Chincy bits from around the 'Net

So I'm minding my own business, snooping around my usual haunts, when I find a couple odd things I couldn't resist commenting on.  First:

What I find so amusing is that Christians will criticize Islam for promoting slavery, complete destruction of their enemies, etc. when the Bible says almost the exact same things.

This one got my attention because the critic doesn't even go so far as to say "Well, Crusades and Galileo and the Inquisition; that's the same as 9/11 and what's happening to the Chaldeans in Iraq."  He only goes so far as to say "Sure, Christians might condemn Islam because some Muslims of dubious fidelity can justify their actions by the Q'ran, but the Bible has examples of violence and human rights violations too!"

So what?  My response was "Show me the Christians today who kill their daughters for being raped."  The Crusades didn't happen because some "warrior pope" noticed that Psalm 150 gleefully endorses smashing the skulls of an enemy's children.  They happened because--and I realize I'm grossly oversimplifying, so bear with me--the Seljuks replaced the Arab hegemony in the Levant with something that took a much dimmer view of European pilgrims and traders.

All those nasty Bronze Age values taught in the Bible?  Old Testament.  Not to say they don't have their own significance, but there was never a time during Christianity when that stuff was considered the right and proper behavior of a Christian.  Unless you count the 21st century GOP.  Maybe that's what is inspiring this critic.

So yeah, the response to people who criticize terrorism and dhimmitude doesn't even rise above "Well, your past is checkered!"  Maybe so, but we know better now.  If opposing terrorism and dhimmitude is also wrong, then what's right?  Or is it just wrong because we're the ones doing it?  Do you have some better ideas, or are you just going to sit up there and gloat about how you and your intellectual tradition have never been uncharitable to people outside your in-group?


Second:

Atheism isn't an ideology.  It is the default position for understanding the world.

Okay, so atheism is your ideology of choice.  Good to know.

All I can figure here is that this critic soaks himself in a positively atheistic scientism.  He went on to say something about how belief in an afterlife is not exempt from science, because "the soul survives death and goes to exist in some new state outside the universe" is "vaguely scientific" because it describes something that is partly in nature.

No, it isn't scientific, unless you are the one who is vague about science; and not every phenomenon in the natural world is subject to science.  Some of those phenomena can be cataloged obliquely, but science won't reveal to you what they truly are.  If you're not sure, try to calculate for me the difference between the density of boogie woogie at STP, using the van der Waals equation, and the relativistic length of umami traveling at 0.92c. 

Whether the soul occupies or animates the body during life is a philosophical question.  Scientists may see the change when a soul departs from a body, but the sciences don't.

I think this distinction gets overlooked a lot.  Most scientists, believers and otherwise, just go about their business doing research and pimping for funding and whatnot.  A few atheistic evangelists who happen to have a STEM degree or pursue science as their day job or avocation then get credit for being "prominent and well-respected scientists who don't believe in God."  Okay, that's a half dozen any American might be able to name off the top of his head, compared to thousands or millions who don't sit down each morning at their lab benches and say "Okay, I do/don't believe in God, so this is the experiment I'm going to do to prove it for my next book."

Unbelievers keep saying that the miraculous healings attributed to saints are merely rare, natural occurrences that we don't have the science or technology to explain.

I think God, in His infinite wisdom and power, works miracles that happen to be beyond the understanding of anyone who would witness.  A miracle to a panhandler a thousand years ago might be transparent to a physicist today; a miracle to a lawyer today might be transparent to a doctor a thousand years from now.

This may seem tidily pat to unbelievers, but hopefully it will remind believers of hope.  There's plenty of room for mystery.

God can do whatever He wants, remember?  If we explained every mysterious healing by saying "I'm confident medical technology will advance to the point where this sort of thing is commonplace; it just happened to occur spontaneously in this case," then we're making hulking, looming idols out of science and technological progress.

There's nothing wrong with putting mundane faith in science; with as much as the state of the medical arts has advanced, there are lots of reasons to hope for continued improvement in maintaining health.  But reasonable optimism is no substitute for sober open-mindedness to unexpected possibilities, or for rational and informed thought.

I'm sure I'll revisit that subject more in the future, as I have in the past.  Permit me a disjointed segue.

Most often, the standard I hear for a healing to be considered miraculous by atheists and non-Christians is the regrowth of a missing limb.  It would be an understandably dramatic and easily documented event, to be sure.  Has such a thing, then, never happened?

In the little research, I've done, I haven't heard of such a thing--the closest I could come was a few references to a surgery in the third century by Saints Cosmas and Damian where the gangrenous leg of Deacon Justinian was replaced by a leg from the cadaver of an Ethiopean.  Not quite the same thing, not a lot of corroborating evidence at hand, if still miraculous in magnitude given the era.

There are a few other cases that might be dramatic enough to qualify, however.

In 1921, Peter Smith was born at Mother Cabrini Memorial Hospital.  As was custom at the time, a silver nitrate solution was put into his eyes for prophylactic purposes.  Instead of using the usual 1% concentration, however, the nurse accidentally used the stock 51% concentration.  Young Peter's eyes were burned out of his head, and the solution ran into the crying infant's mouth and down his throat, burning his lungs.  His temperature rose to 108°F.

They prayed for him before the Blessed Sacrament.  In two days, his eyes were restored.  A day after that, his fever was gone.

Father Peter Smith died of an aneurysm in 2002.

In 1892, Marie Lemarchand visited Lourdes.  A victim of lupus, she bathed in the waters and was cured; her ulcerous skin was regenerated, and she no longer coughed up blood.  Atheist and author Emile Zola was there to witness it.  

But believing and seeing are two different things, and there is such a thing as a dogmatic faith that miracles do not happen.

