sci­ence jour­nal­ism.

I’m not sure what the answer is, but rea­son­ably cer­tain that it isn’t the pub­lic under­stand­ing of sci­ence as most sci­en­tists under­stand that. What they mean by this is teach­ing peo­ple to think more or less as sci­en­tists do about the world. That’s admirable in itself: rea­son­able numer­acy, and some knowl­edge of sta­tis­tics and of prob­a­bil­ity, would hugely improve almost everyone’s life. But it won’t solve the under­ly­ing prob­lem of trust.

via The Browser