Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

Time To Get Religion Out Of Science Classes

220 Comments

Once again, science teachers are under fire by the “scientifically ignorant” for “just trying to teach science,” and they’ve decided that it’s time to fight back:

“There’s a climate of confusion in this country around climate science,” says McCaffrey, and NCSE’s goal will be to ensure that “teachers have the tools they need if they get pushback and feel intimidated.” Recent surveys, such as one done among K-12 teachers in September by the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA), suggest that attacks on climate education are far from rare. NSTA found that over half of the respondents reported having encountered global warming scepticism from parents, and 26% had encountered it from administrators. And a December survey from the National Earth Science Teachers’ Association found that 36% of its 555 K-12 teachers who currently teach climate science had been “influenced” to “teach the controversy.”

NCSE expects this task to be much harder than fighting creationism. “The forces arrayed against climate science are more numerous and much better funded,” Scott says, and are better able to get their message across in the mainstream media than creationism supporters. Organizations such as the Heartland Institute, which questions whether humans cause climate change, send out free educational materials to teachers and school boards. As Science reported in September, teachers who already struggle with small science budgets and little time for teaching have no time to fend off ideological attacks from students, parents, and administrators. Scott says that one of NCSE’s tasks will be to analyze these materials and educate teachers on why they are scientifically unsound. NSTA’s survey found that many teachers feel unprepared for global warming skepticism because of a lack of teaching tools.

Emphasis mine. Note the assumption that “the science is settled” just as much on climate change as it is on evolution. As someone who strongly believes in science and the scientific method, and who thinks that the “climate science” community has betrayed those values (as demonstrated by the scientifically nonsensical phrase “the science is settled”), I am continuously infuriated by the comparison between these two topics, and the implication that if one doesn’t accept the lousy science, not to mention the fraud, one is akin to a creationist. Note also from that link that in order to put together the bible to defend the climate-science religion, they have hired the notable hack Paul Gleick:

While Dr. Gleick is presented as an expert in climate science, he’s mostly about water and water systems. Climate seems to be just an angry diversion for him. But don’t take my word for it, have a look at how he treats others on the topic when he thinks he’s among friends.

Follow the link, he really is a piece of work.

But even leaving the fraud aside, here’s the problem with the comparison between creationism and climate skepticism. Evolution is a scientific theory. It is the one that best fits all of the available evidence. There is also a creationist theory that fits all the evidence: God did it, complete with evidence that evolution occurred. The problem with the latter theory is that, while it might be true, in some sense, it is not scientific, because it isn’t falsifiable. “Intelligent design” also isn’t a scientific theory — it’s merely a critique of one. And hence, it does not belong in a science class, except as an example to illustrate what is science and what is not. If people want to challenge the theory of evolution, they have to come up with an alternative one that is testable, and to date, they have failed to do so.

In contrast, even accepting for the sake of the argument that the planet is really warming abnormally (despite the cooling trend of the past decade), there are numerous scientifically testable alternative theories to explain this, which is why AGW skeptics “are better able to get their message across in the mainstream media than creationism supporters.” In fact, as has been pointed out on numerous occasions over the past several years, belief in AGW has taken on the aspects of a religion itself, complete with sin, a corrupt priesthood, indulgences for the rich to buy absolution and into green heaven, and the persecution of heretics.

In a discussion of this topic on my blog the other day, one of my commenters points out that, in fact, it is AGW theory that is akin to creationism:

Neither one is scientific. CAGW predicts that storms will get more severe, or less severe, or more frequent, or less frequent. Winters will become either warmer and milder or colder and more severe. Summers will be drier, unless they’re wetter. Global temperatures will increase, unless of course temperatures decrease because of the human-induced temperature increases change the oceans’ thermo-haline circulation. You can just pick from a host of completely contradictory papers, depending on what the latest weather event was, citing the one that was correct by random chance as proof that your consensus of credentialed scientific experts is as infallible as the Pope.

Just like creationism, no piece of data, observation, or negative result can refute CAGW, because the theory predicts anything and everything. Theories that aren’t logically refutable by any conceivable observation aren’t part of science. CAGW is something that isn’t science, something that in all respects maps as an offshoot of medieval Christianity, complete with sin, redemption, damnation, indulgences, inquisitions, and charges of heresy and apostasy.

Because its priesthood earned PhD’s in science, and claim what they do is science, their followers can boldly evangelize for an illogical, wacko religion while wrapped in the trappings of acceptable secular appearances, feeling smug and enlightened because what they believe is scientific “truth.”

…Certainly some skeptics are skeptical because they think CAGW conflicts with their belief in God’s creation, but many more are skeptical because they are devoted to science and are horrified by the abuses it is suffering at the hands of a bunch of zealots intent on saving the planet from man’s sin, regardless of actual science, reason, and logic.

Communism, Fascism, and Nazism were also “scientific” belief systems, arrogant in the certainty of their scientific truths, intent on saving the world, focused on exposing skeptics and non-believers, while arrogantly demeaning the un-enlightened, ignorant masses held in thrall by primitive religious beliefs. Do we need another one of these pseudo-scientific, dogmatic, self-destructive secular-religions running amok in our schools? Should we be subjecting students to mindless indoctrination in the hopes that they’ll lower their standard of living, and hopefully stop reproducing altogether?

There are two problems here that are fundamental (to use one of Newt’s favorite words). First is that when you have a public-school system to which everyone has to send their children if they can’t afford private schools, there is always going to be tension about what should be taught, not just in science classes, but in all subjects, given the indoctrinatory nature by which it often occurs. But specifically with regard to how science is taught, sadly, it often isn’t. It is taught not as a method for acquiring knowledge, but as a compendium of established “settled” facts, and that scientists have special knowledge inaccessible to the rest of us, and so we must rely on what they say (hence the priesthood).

I have a modest proposal. Instead of promulgating either the Christian religion, or the Green religion in our science classes, let’s get teachers who actually have degrees in science (as opposed to “education”), so they don’t need “teaching materials,” and teach kids how to do math (including statistics), think critically, and actually formulate testable and falsifiable hypotheses and test them, so that they will be inoculated to all religions, when it comes to learning science.

220 thoughts on “Time To Get Religion Out Of Science Classes”

  1. …think critically, and actually formulate testable and falsifiable hypotheses and test them, so that they will be inoculated to all religions, when it comes to learning science.

    But if we train skepticism, the proles might come to the “wrong” conclusions and everything will be ruined, ruined!

  2. Actually, the issue of evolution and AGW are very analogous.

    We can’t prove humans evolved from any lower animals. There’s a heck of a lot of circumstantial evidence, but nobody saw it happen, nor can we run a repeatable experiment. We can show that evolution is happening in small scale (selective breeding), but we can’t prove that it scales.

    Even now, a century after Darwin, we’re discovering new features in evolution – stick “Russian silver foxes” in a google, for example. Darwin’s theories were used by a collection of jerks to justify being jerks – AKA “Social Darwinism.”

    Similarly in AGW. We can’t run an experiment in full scale on the Earth to see what happens. (Well, we can, but only once.) There’s a heck of a lot of circumstantial evidence tying CO2 levels to temperature, including helping end ice ages, but we can’t prove the link. We can show, in labs, that CO2 will trap heat – a small scale experiment.

    We don’t know exactly what the weather will be like in a warmer climate. Some areas, such as the central US, were deserts during the Holocene Optimum. Other areas, like the Sahara, were wet. And like “Social Darwinism,” some jerks have used AGW to bang on the drums of deindustrialization.

    In both cases, opponents of the proposed theory launched vicious personal attacks on the proponents. Darwin was vigorously attacked by religious and scientific figures of his day. Many sharp elbows were thrown.

    In short, the two problems are very similar. The fact that, a century after Darwin, we’re still arguing about him suggests that the AGW argument will continue for a long time as well.

    1. We can’t prove humans evolved from any lower animals.

      What Mark said.

      It seems to me that you tip your hand that you’re blowing smoke right off the bat (to mix metaphors). Are you actually under the impression that there is any pillar of modern science that is “proven”? Do think special relativity is “proven” and is now immutable? Do you think that DNA is now “proven” to be the mechanism of heredity and that no further questions shall be allowed? For that matter, do you really think we’ve proven that energy is conserved? Do you really think science works this way?

      As Ivar Giaever remarked when he resigned from the APS over their statement about global warming,

      In the APS it is ok to discuss whether the mass of the proton changes over time and how a multi-universe behaves, but the evidence of global warming is incontrovertible?

      At this point I feel sorry for climatologists. They have degrees that proclaim they are scientists. They get to work in buildings that were designed for scientists. Checks show up that pay for computers and other equipment. People — well, some people — treat them as though they are really scientists. Unfortunately, they don’t seem to know how science works, or what peer review is for, or how to behave like scientists when their results are questioned. One longs for a Dean Yeager to walk in the door and tell Michael Mann

      Doctor… [Mann]. The purpose of science is to serve mankind. You seem to regard science as some kind of dodge… or hustle. Your theories are the worst kind of popular tripe, your methods are sloppy, and your conclusions are highly questionable! You are a poor scientist, Dr. Mann!

        1. With due respect, I think you have the pencil-necked geek on the wrong side of the equation here. But it’s true: this Mann has no [anatomical term deleted].

      2. Bbeard said, “Are you actually under the impression that there is any pillar of modern science that is “proven”? ”

        Yes. Science has Laws (The Law of Gravity, Newton’s Laws, the Laws of Thermodynamics). and science has theories (Evolution, Relativity, Special Relativity). Scientic laws always apply. Scientific theories are principles that explain and predict observations. There is a difference.

        1. “Yes. Science has Laws (The Law of Gravity, Newton’s Laws, the Laws of Thermodynamics). and science has theories (Evolution, Relativity, Special Relativity). Scientific laws always apply. Scientific theories are principles that explain and predict observations. There is a difference.”

          WRONG.

          Science has theories which are the best fits to the facts that we know. A scientific theory must make falsifiable predictions. The “laws” you quote are simply extremely good theories which have withstood test after test after test. In fact Newton’s laws are demonstrably wrong at extremely high velocities which is why special and general relativity were developed by Einstein. General relativity in turn is known to be wrong at the quantum scale, it’s just that nobody has come up with a better theory yet so we continue to use general relativity.

          1. I think we’ve already seen most of the standard scientifically ignorant arguments against evolution in this thread, and it’s just a few hours old. I’m sure someone will pop in to tell us that it violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics any minute now.

        2. Depending on usage, a scientific law is usually a numerical relationship based on repeated observation, often without an offered explanation.

          Newton’s law of gravitation is a law and not a theory because it doesn’t posit a cause or mechanism for gravity, it just asserts that the force depends on the masses of the objects and falls off with the square of the distance. A theory of gravity would explain what gravity is, and not just describe its observed effects. Newton’s laws of motion were likewise based on repeated and careful experiments using impacts and pendulums, with the results boiled down to a simple set of rules. Why does F=ma? It just does. It’s some sort of rule that seems to hold.

          The Stefan-Boltzmann law of blackbody radiation holds that the radiated energy goes up with the fourth power of the absolute temperature, based on observation. My laptop screen wildly violates Stefan-Boltzmann’s law, which is why I’m not afraid to touch my screen even though its S-B color temperature says its temperature is over 6000 degrees Kelvin. Not all scientific laws are valid in all contexts.

          And if anyone finds a planetary system that obey’s Bode’s law of planetary distances, I’ll be shocked.

        1. OK, but CO2 was constantly increasing. So either there is no correlation, or the correlation is so weak that controlling CO2 output won’t effect temperature. A scientist would note that the T statistic between reality and prediction is not significant…

        2. Or not. 20-30-year periods of small increases and small decreases characterize what temperature data we have for the last century or so, which correspond to ocean current cycles. We’re due for a trend down in those cycles.

      2. They did find a small amount of warming from 1997 – present, though of course none of the trends from that small of a time frame are statistically significant. And if you change the start year to 1996, you get a about .11C of warming. And if you use Roy Spencer’s UAH satellite data, you get a nice warming of .14C. GISS gives .22C of warming. Sure, you need a couple of more years to get statistical significance – but that goes as equally for the low as the high numbers. The fact is that the first ten years of this century were about .2C warmer than the last. Wait until the 15 year cherry picked start time starts after 1998 – the “skeptics” will insist on either really short time frames of stick with 1998.

        1. The statistical cherry picking works both ways, Robert. Hence, the attempt to focus on the post-1960s years when global temperatures were reverting up after a decline during the 60s (that would be the “hide the decline” decline that the computer models used to base the AGW alarmist claims did not “predict” in arrears. For that matter, focusing on the years the planet has been coming out of the Little Ice Age is itself a kind of cherry picking on a geological time scale. So was the change made by NASA and others a couple years ago, wherein “mean” temperatures were calculated not from a 100-year base of data as it had before (itself an absurdly short period to be measuring climate) to a shorter period that just happened to begin during the coldest period in the samples.

    3. In short, the two problems are very similar. The fact that, a century after Darwin, we’re still arguing about him suggests that the AGW argument will continue for a long time as well.

      This is not the case with AGW. It will be tested and the test is already in its beginning phase. The paper from Livingston and Penn regarding the magnetic flux of sunspots declining to a level to where they will no longer be visible. There is controversy related to whether or not this will result in a Maunder minimum though this seems likely. If this is the case, and if the dearth of sunspots were responsible for the 16th and early 17th century cold minima, then we are in for a real time experiment to see whether solar influences or CO2 dominate the Holocene climate.

  3. “Actually, the issue of evolution and AGW are very analogous.

    We can’t prove humans evolved from any lower animals. ”

    Science isn’t about proving things. Something ‘proved’ isn’t open to further testing or hypothesis, and that is the antithesis of the scientific method. We don’t expect gravity to switch off tomorrow but to say it is proved that it wont is incorrect. Its just very unlikely to from what we currently understand. There are many things you can’t test by simply repetition (the Big Bang comes to mind) but to suggest we therefore have no more reason to believe in the Big Bang than in the Flying Spaghetti Monster is incorrect. Evolution has many thousands of points of data in its favor, and as mentioned above Creationism has no testability at all. We can watch fruit flies evolve over 1000 generations (and have, many, many times) but we can’t watch God separate the earth from the sky, not even once. Not even in theory. Until someone comes up with an alternate theory on evolution that explains all the points of congruence as opposed to simply poking holes in a few points they think they see, there is no alternate scientific theory. Even if evolution is flawed that does not indicate that creationism is correct in the least. Some other theory would need to fit all the points that evolution fits AND the new points.