Zola had claimed he only wanted to see a cut finger healed by dipping in the miraculous water.  Although he examined Ms. Lemarchand closely enough to describe the condition of her skin (he omitted the details of her coughing in the report on his trip to Lourdes) when she arrived, when asked to look at her after bathing in the water, he said "Ah no!  I do not want to look at her. She is still too ugly."

Before he left Lourdes, he asserted that he would not believe in miracles even if everyone at Lourdes were healed.  In his book on the subject, he suggested that it perhaps wasn't lupus the woman had at all, and that her cure was merely psychosomatic.

You can almost feel Zola considering the possibility that the world was stranger than dreamt of in his philosophy, before falling back on "it wasn't really lupus so it wasn't really a miracle."

Some have even speculated that Padre Pio was only faking his stigmata, since they miraculously healed in the days before his death.  While doctors had examined his wounds in life and his woundless body after death, the skeptics comfortably asserted that no medical investigation was allowed or made, for convenience of perpetuating the "myth" of Padre Pio's stigmata.

But what about limb regrowth, you ask?  Was that not the original contention?

I submit that limb regrowth is a more trivial matter than the cure of lupus.  It may also be simpler than regrowing an eye, although I won't stake anything on that.

We are already culturing tissues in the lab.  Teeth and ears have been grown, and in July of this year a trachea was grown and successfully implanted into a human.

To this I say, so what?

We are not talking about "medical miracles" of coaxing stem cells to replace missing or excised tissue.  We are talking about spontaneous curing of conditions of missing limbs.

We must be careful, we believers and we skeptics; for to explain how something might have been done is not to explain how something was done.  In cases when we cannot be sure of all the events, the gap between "what we know at the moment" and "what we know could have accomplished this" may be large enough to admit reasonable doubt, and there is no shame or conviction either way in that; but when we speculate about likely explanations for bizarre phenomena, and we later come into facts that make reasonable suppositions impossible, it is silly and dishonest to persist.

I say this because at some point I would wager a missing limb will be miraculously restored, and some skeptic is bound to say "That could have been done on an outpatient basis" and be satisfied that no supernatural explanation could disprove a natural means for healing, even if it is known that the subject did not in fact visit a hospital, that no one who had the means to grow a limb "in the field" was present. Theists do have it a little easier in that God can work through natural means just as well as directly intervening, and so we may never know when God may make an exception to how the natural processes run in a case of limb stumps or cancer or lupus, but we want to be careful not to accede a miracle when someone fails to prove a mundane occurrence was possible in opportunity while spending all his effort to prove that a mundane occurrence just happened to be physically possible.
It's the difference between "could have done" and "did do."

Putting the doctrinal cart before the developmental horse

On some much more read blog than mine, whose identity I would remember better if I hadn't procrastinated so long before sitting down to write about it, an apparently new visitor to the blog got into the combox and inadvertently drove the discussion off the rails for a bit trying to explain how it was morally necessary to believe in geocentrism.

Most of his argument consisted of citing old Church documents declaring that geocentrism was an obliged belief to hold, like the Trinity or the bodily resurrection, and citing the historical consensus of popes and theologians until the modern era.

I felt some frustration when he continued to assert that geocentrism was held and taught "always and everywhere" despite Catholics with matching credentials, from medieval theologians to the latest popes, being more open to a Copernican conception of the universe. He was quick to point out that the dissenters from geocentrism were only expressing personal opinions, and ones that happened to be erroneous, while everyone else was making official proclamations with whatever weight of authority they could avail themselves of. This dismissal seemed a bit pat in context even before he continued as if to say "Always and everywhere--except for a few occasions of dissent, but I'm not really using hyperbole, so Always and Everywhere." I was almost more alarmed to see him studiously refusing to give more than a hand-waving refutation to these Copernican supposed material heretics, as if spending too much time trying to understand why they would be wrong would make it too hard to believe Always and Everywhere, than to see him stridently warn the blog's readers not to put too much stock in the consensus of their senses and reason.

The geocentrist did, in fact, quote documents where talk of heliocentrism was condemned as absurd or otherwise posed a moral or intellectual danger to the Christian. I will even agree that for pastoral reasons, at certain points in history it may have been prudent to discourage people from fixating on thoughts like "If we've been relegated to the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of some part of the universe, are we still the apple of God's eye?" It seems preposterous today, but before natural philosophy was divorced into physical science and theology, for the layman, maybe such a proposal would have sounded a lot more ominous.

I don't know. I'm only saying I can imagine something of the sort. One wouldn't even have to fall back on "they were a thousand years dumber than we are" to see that the best pastoral action is sometimes to prohibit something that is not inherently evil (such as making same-sex attraction an impediment to the priesthood) or mandate something that is not inherently morally obligatory (such as celibacy for the priesthood).

An idea was raised that I thought may have set the geocentric argument at nines, but it wasn't pursued and then the blogger got things back on topic and that was the end of it.

Someone pointed out that there was such a thing as development of doctrine, that our understanding of old teachings of the Ordinary or Extraordinary Magisterium can expand without contradicting the essence of original understanding. The geocentrist responded that no such thing had really happened, that the authorities who had spoken on the matter had spoken definitively and had left no room for dissent, question, or nuance; case closed--and further, new doctrines are to be judged against old ones, and not the other way around.

I think this is a wounding to doctrinal development. Let me cite the Latin for an example: Extra ecclesiam nulla salus, At the time this declaration--already a familiar concept, written about by St. Cyprian and lamented for not appearing true by St. Augustine--was made, there was only one Church, so "Salvation is the Church" was not going to make anybody wonder about possible schismatic saints. Fortunately, although we don't always know what's going on when the Spirit moves the Church to do one thing and not another, the Spirit does, and He does not err. The declaration that salvation only came from and through the Church did not have to be fully understood by the bishops who declared it.

