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Chris Mooney Quotes

born 1977 United States

Christopher Cole Mooney (born September 20, 1977) is an American journalist and author of four books including The Republican War on Science (2005).

United States
Journalists
Non-fiction authors

Random Chris Mooney quote

27 quotes

Media coverage tends to be episodic and event-driven, always in search of the dramatic and the new.

Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future (2009)

Whereas good science is rewarded for being painstaking and nuanced, politics is the enemy of subtlety.

Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future (2009)

And then there’s religion, the source of the deepest fissure in the science-society relationship.

Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future (2009)

Without the Internet, the modern vaccine-skeptic movement probably wouldn’t exist, at least not in it current form.

Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future (2009)

In part, the divorce of science and politics can be explained by the very different worldviews that inform each field.

Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future (2009)

They didn’t even understand the science they presumed to criticize.

Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future (2009)

Today this country is also home to a populace that, to an alarming extent, ignores scientific advances or outright rejects scientific principles.

Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future (2009)

Policymaking by ideology requires that reality be set aside; it can be maintained only by moving towards ever more authoritarian forms of governance.

The Republican War on Science (2005)

As three of Meyer’s scientific critics have noted, “‘An unknown intelligent designer did something, somewhere, somehow, for no apparent reason’ is not a model.”

The Republican War on Science (2005)

For a very long time, American scientists have found themselves pitted against both our businesslike, can-do attitudes and our piety.

Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future (2009)

But when they don’t like what science has to tell them, those wielding political power of the have another option besides running away from the truth: suppression.

The Republican War on Science (2005)

Many decisions about science policy are made not through decision or analysis but on ideological and political grounds.

Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future (2009)

No one in Congress senses the need for science in their daily lives.

Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future (2009)

But it is only half the story. If powerful religious commitments lead to politically driven abuses of science, so does an unswerving commitment to the bottom line.

The Republican War on Science (2005)

The scientific case for rejecting such bad science (or non-science) is indisputable. But that doesn’t make it persuasive to creationists or other religiously motivated evolution skeptics.

Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future (2009)

At the same time (i. e., 1994), the Republican party continued to define itself in adulation of Reagan and in opposition to mainstream science.

Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future (2009)

When politicians use bad science to justify themselves, rather than good science to make up their minds, we can safely assume that wrongheaded and even disastrous decisions lie ahead.

The Republican War on Science (2005)

“You can’t prove what’s going to happen in the future,” explains Naomi Oreskes, who has written extensively on the uses of modeling. “But that doesn’t mean you don’t have a rational basis for action.”

The Republican War on Science (2005)

To be sure, the intelligent design movement does not claim an animus against science. Science abusers never do. Rather, the movement seeks to redefine the very nature of science to serve its objectives.

The Republican War on Science (2005)

When pressed, ideological appropriators of science will rarely relinquish a cherished idea no matter how many times it has been convincingly debunked. They seek to adopt the veneer of science, but not the critical rigor that should accompany it.

The Republican War on Science (2005)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Chris Mooney (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.