    1. Evolution has many thousands of points of data in its favor, and as mentioned above Creationism has no testability at all. We can watch fruit flies evolve over 1000 generations (and have, many, many times) but we can’t watch God separate the earth from the sky, not even once.

      Er, no. Evolution has “thousands of points of data in its favor”, but that is the case only if you assume evolution is true in the first place and interpret the evidence in that context. The “evolution” of fruit flies that you mention is not evolution from one species to the next, but variations within one species. Has anyone come up with an experiment that can show a fruit fly evolving into a form of life higher up on the evolutionary ladder than itself (a beetle, perhaps)?

      In short, evolution is not a testable and falsifiable hypothesis.

      1. Er, no. Evolution has “thousands of points of data in its favor”, but that is the case only if you assume evolution is true in the first place and interpret the evidence in that context.

        Er, no. One does not need to prove evolution is true in order to observe that all life on Earth has the same fundamental biological processes or that human DNA is remarkably similar to yeast DNA. And the degree of genetic similarity is usually comparable to what we derive from other estimates such as morphology and fossil record. Isotope decay which has lead to dating of various things even in geological time is well understood and can be observed by the layman. Fossils can be and are dated without having to believe in evolution.

        Has anyone come up with an experiment that can show a fruit fly evolving into a form of life higher up on the evolutionary ladder than itself (a beetle, perhaps)?

        It takes time to run that experiment. A generation to a fruit fly is something like ten days. Running an experiment that is a thousand fruit fly generations long can take decades to run. Evolving a fruit fly to a “higher” lifeform will take time.

        Finally, genetic algorithms, which are the claimed dynamic behind evolution, has been demonstrated on the computer to work. We don’t need to believe in evolution to use it successfully. We have the characteristics of genetic algorithms in nature. We have inheritable traits; we have selection, that is, some organisms can reproduce and others can’t and which can be gamed to some degree by the inheritable traits one receives; and we have a variety of genetic mutation and breeding mechanisms for both creating and mixing traits. Thus, we and all known living things are changing today based on genetic algorithms, the basis for evolution, even if we don’t believe in the theory.

        1. Karl,

          Just because a living systems show similarity in DNA structure shows commonality does not necessarily follow that it is due to common descent. It could well be common design.

          What’s more, modern science has not shown any plausible pathway which explains how life arose in the first place. DNA requires molecular machinery for transcription (and error checking) and those ribosomes, etc cannot exist without the protein coding transcribed from DNA. So there is a closed loop of dependency that points to purposeful arrangement and away from random happenstance.

          Modern science has shown us that life is dependent upon a specific ordering of particular matter which results in a system of self organization that is a marvel of efficiency, redundancy, and adaptability.

          Now this doesn’t mean there is not an answer that is consistent with materialist philosophical suppositions, only that one hasn’t been demonstrated. And given the order of nucleic acids is independent from chemical bonding properties of each other and the rest of the DNA backbone and the circular dependence I mentioned above, it is not irrational nor unreasonable to conclude, based on the available evidence and logic, that the building blocks of life show traces of intelligent agency (design).

          1. Now this doesn’t mean there is not an answer that is consistent with materialist philosophical suppositions, only that one hasn’t been demonstrated.

            And the scientific approach to that issue is to continue to seek one, not resort to a deity.

          2. Just because a living systems show similarity in DNA structure shows commonality does not necessarily follow that it is due to common descent. It could well be common design.

            We now have the technology to look at specific genes and see how they evolved. For example, there is a gene that produces hemoglobin. More distant relatives have more genetic differences. When you map out the differences, you see that they line up with where we think our ancestral lines branched. And crucially, the line branching is the same for different biomolecules. My theory is that we evolved from more primitive lifeforms and that different clades branched at different times. In other words, the history of living things resembles the branches on a tree. I call this theory “evolution”.

            What’s your theory? That an old man in the sky picked out different hemoglobin genes for different species in a particular way just to confuse us? Good luck getting that past peer review.

          3. Rand: “And the scientific approach to that issue is to continue to seek one, not resort to a deity.”

            But identifying agency does not appeal to a deity, it appeals to available evidence. See, the philosophical assumption (there must be a material explanation) is leading the investigation, not the evidence. Never mind leaving teleology off the table from the get go.

          4. Just because a living systems show similarity in DNA structure shows commonality does not necessarily follow that it is due to common descent. It could well be common design.

            And “common design” doesn’t rule out evolution. As I note elsewhere, selection (the winnowing of organisms which don’t pass on their genes) is the designer in evolution.

      2. Fruit flies evolved! As into another species? What exactly did those remarkable fruit flies become? So in your world, I guess micro-evolution (adaptation) is proof of macro-evolution (trans-species). Thanks for the laugh!

        1. Dead on. Micro does not prove Macro. Finch beak variation has not, so far, turned a finch into a tiger or even into anything that is not still a finch. That’s the heart of the issue right there, and the failure of many to understand this is why evolutionists get away with the fallacy of equivocation and claim there is scientific proof for evolution. Evolution may be the way of it, I don’t claim to know one way or the other, but if someone has a time lapse DVD of java man turning into that hot girl who lives down the hall from me, I’d like to see it. That’s not really overstating the case much, as to what it will take to prove evolution.

        2. Ok time to use some of my CS/math proofing experience. Proof by induction if I can show micro evolution adaptions exists, how many adaptions dose it take to become macro evolution and trans specie? It like saying if i can climb a infinite equidistant step ladder to the 5th step why can’t i climb it to the 6 then the 7th and so on. Yes I know their a issue something I never quite liked about Proofing by Induction. But for the case of Macro vs micro evolution it can boil down to just a mathematical induction how many adaptions till it becomes a different specie or “vastly different ” from what it was originally.
          We have examples of mutations, examples of genetic information getting carried over, fossil records, and other medical/genetic information markers, supporting it. Anthropogenic Global warming essentially has CO2 is a Green house gas, We unsequester a “lot of it” and the believers claim they have Manipulated data sets of various sorts and simplified models of vastly complex system to help prove their case. Their a lot of contention on the last 2 points and definition of a lot has another issue of

          The main issue is how science is taught at the k to 8/12 grade levels that it a assortment of Facts/knowledge not methods theories and extrapolations of said theories.

  5. There’s a heck of a lot of circumstantial evidence tying CO2 levels to temperature, including helping end ice ages, but we can’t prove the link.

    That’s because the glacier core samples show that CO2 increases AFTER temperature increases.

  6. some jerks have used AGW to bang on the drums of deindustrialization.

    If you look closely, they ALL do. Certainly the high priest does (“Earth in the Balance”)

  7. Instead of having government-based teachings that censor one viewpoint or another, let’s just get the government out of science classes. Then we can all mind our own business.

    1. But Science is based on fact, just like Government is based on law, so you wouldn’t want a Government who isn’t following the rules. That’s how factions start, Gov never sensors, it’s just a “mirror” of who we are, so be mindful.

  8. A Corollary to the “Big Bang Theory” is that all life began after the “Big Bang” but basic physics would say that both matter and energy doesn’t just come into being. Who is to say that their wasn’t life before the “Big Bang” ? I know you can prove it.

    On the same plane of thought, the problem for evolutionists with “Intelligent design” goes to the basic religious philosophy that “there is God and there is man.” Evolutionists depend on religion to disprove any notion of “Intelligent Design” in order to throw religion out of science (it’s an interesting Catch-22).
    If we cast aside the stricture, and put forth the conjecture that there could be a being or race of beings between God and man. I know it’s really hard for humans to accept that there could be any being higher than them but there are plenty of places in this or any parallel universe or universes for multiple races of higher beings to exist. Once you throw out that religious stricture, it’s much easier to accept your potential lowliness in the universe, and the concept of “Intelligent design” by a higher being, whether you call him/her/it “God” or not.

  10. To argue that the Meta Theory of Evolution (aka all life came from inanimate elements billions of years ago) is no more a scientific theory than “God did it” is. They are BOTH untestable, unfalsifiable and therefore lousy science. By all means teach micro evolutionary science in biology but keep the transcendant religious version in the philosophy class where it belongs. I expect better of you Mr. Simberg.

      1. Miller-Urey only shows the building blocks can come about naturally in a controlled (ie designed) environment. Investigator interference is all over this one. And that is the point. It is not falsifiable.

        1. Miller-Urey only shows the building blocks can come about naturally in a controlled (ie designed) environment.

          And if it didn’t show that, then that would have falsified a claim about how amino acids could have been produced.

          Investigator interference is all over this one.

          The interference in question is true of all experiments in the lab.

  11. Where to start? We have science because we have Christianity. Christianity is based on the incarnate, omnipotent God. He took the form of a man and walked on the Earth. He is also a God of weights and measures. By studying nature, and thus science, we come closer to understanding the Creator. Other religions don’t have this belief and other cultures didn’t make the scientific gains Western Civilization has.

    As for the religion of evolution: that is not a settled science. While micro-evolution happens and can be witnessed, there are too many holes in macro-evolution. Eyeballs have no evolutionary antecedent: there they are. Too many species just all of a sudden appear in the fossil records, and then disappear. The reason scientist can’t give up macro-evolution is that they have nothing to give it up for, other than “God did it!” Darwin had problems with his faith and the Church, which did as much to inspire his work as “science”.

    1. We have science because we have Christianity.

      Tell that to Galileo and Bruno. We have science despite having Christianity. Your mythology conveniently sends 2000 years of bullying Christian anti-empiricism down the memory hole.

      1. If you tallied all of the examples of christianity helping and hindering science over the past two thousand years, you would find more helping than hindering. That doesn’t mean you have to convert but you shouldn’t try to diminish christianity’s contributions.

      2. Sorry, it wasn’t the Christians that persecuted Galileo and Bruno, it was a bunch the elite academic priesthood of the day hiding behind the Christian moniker. Same story today an elite academic priesthood hiding behind the Evolution moniker. History runs in circles.

      3. The value of a religious system to scientific advances is not in what a few men did to a few other men. Those actions have some influence, of course, but they are very possibly swamped by how a religious or philosophical system causes a person to view himself in relation to the natural world. Confucianism in ancient China emphasized tradition. Judeo-Christian traditions seem to have encouraged something else, in spite of the best efforts of priests and kings to paint it otherwise to their subjects. The Judeo-Christian relation between man and his world is one of a nature beholden to man and one in which a constant linear progression is natural and desirable. Example, despite faults, Puritans in New England were extremely industrious AND open to the development of labor saving technologies (unlike in China during the same period). This was, in part, due to the fact that, for religious reasons, they encouraged extreme literacy and encouraged each other to spend their free time working, often at two trades. The great political thought of the 18th century (which lead to democracy in its current form) was a synthesis of Judeo-Christian values and Greek thought.

    2. +1.

      The assumption (and that is what it is) that the observable universe is rational is a corollary of belief in a rational Creator of the universe. By this I mean that we hold that it behaves according to an underlying order or set of physical laws.

      We could just as well hold that it behaves randomly, and that any observable patterns we perceive are illusory, like attempts to predict future lottery numbers from past draws. Obviously this belief would be fatalistic, and ultimately fatal to the scientific method. But it is, as Pope Benedict noted in his Regensburg lecture, intrinsic to the Islamic concept of Allah as absolute will unbound by reason or anything else — so it is not a hypothetical belief system.

      This is not to say only Christians can do science. Non-Christians operating within a Western Christian worldview take the rationality of the universe as axiomatic, and proceed from there. But it evidences a weakness in current Western education (i.e., we don’t teach philosophy anymore) that most scientists are unaware of the epistemological limits of the scientific method and the Aristotelian distinction between types of causes. (In Aristotle’s parlance, the universe’s rationality is its formal cause, while matter and energy are its material cause and the Big Bang its efficient cause.)

      We get these endless irreconcilable disputes (e.g. creation/evolution) whenever it is impossible to answer a why? question without stepping outside the scientific method which is designed to work with only material and efficient causes, but scientists foolishly pronounce the question as ‘settled science’ anyway.

  12. There is also a creationist theory that fits all the evidence: God did it, complete with evidence that evolution occurred. The problem with the latter theory is that, while it might be true, in some sense, it is not scientific, because it isn’t falsifiable. “Intelligent design” also isn’t a scientific theory — it’s merely a critique of one. And hence, it does not belong in a science class, except as an example to illustrate what is science and what is not. If people want to challenge the theory of evolution, they have to come up with an alternative one that is testable, and to date, they have failed to do so.

    Wow Rand – you really need to do your homework on what both the Creation & ID paradigms teach. Agree or not, Creationism does not teach that ‘God [created]…evidence that evolution occurred’. Likewise, ID is far more than a critique of an existing scientific theory. And, contrary to your assertion, both Creationism & ID make testable claims. All of this can easily be gleaned by a fair reading of contemporary material from each camp.
    I suspect that your conception of creationism and ID based is on the coverage provided those subjects by mainstream sources – such as the NCSE. The NCSE’s characterizations (and those of its fellow travelers) of Creationism & ID is no more reliable than their characterizations of the state of climate science.

      1. Catholic and Orthodox Churches made their peace with evolution a long time ago. God created life via evolution, hence you will see evidence of it. The emphasis isn’t on the method, but the why. I often suspect if the atheists in Darwin’s day hadn’t jumped all over the theory, it would be less of an issue.

        It will be interesting as Muslim fundamentals increase in the general population. Christianity has a tradition of analogy in interpretation of scripture. Islam does not. India has similar problems with Hindu sects.

        And while discussing science, I worry more about the liberal distortions of genetics, medicine, etc to fit their worldview (along with the climate science you mention) than evolution. Those all seem to require an all powerful state to save us.