"Ah," said the geocentrist in paraphrase, "but we must interpret new doctrines in light of old, rather than redefine old ones under the light of novel and potentially heretical ones!"

Okay, so we have to be sure that a new dogmatic definition is consonant with old ones before it is accepted as anything more than a hypothesis. Fine, but it is not the same thing as allowing for understanding of an old doctrine to grow.

Development of "extra ecclesiam" would be like "Outside the Church there is no salvation. We used to think that meant only Catholics in good standing went to heaven. In further consideration of the Church's role as the sacrament of grace to the world, and of people who strive for virtue as they can and are not culpable for being outside our official ranks, we believe now that people who are not formal Catholics may be saved, but it is through the instrumentality of the Church that saving grace is somehow afforded to them."

Insisting that doctrines can develop only within the confines of undeveloped understanding, which is the essence of the geocentrist's objection to modern bishops and astronomer-friars taking no umbrage at a relativistic physical universe, is a confounding of development in the first place. It is like saying "We used to teach that only people in good standing with the Church can go to heaven; today we understand that God provides some graces to sincere unbelievers through the instrumentality of the Church, but they have to be Catholic to get to heaven." It's like proving the square root of two is irrational by assuming it is rational and then deducing a contradiction, and then claiming development of doctrine on the grounds that you've found a new way to state the same thing. There's no increase in understanding there, just an increase in confusion about how or why God would dole out some graces and not others.

Consider further that the Church has drawn its own borders of competence around faith and morals. The Church may contain members who are experts in science or politics, but it learned the hard way that acting as a secular power is not the best way to go; by and large, it never had as great a problem with science (if you say "Galileo!" then try to think of someone else who got the same treatment and get back to me--I won't take the time here). If the geocentrist wishes to convince me that I must accept that the Earth is the center of the universe, he's got to offer some proofs of the following:

1. The universe has a center in some meaningful and detectable way at all


2. Why the universe's construction leaves only the subtlest clues that our current cosmology still has a few unasked questions; clues so ambiguous that a particular, grossly different geometry never even makes the list of possible explanations for remaining discrepancies between data and theory; clues whose own subtlety suggest that the way we think the universe hangs together at large and small scales is, to the best of our ability to observe it, pretty close to how it actually does. If quadropole and octopole asymmetries in the Cosmic Microwave Background are real, and are physically meaningful anisotropies, why should I have to discard the Big Bang completely for one explanation that doesn't actually explain the observations, instead of another acentric that does?


3. Presuming the universe does have a center and we're at it, what moral meaning it would have and why I should be obliged to hold it (I'd accept excerpts from or commentaries on the documents he already cited for the former, but for the latter, I'd also like to know what the danger of heliocentrism was besides what usually comes with hypothetical disobedience to moral authorities.)


4. Failing anything better than "Rome has spoken! Don't trust your senses," at least explain how the Church could declare a physical arrangement of the universe to be a necessary belief and then say it's not competent as a body to judge empirical data. Either the Church lost some capability in recent centuries, old papal bulls trump formal pedagogical documents as cited in the Catechism (the agreement of other councillar or encyclical documents on this matter being the umbrella over this tension), or development of doctrine is bogus.

Update:
Something else occurred to me. If all the geocentric-favoring statements made in Church history were dogmatic and binding, and all the Copernican statements made later on as science improved were merely opinions, what does the geocentrist make of this pandemic of heretical cosmology? Sure, no pope has taught ex cathedra against heliocentrism, but why is the support for geocentrism so...obscure? Where are all the other uncomfortable doctrines that are clearly resolved but disapproved (only personally, not formally!) by popes and theologians?

God, Darwin clash again in Kansas

Briefly, the Kansas Board of Ed is reconsidering the policies it adopted in 2005 that downplay the scientific value of evolution (and probably all science that doesn't support a superficial reading of Genesis).

The usual rationale is that evolution and whatnot is not without its gaps, to which I will say that the critics are correct.

The solution, however, is not to refrain from teaching it. If you want to point out the inconsistencies and the questions it hasn't been able to answer, great; it'll give future scientists some ideas of what to focus their research on next, and keep today's scientists modest and hopefully take the wind out of their politics (evolution as proof for atheism is no more valid than intelligent design is for theism). If you want to stop teaching all science that may be conditional or confusing, then you have to stop teaching all science.

In fact, to avoid confusion and muddying up the classroom with uncertain interpretations of things, you really would need to stop teaching everything. Obviously that option is ridiculous, because education is about removing ignorance, not keeping people from getting confused. Some students will get confused along the way; at some point, probably every student at least once. Educators, like scientists, are just human, so we can only hope to minimize confusion and work through it when it arises. Refusing to do their job to keep people from misunderstandings is plain old wrong. There's withholding knowledge to prevent scandal (which can be permissible), and then there's just preserving ignorance to keep people sedate.

Can science tell us everything? No. Can evolution tell us everything about the science that involves it? No. Evolution does, however, happen to be well demonstrated by more different fields of science than perhaps any other theory. The fossil record doesn't prove it, epidemiology doesn't prove it, DNA and morphological similarities between related species don't prove it, but take them all together and you've got something that isn't going to be displaced unless it can answer all these claims (or provide some unimaginably revolutionary breakthrough in one particular area or more).

What claims does "evolution can't be right" make? The chances of random atomic activity resulting in human life are distastefully low; a superficial reading of a religious text demand that the logic and observation that go into science are wrong--either lies or misinterpreted.

I'm sorry, but "It can't be A, so it must be not-A" isn't science. As simple logic, it's fine, but here, it's like dividing the universe up into bananas and non-bananas, and then implying that the only plausible non-banana is an apple, since the fruit in Genesis is usually thought of as an apple.

Whatever it is, it's not science. Are opponents of evolution even as a tentative (if robust) theory interested in having science taught at all?

