The Allure of Science

In the eyes of most people, science has a lofty allure. Even people who do not like the conclusions and beliefs of scientists feel this way. Why is this?

The ideal scientists zealously pursue the truth about the natural world, relentlessly cutting away the prejudices that they and others have, and demanding only the best evidence. No sloppy thinking allowed, no reliance on hearsay or single observations. To be a scientist is, in some ways, like being an athlete. Scientific thinking is a discipline. It is available to anyone, but it is usually only professional scientists and science educators who take on the discipline consistently. A scientist exploring the depths of nature, and an athlete running the course, have a kind of golden shimmer quite unlike the sloppy thinker or the armchair athlete.

This is why anti-scientists want to look like scientists. There are numerous anti-scientific think tanks that announce their seriously flawed beliefs in sciencey-sounding jargon. And some religious groups have even started up their own pseudo-scientific journals. They imitate the very appearance and structure of scientific articles: an objective-sounding title; an abstract; a text that cites evidence and analyzes it with reason; a conclusion; and references to other articles previously published on the same topic. They want everyone to think that they are scientists, even as they discredit scientists.

One example is an article in “Answers Research,” the pseudo-journal started by Answers in Genesis, that purports to show that the speed of light has decreased over the last few thousand years. Therefore the red shift does not indicate the universe is billions of years old but that light used to travel a lot faster than it does now. From the link you can download the PDF. The PDF of the article looks exactly like a scientific article, down to the most minute detail of its appearance.

One hallmark of scientific papers is that they are “peer-reviewed,” which means that other competent scientists anonymously review the paper and pass judgment—sometimes fair, sometimes unfair—on whether the paper should be published. If religious pseudo-science articles have “peer review,” it only means that people who share the same delusion have read it prior to publication.

Remember that in such pseudo-journals, anyone can be a peer (in the sense of micturator).

Of course, it is not just creationists who produce fake scientific articles. There are numerous online journals that will print anything so long as it has a sciencey appearance and you pay them. There is no peer review. I discuss this in Chapter 14 of my book Scientifically Thinking. I end that chapter, “I’m thinking about starting a science journal. I only charge $10,000 per article. If you are interested in publishing there, let me know, and remember I’m a peer.”

I suppose I am flattered to be a legitimate member of the scientific community. But, with ever more fake scientific journals, I fear that the public will begin to disbelieve true scientists along with the fake ones. With this, society can no longer benefit from true scientific research.

Resource Spaces of (Bestial) Competition

Wherever there is a resource space, entities capable of reproduction will inhabit it and begin fighting one another. This can be bacteria in a broth, humans fighting over territory, ideas competing with one another for attention in the collective human mind. I have witnessed competition and outright war in a place I would never have expected it, in a resource space that I created. I refer to the comments on my YouTube channel.

Yes, I created a resource space when I started my YouTube channel in 2010. On this channel, I pretend to be Charles Darwin, and I take an often humorous look at bite-sized evolutionary concepts. I try very hard to do outrageous and funny things, often drawing the humor upon myself. You know, things like falling off of a cliff or into a river. Like most channels it got a slow start, but it quickly built up to have over five hundred followers. I have to date had over 34,000 views. Check it out. It’s fun and you’ll learn a lot.

Viewers post comments on this as on most other YouTube channels. Sometimes, the comments are pretty insulting to me. Some are insulting to the guests I interview. But this is pretty rare. I more commonly get appreciative comments. What really surprised me recently is that the people have started posting comments about one another, making some pretty brutal statements not against me but against other viewers. In effect, I have created a resource space in which people, hidden in anonymity, can wage war on one another, with few rules of decency.

It is awesome. And awful, too. I marvel at it. For a while, there was a war between someone named Atheist Rex and someone named Raining Fire, who was (or pretended to be; one cannot know) a fundamentalist. They wished death upon one another; Raining Fire fervently desired that God would rain fire down out of heaven on Atheist Rex and kill his or her children. For a while, I began to wonder if I should report this activity to Homeland Security. But, they probably know about it already. Anyway, they might just be playing. No language is off limits, for either the atheists or the Christians.

Usually the arguments are just name-calling and counter-name-calling (you’re-so-stupid-all-you-can-do-is-name-calling etc.) Sometimes the arguments can take an interesting turn. Somehow the topic of abortion came up—a topic I never remember mentioning online. Prepare yourselves for some interesting mind-expanding concepts here. A woman (unless the photo is fake) accused Atheist Rex of supporting the mass genocide of babies in abortion clinics. Atheist Rex responded that God one time commanded the killing of all the babies in the world: at the time of Noah’s Flood. Good point. Then the woman responded that the babies were not really human, because demons had sex with human women and produced satanic spawn who needed to be killed in the Flood. That’s a pretty creative idea—one that, incidentally, is not in the Bible. So far they have not discussed the fact that, according to the book of Joshua, God commanded the killing of entire populations, including the children—and these were humans, not half-satanic creatures. Anyway, it was the first time I ever opened my inbox and found 45 comments only slightly connected with my video. The video was about the dinosaur tracks in the bed of the Paluxy River in Texas. A similar flurry of activity has continued since this original flare-up.

I’ll just mention that I refuse to take responsibility for any of this craziness. I am like a man who purchased land and built a school on it, with a playground. The man is not responsible for the bullies fighting one another on the playground.

And I will just sit back and see what happens next. Thank God they cannot track one another down. I hope.