      2. The implicit – and wrong – premise here is that there is only one way to legitimately interpret the data. Related to this is the pivotal and often decisive role one’s fundamental assumptions and axioms play in the interpretation of data. To use an obvious example, an avowed atheist-materiaist is unlikely to consider even the possibility of design/a Designer as such runs counter to what he believes about reality at a fundamental level. Some have even gone so far as to admit this. Kansas State University immunologist Dr Scott Todd wrote:

        ‘Even if all the data point to an intelligent designer, such an hypothesis is excluded from science because it is not naturalistic’

        correspondence to Nature 410(6752):423, 30 Sept. 1999.

        In a similar vein, Richard Lewontin confessed:

        We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is an absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.

        Billions and billions of demons, The New York Review, p. 31, 9 January 1997.

        All of this is to point out that a person’s worldview unavoidably colors their interpretation of the evidence – and this is just as true for an atheist/materialist as it is for a Creationist of IDer. Just as importantly, evidence doesn’t speak for itself – it must be interpreted within the context of a larger framework (e.g. evolution, creation, etc.). In any case, as I mentioned before both Creationism and ID make testable claims (some of which have been quite successfully fulfilled).

        (I am aware of Theistic Evolutionists such as Francis Collins; but they simply put a theistic coat of paint on the mainstream interpretation; an interpretation that has been engaged with in depth by both Creationists & ID theorists.)

    2. I suspect that your conception of creationism and ID based is on the coverage provided those subjects by mainstream sources – such as the NCSE. The NCSE’s characterizations (and those of its fellow travelers) of Creationism & ID is no more reliable than their characterizations of the state of climate science.

      Stuff and nonsense. I don’t speak for Rand, of course, but in my case one of the reasons I am so adamantly opposed to creationism is that I have looked at creationist literature. In fact I have a good friend — a steadfast creationist — who has supplied me a number of papers from the Institute for Creation Research and similar organizations. Without exception these papers are crap. The authors simply have no idea what they are talking about, or what constitutes “evidence” for a scientific journal, or even how to make a scientific argument. I’m insulted that you think our opposition is based on ignorance and not knowledge.

      1. Having read quite of a bit of contemporary Creationist material myself, I’ll just have to disagree. I’ll just bounce your assertion right back at you: you simply have no idea what you are talking about, what constitutes “evidence” for a scientific journal, or even how to make a scientific argument.

        I’m insulted that you think our opposition is based on ignorance and not knowledge.

        So? You think the same of creationist opposition to evolution and I couldn’t care less. Regardless, I say this as someone who has read quite a bit of contemporary evolutionary material and when they do, on the rare occasion, deign to engage Creationism, with extremely rare exception, the arguments and positions of creationists are grossly distorted. The NCSE is a big offender in this regard.

        1. I’ll just bounce your assertion right back at you: you simply have no idea what you are talking about, what constitutes “evidence” for a scientific journal, or even how to make a scientific argument.

          Risible. Again spoken from ignorance. You might want to do a literature search before going any further with this line of ad hominem argument.

          BBB

          1. Priceless; you can dish it out but you don’t much like getting it back. First, the fact that you’ve published peer-reviewed science papers doesn’t prove anything. Plenty of Creationists and ID theorists have published scads of papers, earned PhDs from secular institutions, secured patents and won scientific awards for their secular work. It’s no more risible or ad hominem for me to accuse you and your fellow travelers of scientific ignorance than for you to do the same to Creationists.

          2. Risible. Again spoken from ignorance. You might want to do a literature search before going any further with this line of ad hominem argument.

            Take your own advice: here’s John Hartnett at the University of Western Australia:

            Born in Manjimup, Western Australia on March 24, 1952. Received both B.Sc. (hons I) and PhD with distinction from the School of Physics at the University of Western Australia (UWA). In 2005 received an ARC QE II Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship and in 2009 became a tenured professor at the University of Western Australia.

            Currently works as a Research Professor with the Frequency Standards and Metrology (FSM) research group in the School of Physics, UWA. He heads up his own division of the FSM group: Local Oscillators—building ultra stable local oscillators for time and frequency metrology labs and for applications in millimetre wave VLBI radio astronomy.

            Current research interests include ultra-stable microwave clocks based on pure sapphire resonators and tests of fundamental theories of physics. Also he has an interest in non-standard cosmologies and the large scale structure of the visible universe.

            Click on the link and go to the publications tab. Among other things, Hartnett is a prominent Creationist, yet somehow his scientific ‘ignorance’ hasn’t been an impediment to his work. Risible indeed.

        2. here’s John Hartnett at the University of Western Australia

          Pretty humorous. Apart from his sapphire oscillator papers, Hartnett seems to toil in an odd little corner of wacky physics. He seems to be very attached to Moshe Carmeli’s theory about how the universe is really 6000 years old because we are all fooled by the redshift of distant galaxies. Carmeli, as no doubt you know, is the author of “The First Six Days of the Universe” and “Lengths of the First Days of the Universe”.

          Well, judge us by our cites. I have a single paper that has more than double the citations of all of Hartnett’s work put together — and I’m not even a particularly significant physicist, and I’ve only put out a handful of papers. (My work nowadays is “sensitive but unclassified”). And the comparison would be worse except that Hartnett piggy-backed onto a paper, about testing Lorentz invariance, that accounts for half of his cites. Skipping over to CreationWiki and reading some of his articles there, I can see why he doesn’t bother to submit those to actual journals.

          I stand by my assessment.

          1. You completely missed the point. The only reason I cited Hartnett (and I could have cited many others) was your indignation at having your assertion regarding the scientific aptitude thrown back in your face. Hartnett – and many others – have plenty of papers published in secular journals. This explicitly rebuts your assertion. Unless you want to claim that the number of cites a paper has is an indicator of its scientific rigor (in which case, what is the point of peer review?).

            That said, I’ll play your game. Consider Henry F. Schaefer III. Henry F. Schaefer III:

            …author of more than 1150 scientific publications, the majority appearing in the Journal of Chemical Physics or the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

            In February 2004, a total of 300 scientists from 35 countries gathered in Gyeongju, Korea for a six-day conference. The conference was titled “Theory and Applications of Computational Chemistry: A Celebration of 1000 Papers of Professor Henry F. Schaefer III.

            […]

            During the comprehensive period 1981 – 1997 Professor Schaefer was the sixth most highly cited chemist in the world out of a total of 628,000 chemists whose research was cited. The Science Citation Index reports that by December 31, 2006 his research had been cited more than 39,000 times. His research involves the use of state-of-the-art computational hardware and theoretical methods to solve important problems in molecular quantum mechanics.

            Somehow, being an ID theorist and a fellow at the Discovery Institute didn’t stop Dr. Schaefer from successfully publishing all those papers; nor did it stop others from citing his work prolifically. Perhaps he just occupies a waky little corner of physics…

        3. Can you point me to a scientific paper Schaefer has written about evidence for creationism? I don’t mean a popular lecture — anyone can spout off any kind of nonsense they want in a public forum — I mean an actual paper that he submitted to a refereed scientific journal. I’m not going to plow through 1000 papers looking for your magic bullet.

          1. Moving the goalposts again. First, it was that opponents of evolution ‘…simply have no idea what they are talking about, what constitutes “evidence” for a scientific journal, or even how to scientific argument’. I responded by pointing out that creationists & ID theorists have plenty of papers published in peer-reviewed, secular journals, showing that your charge to be patantly false. Having failed at your first attempt, you moved the goalposts to ‘I have more cites than your guy does’. What that was supposed to prove, I’m not sure. I responded by citing an ID theorist with cites up the ying-yang. Now you’ve moved the goalposts again to ‘show me a peer-reviewed paper supporting creationism’.

            First, as far as I know, Schaefer is not a creationist, but an ID theorist (there is a difference, despite the protestations of evolutionists). Second, I have demonstrated that creationists & ID theorists are capable of making a scientific argument and do, in fact, understand what constitutes “evidence” for a scientific journal since they have plenty of published papers in mainstream journals. The theory must be that such people suddenly lose sight of their training and experience when addressing the subject of origins and subsequent development only to snap back to their senses when dealing with chemistry, QM and other areas of science.

            As to your request for a peer-reviewed scientific paper supporting creationism published in a mainstream journal, you might as well request a peer-reviewed paper making the case against the papacy in a Catholic theology journal. I refer you to the sentiments expressed by Todd & Lewontin above; materialism must be defended at all costs – evidence is beside the point.

            I’m not going to plow through 1000 papers looking for your magic bullet.

            And where, pray tell, did you get the impression that I expected you to?

      2. You should check out the work of Hugh Ross at Reasons to Believe. Not a young earth creationist and firmly committed to science.

        1. I’m aware of Ross and his work. Regarding the science, Creationists have the same problem with him as they do with mainstream evolutionists (since he largely agrees with the evolutionary interpretation of the evidence). In addition to that, there are fundamental theological disagreements with his positions.

  13. I’m really confused by this critique of Intelligent Design. Darwinism says there is no teleology; Intelligent Design says yes, there is. If one doesn’t belong in the science classroom (the portion about teleology), the other doesn’t as well.

    If you want to say Intelligent Design isn’t science, then I guess Darwinism isn’t science because it can’t be falsified since the way you would falsify it (Intelligent Design) is out of bounds.

    Frankly, the point of this post isn’t to solely point this out, but this… scientists imho tend not to be the best philosophers. And that includes the philosophy of science. It’s just not their best area.

    1. scientists imho tend not to be the best philosophers

      My father got his degree in physics with a minor in philosophy. He seems equally interested in WHAT happens in the physical universe ad in WHY it happens. But maybe he’s an exception.

    2. That just sounds like a rehash of David Hume’s argument of the futility of empiricism. All it takes is supernatural action (that is, unobservable and/or unexplainable action) and then no empirical evidence can be valid.

      The thing is, what we observe is remarkably consistent and parsimonious. That is, we can come up with simple models for explaining why things happen the way they do and they work.

      Finally, evolution doesn’t depend on the presence or absence of a teleology. It’s like claiming the number “2” depends on a teleology (or the contrary, doesn’t depend on a teleology) in order to work as a concept, which simply isn’t true.

      Frankly, the point of this post isn’t to solely point this out, but this… scientists imho tend not to be the best philosophers. And that includes the philosophy of science. It’s just not their best area.

      It’s worth noting here that philosophers tend not to be good philosophers either.

    3. scientists imho tend not to be the best philosophers. And that includes the philosophy of science. It’s just not their best area.

      I’m curious — who do you think is a good philosopher of science? My observation is that philosophers today by and large create theories of science without being informed about how science works. I am, however, respectful of the critical rationalism of Karl Popper, as well as the efforts of Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead to place mathematics on firmer footing.

  14. Actually, CAGW is a Cargo Cult. It does not follow the scientific process in any respect; rather, it merely adheres to the superficial forms of science and concludes that it therefore is doing science. Its proponents establish degree programs awarding scientific sounding titles and possessors of those titles issue studies that are full of scientific jargon and terminology, they then look at each other’s studies and call it the peer review process.

    What they don’t do is develop hypotheses based on facts that are testable and falsifiable. They do not welcome criticism and use “skeptic” as a derogatory term. No science, just Cargo Cult.

  15. I don’t mind so much that evolution is taught if teachers would include the many flaws and inconsistencies with that hypothesis. Further, evolution isn’t presented as a theory but rather as fact. To question evolution means you really just want everyone to fall on their knees and accept Christ.

  16. You wrote:

    “Intelligent design” also isn’t a scientific theory — it’s merely a critique of one. And hence, it does not belong in a science class, except as an example to illustrate what is science and what is not. If people want to challenge the theory of evolution, they have to come up with an alternative one that is testable, and to date, they have failed to do so.

    That’s mixed up. If you want to be Popperian and make falsifiability central, then you shouldn’t require a new theory before you reject the false theory. The whole idea of falsifiability is that you stop believing a theory that’s proved false. Being falsifable and false is not the sign of a good theory. A theory that is not proved false and is not provable at least has some chance of being true and we just don’t know it.

    1. If you want to be Popperian and make falsifiability central, then you shouldn’t require a new theory before you reject the false theory.

      I didn’t say you that you do. But evolution is falsifiable, and hasn’t been proven false.

      1. But evolution is falsifiable, and hasn’t been proven false.

        Really? Falsifiable how? What would constitute evidence that evolution is false? The problem with evolution is that it is so speculative and dependent upon individual interpretation that in a sense there is almost nothing there to prove or disprove. Life came about from non-living organic chemicals (we don’t know how) which evolved over billions of years into higher organisms (a process which we cannot hope to reproduce in an experiment).

        Evolution is a lot like Jell-O – it shimmers and looks pretty and lots of people admire it, but it has practically no substance. The lack of specifics does not by itself make evolution false, but it hardly qualifies as a scientific theory (conjecture might be a more accurate word).

        1. What would constitute evidence that evolution is false?

          Oh, please. If someone found pre-Cambrian rabbits in multiple strata around the earth, it would be a disproof. If there were no relationship between the DNA of seemingly related species, that would be a disproof. If there were no plausible means of mutation, that would be a disproof.

        2. It’s worth noting that the most important implied prediction made by evolution is the presence of a media in an organism by which trait information is transmitted. It’s worth noting that the theory of evolution was officially formulated and disseminated in 1858. The demonstration that DNA was the media happened in 1943 with the transformation of bacteria via implanting of pure DNA (the famous spiral model of the structure of DNA came later in 1953). That was a big falsifiable prediction that turned out true.

          1. Folk theories about “bloodlines” and “breeding” that long predated Darwin made the same prediction. Even the theory of natural selection which makes much weaker claims than evolution makes that same prediction.

            Maybe you want to suggest some other prediction, one that evolution does not share with other theories?

          2. Folk theories about “bloodlines” and “breeding” that long predated Darwin made the same prediction. Even the theory of natural selection which makes much weaker claims than evolution makes that same prediction.

            So what? This big prediction still turned out to be true. Also, natural selection is a phenomenon not a theory. And evolution is an elaboration of the breeding lore.

        3. Really? Falsifiable how? What would constitute evidence that evolution is false? The problem with evolution is that it is so speculative and dependent upon individual interpretation that in a sense there is almost nothing there to prove or disprove.