In the absence of a theism, scientism often rushes in to fill the vacuum.

A while ago I caught, on the Scientific American podcast, part of Michael Bloomberg's commencement address to JHU's medical school. If ever I dreamed of a nigh-utopia ruled by scientists, Bloomberg's speech woke me up.

Don't get me wrong; I still think the average American needs more science education, and more sophisticated science education. I just think that Bloomberg's speech made it plenty clear that "more science" isn't "enough."

Some of his bullet items are no-brainers to anyone who's been around the Catholic circuits at all. I realized that many of them were extrascientific long ago, but I had fallen into the trap of assuming--probably not with the best justification--that common sense was, well, common.

Now, if everyone just upped their science quotient when it comes to voting and public policy discussion, we'd make great strides. However, there were a few things Bloomberg cited that put the lie to his science-as-panacea thesis:

• Terri Schiavo


• global warming


• funding of stem cell research

He also mentioned how ID, as gussied-up creationism, does a disservice to science by masquerading as it, and to theology by conflating the two; but he still betrayed a penchant for utilitarianism.

You can make valid arguments from utilitarianism, and make different ones from existentialism or some other school of thought that may contradict or not even intersect with the utilitarian ones, but just advocating a purely practical or existential position isn't the same thing as using the logical bedrock upon which all philosophy rests, nor can it (or logic) guarantee truth or goodness as its object.

Obviously, bridging part of the gap between "more science" and "enough knowledge to get the job done well" is some basic philosophy, so people can recognize what informs an argument when they see it. In addition, though, I think fundamental critical thinking skills in addition to "X is utilitarianism, Y is stoicism, etc." is essential. I started learning critical thinking when I was ten years old, in a public school no less; I didn't get to differing philosophical schools until I was in tenth grade. Not that I was precocious, but in the state of today's education, most students don't get to the latter until college when they need to fill some general education requirement, and most students never get to the former. It can't be that hard to add a little elementary logic to a curriculum (just showing students half a dozen propaganda techniques and a dozen common logical fallacies should be enough to get us past the "expert juror" hazard in public discourse).

Anyway, I just wanted to touch on the three examples Bloomberg gave, especially the last one.

The Terri Schiavo bit was typical "society has no compelling interest in preserving her, so look--but not too closely--to her husband." Terri wasn't dying, she just didn't have any usefulness left in her. I suppose the pro-euthanasia types also felt some irony, but I was a little disappointed to see so many people making the libertarian argument, that the federal government shouldn't get involved in saving one sick woman's life.

Global warming I've said enough about. Suffice it to say his "what we now know about water being wet and the sun rising" panegyrics to the environmentalist lobby were about as edifying as an Enzyte commercial.

As for stem cell research, the problem isn't stem cells themselves--which is old news I'm not afraid to repeat. The problem is in killing babies to get the embryonic kind. Last I heard, we have around 95 therapies currently in use--at least as effective clinical trials--from adult and umbilical cord blood stems cells, including a functioning coin-sized liver in a petri dish. The embryonics have yielded nothing so far except tumors.

If Bloomberg--or anyone--is so hot and bothered for really helping people, curing life-threatening diseases, then why isn't he more interested in the most practical solution, the one we've already got?

A bird in the hand, Mr. Mayor.

I like having dissenters around.

They can help keep us humble, which helps keep us honest. Even Voice of the Faithful is right in reminding us not to cover up a scandal. Yes, sometimes it is easier for an educated person to tell a recalcitrant ignoramus "Shut up and trust me," but being easy doesn't always mean it's always appropriate.

Most people aren't experts in all, or any, of the subjects that are major, contentious policy issues in this country, but they're not stupid, either. They can be duped by a propaganda campaign but respond thoughtfully when accurate and balanced information is made available. Sometimes people need to be reminded, but with flawed policy as with heresy, the danger is in unbalancing a complementary set of principles and emphasizing one at the expense of the others. We generally take it with a grain of salt when it's commercial advertising or political campaigning, but it's often confusing when it comes from a different source, and sometimes the paralysis of confusion is the biggest defense against would-be policy makers with strange agendas.

Generally this paralysis can be pushed through with a persevering united front of public institutions, either by getting the honest word out or by spinning a convincing story otherwise. There are several examples--pro-abortion activists perpetually recasting the debate in terms of "women's rights and safety versus oppressive men and their brainwashed wives," war opponents defending Saddam (and I'm not saying the Iraq thing has been clean on any level) and conveniently forgetting UN weapons inspectors' reports of being stopped outside of facilities and watching convoys leaving through other exits, people claiming the APA has certified homosexuality as healthy because it took it off its list of disorders (the real reason being, with no apparent means of treatment, reducing the stigma would at least be palliative), and environmentalists warning us that deleterious climate change is such an urgent matter that we can't take the time to study it before trying to fix it.

I'm going to focus on this last point today. I'm not going to say there isn't good science out there, but I'd like to talk about how science isn't the only thing in play, and how if there weren't skeptics of global warming asking these questions, the stop-industrial-emissions-in-developed-countries program would be a lot farther along, and the climatological evidence would either be undiscovered or underreported (because, hey, if crackpots couldn't make skeptics out of normal people, why divert efforts trying to prove anything to them?).

To wit, Dr. Stephen Schneider, a high profile activist for the global warming theory, as quoted in Discover in 1989:

To capture the public imagination, we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we may have. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.