Religion vs. Science, the Vast Gulf Part Six: Continents

It is with considerable relief when I say, Congratulations to Barack Obama for winning a second term. I was afraid that Mitt Romney would make devastating cuts to science and education, cuts that would actually not reduce the deficit very much. At the same time, almost exactly half of the voters voted against Barack Obama. His next four years may be even harder than his previous four years.

Now back to our series about the many ways in which science differs from traditional religion.

The Biblical view of the Earth is that orderly dry land is surrounded by chaotic oceans; in fact, one of God’s earliest acts of creation was to set a boundary between land and sea. The landlubber Israelites were frankly afraid of being out on the ocean (so am I). The God of orderliness had created dry land as the place for people to live.

But the Israelites had no idea that the continents moved around. Of course, neither did anybody else. The idea of continental drift was proposed by Alfred Wegener in the early twentieth century, and accepted only decades later by geologists. You cannot fault the Bible for omitting continental drift, unless you believe the Bible to be the outline of all scientific truth, in which case you have to reject continental drift.

But it is a little more complicated than this. Creationists believe that God sent a Flood upon the Earth, saving only Noah and his family (which, they imagine, contained black, white, and oriental daughters-in-law) from which all the people of the Earth are descended. This was such a severe disruption to the stable continents that all sedimentary rocks (of which continents largely consist) and all volcanic and metamorphic layers between them were produced at that time. Where did all the land come from? Not from day three of Genesis 1, but from the big piles of mud left over after the Flood of Noah. The problems with this theory could fill a book, and have filled many books.

But it gets even more complicated than this. Genesis 10:25 said that in the days of Peleg (a mysterious patriarch about whom little is known) the Earth was divided. This was after the Flood. Let us consider the tremendous scientific implications of this verse, if we take it literally. This verse literally says the Earth was divided. The word for “earth” is the same Hebrew word that is used for the entire planet (see here for concordance references). The word for “divided” refers to cutting entirely in half (see here for concordance references). To really take this verse literally, we have to say what one creationist (Walter Brown) once said in a public forum at the University of Illinois: this was when God created the Atlantic Ocean, causing the Eurasian and North American plates to diverge. But the word literally means to split into pieces, thus we must go way beyond continental drift and believe that the entire planet was split in two. One of the halves must be the one we are on, and presumably the other half has been lost. This would mean that, even right after the Flood, Earth was a much bigger planet, which would give it stronger gravitation, which would make birds unable to fly and large animals (as they are currently designed) unable to walk… This quickly leads to absurdity. Therefore, creationists such as the people at Answers in Genesis claim that “earth” in this verse refers to the people of the Earth. They refuse to allow this interpretation for the very same word in reference to the whole Earth being covered by the Flood, or to God creating the whole Earth in Genesis 1. Apparently, creationists have appointed themselves as the official “deciders” of which passages are to be taken as scientifically literal statements and which are more figurative.

It gets even stranger. Something interesting happened during King Solomon’s coronation parade. “And all the people went up after him [King Solomon], playing on pipes, and rejoicing with great joy, so that the earth was split by their noise.” Some translations say that the earth rumbled with their noise, but the actual Hebrew words refer to the Earth itself actually splitting. Most of us would assume this is the figurative equivalent of “ear-splitting,” and some Bible translations take the liberty of translating it, “The earth rumbled with their noise.” But if you base your science on a literal interpretation of the Bible, you have a problem here. Creationists quietly accept the figurative meaning of this verse.

There are whole continents of difference between the ancient religious view of the earth and the modern scientific one.

Darwin, Science, and Bias

Scientists take great precautions against bias. Scientists, like all humans, have a tendency to see what they expect to see rather than what is really there. But scientists are very careful to design research and experiments in such a way as to exclude bias. For example, in testing drugs, the patients who receive the placebo (“sugarpill”), which does not contain the drug, are not told that the pill is a placebo, otherwise they would assume it will not work and they will report themselves as still being sick. But scientists go further and make sure the assistants who actually administer the placebo do not know that it is a placebo, lest the attitude of the assistant influence the patient’s attitude as well. The placebo usually has a bitter chemical in it, or even a mild sedative, so that the patient will believe that it is the real drug. A large amount of the design and expense of scientific research is to avoid bias.

Charles Darwin had to deal with bias also. His evolutionary theory gave nature, rather than God, the creative role. It is the ideal theory for someone who wants God out of the picture. Was Darwin such a person? Well, not at first; his wife Emma was a moderate creationist, and Charles was sensitive to her opinions, as you might guess. But after their daughter Annie died at a tragically young age, both Charles and Emma were devastated. This deepened Emma’s dependence upon Christianity but pushed Charles into agnosticism. This was years before Charles wrote the Origin of Species.

So Charles must have been biased against creationism and in favor of a theory that would make God irrelevant. But he worked very, very hard to make sure that his bias did not influence his scientific judgment. He spent years gathering information about the variability of traits in populations, and about natural selection, as well as about fossils, biogeography, and other evidences of evolution. The Origin of Species is full of numerous lines of reasoning, each with its own evidences, which lead to an undeniable conclusion. That is, he spent years amassing evidence that would prevent his bias from influencing his results. This is the mark of a true scientist.

Creationists are just the opposite. They hate evolution, and will grab at any shred of information that they can twist into evidence to support their view. They even bring together so-called evidences that contradict one another. For example, they present information that they claim proves the Flood of Noah, then they present information that they claim shows gaps in the fossil record. But if there was a flood, there could be no order in the fossil record in which gaps might appear!

Charles Darwin is an exemplar of the heroic scientist who disciplines him or herself to pursue the truth even when bias presses upon the scientist from his or her personal experience.

This essay will also appear in my website eventually.