          In an upstream comment I mentioned the genetic sequencing that has shown how the hemoglobin molecule has evolved over time. Here’s a falsifiable prediction of evolutionary theory: Evolution predicts that clades of living things have branched at various times through history. One consequence of this is that once two clades have been separated long enough that they no longer interbreed, mutations in genes that create biomolecules like hemoglobin will be correlated within the clade, and those mutations will be different for different clades. We can define the distance between two genes by the percentage of differences between the codons in the sequence for that gene. So you will never see a case where a species has hemoglobin nearly identical to human hemoglobin while having myoglobin with significant differences. If you were to find a species of mountain lion, for example, with nearly human hemoglobin but very different myoglobin, this would falsify evolution. So far it hasn’t happened. Do you seriously think it will?

  17. “Evolution is a scientific theory.”
    .
    Uh, no. It is not a theory. Gravity is a theory, and can be proven in a lab. Evolution is a hypothesis, or a model. It can not be repeated in a lab. And creation scientists have valid models as well. The difference is that the creation scientists don’t resort to bullying and smear tactics.

    1. Evolution and gravity are both hypotheses and scientific theories. There’s no “uh, no” here. And yes, evolution can be and has been repeated in a lab, for example, the fruit fly experiments that were mentioned elsewhere in the comments or table-top experiments with genetic algorithms in the computer.

      1. Algorithms also predicted global warming. As far as the fruit flies, that demonstrates that changes occur within species. But no one has demonstrated that a fruit fly can evolve into an eagle.
        .
        Karl, you have more faith in evolution and “science” than most people have in their religions.

        1. Algorithms also predicted global warming.

          And an individual algorithm can be falsified.

          But no one has demonstrated that a fruit fly can evolve into an eagle.

          I’ll give you thirty seconds to show by personal example that one can walk from Spokane, Washington to Jacksonville, Florida. Such statements are meaningless without being granted enough time to run the experiment.

          Karl, you have more faith in evolution and “science” than most people have in their religions.

          I have experiments and observations which are for the purpose of modeling reality stronger than faith.

        2. Evolution would argue strongly against a fruit fly ever evolving into an eagle. Their nearest common ancestor would be an early Cambrian animal little more advanced than a sponge. One is an arthropod, the other is a chordate (has a spine). The evolutionary changes accumulate from there.

  18. one of the foundations of architecture is “form follows function”…this is also used in engineering and automotive design etc. one can also apply the
    three f’s to creation……form (the shape of somthing) follows (comes after) function (the purpose of the item)….ergo the existence of a designer…one cannot have a shape “first” and then the function following…as the item will require millions of unusable shapes prior to having one that suits the function…then….consider that there are millions of ongoing functions in the world and it soon becomes clear that giga-trillions of unusable forms would need to be made by CHANCE alone…in order for ALL to have been made to appear SIMOULTANEOUSLY (because one could argue that ONE animal may have emerged from the slim to crawl upon the dry land….but, for that animal to have reproduced one male and one female would have to have simoultaneously emerged and in close proximity….not one 1/2 way around the world from each other lest they never meet and reproduce….then the offspring too must be of both genders so that the line could continue)….so an engineering/architectural/designers RULE namley FORM FOLLOWS FUNCTION…DISPROVES EVOLUTION….

    1. There are two flaws here. First, you haven’t shown “form follows function”. If the rule is not true, then one needs not consider the rest of your argument. Second, selection is the designer in the theory of evolution.

      As to your “animal crawling from the slime” example, the animal that dares dry land can still breed with its relatives who stayed underwater. If as a result of being able to move better on land, it has more children than its relatives, then its traits will tend to pass on.

      1. But Karl, that is a ‘just so’ story. “evolution” is true, strictly speaking – life changes over time. But those changes seem more evidently a programmed response to adapt, not a result of chaos, but of order.

        Experiments with bacteria show that if denied an energy source, they will begin to mutate in a limited range to consume other energy sources (see nylonase, for instance), but when the same mutated colony is given its old food source, it reverts back.

        There is no experimental body of work which shows physical-dynamic forces alone explain the adaptive cybernetic code we witness in life today.

        1. But Karl, that is a ‘just so’ story.

          A “just so” story is sufficient to disprove an assertion that “chance alone” couldn’t generate the hypothetical situation.

          There is no experimental body of work which shows physical-dynamic forces alone explain the adaptive cybernetic code we witness in life today.

          I’d have to disagree. The experimental body of work exists, but it’s incomplete. Abiogenesis hasn’t been demonstrated though there is interesting work in that area. Evolution OTOH is well established. And it’s worth noting that there’s a vast amount of time over which life has been able to evolve.

          To the contrary, I think it would stretch credulity to claim that life would not have changed radically in the time it has existed on Earth (which might be more than two billion years), especially given the evolutionary mechanisms that we know life has.

  21. So, judging by some of the responses here, the whole “get religion out of the classroom” message didn’t really sink in…

    I thought it was a good article. Thanks.

    1. Duh! Human beings frequently mistake their beliefs for reality: good science is the only known cure but the vaccine only seems to work with about 10% of the population.

  22. Pingback: Air & Space

  23. Decades ago I had a quite demanding Russian history professor in college (on my way to a Russian Studies degree) who strove to impart a discipline of critical thinking, research and coherent thought rather than seeing how well we could simply regurgitate facts. His mantra before usually-challenging essay tests was that he’d readily award you an “A” if you could support your thesis to conclusion, even if you disagreed with his personal viewpoint, but if you simply parroted back his viewpoint without being able to logically support it he would not hesitate to flunk you for being intellectually lazy. As tough a class as it was, students respected and admired his approach and fairness.

  24. Is it fair to say that evolution skeptics are a subset of AGW skeptics? Is there anyone who disputes evolution but doesn’t dispute AGW?

    1. I don’t have proof, Jim, but given the number of churches that have embraced AGW, I’d be quite surprised if the answer weren’t, “yes, there are many people who dispute evolution but do not dispute AGW.”

    2. Actually, contrary to the narrative that the climatologists are trying to construct, religious conservatives are the weakest part of the conservative coalition when it comes to climate change. A substantial fraction of religious conservatives place stewardship of the Earth high on the list of virtues, but are fuzzy on the whole “socialism is bad” doctrine that drives the libertarian and fiscal wings of conservatism over the edge when climate change is discussed.

      So, no, your Venn diagram is not correct.

      1. So there are evolution skeptics who think that biology and paleontology are corrupt, but climate science is legit, while Rand and the like think the opposite?

        Occam’s razor argues against either position.

        1. Occam’s razor argues against either position.

          The difference is that there is abundant evidence that climate science is corrupt (particularly since it’s become a massively government-funded enterprise), despite your desire to ignore it or wish it away. The only notable instance of corruption in biology and palentology is Piltdown Man.

          1. particularly since it’s become a massively government-funded enterprise

            In case you hadn’t noticed, every field of science is a government-funded enterprise, and funding for climate science lags that of many other fields.

            Creationists see all sorts of evidence that biology is corrupt, e.g. that evolution heretics are weeded out of graduate programs and faculties, that their publications are suppressed, that data supporting evolution is manipulated, etc. They see the exact same things you see when you look at climate science, and for the same reason: you want to see them.

            The challenge for AGW conspiracy theorists is to explain why climate science is uniquely corrupt. The same forces you see compromising climate science could just as well corrupt every other field, but you don’t believe that’s happening.

            The fact that you have a problem with climate science alone says more about you than it does about climate science.

          2. I didn’t say that climate science is uniquely corrupt.

            Is it your contention that if we were to see emails from the leading evolutionary biologists that they’d be discussing ways of conspiring to ensure that people with legitimate alternate scientific theories to evolution weren’t allowed to publish, and various subterfuges to which they have had to resort in order to shore up weaknesses of their data and theory against legitimate criticism of it? Are there evolutionary biologists fighting or ignoring FOIA requests for their raw data?

            Are there evolutionary biologists whose research is being used to justify massive government intervention in the economy and individual lifestyles, and who receive massive government grants for it? Could you point them out, please?

        2. Occam’s razor argues against either position.

          So we have two positions, Jim has properly used Occam’s razor or he has once again as many times before, failed at logic. Which position is selected for by Occam’s razor?

        3. Clearly, Jim has never been to a church on the west coast.

          Outside OC and SD, believing “evolution is a lie” while swallowing everything about Left-wing politics, CAGW included, is Left-coast orthodoxy.

        4. Occam’s razor argues against either position.

          How so? I don’t see what Occam’s razor has to do with either debate. Are you saying that it’s simpler to assume that catastrophic anthropogenic warming is valid, than assuming the contrary? Why? This makes no sense to me.

          Trying to haul out Occam’s Razor to pick sides might be a reasonable strategy when you know nothing about science and want to know nothing about science — journalists do it all the time.

          But those of us with a scientific background are ostensibly equipped to look at the evidence and to draw an informed opinion about the strength of that evidence. It’s not about who it’s simpler to trust — it’s about what they’ve done and whether the evidence they have marshaled is compelling.

  25. Climate science with a warmist slant often does not do well when it offers up falsifiable predictions. None of the computer models of global climate correctly predicted the current 15 year long period of slight cooling. None of the global climate models have any proven predictive power. The climate scientists are very good at coming up with (often contradictory) explanations of what has already happened. Thus we have Hansen claiming that the weather over the central US was hot and dry last summer because of global warming while others blamed the La Nina event.

    The non-falsifiability of climate science also extends to willfull misinterpretation of data. In other words, when clear cut data contradicting warming theory is presented then it won’t be too long before that data is run through a model of some kind to “correct” it. In some cases the suggestion to use such models comes from peer reviewers, who won’t let the data be published without the “corrections.” Data from the Aqua satellite has undergone this kind of “interpretation” when a straightforward assessment of the data shows that figures for climate sensitivity used by modelers are too high by an order of magnitude.

    There are serious scientists out there doing work on atmosphere and climate who confine their investigations to testing hypotheses scientifically. These are overshadowed by the guys who get bookoo money by spouting the global warming line. Once politics enters good science becomes very hard to do — the charlitans suck all the oxygen out of the field.

    1. None of the computer models of global climate correctly predicted the current 15 year long period of slight cooling.

      Because there hasn’t been such a period. 2010 was the hottest year yet (GISS data). Nine of the ten hottest years recorded were in the last ten years. The climate models have predicted a gradual increase in average temperatures decade by decade, and that’s what we’ve seen.

      1. “decade by decade”? LOL. Jim, you are largely a counterpoint here. But mostly it’s over issues of politics. Would you like to go on the record regarding “the climate models”? Do you think they should be believed? And if so, why the paranoia-bordering-on-schizophrenia from UEA?

  26. Welcome to the crowd, Mr. Simberg. The accusation of being a ‘Creationist’ is always the fall back from those who stretch the limits of their pet “theories.” Now you know how it feels…

    Frankly, I don’t find your arguments or your criticism much different than the AGW crowd – just a different flavor. But one thing for sure – God does have a good sense of humor.

    One thing that can be verified beyond a shadow of a doubt – you do indeed reap what you sow.

  27. Seems to me that the science or AGW is settled, and against those who promote AGW. The Navier Stokes equations are non-linear, chaotic, and show sensitive dependence on initial conditions. They describe fluid flow with changes in density and temperature. Because of non-linearity, systems described by the NS equations can not have distant future states predicted accurately from past states. The earth’s weather, and climate are described by the NS equations. So is the output of the Sun, which, being much much larger than the earth, has an outsize influence on earth’s climate, and in like manner, can not have the distant future predicted from past states.

    1. Actually Navier-Stokes equations are horrible for predicting weather because they don’t include the volume and latent heat changes resulting from evaporation or condensation, the very things that make weather so interesting.

      The closest I’ve seen to amending them was a ton of math and brutal numeric solutions to handle condensation in the low-pressure turbine section of a ship’s boiler, but climate modeling isn’t nearly this advanced.

      You might think a science as important as climatology would use far more rigorous math than an engineer working to improve the fuel-oil efficiency of a tramp steamer, but you’d be wrong.

      I think MIT’s climate model is the only one that even bothers with Navier-Stokes. The rest use a shallow-water model where the vertical dimension is fictional.

      1. You might think a science as important as climatology would use far more rigorous math than an engineer working to improve the fuel-oil efficiency of a tramp steamer, but you’d be wrong.

        But why would one think that? Engineers have an amazing incentive to get it right, including costly, if not disasterous, consequences for getting it wrong.

  28. Unfortunately, many, if not most, people opposed to the idea of AGW are opposed to it, like antievolutionists, because they want all of the historical sciences – astronomy, climatology, ecology, evolutionary biology, geology, and paleontology – to be delegitimized. And yes, I know perfectly well that Rand, and many of his commenters, are not such people, any more than I am. But a near-majority of adult Americans are young-Earthers, and these are largely overlapping sets.
    (I tried to post this an hour or so ago when the Instalanche started. I note the large number of antievolutionist comments that have appeared since then.)

    1. But a near-majority of adult Americans are young-Earthers

      I doubt that strongly. For example, if that were so, then there should be fair-sized areas of the country where young-Earthers have a majority and hence, able to constitute school boards capable of mandating creationism taught in the classroom.

      Instead, we find the weaker theory of intelligent design promulgated and school boards subverted by stealth candidates. And to my knowledge, most if not all of these attempts to insert intelligent design into classrooms have been subsequently defeated at the ballot box (such as the Dover Area School District where the eight members of the school district who voted for a mandate to teach intelligent design were soundly defeated at the next election). That indicates to me that young-Earthers (and similar ideologues) are actually a small minority everywhere in the US.

      1. No, it means that young-Earthers (around 45% of the population per National Academies surveys) are relatively less likely to vote, or to vote for candidates who prioritize that issue. They can be a large plurality of the general population and simultaneously rarely win elections. IDers have tried to pander to them; the problem is they just don’t reliably go to the polls, and in any case probably a quarter of them are African-American and unlikely to vote for social conservatives in any case. See the multiple flip-flops of the KS Board of Ed, which has changed hands several times in the past decade and a half.

        1. The problem. Jay, is that as I understand it, young-Earthers are a subcategory of observant Christian and that group gets out the vote pretty well. I think rather it is more likely that young-Earthers are a fairly well-organized minority politically and the flip flops in the Kansas board occur because the majority, which isn’t so politically active, only occasionally comes out in force. That is, a focused special interest group is more effective than a disinterested majority.

