Humankind has now a long history of development and learning. Today’s Western societies in particular have been blessed with benefits that have accrued from the accumulation of knowledge over many centuries.

But learning has often been challenged by contrasting ideas that have had to be adjudicated and eventually resolved before adding to the compendium of human knowledge.

In ancient times it was assumed, for example, that the earth was flat. This was abetted by the fact that the radius of the earth is so large that its curvature is hard to discern with the human eye. But some of the Greeks had the notion that the world was spherical and made a fair fist of estimating its circumference.

And of course we had the debate about whether our solar system was centred on the earth or centred on the sun. Galileo, who with his enhancement of the design of telescopes in the seventeenth century, had reasonably come to the conclusion that the earth revolved around the sun and not vice versa.

(It is interesting, but seldom mentioned, that Galileo’s development of the telescope finally put to bed the “flat earth” theory. When with a telescope you looked far out to sea to observe an approaching ship the first thing that was observed was the top of the masts. As the ship approached more closely more of the ship was observable. This made it obvious it was the curvature of the earth that was obscuring the bottom part of the ship until it was close at hand,)

Copernicus had, before him, came to the same conclusion but couldn’t prove it. He observed that if the earth revolved around the sun the calculations of the trajectories of the planets proved to be much simpler.

But Galileo was taken to task not because of any rational criticism of his hypothesis but because his findings contradicted scripture.

There are passages in the Bible that don’t make literal sense if the Sun was regarded as immobile. The most glaring is in chapter 10 of the Book of Joshua, which tells how the Israelites annihilated the Amorites in the battlefield after the Israelite leader Joshua asked God to make the Sun and Moon stand still so that the fighting wouldn’t be interrupted by nightfall.

At that time, because the Church viewed the Bible as the literal truth, anything that challenged what the Bible posited must be false. Consequently Galileo was forced by the Church to recant and not risk their vested interests being challenged.

An approximate contemporary of Galileo was Bishop James Ussher. Ussher was the Archbishop of the Church of Ireland and a professor at Trinity College, Dublin.

In 1650 Ussher published a work where he purported to date the age of the earth using biblical genealogy and other clues from the Old Testament. He concluded that at the time the earth was a littler 6.000 years old.

It wasn’t long before geologists and others began to question this so-called “young earth” theory. Creationists found it particularly difficult to have Ussher’s work disputed.

In the 1940’s Willard Libby from the University of Chicago developed a technique for dating organic material which has come to be known as Carbon Dating. The technique is based on the fact that living organisms—like trees, plants, people, and animals—absorb carbon-14 into their tissue. When they die, the carbon-14 starts to change into other carbon isotopes over time. Scientists can estimate how long the organism has been dead by measuring the concentration of the remaining carbon-14 atoms.

This technique can provide accurate dating for up to 60,000 years. The application of Carbon Dating soon revealed that life had existed on earth well beyond Ussher’s 6,000 years.

Calculations by Cosmologists assuming the “Big Bang” theory of creation suggest in fact the earth could be 1.5 billion years old! Mind you accepting the proposition of the “Big Bang” requires a leap of faith as great as accepting creationism!

Now I haven’t provided this history to you to refute the literal truth of the Bible but as an example how we interpret the world to reinforce our vested interests. I will probably bore you again but I can’t help reiterating the perceptive quote from the French writer Anaïs Nin which I have shared with you many times previously, who wrote:

We don’t see things the way they are, we see things the way we are.

The great scientific historian Thomas S Kuhn came to a similar conclusion. Kuhn wrote a fabulous book titled On the Nature of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn observed that major scientific discovery wasn’t normally incremental. It often involves the change of a whole mindset or worldview, the way of interpreting the world. In order to describe this he coined the word “paradigm”. Now such a transition is not an easy thing.

As much as we might want to believe that science is guided by objectivity and reason, this is often not the case. When a scientist goes to the trouble to study and gain an understanding of a particular scientific paradigm, he has a vested interest in maintaining that paradigm. He is in a similar position to the Biblical scholar who has gone to great lengths to learn the Old Testament. The very foundations of his being are threatened when the text he has invested so mch to understand is challenged.

In this way even scientists, like politicians, might be said to be ideological. Often a person’s ideological beliefs underpin their sense of self and therefore are mindlessly protected from assault. When such people look out at the world, by and large they are not trying to garner new information but are seeking self-affirmation – ie they are seeking evidence in support of their own particular paradigm. And quite often they don’t even do this consciously.

Charles Darwin, perceptively, wrote a telling note in one of his diaries which went something like this:

When I am in the field trying to extract data to support a new theory and I find evidence to the contrary, I immediately write it down because I know from experience this is what I will most easily forget.

(I must apologise that this is paraphrase of something I read long ago but can’t now give you a definitive source.)

Now it does not take much observation to confirm this is a very human trait. I just ask you to think back to the Covid epidemic and remember how people acted. In most countries Governments panicked and imposed draconian constraints on their citizens exaggerating Covid’s impact on the population. Once this authoritarian stance had been taken any suggestion that the isolation was not required, masks were ineffectual, vaccines may be harmful or whatever were immediately silenced. People were jailed and others lost their jobs for daring to question the government orthodoxy. In the subsequent time since, many of the ideas that challenged the authoritarian response of government have in fact proved to be correct.

It was another example of where challenge to the conventional wisdom (the paradigm concocted by government, aided and abetted by Chief Medical Officers, Ministries of Health and politicians relishing their new found power) could not be tolerated and so dissenting voices were quashed. So in the face of such strong vested interests the truth can often be denied, obfuscated or obliterated.

Another area where the truth is difficult to access because of the vested interests of the protagonists is climate change and consequently the debate about renewable energy. I have written extensively on this so won’t go there again in this essay.

So what is the point of relating all of this to you? The point is to register my profound disquiet about the Albanese Government’s proposed bill to combat supposed misinformation and disinformation.

The terms “misinformation” and “disinformation” are themselves very recent additions to the lexicon. I am not sure that they are helpful in pursuing truth but are just more weasel words designed to obfuscate and equivocate.

The most pertinent question, of course, is who is going to adjudicate what we might appropriately say, write, publish without incurring the wrath (or more likely the confected offence) of our unduly sensitive audience that has its own vested interests to protect? The government’s current proposal nominates the Australian Communications and Media Authority as the adjudicator.

Probably controversially I would contend that perhaps none of us can objectively discern the truth. We all have our vested interests and our prejudices. But one thing is for sure if the adjudicating body is appointed by the Government it will more than likely have a bias and given the long march of the left through our institutions it will most probably be biased towards the left.

But more than this, truth is most properly advanced by allowing free debate between conflicting viewpoints. Closing down dissent because it challenges conventional wisdom merely stalls the progress of learning. Because the Church discounted Galileo’s findings, it took a further three and a half centuries before The Vatican could admit it was in error. We can’t, for example, wait that long to learn the lessons from the Covid pandemic!

Many of the issues in dispute are likely to be contentious and/or require specialist expertise to make an informed decision, As history shows right from the time of Galileo through to the Covid pandemic the powers that be have often suppressed the truth in order to prop up the conventional wisdom, We have enough challenges to our free speech without deliberately adding another. The government’s proposed Bill should be fervently opposed!