Jim Eagles: Passionate beliefs don’t change reality

If i ignore it, it will go away. If I pretend it hasn't happened, it hasn't. If I don't listen, it won't be true. It's a common enough approach to life.

I often turn off the radio when the New Zealand cricket team are batting as though that will somehow prevent the fall of any further wickets. I've procrastinated over medical tests to avoid the risk of bad news.

There's nothing very unusual in that. It is a form of behaviour which has a long and generally ignominious history. As the English philosopher Francis Bacon observed 400 years ago, "Man prefers to believe what he prefers to be true".

Unfortunately this approach is sometimes taken not only over things which don't matter - such as cricket - but also with respect to things that do.

Over the centuries, profound discoveries in cosmology and navigation, physics and biology, medicine and nutrition, with the potential to bring huge benefits to humankind, have been suppressed because they did not suit what those in authority wanted everyone to believe.

Probably the most famous example is the way the Church tried to quash the discoveries of Copernicus and Galileo because it did not want to know the Earth was not, in fact, the centre of existence.

It sounds ridiculous to us today. It didn't alter the reality that the world on which we have arisen is but a humble planet circling a smallish star on the edge of a fairly ordinary galaxy in a vast universe. Nor did it stop the truth eventually becoming accepted.

But before we sneer at the foolishness of those priests we should note that such irrational behaviour is alive and well today.

The residents of whole towns and cities are condemned to suffer needlessly bad teeth because they choose to ignore the overwhelming weight of scientific evidence about the benefits of fluoridation in favour of the dire warnings from a tiny minority of fringe practitioners.

Increasing numbers of parents refuse to inoculate their children, even though once again the vast majority of medical opinion holds that the advantages of being protected from disease hugely outweigh the risks.

There is widespread opposition to genetic modification based largely on urban myths about two-headed fish and birds poisoned by deadly wheat, though these have been exposed as bogus.

It is an article of faith that nuclear power is beyond the pale, though we are running out of alternative sources of energy and the new generation of nuclear power stations have been clean, safe and accident-free for decades. And so it goes.

The most recent example of this fascinating preference for myth and rumour over fact and scientific research is the refusal of various indigenous people to take part in a project - by National Geographic and IBM - to use gene research to trace the spread of the human race around the globe.

Dr Paul Reynolds, of Auckland University's Maori research centre, Nga Pae o te Maramatanga, is among those calling for a boycott because it implies people's origins can be traced in their genes. "Indigenous people will be saying we already have our stories about our origins, so we don't need a scientific rationale to justify our origins."

That's pretty much what you can imagine some zealous inquisitor telling Galileo, "We don't need to look through your telescope to study the movements of the planets and the stars. All we need to know is written in the Bible."

Wellington lawyer Moana Jackson has chimed in by questioning the project's motives: "I'm sure part of it will be to try to strengthen some of the existing theories about the arrival of indigenous peoples in various countries, and that has a sordid history because it has been used to diminish indigenous rights."

Again, you can almost hear the inquisitor: "We cannot allow your research to undermine the stories told in the scriptures. That might weaken belief in Christianity itself."

None of this is to argue against the need to view the latest scientific claims with a healthy scepticism or the importance of judging the merits of any research from a moral perspective.

There was nothing silly about the traditional belief that the sun revolved around the Earth. That is how it looks from down here.

It isn't foolish to be wary of putting chemicals into water or injecting ourselves with dead germs.

Nations are wise to treat nuclear energy with caution. The world saw what happened at Chernobyl.

The problem arises when we become so fixed in our beliefs that we refuse to contemplate any evidence to the contrary.

If 99 per cent of the scientists working in a particular field hold the same viewpoint on some topic - the safety of fluoridation, for instance, or the efficacy of vaccination - then it's at least worthy of consideration.

Yes, it is possible there has been some complex conspiracy to gull the public. At one point opponents of fluoridation argued it was a communist plot to undermine the health of the Western world.

These days the argument is more likely to be that all those scientists have been bribed and all evidence to the contrary suppressed by drug companies.

It is possible but is it likely? Or is it more likely that the generally accepted view is the correct one?

The determination of the inquisition to defend Christian beliefs or of Maori to cling to their stories of the homeland of Hawaiki is entirely understandable. We all need sacred stories, holy places and legendary heroes to answer those unanswerable questions, add meaning to a humdrum existence and provide inspiration for ordinary mortals. That, I suspect, is part of the explanation for the growing significance of Anzac Day.

But passionate conviction cannot alter reality. The faith of the inquisition did not prevent the Earth from revolving round the sun. And the legend of Hawaiki will not alter any research finding that human life originated in Africa and reached the Pacific by way of Asia.