In the same quote he also said that scientists are also humans who care about people and how they live, and I do sympathize completely with his motivation; mentioning any single piece or small assemblage of evidence and letting it drop might elicit no more than "How interesting. What's next, evidence of an inflationary universe?" I also can't blame him for oversimplifying--we see it everywhere, with some of the most dramatic examples coming from the field of nutrition, where we were at first told to cut out all fats because they didn't think we could distinguish HDL from LDL, so people binged on low-fat and later low-carb snacks (well, all right, I won't blame the talking heads for people consuming far more than normal because "good in the right amount" was confused with "harmless")--and it's hard to tell when you're above the "a little knowledge is dangerous" threshold but below the "too much information is confusing to the untrained mind" point. However, what Schneider is talking about isn't science, it's propaganda, plain and simple. While making efforts to convince people of something is just a natural part of society, we have to remember the difference.

"Oh, but now we understand the science better than we did before," says many a disciple of global warming. Yeah, and in a decade we'll understand it even more. Thirty years ago, we were sure there was global cooling because scientists were in consensus. After years of propaganda that got way out ahead of the science, do you really think we're just supposed to pretend that enchanting us with doomsday stories has something to do with reality? Fool me once, fool me twice. Why should we believe your story is true just because you want us to find it engaging? If it was clearly overstated from the beginning, but you advertised it as fact anyway, then it's either pure marketing or part of some other agenda.

We can handle the truth, even if it's bad news. We might want it with a pinch of sugar, but if you're just trying to manipulate us into pressuring the Powers That Be into funding your project, into stopping your pet apocalypse, whatever, we're going to be suspicious because unmixing the truth from the propaganda isn't easy. Show us the science--try not to water it down too much--because trying to convince us to believe it because everyone is believing in it is just calling us to jump on the bandwagon.

Oh, and the Atlantic "conveyor belt" isn't in such bad shape, after all (see the 1117-06 issue of Science). Was this oceanic current supposed to be one of those smoking guns that we can trust, or just a curiosity? Will there be any others?

We've also got The Weather Channel quashing open discussion of doubt in global warming, in the interest of raising science above the level of politics. Science isn't about silence. Honest science--I admit, with humans as scientists, egos often get in the way on all sides--requires listening to all hypotheses and their criticisms, finding evidence for the accurate ones and against the inaccurate ones, and addressing the inadequacies that dissenters can more easily see. The answer to "your theory doesn't cover a few discrepancies I'd like to address" is not "Never mind, and listen to us; we're the ones with the consensus." Sometimes criticism is easily answered, but for the sake of us unwashed masses, please make the effort.

It's doubly important when there's public policy to downplay the facts, whatever they may be. The antidote to propaganda is not contradictory propaganda; it's truth. When someone calumns your position, your first responsibility is not to play that game. Present what you know, admit what you don't, address the criticism, but don't incite panic. There's more to being right than just being persuasive.

"The world's about a degree warmer than it was a century ago!" Look, I'll give you shrinking ice caps, but you've got to come clean so we can all try to solve the problem, whatever shape it's taken: Are you measuring temperatures in 1907 the same way you're measuring them in 2007? What's your confidence interval in each case? Just tell us, and show us how. Obviously being patronizingly vague has gained you as many enemies as it has sycophants, neither of which will convert the other.

One degree doesn't tell us much, anyway. We have decades of detailed meteorological data, including some studies of historical outliers like the little ice age and the warm middle ages, and still have trouble predicting a week in advance. Are we putting a reasonable amount of faith in the predictions made for decades and centuries into the future?

Besides, it's not just a question of what some planetary thermometer can tell us. Just being hotter may not mean much; we also need to look at heat capacity, how thermal energy is stored; at the difference between isothermal climate change and adiabatic climate change. Some extra heat energy is hypothetically converted to mechanical energy in the form of more severe and numerous storms, but there hasn't been much of a change there at this point, as well as in the conversion of ice to water, which we have seen (although they're getting thicker--more snowfall is another meteorological effect of heating in current science; this quickening of the polar water cycle might be another means of buffering the atmosphere from greenhouse gases).

"It's our fault! Temperatures are changing more quickly than they should!" How do we know how quickly they "should" change? Are there studies out there using human-excluding models that have much flatter "hockey stick" graphs than what we're really seeing? I saw one presentation where a researcher from, I believe, NOAA presented a model and findings where the opposite was true, where our impact didn't appear to be sufficient to cause what we're seeing. Just one man, yes, verses a horde of environmental activists and journalists who can't distinguish context from slant assuring me that some expert or plurality of experts somewhere is sure that we're mostly responsible. Whatever studies are out there, once they're in the public sphere, they seem to be suffering from the Bush Dictator effect: badly paraphrased, vaguely cited.

Not to mention methane, which is more potent than CO₂, but not anthropogenic, and the fraction of greenhouse gases that are artificially produced. Actually, they don't mention methane nearly as much. Is it because it's not as important, or just because there's less we can do about it? Why don't we plant a few trees and try to reign in a little our enthusiasm for government oversight, and then look at what we can't do without federal or international cooperation?

Don't get me wrong, I'm concerned about the place we live, too. Even if the Earth were on the verge of another ice age and this shrinking ice cap thing were just a fluke, I'd be in favor of trying to minimize our environmental impact in every sphere--fertilize or irrigate when necessary, but try to do no harm along the way. I'd be a little wary of trying to tame the weather when our knowledge of how climate is is so limited we can hardly even ask the question of how the climate should be. I just don't see the loudest advocates treating it like the emergency they tell us it is. Al Gore--not a scientist--is up for a Nobel Peace Prize for bringing American industrial waste gases even more to the public's attention. To paraphrase a recent letter in the local paper, we shouldn't confuse activism, activity, with accomplishment; but I suppose if Yasser Arafat deserved the prize, Gore is no less qualified.

Not to pick on him, but he's a dramatic example.

Come on: he tools across the country on a private jet that puts out more emissions in a single flight than the average SUV does in a year, in order to warn us even more about global warming, including promoting America as being to blame for being so productive. When he lands, he takes an SUV. Conservation for thee but not for me? Is saving the world too important to bother saving the world along the way?