          A falsiable prediction of my theory is that IDers would tend to get voted in during times of low voter turnout and removed during periods of high voter turnout.

        2. As to those polls, I think rather a large portion of US residents simply aren’t confident enough to answer science polls reliably. My view is that with the right wording, one could probably get that same 45% to agree with any false science-based statement, such as, people never walked on the Moon, humans have a little known backup appendix, or dihydrogen monoxide is so dangerous, we should ban its use completely.

    2. “But a near-majority of adult Americans are young-Earthers”

      What?!?! You know what, that is really… you do know that “Young Earthers” believe that the Earth was created only a few thousand years ago, and that the actual number of adult Americans who really believe that in the USA is in no way “a near majority.” Believing God created the universe isn’t the same thing as believing he created it 6,400 years ago.

      But I’ll believe the Earth was created basically yesterday before I believe in a “poll” produced by something called “National Academies” that “proves” that “45%” of “adult Americans” think so. If nearly fifty percent of the country’s population believed in Young Earth Creationism, we wouldn’t have a problem with teaching evolution in schools — it simply wouldn’t be taught.

      1. If 45% of Americans are so blindingly ignorant to believe in a “Young Earth”, that would explain a lot, and none of it good.

        (Note that my comment says nothing about evolution, creation, or intelligent design. But “Young Earthers” are complete and utter retards.)

      2. We’re talking about a significantly marginalized subset of the population which, as Karl notes, is not espousing an especially coherent belief. Yes, if they were organized, they’d run everything. They aren’t, and aren’t ever likely to be. And I like his hypothesis.

  29. Perhaps religious faith in AGW is a replacement for the loss of religious faith in Evolution? In either case such calamity is turning the discipline of science into a nonsensical joke.

    With this said; Carl Sagan may point to the problem with SCIENCE!!!!!:

    “The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be

    Some part of our being knows this is where we came from. We long to return. And we can. Because the cosmos is also within us. We’re made of star-stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.

    Human beings have a demonstrated talent for self-deception when their emotions are stirred”

    On the other hand; in a series of speeches Michael Critchon makes an excellent case as to why Aliens Caused Global Warming and why the pollutant called Politized Science is destroying any ability to scientifically advance:

    http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/commentaries_essays/crichton_three_speeches.html

    I offer no scientific consensus on the matter, I’ll leave it to SCIENCE!!! to figure this all out.

  30. The problem with the latter theory is that, while it might be true, in some sense, it is not scientific, because it isn’t falsifiable.

    A bit of a quibble, but creationism isn’t scientific because science assumes -without evidence- there is no divine actor. Any system that assumes otherwise is not ‘science’ by definition. It’s important to note, however, that this doesn’t mean that those systems are not true or even less right.

    1. Frankly, the ‘theory’ of evolution isn’t falsifiable either. Falsifiable means that you are able to devise an experiment that, if it fails, will strike out your idea. What experiment can be devised to prove or disprove evolution? Is it repeatable? About as well as Creationism is.
      The fact is, any evidences for or against evolution or creationism will be decided in the minds of and by reason of the inherent biases of the observers. In that respect, they are both faiths, not sciences.

      2. Evolution is falsifiable because (unlike intelligent design), it makes predictions. It has implications. All the life sciences, virtually all modern medicine, depend for their reliability and utility on the truth of evolution. The truth of evolution does not require the untruth of intelligent design. They could both be right.

        The problem with intelligent design is it serves no function other than to try and shoe-horn the bible into science class. It makes no predictions, it has no implications, it doesn’t help us understand anything practical. Believe it, don’t believe it, true, false, it doesn’t matter. Whereas it matters a great deal if evolution is wrong.

        1. You DO realize that nearly every scientist prior to 1900, and certainly all the really important ones, were proponents of Intelligent Design, right?

          Newton shouted it in the Principia.

          All four founders of modern chemistry, nearly everyone involved in the study of electricity and magnetism, most of the men who did cosmology, most of the major mathematicians (including Godel – who provided a proof for God’s existence using modal logic), all of these guys believed in Intelligent Design.

          You know that, right?

          Of course you don’t.
          You just spout anti-Christian bigotry because you don’t like the fact that Christians invented modern experimental science, and ID reminds you of that.

          1. You know that, right?

            Of course you don’t.
            You just spout anti-Christian bigotry because you don’t like the fact that Christians invented modern experimental science, and ID reminds you of that.

            Oh, you mean those famous Christians like Albert Michelson, Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, James Franck, Otto Stern, Isidor Rabi, Felix Bloch, Max Born, Ilya Frank, Emilio Segrè, Lev Landau, Eugene Wigner, Richard Feynman, Julian Schwinger, Hans Bethe, Murray Gell-Mann, Leon Cooper, Brian Josephson, Ben Mottelson, Burton Richter, Arno Penzias, Sheldon Glashow, Steven Weinberg, Leon Lederman, Melvin Schwartz, and Saul Perlmutter? [Those are just the more famous “Christians” who won the Physics Nobel while inventing modern experimental science.]

            I’m tempted to say something undiplomatic about the peculiar kind of myopia from which you suffer, but I don’t want to force Rand to delete my post.

          2. For your information Arno Penzias is a staunch Catholic.

            Other serious Christians include (but are not limited to):
            Allan Sandage (founder of observational cosmology),
            Arthur Shawlow (co-founder of laser physics),
            Charles Townes (co-founder of laser physics),
            Werner Heisenberg (co-founder of quantum physics)
            Father George Lemaitre (father of cosmology)
            Otto Hahn (founder of nuclear chemistry)
            Max Planck (founder quantum mechanics)
            J. J. Thompson (founder of atomic physics, demonstrated the electron)
            John Ambrose Fleming (founder of electronics)
            James Clerk Maxwell (founded the electromagnetic synthesis)
            Georg Cantor and Bernhard Reimann (founders of set theory and non-Euclidean geometry necessary for Einstein’s work)
            George Boole and Charles Babbage (the men who developed the math and the foundational machines necessary to run the computer you’re typing on).

            I could go on (Ampere, Watt, Cuvier, Herschel, Lavosier, Berzelius, Boscovish (a Catholic priest), Dalton, Jenner, Pasteur, Mendel (a Catholic monk), Kelvin, etc., etc., etc. ) , but you don’t know any history so it would be wasted.

            To say that some of today’s scientists are atheists is to say only that some of today’s scientists are much more parochial and narrow-minded than the giants who preceded them.

          3. For your information Arno Penzias is a staunch Catholic.

            I think you’re delusional. Penzias is Jewish. Perhaps you are confusing him with Georges LeMaitre.

            Other serious Christians include…

            Again you really don’t get how this works. Your assertion — let’s call it an “hypothesis” — is that Christian belief is somehow mysteriously fundamental to the scientific enterprise, despite the fact that Christianity itself is a magical, supernatural belief system that discourages independent thought and investigation (historically unto the point of death). I present counterevidence, to wit, a list of Jewish Physics Nobel winners, including, I dare say, more than half the Top Ten 20th Century physicists. This counterevidence falsifies your hypothesis. So no matter how many Christian names you add to the list, your hypothesis has been falsified. There is no way to patch up your hypothesis. It’s passed on! This hypothesis is no more! It has ceased to be! It has expired and gone to meet it’s maker! Bereft of life, it rests in peace! If you hadn’t nailed it to the perch it would be pushing up the daisies! It has kicked the bucket, shuffled off the mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin’ choir invisibile! This is an ex-hypothesis!

      3. Evolution was an extremely falsifiable theory, as it held that living things would be related by common descent, etc. When it was proposed, about the only tool we had was some simple comparative anatomy, the same as was used by monks to categorize God’s creation.

        Early experiments with genetics (peas, fruit flies, etc) could’ve easily disproven evolution, but just added more confirmation of it.

        Paleontology and modern geology, looking back into the past with a wide variety of methods, could’ve easily disproved evolution, but instead added much more confirmation.

        Revolutions in DNA analysis could’ve disproved everything we thought about evolution, but instead added yet more confirmation.

        As this is a space blog, often focusing on space settlement, it’s ironic that if we’re successful at expanding to other star systems and terraforming planets, then all those new worlds will show evidence of creationism. Geologists on those worlds will see a period of lifeless geologic activity, then bam – algae, moss, bugs, birds, fish, whales, horses, and technological man all show up at the same time, right out of nowhere, on planet after planet. That’s what creationism should look like in the fossil record. On this planet it doesn’t.

  31. Someday soonish a person will create life in a petri dish and then there will be more arguing about creationism.

  32. I thought you might be interested in this. It’s from the preamble to the constitution of the Communist Party of the USA, around 1944 (from the book “Odd Man Out” by Edward Dmytryk).

    “by the establishment of socialism, according to the SCIENTIFIC principles enunciated by the greatest teachers of mankind, Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin”.

    http://www.flickr.com/photos/99115850@N00/6797674307/

  33. So the chemical bases of organismal evolution is to be ignored, eh? The inquiry into the systemology of life and its origins arising from the ‘physical universe’ is better conducted from studying the species of chemicals and the evolution of reactions within the respective ecotones that are made possible by the caprices of the physical environment, so much of which physics and chemistry is not yet able to describe. This runs so very far beyond the present capacity of human knowledge we have only metaphysics and metaphor.

    Yet the dialectical materialists demanded such not be taught. The result has been as Karl Popper and his cohorts in the Mont Pelerin Society warned; the result has been an orgy of “Scientism”.

    And this brings us a plague of postmodern journalists, activists and career university employees opining as authorities, often far outside the competency secured by their credentials. This brings is the political clown show of secular proselytizers like NCSE now apparently desperate to pick fights with The 700 Club.

    Compared to the traditions of scholarship in the classical western tradition, these postmodern dialectical technicians are but marginally-educated. Some are little better than self-worshiping priests lost within the dying embers of the 19th Century Hegelian Supremacy movements that touted the “sciences” of Behavioralism, Eugenics, Taylorism and Phrenology.

    Now they wish to manufacture high-purpose by returning to the absurd dialectic of creationism vs science: “The only good dualism is a dead one, as they cannot be otherwise empirically demonstrated.” Dialectical materialism uber alles; not only blind, but double so.

    Of what good is another round of “divine creationist” vs “secular creationist” embraced in a death match of rhetorical fabulism and concretized thought by which absolute truth will supposedly be rescued via devices of 19th Century academic culture which still have the postmodern university of today practicing Phrenology in many varied forms under the guise of diversity, equality and social justice?

    How are we to rescued from religion by the half-educated postmodern technician who is by design entirely untrained and unread in the intellectual foundations of western and eastern civilization which are themselves rooted in and built upon the existential struggle framed in the disciplines of teleology, ontology and cosmology, in addition to the sciences and humanities?

    Except for the psychiatric and cognitive implications, the obsessive “scientism” practiced by the postmodern academic is at most unscientific identity politics cryptically rooted as secularized religious beliefs. What is “AGW” at is naked best but an embodiment of factoids bolstered by episodes of serial fraud and badly-fragmented data framed into fundamentalist belief system promiscuously applied as a secularized neo-religious dogma, exploiting the passions (and ambitions) of journalists who prosper as entrepreneurs of the televangelist wing.

    Metaphorically and metaphysically, are not the origins of Animalia in commonality with the origins of the universe and all matter and being therein?

    Be the primal deity hugely meatballed or spaghetti-free, the absolute [insert preferred pronoun of particularity here] did not happen to grace you or me with fullest possible set of sensors which would allow us to see and eventually master all the materiality which surrounds and comprises our existence, in all possible bandwidths and frequencies, along each and every boundary of of each and every particular thing, in every possible scale of material interaction, and to allow us to do so in totality, in real time.

    Yet mere mortals continue to spew on about the absolute truth.

    Follow the money. But don’t forget it too is largely metaphor.

  34. Everyone says “Get religion out of the classroom!”

    Just how do you propose to do that?
    Take the language we are all speaking right now – English.
    Modern English comes from Medieval English which comes from Old English.

    Old English starts around 500 AD.
    Trivia question: what religion existed in England in 500 AD?
    That would be Christianity.

    Christian philosophy molded the English language over the course of a thousand years. That’s true not just of English, but of every European language.

    That’s why, for example, Swahili doesn’t have words for “cell” (which was derived from its resemblance to a monastic cell) or any of the various kinds of tissue cells in plants or animals. Swahili is not a Christian language.

    If you want to get religion out of the science classroom, you have to teach science in some other language, like Chinese or Swahili or Sanskrit. English is an essentially Christian language in its outlook and philosophical presuppositions.

    You can’t say “reality exists!” because that’s an essentially religious statement. Christianity and Judaism invented that idea, Hinduism and Buddhism mostly actively denied it, and this entire conversation began centuries before modern experimental science appeared on the scene to bolster the Christian viewpoint.

    Furthermore, essentially everyone you want to call a “scientist” prior to roughly the 1900’s was a proponent of Intelligent Design.

    Newton, for example, did his work in order to illustrate that the universe was designed. All four founders of modern chemistry were devout Christians. The guy who discovered Uranus performed 20 years of astronomical calculations by hand based entirely on the faith that the Creator God had made a rationally constructed universe.

    Quite a lot of the most eminent scientists in history were Catholic priests and bishops, their titles and religious affiliation neatly snipped out of their scientific biographies.

    So hating on Intelligent Design is not just anti-Christian bigotry, it’s a-historical AND anti-scientific because it is both FALSIFIABLE and FALSE to reject ID.

    Stick that in your pipe and smoke it.

    1. You can’t say “reality exists!” because that’s an essentially religious statement. Christianity and Judaism invented that idea, Hinduism and Buddhism mostly actively denied it, and this entire conversation began centuries before modern experimental science appeared on the scene to bolster the Christian viewpoint.

      Excuse me? Buddhism, among all major religions, is focused on reality. It’s Christian dogma that tells us to ignore the world and plan for eternal life in Heaven. It’s Christian dogma that tells us that miracles are commonplace and signs of the supernatural abound, that angels intervene in human lives and that not only does God have a Son but he’s booking a return trip. You will find none of this claptrap in Buddhism. Buddha’s gone. He’s not coming back. Don’t expect miracles. This revisionist idea that Christianity is rational and is the basis for modern science can only propagate in an atmosphere that is ignorant of 2000 years of villainy and nonsense.

