Merapi is one of some 500 active volcanoes in Indonesia and among the most active of the lot, erupting about once a decade. In the 1930 eruption, 1,370 people died.

In the last few weeks, it has come to life again, with searingly hot gas clouds rolling down the mountainsides for miles, rains of ash and rocks and the occasional lava flow. Despite these, as at the time of writing, its lava dome is still building, suggesting that the pressure within has not been fully relieved.

The Indonesian authorities ordered an evacuation of the area, but despite much persuasion, many villagers refused. Even those that did, went home again during a recent pause in Merapi's activity.

For many, evacuation alone was no answer. How could they be away from their fields and livestock for weeks on end? Who would feed the goats and chickens, who would tend the fields? If these died, or were stolen while they were in evacuation centres, what livelihood would there be to return to?

Yet others simply refused to believe the authorities' "scientific" assessments of risk. Theirs was a world of spirits; the rumblings of Merapi were signals that the spirits were unhappy. To them, the proper response was not evacuation, but appeasement of the spirits by means of time-honoured rituals.

Led by Mbah Marijan, the 73-year-old appointed by the Sultan of Yogyakarta as the guardian of Merapi, a group of men went on an all-night hike around the various villages recently, performing some of the rites that generations before them have done.

Other village headmen too conducted their own prayers and made offerings. It's not that they do not believe Merapi will ever erupt in a big way -- they know historically that it can -- but they believe they are in communication with the spirit world, and before the volcano really erupts, a warning will come to Mbah Marijan, perhaps in a dream. He will then lead his people to safety.

What we have here is a divide between the modern, scientifically rational world that uses technical instruments to monitor the mountain's behaviour and seismic theories to predict risk, and the traditional world that uses myth to do the same thing -– to assess risk. Myth has an advantage as well: through its rituals, it can also mitigate danger, not just predict it.

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Then came reports of 6 deaths from bird flu in a village in the province of North Sumatra. All 6 were related to each other, belonging to one extended family. The World Health Organisation was particularly interested in this cluster because it appeared to be a case of human-to-human transmission. There were no indications of widespread deaths of fowl; rather, the patients had been in close contact with one another, sleeping in the same room.

Any sign of human-to-human transmission must be taken seriously because that is how a pandemic of avian influenza is likely to begin.

When the health minister, Siti Fadillah Supari, said publicly that this was a cluster of bird flu, the family got extremely angry. News reports didn't explain why, but I can imagine that they and their neighbours must have been concerned that their flocks of chicken would be culled. That would be a huge blow to their livelhoods. Perhaps the family didn't want to be blamed by their fellow villagers for this disaster.

They would rather the authorities not declare this as a case of bird flu, and not take measures like culling and quarantine that scientific rationalism dictated. The village headman, in an effort to prove that the birds were not sick or infectious, ate a chicken's head publicly.

But what really caught my eye was a report that when the 6th member of the family died, the surviving relatives blamed Tamiflu for his death. Bird flu didn't kill him, or anybody. Modern science did, they said.

And here we are stocking up millions of doses of Tamiflu in advance.

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Why don't these people trust scientific rationalism like we do? This is not as trivial a question as it might appear, for it undermines our belief as to why we believe.

Off hand, we often take the view that scientific rationalism, combining as it does, objective facts and rationality, deserves a bigger claim on our credulity than other systems of belief. Yet, here we are confronted with people, on the slopes of Merapi and in North Sumatra, who even in the face of death, have no time for scientific rationalism and its products -- vulcanology and pharmacology.

To the villagers on Merapi, having lived a life immersed in a culture animated by tales of spirits and reinforced through countless rituals, the logic of supernatural intervention is coherent and inescapable. The blips on seismologists' radar screens and graphs, on the other hand, are quite disconnected from their known world. The theories of volcanic behaviour on which are founded the government's summons to evacuate are just words from alien soothsayers. Nothing in the villagers' culture and experience can explain why those scientific theories should be believed, just as nothing in ours can explain why ghost stories should be believed.

Similarly, nothing in the North Sumatran villager's experience tells them modern pharmacology can be trusted. Theirs is a world of herbs and poisons, and the measure of whether one is this or that is a matter of cultural legacy. When in doubt, especially when lives are at stake, the bias may be to treat the unknown as poison, even if it's nicely packaged as Tamiflu.

This then raises a question: do we, like them, believe what we believe merely out of familiarity? Do we put faith in scientific rationalism simply because it is something we've grown up with, not because it is in any way more objectively correct?

Consider this: how many of us are able to explain exactly how Tamiflu works, or what are the theories of vulcanology relevant to the Merapi situation? We merely trust. We trust because we've been schooled in scientific rationalism. We've gone through chemistry classes in which we had to titrate some chemical solutions, and at some calculable point, the liquid changes colour. We've learnt to determine how much load a given mechanical set-up can bear, and how the mathematics of probability can anticipate queue behaviour at supermarket check-out counters.

With this initiation into scientific rationalism, we learn to trust of rest of it. More importantly, all through life, we see repeated demonstrations of it. Airbuses take flight despite weighing tons, mobile phones bring distant voices to our ears and antibiotics make us feel much, much better. We trust scientific rationalism because we've been schooled in it and they are familiar to us in our world.

How different is this from people who have grown up in other cultures? Isn't how they believe similar to how we believe -- which is, to trust the familiar? Should we adopt a perspective of cultural relativism instead of the arrogant belief that our way of thought is objectively correct?

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The near-obsession of religious fundamentalists in America with the school curriculum seems to support this theory that schooling makes all the difference. We've heard of attempts to discredit evolutionary biology and purge the teaching of it from schools [1]. Why is this so important when it's hardly essential to the core of Christianity?

Might it be because this is one of the most obvious parts where scripture comes up directly against scientific rationalism? This extreme reaction may be indicative of a deep fear that the latter will prove fatal to religious faith (though personally, I don't think so).

The creationists seem to be at least subconsciously aware that teaching pupils about evolution renders the subject familiar to them for the rest of their lives, thus undercutting their acceptance of the biblical account, and by extension, the Bible itself.

We saw it again when a Massachusetts school teacher became a subject of controversy for reading a fairy tale to her class. The problem was that the prince (or was it a princess?) eventually fell in love with a same-sex partner.

Outrageous! some people said. The teacher should be sacked!

But wait a minute, same-sex marriage is legal in Massachusetts, and is supposed to be treated by the State as completely equal to opposite-sex marriage. If the fairy tale ended with inter-racial marriage -– which is legal too [2] -– few would think it controversial. So why not same-sex marriage?

At the heart of the controversy was really this: that the fairy tale rendered same-sex marriage familiar to a new generation.

Familiarity is the battleground in cultural relativism.

Yet there is something to be said about scientific rationalism that cannot be said for myths about volcano spirits, creation and the like: scientific rationalism does more than just provide an explanation for nature, it provides a foundation for vast improvements in material and physical well-being. Its track record contradicts cultural relativism, for it is demonstrably superior as a system of thought, as least in terms of our worldly aspirations.

Yet from Indonesia to Indiana [3], from a third-world country with a creaky education system to a first-world country with places for all, scientific rationalism is hardly universal yet. The resistance remains intense. The human mind is more curious than we think. 

© Yawning Bread