An Inconvenient Principle?

Bad science, bad theology (I)

Tom Phillips seems to think science has disproven atheism and evolution. He said as much, anyway. I'm not sure what kind of science he's talking about, though. It's not the kind I practice. I'll write a little more generally about it in the future. I think he's more upset at atheists using the science of evolution as a philosophical crutch. Turnabout's fair play, eh Tom?

I tire of such arguments, on both sides. There seems to be the presumption that a little cleverness will allow anyone to overcome the apparent falsehood of a field of knowledge, even without a solid grasp of that field's bailiwick. Usually I see atheists trying to disprove religion by "scientifically" (I'm using suspicious quotation marks, not sarcastic ones--the science and reason are sometimes rational, and sometimes hollow) attacking propositions that were plausible a hundred or a thousand years ago but do not hold up under more careful scrutiny, using more advanced tools. Theistic scientists also sometimes challenge contrarational assertions put forth by particular groups, faith-based and otherwise, but being willing to accept both Faith and Reason, they are, I think, less likely to succumb to an untenable sense of triumphalism like we so often see: being confident that just one side or the other is correct, it's easy for a theistic nonscientist or a science-interested nontheist to assume his or her beliefs are self-evident and only some competing propaganda stands in the way of widespread acceptance. Some creationists talk about fossilized human footprints being found in the same rock as dinosaur footprints, relying only on a similar aspect ratio to that of a real human footprint as conclusive proof, regardless of the facts that these footprints are far larger than modern humans (maybe they were Nephilim?) and closely resemble the nearby three-toed dinosaur footprint with one toe missing. On the other hand, some atheists consider Marian apparitions to be coincidental configurations of birds in a tree, misinterpreted by gullible theists as a an indistinct image of Our Lady, whereas many descriptions are not of merely gussied up vaguely female outlines on pancakes (although to be fair, I've seen such pictures), but are clear images of a beautiful young woman in obviously out of place garb.

Such smug carelessness does not edify anyone. It's not instructive, usually insulting, and leaves one side thinking the other is more worthy of contempt and less of respect. One example I remember from maybe sixteen years ago is a crucifix in a Massachusetts church where the eyes of the corpus, which had been open, closed. I was telling a self-described open minded nonbeliever about the event, just to point out that whether or not you believe in God, there are still plenty of bizarre phenomena we don't understand at all and perhaps never will. He asserted, not hiding his skepticism, that some yahoo must have gone in with a bucket of paint and changed the face of the corpus when no one was around. From the pictures I saw, a simple paint job could not have done the job, and from what I remember, there were people about the church at the time of the miracle, so even if no one had seen it happen, there's no way a guy could have gone in, gotten up to the crucifix, and repainted the face, with no one noticing his presence on church property or the freshness of the hypothetical paint. I can see someone pulling a Sherlock Holmes--"once the impossible has been eliminated, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth"--but an explanation like this one is the best that someone free of the intellectual stunting of organized religion can come up with?

There has been much propaganda regarding intelligent design.

In truth, creation/design is the scientific position; evolution is unscientific. By definition, science is based upon what we observe in the physical world and logical inference from what we observe.

While microevolution, which is change within a species, is observed and scientific, macroevolution, which is what "evolution" customarily means, is not. It asserts life somehow arose from non-life by chance.

No, it doesn't. Macroevolution is what biologists refer to as speciation, one type of organism turning into another--dinosaurs into birds, say. It speaks to the origin of species, not to the origin of life. To call what other theoretical biologists are studying "spontaneous generation" is clever but deceptively low resolution of the concept. As for the distinction from microevolution, there's no solid, objective line in between. Speciation is the accumulation of enough intra-species changes for us to recognize that one or more man-made criteria used to decide what's one species and what's another. Usually the main criterion is the biological or societal capacity for interbreeding, but it doesn't have to be.

The old spontaneous generation model, which Phillips correctly stated was disproven long ago, "predicted" that you could get scorpions by putting mustard between bricks, or that maggots would naturally arise from meat over time. Wikipedia (if you're anti-wiki, suspend your incredulity; if you can get past a little hand-waving chemistry it'll be fine) sums up current thinking fairly well. Basically, some experiments looking at Darwin's primordial soup notion, taking a mix of simple chemicals and running an electric current through it, yielded simple amino acids. These acids themselves aren't self-replicating, but self-assembling structures (see also nanotechnology and colloids) comprise a field that is currently enjoying tremendous practical research and progress therein.

Evolution also asserts one life form can change into another, higher form - something also never observed and thus unscientific.

"Unobserved" does not equal "unscientific." If it were that simple, relativity would be unscientific because we could not observe the effects until after Einstein suggested ways to test for it. I suppose relativity could have suddenly become scientific once we learned how to see it, but by the same token, macroevolution cannot yet be ruled out, and intelligent design cannot yet be ruled in. It would be more accurate to say "unobservable" is "unscientific," but it still would be missing the point. A theory, so to speak, can be unscientific, but not a phenomenon. You can say the theory of evolution is unscientific, but speciation can only happen or not happen within our experience. Paraphenomena may be either a protoscience or a pseudoscience, but we cannot say some strange occurance is scientifically treatable or not until we successfully do so (for if we fail, it only means that our attempts so far have been fruitless, not that all possibilities must be fruitless).

In fact, talk like this assertion belies the misconception behind ID: that because we haven't figured something out already, we never will. Unless it's objective, conclusive proof of God.

I should have stopped here, but even though I don't fancy myself a Darwinist pundit, there are some logical problems that often fail to get addressed, and I want to stop it.

Instead, we always observe exactly what Genesis states numerous times: Life reproduces "according to its kind," i.e., cats beget cats, crickets beget crickets, etc. They never change into something else. With microbiology, we understand why.