      Now, I have a lot of friends who are Christians. I think Christianity, for the most part, has arrived at a pretty decent place in the 21st century, and I tend to side with the Christian right on a lot of political issues. But let’s not lie about the Christian history of repression and obscurantism. It is what it is. And to the extent you think creationism is compatible with science, it simply indicates you know nothing about science.

      1. “The heavens are telling the glory of God” – That’s Jewish Scripture.
        “Test everything, retain what is good” – That’s Christian Scripture.
        Christians, of course, retain essentially all the theology Judaism has.
        It just adds some.

        I can point to at least three places in the Old Testament where experiments were done.

        Buddha said “We live in illusion and the appearance of things. There is a reality. We are that reality. When you understand this, you see that you are nothing, and being nothing, you are everything. That is all.”
        Yeah…. that sure does support the idea of experiment.

        As I said, the problem is that most scientists don’t know squat about history, not even the history of their own disciplines.

        Read a book.

        1. Not only do you not understand my religion, it’s clear you don’t understand your own.

          When Buddha said “we live in illusion” he might just as well have had Christianity in mind (though he predated Christ by 500-odd years, of course). He of course did not mean that reality is an illusion (how could that be?), only that the human tendency is to create illusions to help us deal with reality, and when we are unenlightened we allow these illusions to dominate our lives and every waking moment. You suffer from an illusion that there is an old man in the sky who controls everything, who listens to your prayers, and who has a son who came to save everybody but wound up skewered on the cross. This illusion blocks your ability to think clearly about many things, but in particular about science, which is the subject of this thread. I don’t pretend to hope that you will suddenly see how nakedly absurd your belief system is. But let’s keep exchanging ideas and we’ll see if we can… evolve.

  35. I got an A+ in my capstone evolution class in college (I was a double-major in biology and chemistry and took twice the required hours of biology for my degree). Please explain to me how the theory of an evolutionary origin of life is a falsifiable scientific theory, and show me the experiment that accomplishes this in a definitive way.

    1. The topic of discussion isn’t origin of life, it is origin of species. Abiogenesis is a separate issue. There are no good theories yet, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t continue to seek them. That’s what science is about, and Intelligent Design is an abdication of it.

      1. Rand,

        You aren’t serious, are you?

        Evolution assumes common ancestry, that is, it assumes that life began only once. It has no freakin’ clue how that happened, but that is the central tenet of evolutionary theory. Simply asserting that it is a “separate issue” doesn’t make it so.

        In fact, it is THE central issue to evolutionary theory, but since no one has a clue how to fold it into evolution, everyone pretends that it isn’t relevant.

        It’s like saying the existence of a piano is a separate issue from the existence of piano music. You can go on and on about how the different sonatas and concertos diverge or recombine, but if there is no piano, the entire discussion is kind of stupid – like talking about the mating habits of unicorns, and whether zephyrs are closely related or on a separate branch.

        As far as only “scientists” teaching science, I find that “scientists” are historically ignorant, which is no whit better than being scientifically ignorant.

        Historically ignorant “scientists” prattle on about how stupid Intelligent Design is, without once even being aware of the fact that experimental science would NOT EXIST if not for the fact that the intellectual giants of the past:
        INSISTED on Intelligent Design,
        PRESUPPOSED it before they began their observations and
        EXPECTED its effects to be present in their results.

        Most of the founders of the various modern sciences would be shocked at your ignorance and your atheism, but I repeat myself.

        1. You aren’t serious, are you?

          Of course I’m serious. I wouldn’t joke about such things.

          Evolution assumes common ancestry, that is, it assumes that life began only once.

          No, it doesn’t. It assumes that if it happened multiple times, at least on earth, the life that we see today was sufficiently superior that earlier instances didn’t survive. It is possible that we will find life forms that don’t use DNA, and in fact one of the reasons that we search for extraterrestrial life is that it’s more likely that such life will be found off planet. We do not need to know how the first DNA-based life form developed to see that it’s clear that all life that we’ve found on earth (so far) has a common ancestor.

          1. Rand,

            How do you know that DNA-based organisms didn’t arise multiple times?

            If there can be such a thing as virtual particles (and there are) constantly appearing and disappearing, then why can’t an analogous thing be happening with DNA-based life, such forms arising dozens and dozens of times, constantly, every year, everywhere, with only the semblance of relationship? Maybe at the single-cell organism level, or if it happens really, really often, multiple simultaneously appearing cells banding together into a new multiple-celled organism.

            And if THAT’S true, then what does that do to the whole “evolution” theory? Evolution goes into the trash, that’s what it does.

            And why don’t you buy into that kind of spontaneous generation?
            Why, because you haven’t seen it in the lab!

            Of course, you haven’t seen any of the evolutionary changes take place in the lab either, but that’s blown off because evolution is SCIENCE and spontaneous generation is NONSENSE!

            Now, I’m not an SG proponent.
            I’m just pointing out that no matter how many data points you have, an infinite number of theories can account for them.

            Evolution doesn’t make vastly more sense than creationism because evolution assumes something which cannot be proven. Instead of calling it “God”, it calls the beginning “biogenesis”, but it might as well be God as far as explanation goes.

            And evolution doesn’t like the fact that it has to rely on God, so it insists that unique biogenesis is a “separate problem”.

            You’re making me laugh.

            At you.

          2. How do you know that DNA-based organisms didn’t arise multiple times?

            We don’t know that, but we do know that we’ve found only one DNA-based lineage that has survived into modern times.

            If there can be such a thing as virtual particles (and there are) constantly appearing and disappearing, then why can’t an analogous thing be happening with DNA-based life, such forms arising dozens and dozens of times, constantly, every year, everywhere, with only the semblance of relationship? Maybe at the single-cell organism level, or if it happens really, really often, multiple simultaneously appearing cells banding together into a new multiple-celled organism.

            It’s theoretically possible. But arguments of complexity work in this situation since you’re going from vacuum background to viable cell. The theory of biogenesis breaks that complexity jump into somewhat smaller pieces. Amino acids, produced either in atmosphere or water to eventually reside in water, form a “soup”. Then somehow they polymerize into random bits of either proteins or RNA. Some of those random bits could have the ability to make copies of themselves and to change their environment for the better. At that point, the dynamic of evolution can take over and run with things.

            Evolution doesn’t make vastly more sense than creationism because evolution assumes something which cannot be proven. Instead of calling it “God”, it calls the beginning “biogenesis”, but it might as well be God as far as explanation goes.

            I assume here you meant “proof” in the sense of providing supporting evidence, not the math sense. And one can conduct experiments on environments thought to be present during early Earth and subsequent biological processes thought to exist. We can explore how likely it is for RNA or proteins to assemble and reproduce.

            I’m just pointing out that no matter how many data points you have, an infinite number of theories can account for them.

            That’s a limitation of all human knowledge of reality. There’s always an out-there rival explanation or supernatural agency that could be pulling our strings. There are several characteristics of good scientific theories however. First, that the theory doesn’t depend on unobservable agency to work (such as the claim that reality works only through the direct will of God as proposed by Imam al-Ghazali in the 11th century, presumably one cannot know how that works). Second, it is parsimonious. The theory is not complex to describe (such as evolution is a straight-forward theory compared to something like Intelligent Design which still has to explain the presence of the designer. Is it extraterrestrial aliens? Where did they come from in turn?).

            The latter condition actually is very useful in culling theories since of those infinite theories, only a finite number have any given length of description.

      2. As an aside, evolutionists are really stuck on this issue.

        They are in the unenviable position of simultaneously denying spontaneous generation, while insisting it happened, but it happened only one time, and they have no idea WHY it happened only one time.

        Talk about non-falsifiable….
        Why do you think Richard Dawkins is always on about alien beings?

        Dawkins’ position makes more sense than the idea that spontaneous generation is simultaneously true, false and unique, while all of its effects are both extremely common and mathematically impossible.

        1. They are in the unenviable position of simultaneously denying spontaneous generation, while insisting it happened, but it happened only one time, and they have no idea WHY it happened only one time.

          These sorts of uninformed strawmen about what evolutionary biologists believe is what makes it so tiresome to discuss the topic.

          1. The sort of uninformed comments you make about ID make you tiresome as well.

            You keep discussing it, though, because you know your argument stinks and you keep trying to hoe your way around the stump in your field.

            Go ahead.
            Deny that evolution insists on a common ancestor (you can’t – you already admitted it above).
            And how did that common ancestor arise?
            Spontaneous generation!

            That’s all you got, bud.

            As an aside, I find 6-day or 6000 year creationism equally stupid.

            If evolutionists would just admit the problems with their theories, I would have no quarrel with them.

            If we can argue about the age of the universe or the mass of a proton, why can’t we argue about “global warming” or “evolution”?

            Science is about discussion of facts.
            You’re just into ad hominem, especially when you start to lose.

          2. Deny that evolution insists on a common ancestor

            It’s worth noting here that evolution doesn’t require a common ancestor. For example, life elsewhere in the universe needs not have an ancestor in common with life on Earth (or have anything in common at all aside from following the same physical laws). Similarly, life on Earth could have started multiple times from whatever caused life in the first place (be it abiogenesis, aliens, God’s pinky finger, whatever).

            The fact that present day life seems to have a common origin is beyond the scope of evolution.

            If evolutionists would just admit the problems with their theories, I would have no quarrel with them.

            It has to be a problem first. You are simply wrong in your assertion that evolution requires a common origin. And your error is especially bizarre given that our observations indication that all Earth life seems to have a common origin. Even if your assertion were true, we would have the precondition for the theory.

        2. How did you arrive at this strawman about spontaneous generation? First of all, spontaneous generation used to be the predominant theory explaining the appearance of maggots in rotting meat (you know, back when the Church was running things). Francesco Redi performed careful experiments that showed that maggots came from flies (and metamorphose back into flies), showing that in this case abiogenesis was not needed to explain maggots. And this finding has been repeated over and over since then in many contexts. The point is that we don’t disbelieve in abiogenesis because we don’t see it — we just don’t need it to explain what we do see. Do you understand the difference? Like most of your rants, your understanding is simply inverse to the actual situation.

          Why do you keep insisting that we “have no idea” how life could have arisen? Surely you are at least glancingly familiar with the Miller-Urey experiment and the theoretical speculations that led to it? Sugars, lipids, and nucleic acids were formed from simple chemicals in a spark discharge tube. You should read up on some of the research that followed — there has been a lot of it. Again, reality is inverse to your rants. And what should be obvious to any schoolchild is that, given a choice between continued experimentation on the one hand, and a fairy tale about an old man in the sky on the other, only the scientific method will lead us to an understanding of the origins of life.

          Biologists don’t deny that abiogenesis can occur. However, virtually anyone, even without a biology degree, can understand that if nucleic acids were to arise spontaneously in a warm pond somewhere, they would be eaten by the prolific lifeforms already in that niche. I doubt any biologist would be so foolhardy as to insist that abiogenesis can only have happened exactly once. You foolishly assert this hubris on the part of biology but you provide no citations. You’ll pardon us if we ignore you until you do.

          1. Sure, “Jesuit-trained Francesco Redi” (as PBS helpfully points out) was able to demonstrate spontaneous generation didn’t happen BECAUSE the Church was running things.

            The Jesuits had taught Redi how to think, so the old pagan Aristotelian idea that a vital force just spontaneously generated life was overthrown by a staunch Catholic.

            In the same way, Vincenzio Renieri, a Catholic monk, was the one who actually performed the Tower of Pisa dropped ball experiment.

            But your conclusion is fallacious. Since you don’t know how many times life spontaneously came into existence, you don’t know if you need that theory to explain different life forms or not.

            As has already been pointed out, the Miller-Urey experiments didn’t prove anything. We have no real evidence that the conditions they created in the lab matched conditions necessary for the creation of life. They never created life, they just created some amino acids.

            They never GOT nucleic acids.

            Do you have even passing familiarity of the enormous, complex difference between amino acids and nucleic acids?

            Do you realize that you can’t just casually substitute one word for other and retain a shred of respectability?

            Do you have even a passing familiarity with the complexity that is a living cell?

            You could run that experiment for decades, centuries, and you still aren’t going to get nucleic acids, much less a living cell.

            If you want to call me “foolish” for asserting that evolution assumes a common ancestor, then you have condemned essentially all evolutionary theory as “foolish” because THAT is precisely what it assumes.

            Read a book.

          2. Do you have even passing familiarity of the enormous, complex difference between amino acids and nucleic acids?

            The difference between amino acids and randomly produced polymerized amino acids (into proteins and nucleic acids) isn’t that great. One abiogenesis theory is that random bits of free floating RNA were formed first and the pieces that were capable of making copies of themselves experienced selective pressure and eventually evolved the characteristics of all known modern life (such as cell structure and the sophisticated means for RNA and DNA storage and replication).

        3. Actually, evolution doesn’t address how often life may have arisen. It could’ve had millions of starts in all sorts of places in the early Earth, and none of it would matter until traits became heritable. Then it started competing and filling up available niches, and bacteria are extremely good at gobbling up bits of floating DNA and executing the instructions. It’s even possible that archaea (very simple extremophiles) are another group altogether. But we have tools to test and reject hypothesis about the relatedness of groups.

          Where are different creation theories tested against each other? Obviously they can’t all be right because they don’t remotely agree with one another, and vary widely in their agreement with observations. One of the best matches to our understanding of the world would have to me the Mayan creation stories in the Popul Vu, which describes early creation as a repeated four-fold operation on a string (in rough agreement with some theoretical physics), followed by the creation of multiple dieties. Those then had long committee meetings on how best to proceed, with creation occuring in fits and starts in a trial and error process. Early attempts at making intelligent life resulted in monkeys, which the gods considered a partial failure, but further experiments produced humans. Mayan creation theory also explains disease and suffering, as some of the gods (especially Stabmaster) think making humans thrash and die, bleeding from both ends, is hysterically funny.

