Many people hate science, but love quasi-science books about bits that fall off Jupiter and the Pyramids that came from Outer Space. The hatred of real science and the love of quasi-science are opposite sides of the same coin.
The first is deeply pernicious
The second is merely inevitable
It is sad that so many miss all the fun in good science, and it is blasphemous to be sent into this world with trillions of brain cells, and to shutter them off against the more vigorous half of human thought. It is Philistine not to see that a fact and a theory, simple components of knowledge, are a way of coming to terms with nature. Perhaps the greatest force causing the hatred of science has been the mistaken idea that science deals in inhuman truths, that could be ground out of machines if enough facts were fed in. Science is a human activity, dependant on human imagination, setting itself the obligation of bouncing its ideas against reality. Prejudice against science, leads to ignorance. Ignorance leads to frustration and fear. Prejudice, ignorance, frustration, and fear, together lead to hatred.
There must be nothing worse to find that there is a whole world out there of incomparable pedigree that has become inaccessible.
It is not too awful to be confronted with people cleverer than oneself in science, it happens quite a lot. But it is intolerable to share the world with people who are party to knowledge and ways of thinking that make one’s own ideas seem petty. Our response is to fabricate another esoteric world of ideas that seem to challenge the ideas that are so bothersome. So, for example, if modern astronomy seems omniscient, let us erect alternative theories that challenge its claim, whilst casting orthodox science in the role of the lame and also ran. The hatred of science, might in a hundred years fade into history; a quaint phenomenon of the 20th century.
Quasi-science will remain as a perpetual epiphenomenon.
Condensation of an Article by Colin Judge, ‘New Scientist’ 7th April 1983.