Wow, one example of what Genesis states, although I don't remember the references to like begetting being numerous, except for the geneologies. I do need to read Genesis more, though. I do see snakes getting shunned by humans, with the whole head-and-heel striking business, but none has ever approached me or a flesh-of-my-flesh woman and made any kind of temptation. I haven't heard about anyone bringing back pictures or wreckage of Noah's Ark, either. Is only Genesis subject to literal inerrancy, or can we trust the rest of the Bible, like normal Fundamentalists? How about I Kings, where pi is shown to equal three? Are all those "observations" I make with a compass and a calculator, where pi is a little higher than Kings suggests, erroneous or a hoax?

All life contains DNA, a genetic blueprint containing information. But purely material processes cannot create information, which originates only from a "mind." Evolution proceeds via chance, the antithesis of information. The DNA in simple bacteria has several million specifications; man's has several billion.

What's "information?" A message? A regular pattern? Is ammonia a medium of information because when heated with oxygen (heat and oxygen are not that hard to come by, nor is ammonia, in the world), it creates predictable quantites and proportions of NOx and water? If I may wax sincere for a moment, if I perform an experiment on an abiotic system, do the data I collect constitute information, or does my participation preclude the experiment from being a purely material process, even though I'm only observing? Back to the subject at hand, when bacteria live in or near another organism, they can take in the other organism's DNA. Their nuclear reactions are far stranger than what we normally think of when we imagine microbial reproduction.

Chance and information are not antitheses. Statistics and probability are all about extracting information from chance. Heck, play with any anagram generator on the web and you'll get lots of provoking words and phrases that are not directed by the original permutation. Certainly, anagrams are limited to the letters of the original, but a random string of words can generate an intelligible expression. Was information spontaneously generated ex nihilo? It didn't come from the generator (which only works with what you gave it--some of them filter through a dictionary, but it's not necessary), and its source wasn't in you (else the random string you tested wouldn't have been random), and it didn't come from the letters (which are only symbols of sounds, largely arbitrary things that except for a and i only denote meaning in groups and very limited contexts).

If anything, information is the opposite of entropy, and chance is the opposite of certainty.

The DNA molecule, the most complex structure we know and unquestionably the most efficient copying device, with self-correcting processes, prevents one life form from "changing" into another. We are all copies of a copy of a copy, etc., going back to the very first human parents.

Sorry, where did mutations go? Depending on how strict you want to be in defining "species," we can induce enough mutation in like such that it begets something very unlike, or perhaps just becomes unlike, although that would only satisfy the Lamarckians.

DNA is certainly complex, but it is not terribly efficient, and it does not have self-correcting processes that prevent speciation. These processes do not stop mutation, but allow the organism (or individual cell) to die when too many unfavorable mutations occur, either at conception or through environmental influences.

If we were all copies of a copy of a copy, then we should all look the same. It should be obvious that we're not. Where do you think this variation came from?

Even evolutionists accept the finding that all humans descended from a relatively recent woman whom scientists have taken to calling Eve, based on the DNA in our mitochondria, the cell's powerhouse. Mitochondrial DNA comes unmixed, only from the mother.

So? "Relatively recent" to scientists is still long, long before the usually accepted dates for creation. By my reckoning, it still leaves more than four and a half billion years from the time the Earth coalesced for life to form (sorry--that is, assuming it didn't get here from somewhere else). Either way, this "mitochondrial Eve" is not the first modern human. She is only the last human female whose line of daughters we know not to be broken. Any women who were her contemporaries, or women who descended from them, either had only sons or nor children at all, or possibly we haven't surveyed their mtDNA yet.

The fossil record disproves evolution. If the first life form changed into another, higher form by gradual gene changes, and so on down the line, accounting for all life then, quoting Darwin, "the number of intermediate and transitional links, between all living and extinct species, must have been inconceivably great."

The whole world would be awash in the remains of "infinitely numerous connecting links." It isn't.

Um...we haven't found all the fossils we expect, so we've found all that there are? Scientists know better than to traipse around in fields they haven't mastered; why do people who haven't studied any of it think two and a half years of a liberal arts degree is adequate?

I'm sorry, I was being rude. I don't mean to belittle any liberal arts program. They're not inferior at all; they just deal with completely different bodies of knowledge, just as ferrous metallurgy and constitutional law do. Still, I wonder if Phillips would go so far as to claim that, if we have dug up a dozen T. rex skeletons, then God must have only created a dozen of them, or at least created a dozen apparent skeletons and buried those when He was finishing up with assembling dry land.

Over the hundred years we've been studying paleontology, we've gotten a low-resolution picture of the fossil record, which is billions of years long. Why do self-appointed, external overseers of science get to decide that now is when we need to start producing some conclusive results?

Darwin conceded that fact, calling it "the most obvious and serious objection" against his theory. He attests the "sudden appearance" of species, complete and distinct, in the fossil record - just as if God created all life individually.

Uh, okay. Last I heard, Darwin's linchpin was something closer to irreducible complexity, but I may have simply forgotten. Maybe Phillips forgot that most biological and paleontological research took place after Darwin died, so Darwin couldn't have known to write about it. Einstein fudged relativity to permit a steady-state universe, though, so if he can be wrong about something untrue, despite having a surprisingly (to him, in the case of universal expansion) accurate grasp of something true; then why can't old Charles?

Evolution is scientifically preposterous. Laws of probability are real scientific laws. Our DNA is unique because the odds of another person having our exact DNA are so remote we can dismiss that possibility altogether. Likewise with evolution.

Here he's confusing science with engineering. Engineers are all about how to make things work first and asking about why things work later. A good rule of thumb for an engineer is to always try a first-order approximation and see if it's close enough to work with.