          Creation with a heirarchal command structure and division of responsibilities, with meetings, experiments, failures and successes (complete with ineptitude, occassional flair, and sadistic cruelty) is much more in line with the observed results than a monotheistic theory.

          So how about teaching Mayan or Aztec creation theory in schools, presenting it as science, and have the kids write essays on why ritual human sacrifice is important to maintain crop yields?

          1. We already have ritual human sacrifice via euthanasia and abortion, not to mention increasing cases of consensual cannibalism, so I don’t doubt that this kind of thing will become more in vogue as time goes on.

            That’s what Obamacare death panels are all about, after all.

            I didn’t say I liked 6 or 7 day creationism or the 6000 year old earth.
            I don’t.
            Those theories are at least as stupid as evolution is.

          2. George,
            Your last question is possibly meant as a joke, or a stumper, but its actually a good one.

            Practictioners of Materialism have their Creation Myth, Mayan heart yanking priests have theirs, and Jews and Christians have theirs, as well as dozens at least of others including the laughable Flying Spaghetti Monster. How to choose?

            You could choose by results. Mayans=human sacrifice. Christians=Science, Capitalism, Republic, and Tolerance. Evolution=Naziism, Communism, abortion, and euthanasia. FSM=Bad jokes and lame arguements.

            You could choose by an agreed upon event: the Global Flood. Over two hundred cultures have a Global Flood with generally agreed upon characteristics. This would be a strike against Evolution and FSM, and a plus for the Mayans and the West.

            You could choose by a Scientific theory of a past event. Unrepeatable science is less valid than repeatable, but Forensic Science and Archeology are both science. Note that an a priori committment to a materialist answer is NOT Science. Science is the systematic search for answers using as much of the Scientific Method as possible.

            Let’s consider the Grand Canyon. The Evolutionary explanation is Time X Water= GC. Interestingly enough, so is the Creationist explanation. Its only the Creationist has a short time span and LOTS of water while the sediment layers are still relatively fresh whereeas the Evolutionist has a small amount of water and LOTS of time as the sediment layers are very slowly indeed laid down with huge multi-million year spacings between some layers.

            Either works. The equation does not care. 10 X 1 or 1 X 10 is all the same to it.

            So we need to look further. One thing that is obvious is that a land surface that has been exposed for millions of years is going to show signs of erosion. So when you find two layers of rock that have no such signs between them, there is an obvious answer.

            After the Global Flood, there were significant inland water pools such as one in China and one in the American Southwest known as Lake Bessemer. The layers of sediment layed down by the Global Flood were suddenly disturbed when an earth dam broke, and Lake Bessemer flooded out to the ocean, ripping the Grand Canyon into existence in what must have been an astounding event to see if anyone was around to witness it. The Great Salt Lake is the remnant of this event after further evaporation.

            Now, that does not disprove Evolution. Its only one more straw in the weighing pan in the favor of Creationism.

            Science working as well as it does seems to indicate we live in an Orderly universe. And despite slander otherwise, the Creator is a God of Order. Miracles are at best, odd exceptions to the Rules. This tends to be a strike against both Evolution and the Mayans, and hey, the FSM as well.

            As you can see, I’m not so much trying to PROVE something as point out where the preponderance of the evidence is going. Keep an open mind and heart. Use the Reason and the Intuition and the Faith you’ve been given. May God bless your search.

          4. Tennwriter:

            You could choose by an agreed upon event: the Global Flood. Over two hundred cultures have a Global Flood with generally agreed upon characteristics. This would be a strike against Evolution and FSM, and a plus for the Mayans and the West.

            You’re kidding, I hope. How many of those 200 cultures believed that the earth is flat? How many believed that the sun orbited the Earth? How many thought light traveled infinitely fast? For that matter, how many thought light travels at all?

            And do you really want to put it to a vote?

            Its only the Creationist has a short time span and LOTS of water while the sediment layers are still relatively fresh whereeas the Evolutionist has a small amount of water and LOTS of time

            You seem to be ignoring that whole “deposition of sediment” thing. Creationism requires that we ignore the progression of fossils from the bottom to the top layers of sediment of the Grand Canyon. The layers were laid down over eons, when that part of the American Southwest was underwater, and the evolution of aquatic species is mirrored in the fossil record. But Creationists (at least, the Creationists I know) believe all those fish were killed at the same time in a tumultuous flood that laid down the sediment and then cut it like a knife. They have some screwy idea that the smallest fish were killed first and that it is only our warped biology-demon perspective that prevents us from seeing that the evolutionary sequence we think we see is just God’s floodsort order.

            Lake Bessemer

            The only Bessemer Lake I can find is the little one in Pennsylvania. Are you sure you don’t mean Lake Bonneville? Lake Bonneville was the progenitor of the Great Salt Lake. It drained through Red Rock Pass in Idaho about 14,500 years ago, not through the Grand Canyon and not 4000 years ago. In any case, no event like this approaches anything like a global flood and it really has nothing to say about evolution — except that local floods probably endanger some species and create niches for other species.

            Science working as well as it does seems to indicate we live in an Orderly universe. And despite slander otherwise, the Creator is a God of Order.

            The first statement is a tautology. The second statement is devoid of semantic content. Neither have anything to do with science.

            Miracles are at best, odd exceptions to the Rules.

            There are more than 10,000 Roman Catholic Saints. As I understand the rules, in order to be canonized, two miracles must be verified, so that’s at least 20,000 miracles, right there. So, like, 10 per year since Jesus left, or in round numbers, once a month. Not even a “once in a blue moon”, any full moon will do.

            And that’s not even counting the saints in the Eastern Orthodox church.

            As you can see, I’m not so much trying to PROVE something as point out where the preponderance of the evidence is going.

            No, you haven’t even begun to scratch the surface. Your ruminations remind me of the chain of logic that ends “so, if she weighs as much as a duck… she’s a witch!” Anyway, cheap shots aside, here’s a really nice summary of what is known or believed about the Grand Canyon. I suggest you start with this, and substitute your own preferred timeline and provides links to the alternative evidence you think substantiates your belief better than the “standard model” of the Grand Canyon. Good luck, and keep an open mind.

          5. You could choose by an agreed upon event: the Global Flood. Over two hundred cultures have a Global Flood with generally agreed upon characteristics. This would be a strike against Evolution and FSM, and a plus for the Mayans and the West.

            The argument for the Great Flood is defeated by a simple observation. We don’t have enough water on Earth to flood the land to the degree required. And it doesn’t help that no geological record of a global flood exists either.

  36. So let’s just allow for the possibility that the universe and everything in it bears the marks of “intelligent design”, or at least enough order to be suggestive of such. Does that therefore mean the designer is “God” and if so would it be the Christian “God” or perhaps Allah? Maybe we should bring in the Hindu Pantheon of God(s), or the Greek or Roman sets. This sort of drivel is beyond annoying. Granted I am not a guy who received an A+ in my capstone evolution course, but I do have common sense. The theory of evolution, as stated repeatedly in this thread, has been “exposed” several times to experiments that might have conclusively disproven foundational elements of the theory. In every case the evidence SUPPORTS the theory of evolution. This is the essence of scientific investigation.

    Now AGW on the other hand has also been “exposed” to experiments, new data, refined computer models, etc.. In many cases these additional data or results tend to DISPROVE foundational elements of the AGW religion. This does not even consider the outright fraud that has been revealed from the e-mail among “peers” in the field. Yet despite all of this, the theories are redefined, the models are tweaked, the target is always moving, and the drumbeat for massive government control and expenditure is never ending. This is the antithesis of science.

    Last but not least, all the historical scientists and English language tradition crap is utterly irrelevant because the tools of modern science were not available to them. In case you didn’t know, the big “C” CHURCH was also pretty much all powerful in those days, and you were in a very real way risking your life (and certainly your reputation) if you disagreed with the ID school. But anyhoo…

    If we all agree to allow for the possibility of intelligent design of earth and its inhabitants by some unknown extra-terrestrial force, will you then concede the absurd bullshit that is the religion of AGW? Christ you people are annoying.

    Great article Rand.

  37. Any theory of the origin of the universe can’t quite be falsifiable, right, because there’s only the one case.
    All the evidence that has been referred to, DNA, etc, may provide evidence of links, but it can’t quite prove the “descent” aspects very perfectly, no?
    And natural selection has a ring of sense to it, perhaps, but again, how do we test it when all we have is this one case, of stuff that survived; we don’t know, or can’t SHOW, that the fittest survived, cause we have no control group; all we’ve got is us that’s here.
    Was it selection by random competition of traits, or something else, just damn luck, that resulted in these results. Or this result; there’s only one result…so….

    1. Any theory of the origin of the universe can’t quite be falsifiable, right, because there’s only the one case.

      Well, that might make sense if there was nothing in the universe which we could observe.

      But different theories have different observational consequences. There is a set of hypotheses that fall under the general category of inflationary cosmology. The principle variants of inflation make very specific predictions about the irregularities in the cosmic microwave background radiation, in particular about the pair-correlation function of CMBR intensity. If the observed irregularity differed from the prediction, we could rule out those theories (it didn’t, but in principle it could have).

  38. The AGW supporters are correct to claim similiarity with Evolution. If you support fraud, illogic, and poor science financed by gov’t cheese, then you support AGW/Evolution. If you support Logic, Science, and honest History despite the attacks of the prejudgiced and powerful, you support AGW skepticism/Creationism.

    AGW is Evolution’s younger sister, not yet as well versed in hoaxes and sucking on the gov’t teat as Evolutionists, but full of ambition to do her whorish older sister one better.

    The fact that you only know of Piltdown Man as a hoax in Evolution only means you’re not read up on the subject not that there are not plenty more. Ernst Haeckel’s drawings are truly shocking in the rampant culture of dishonesty they reveal. The Neanderthal Man walking crouched over reveals as another hoax, and bad science. There’s more for the person willing to seek the truth and be disillusioned.

    A large part of the problem is that we need to separate Science and the State. This might reduce the great corruption in the many fields of science (not just Evolution and AGW).

    Evolution is going to go the way of Communism.

    1. If you support Logic, Science, and honest History despite the attacks of the prejudgiced and powerful, you support AGW skepticism/Creationism.

      Creationism is not the same as evolution skepticism. It asserts without evidence that the Earth and its life was spontaneously created. So how was this done? Where’s the tool marks? Who are the creators?

  39. Having a Master of Divinity, I explained the Christian-surrogate tenets of environmentalism almost four years ago “(Environmentalist religion explained,” May 2008). That it is a religion is not original with me, of course, as Freeman Dyson had already (approvingly) tagged it as such.

    However, I don’t think you accurately characterize creationism and inaccurately conflate it with Intelligent Design. They are not the same.

    Creationism is usually thought of by its critics as identical with Christian fundamentalism, in which the creation account of Genesis 1 is claimed to be (a) scientifically accurate or, contrariwise, accurate despite what science says. This is far from the state of scientific creationists today.

    I remember reading, not recently so no link, sorry, an interview with a university dean who said that when he wants a faculty member to debate in favor of atheism, he has to go to the philosophy department because “the physics department is of no use at all.”

    Indeed, the stronghold of scientific creationism today is found among practicing physicists because the state of cosmology today argues pretty much conclusively that the universe had a definite beginning in time and space, is not eternal, is not multiple and is not cyclic. The math is well beyond me, but these are scientists arguing on purely scientific grounds.

    Many state plainly that an agency greater than the universe must be responsible for the universe’s creation. Some, not all, come to affirm the creator as the God described in Genesis, though not adhering to a six-day creation timeline, of course. You may recall that Antony Flew, the most respected and prominent proponent of atheism in the last century, announced in 2004 he had “converted” to theism/deism because of cosmological physics and the complexity of life. See here. By no means did Flew embrace Christian faith before he died; his idea of the deity corresponded more to Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover than anything biblical.

    I am not so conversant in Intelligent Design’s proponency, as the cosmological argument seems to me me to be more basic. After all, if you can reasonably adhere even to as non-biblical a deity as Flew did, directed evolution is hardly implausible.

    Yet evolution is not the stumbling point at all. The origin of Life is. I turn to Freeman Dyson again, who wrote less than a year ago, “The origin of life is a total mystery, and so is the existence of human consciousness.” Dyson, of course, is a theoretical physicist and mathematician, famous for his work in quantum field theory, solid-state physics, astronomy and nuclear engineering.

    Fred Hoyle, who confesses no religious faith, said,

    Biochemical systems are exceedingly complex, so much so that the chance of their being formed through random shuffling of simple organic molecules is exceedingly minute, to a point where it is no different from zero. … For life to have originated on earth it would be necessary that quite explicit instructions should have been provided for its assembly.

    Hoyle’s answer is that life was brought here by extraterrestials, which of course does not solve the problem at all but merely shifts it elsewhere.

    Francis Crick, Nobel laureate for co-discovering the structure of DNA, wrote in Life Itself,

    An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going.

    Like Hoyle, Crick professes no religious faith.

    -more to follow-

  40. -continued-

    One more, published in Astrobiology, March 2011. Of the 80 amino acids that could be used to build genetically encoded protein polymers, nature uses a “standard set” of 20 identified amino acids. GK Philip & SJ Freeland, NASA Astrobiology Institute, University of Hawaii, wrote, “Specifically, we show that the standard set of 20 amino acids represents the possible spectra of size, charge, and hydrophobicity more broadly and more evenly than can be explained by chance alone” [Italics added, see http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21434765 (link wouldn’t take for some reason)].

    I do not claim that any of these “hostile witnesses'” statements prove the Bible is true. But these and many similar statements of other scientists about the scientific understanding of the origin of the universe and of life itself do demonstrate that positing the power and influence of a supernatural agency in bringing forth the universe and life on earth is hardly unreasonable, quite the opposite.

    So should these perspectives be taught in public schools’ classrooms? Though I adhere to them, I would prefer not, mainly because it would not be taught any better than environmentalism is. I rather think it is the responsibility of clergy like myself to become scientifically literate and teach our parishioners.

    Here is a Youtube video, 75 minutes long, of a lecture at Stanford University by physicist Dr. Michael Strauss on evidence for the existence of God from a scientific viewpoint. Strauss was at the time at Fermi National Laboratory and is now a professor of physics at the University of Oklahoma (CV here), specializing in Experimental High Energy Physics.