You do see similar simplifications in statistical mechanics, but no stat mech scholar will deny that the extremely rare events that seem impossible to those of us living in the big, slow, hot regime we do live in are still possible. You can drop a piece of metal in a bucket of water and reasonably not expect the water to freeze while the metal turns red-hot, but an actual scientist who knows a thing or two about stat mech would not look at a red-hot piece of metal in a bucket of ice and say "Nah, didn't happen; it's too unlikely."

I'm suddenly reminded of the island of peaceful, terrible musicians from "Erik the Viking." They got to live in peace as long as not a drop of blood was spilled there. One of the main characters murdered someone, and the island sank. The inhabitants refused help, as the water rushed up around them, believing their track record should speak for itself. Am I being clear enough?

Lastly, one should hesitate before labeling mathematical principles as scientific laws. Sure, math is a sort of science, but probability and statistics derive from logic, not from analysis of test results (which even theoretical physics has to fall back on, after a fashion).

Nobel laureate Francis Crick calculated nature's chances of producing one small protein: 1 in 10 to the 260th power. Crick reminds us there are only 10 to the 80th power (1 followed by 80 zeros) atoms in the whole universe; he concludes even the elementary components of life "cannot have arisen by pure chance."

Ah, another infallible scientist. No, I'm only being mean again, although I'm not sure why the faithful would be inclined to use the work of an atheist, who believed the soul was only a superstitious model of the yet-undefined psychological phenomena that emerge from the structure of the brain to form the person, to support something the atheist himself found ridiculous. Is he accidentally promoting some theistic principles, or just being misinterpreted and/or taken out of context?

What I'd really like to know, though, is where these statistitians are getting their probabilities from. Some of the magnitudes seem reasonable, but if I can accept ten to the 260th power for a probability, should I not be willing to consider ten to the 250th? The 270th? The 100th or 1000th? The 80th?

Whatever the answer to that question, the comparison is disingenuous. If there were 10⁸⁰ particles randomly distributed throughout the universe, my chance of taking one particle and pairing it with another randomly selected particle is 1 in [10⁸⁰-1]. The universe isn't built that way, though. We're dealing with a much smaller population, yes, but also one that is much denser, so particle interactions have a tremendous impact on the kinetics of the system.

Mathematician Emile Borel states an event will never happen when the odds are less than 1 in 10 to the 50th power.

Dr. Borel sounds like either a good engineer or an arrogant classical physicist. If I showed you that some phenomenon had odds worse than 1:10⁵⁰ of occuring, and then I showed you the phenomenon, would you deny that it did happen? Odds like "1 in 10 chance" don't mean something might occur ten times but actually does so only on the tenth. The probability of an event is not based on the opportunity for that event to happen. If I roll a die, the chance of me getting a 5 is one in six; on average, I'll have to roll six times to get a five, all the numbers coming up more or less equally often. It does not mean that if I roll the die once, I cannot get a six. When these other, huge improbabilities get bandied about, I suspect that critics of evolution are looking at the average expected behavior (for the six-sided die, add up the possibilities and divide by how many there are: 21÷6=3.5, which is sensibly right in the middle, but unreasonable for obvious reasons) and taking it as the way things must be.

1 in 10⁵⁰ is still a nonzero possibility. "Statistically impossible" is an arbitrary, if convenient, lie we tell ourselves to keep the math easy.

Phillips goes on a little longer about famous people citing figures and attitudes that seem to have no place outside classical physics. Maybe it's not fair to use ad hominems, but he's the one who started name dropping, and appeals to authority are not logically sound, either. His evidence comes from scientists who died decades ago, an atheist who had nothing a creationist would stomach for an alternative to evolution, a mathematician who believes in panspermia, and Albert Einstein:

Albert Einstein said, "I want to know how God created this world." Einstein knew the universe didn't happen by chance.

Right, because he also knew the universe was static, and he has access to secret proof of God that doesn't actually happen to explain scientifically God's existence, so Einstein has to do that part himself.

Nobel laureate Ernst Chain said, "To postulate that the development and survival of the fittest is entirely a consequence of chance mutations seems to me a hypothesis based on no evidence and irreconcilable with the facts."

Which facts? We've only had a hundred or so years to sift through what so far looks to be billions of years of fossil-hiding rock? Everything we know, scientifically, jives poorly with some poetry composed in a prescientific, and at the time probably preliterate, society?

Atheism and evolution are dead. Science destroyed them. Those claiming evolution is scientific must demonstrate that life can come from non-life by purely material processes and that one life form can turn into another, higher form. Science demands it. Put up or shut up.

Now Phillips just sounds, to me, like he feels seriously threatened and is posturing, at least after everything else he's written. Evolutionary science has yielded too many fruitful results for such an ultimatum to be taken seriously. Science, by definition, does not speak to the absence or presence of a Diety. Atheists like it because it explains so many things so well without invoking the Deity. Creationists, literal or otherwise, see science as an incomplete religion (and I can't blame them for getting that impression sometimes, although everybody really should know better) and try to graft in the Truth they know from revelation as if we should have been able to find it by reason alone, making the attractiveness to atheists and scientists themselves (I've written on narrow ecclesiology and the inadequacy of reason before, as have far greater thinkers) less of a threat.

Anything we could reliably reproduce and test--i.e. with science--is inherently not supernatural. Evolution, meanwhile, does not speak to the origin of life, like I said, but only to its development, hence the name.

You cannot demand that a field, which is not even your own, solve problems outside its scope, and when it says it cannot, you have no place to declare the whole field invalid. Whom could I rail against if I believed that a shotgun should serve well as a hammer, or a briefcase as a dinner salad?

As I would like to say if they let me give out flu shots, "This vaccine is brought to you by the science of epidemiology and the theory of evolution." As the theolgians say, "Believe it, so that you might come to understand." Short of understanding, you will always fail to disprove it.