    1. GK Philip & SJ Freeland, NASA Astrobiology Institute, University of Hawaii, wrote, “Specifically, we show that the standard set of 20 amino acids represents the possible spectra of size, charge, and hydrophobicity more broadly and more evenly than can be explained by chance alone”

      You don’t get it. You’re not talking about something that happens by chance or purpose only. That distribution of amino acids could well be influenced by evolution.

  41. How many ancient cultures believed the Earth was flat, Bluebeard? Not very many. Anyways, you mistake the nature of the point. What I am discussing is historical evidence, not the ancient cultures theories of the Four Elements or whatever. Your standard, although I’m sure you don’t realize this would mean the Death of History as any preceding culture that had a scientific error could not be relied upon to get its own history right. Do we really know that George Washington was the Father of the Country given that he was leeched? Silly, right?

    Actually, yes, I want to put it to a vote. The other option is a tyranny of some know-it-all, and I’m an American, thank you very much.

    Your summary of Creationist theory as to the Grand Canyon seems reasonably accurate. You offer no reason other than scorn to disbelieve it. And you’re probably right, Lake Bonneville. Mea culpa.

    And of course, the draining of such a grand lake, while immense, is not a Global Flood. As I said, the Grand Canyon was formed after the Flood from an interior lake draining to the ocean. This was probably right before the Ice ‘Age’ aka Ice Centuries as the warmer ocean water created the Great Ice.

    It does not directly impact evolution other than to deprive an evolutionists of one of his arguements. ‘Great time spans are proven by the rocks…’ ….’Um, no, they’re not. Actually the rocks speak of Catastrophism.’

    If this was not an orderly universe, Science would not work. Science is based on a philosophical presupposition of an Orderly universe that is knowable. It got this from Christianity. Also, your Materialist Superstition does not get to define
    Science.

    Multiply the seconds in a day by the number of people on the planet, and tell me again that one miracle a month is more than an odd exception.

    Its quite true that I’ve only scratched the surface. This is a blog comment section. Its not the place to try to write an essay.

    I don’t have much of an open mind on this topic. I don’t respect Communists as a general rule, and find no need to waste my valuable time reading Das Kapital. Similar with Evolution….its a failed theory.

    1. What I am discussing is historical evidence, not the ancient cultures theories of the Four Elements or whatever.

      No, you were discussing myths of a global deluge, for which there is no historical evidence at all.

      Actually, yes, I want to put it to a vote. The other option is a tyranny of some know-it-all, and I’m an American, thank you very much.

      Ah, yes, the tyranny of knowledge. How frightening. Much better to be ruled by superstition. Not.

      You offer no reason other than scorn to disbelieve it.

      No, I specifically pointed out that the Flood Myth in entirely incapable of dealing with the fossil record in the Grand Canyon. And yes, I am scornful of that fact, but no, it is not immaterial.

      If this was not an orderly universe, Science would not work. Science is based on a philosophical presupposition of an Orderly universe that is knowable. It got this from Christianity.

      It is tautological to suggest that the universe is governed by laws. This is quite independent from Christianity. And it is only after separating science from Christian dogma that science was able to progress. Unfortunately, we can’t go back and unburn all those heretics the church executed for suggesting the church’s worldview wasn’t so perfect. We can’t go back and retrieve those years of work lost to Galileo when he ran afoul of Christian dogma. We can’t recover the years Isaac Newton wasted on theology. But we can sure try to shame you into not claiming credit for their work.

      1. So when 200 cultures claim a Global Flood happened to them in the past, that’s not historical evidence according to the Great and Wise Bbeard. How lame.

        …tyranny of knowledge… Now you’re looking like an Authoritarian or even a Lefty.

        You described your theory, and the Creationist’s theory, and then offered scorn as if the self-evident logic of your position was obvious. Since I’m an adult ‘Because I say so!’ doesnt’ cut much ice.

        We did not have to decide and agree with Revelation that the universe was governed by laws. We could believe in a celestial chaos.

        Your anti-Christian bigotry and hatred is noted and rejected.

        Go away and learn something.

        1. So when 200 cultures claim a Global Flood happened to them in the past, that’s not historical evidence according to the Great and Wise Bbeard. How lame.

          Before a few centuries ago, not many cultures would be able to know whether or not a global flood occurred.

          Second, it’s worth remembering that myths traditionally have been vastly larger than life, be it a guy who can throw a hammer and shatter mountains or a god who creates the universe merely by wanting to. Every day events are often interwoven into the mythology. The gods often did the same sort of tasks that humans did, but merely on a grander scale. And they often suffered the same tribulations humans did or were responsible for the tribulations that humans suffered.

          And that leads us to the second part. Almost everywhere it rains and does so at varying rate. And humans are dependent on water to live. So flooding for any culture anywhere is inevitable. Why shouldn’t we expect that tribulation to make it’s way into their legends? Why shouldn’t we expect that story to be exaggerated as virtually all such legends are exaggerated?

          So no, I don’t think that 200 separate stories of global floods means anything other than flooding is a universal human tragedy.

    2. How many ancient cultures believed the Earth was flat, Bluebeard?

      I’d say the vast majority of them. Unless, of course, your definition of “culture” excludes the cultures, particularly of primitive tribes, which didn’t have knowledge beyond their small patch of earth.

    3. Science, that is, natural philosophy predates Christianity by about 500 years. The Ancient Classical Greeks invented the scientific method centuries before Christ.

  42. Donald Sensing:

    Indeed, the stronghold of scientific creationism today is found among practicing physicists because the state of cosmology today argues pretty much conclusively that the universe had a definite beginning in time and space, is not eternal, is not multiple and is not cyclic. The math is well beyond me, but these are scientists arguing on purely scientific grounds.

    Many state plainly that an agency greater than the universe must be responsible for the universe’s creation. Some, not all, come to affirm the creator as the God described in Genesis, though not adhering to a six-day creation timeline, of course.

    This is a grotesque misrepresentation of physics and creationism. I know quite a few physicists, since I earned my doctorate at the Center for Theoretical Physics at MIT and have attended more than a few conferences and workshops and guest lectures. I do not know a single physicist who has even hinted that creationism is valid. I suspect that your sample is either biased or derived from creationist propaganda.

    Let me clarify that despite protestations to the contrary, “science” has not come to a definitive conclusion that the Big Bang was the sole and unique origin of time. In particular there are hypothetical variants of inflation theory which provide for a “self-reproducing inflationary universe” in which inflationary “bubbles” branch off an eternal background. And, assertions to the contrary notwithstanding, it is not established a priori that there is no way to test such hypotheses. It may be possible to detect this branching in some distant regions of spacetime, or it may even be possible to generate these branches through sufficiently advanced technology. We just don’t know yet. And I certainly know physicists who work on multi-universe theory, though I am not sold on this myself. It’s another open question.

    I don’t know who your “many” physicists are who argue for an agency greater than the universe. Surely as a divinity student you are familiar with the argument that if any gods exist, they must be part of the universe and subject to some kind of laws. If you are referring to the Strauss video, it is clear that many of those statements were metaphorical in nature. (More about Strauss below.) In fact, from your quotes and the Strauss video one can formulate a general principle “If you are a scientist, do not emit titillating references to a deity, because they will inevitably be taken out of context and used to support superstition.”

    GK Philip & SJ Freeland, NASA Astrobiology Institute, University of Hawaii, wrote, “Specifically, we show that the standard set of 20 amino acids represents the possible spectra of size, charge, and hydrophobicity more broadly and more evenly than can be explained by chance alone”

    I don’t think this means what you think it means. There is a common misconception that evolution is equivalent to “random chance”. This is patently untrue. Mutations are statistical in nature, but natural selection is anything but random. Environments place severe, non-random constraints on organisms. What this amino acid study indicates is that the set of amino acids used by DNA here on earth is most likely the product of evolution and not just random happenstance. One might then infer that there were more, or alternate, amino acids used in older lifeforms. It would be interesting to try to recover DNA from ancient insects, a la Jurassic Park, and check their amino acid content.

    Dr. Michael Strauss

    Well, I watched the entire video. It was interesting but ultimately disappointing. Thanks for providing the link. I can’t vouch for Strauss’ scientific credentials. He seems to be a minor contributor to the D0 collaboration. But clearly he is not a cosmologist, nor a philosopher of science, nor schooled in theology. His argument mainly consists of a regurgitation of the “fine-tuning” argument, bolstered by some utterly bogus probability calculations from Hugh Ross, who is a creationist and a scientific incompetent.

    Apart from considerations of the anthropic principle, there are two major shortfalls of fine tuning arguments. The first is that we do not know how to show if the constants in question could have taken other values. For example, Strauss mentioned the strong coupling constant, and asserted that if it were higher or lower by some percentage, things would be different. But since our crude understanding from our work with gauge theories so far, the strong and weak coupling constants are the result of symmetry breaking at a higher energy scale. We don’t if they could be 5% higher or lower — and there is no way to assign a probability to it having the value it has. The other problem with fine tuning arguments is that we don’t really know what other physics would result if certain parameters were varied. We have a good model of stellar nucleosynthesis and its dependence on nuclear resonances, for example. But we have not done a systematic search for other combinations of resonances would also lead to habitable planets. It’s not sufficient to marvel that one particular resonance is close to optimum without knowing whether other combinations of parameters could be equally successful.

    Interestingly, Strauss tries to maintain an even demeanor during the talk, and it is really in the Q&A afterwards that he lets his hair down, so to speak, and tells us that any theory of evolution has to include Adam and Eve. This is a clue that he is a Christian first and will reject science if it does not accord with his religion. It’s a dishonest dodge for him to suggest he won’t have to make that choice because science has confirmed his beliefs. It’s a good thing he chose particle physics instead of molecular biology.

    There is a special award that should be given to creationists who gin up the courage to provide completely bogus estimates of probabilities for “unlikely events”. Strauss trumpets the absurdities of Hugh Ross, for example. A clue to the mendacious nature of these kinds of estimates is that Strauss is actually unwilling to show us what went into the calculation — he just flashes up a slide with a list in 3 point font, which is supposed to impress us. If you visit Ross’ website, which I won’t dignify with a link, you will find the line items on his list are things like “sizes of largest cosmic structures in the universe”, “degree to which exotic matter self-interacts”, and “degree to which the atmospheric composition of the planet departs from thermodynamic equilibrium”, each of which he ascribes a 1% chance of being in the habitable zone, and on and on — he lists 322 parameters in all, ranging from 70% down to 0.001% in probability. Most egregiously from my standpoint, he multiplies these probabilities together rather than doing a proper chi-squared analysis.

    I could tick off a list of particular distortions from Strauss, but to me the hole that came up again and again was cosmic inflation. He is so unfamiliar with the theory and how it addresses cosmological questions that he couldn’t even name it during the Q&A — he had to be reminded by an audience member.

    Strauss’ bottom line is “science says whoever started this universe is transcendent” — and this is a bald-ass lie. Science says nothing of the sort.

  43. Pingback: The rise of atavism and the death of science: “green” education at a school near you | The Libertarian Alliance: BLOG

  44. It seems to me that the discussion shows that evolution and AGW are both not science. “Hard” science such as physics and chemistry deal with verifiable observations and theories that derive from those observations. Without setting off the philosophers out there with the limits of empirical study BS, I submit that unless you are working with verifiable (i.e. repeatable) observations and theories/analysis from them, it is not science but is something else. Science requires use of the scientific process (hypothesis to explain data, test, analysis of new data to refine hypothesis) as the center of study not as an adjunct.

    Based on the above definition, it is easy to show many things are not science. Evolution fails because the lack of scientific method. It also fails any scientific analysis because of irreducable complexity and time-line problems that became readily apparent with the advances in bio-chemistry (not enough time to evolve the complex proteins can try one a second for life of universe and still not get to the correct dozens necessary for life; need sequential steps that do not confer advantage before getting advantage). Once a reasonable theory to bio-chemistry arrives, it can be looked at and analyzed. In the meantime, ID, evolution, and other theories simply aren’t science. I think that most debaters wpould simply like evolution de-throned from science, allowing discusison outside of the science about life and forget the “science disproves this or that religion crap.”

    AGW is easily disproved by observation of the data. All the horror and bad problems occur in the future, but necessitate immediate government power and aciton now. How convenient. Too bad the ice data (around for decades) and the satellite show something different. What is going on as climate science simply isn’t science.

    Both evolution and AGW are examples of politics masquarading as science for politicval reasons. Both have been use or are trying to be used to force a non-scientifically trained public into accepting courses of action they would not otherwise follow. Science lost the evolution fight for a few decades but is slowly coming back. However it looks like science might win and recover from the AGW fight (hence all the fighting over the data… show me the real, undiluted data fights).

    1. It seems to me that the discussion shows that evolution and AGW are both not science. “Hard” science such as physics and chemistry deal with verifiable observations and theories that derive from those observations. Without setting off the philosophers out there with the limits of empirical study BS, I submit that unless you are working with verifiable (i.e. repeatable) observations and theories/analysis from them, it is not science but is something else. Science requires use of the scientific process (hypothesis to explain data, test, analysis of new data to refine hypothesis) as the center of study not as an adjunct.

      Based on the above definition, it is easy to show many things are not science. Evolution fails because the lack of scientific method. It also fails any scientific analysis because of irreducable complexity and time-line problems that became readily apparent with the advances in bio-chemistry (not enough time to evolve the complex proteins can try one a second for life of universe and still not get to the correct dozens necessary for life; need sequential steps that do not confer advantage before getting advantage). Once a reasonable theory to bio-chemistry arrives, it can be looked at and analyzed. In the meantime, ID, evolution, and other theories simply aren’t science. I think that most debaters wpould simply like evolution de-throned from science, allowing discusison outside of the science about life and forget the “science disproves this or that religion crap.”

      In other words, another bogus argument against evolution. The obvious counterargument is that you can indeed apply the scientific method to the historical sciences and evolution is an outcome of doing so. Just because you can’t run table-top experiments with alternate earths or whatever, doesn’t mean that you can’t formulate hypotheses, conduct reproducible experiments and observations to test those hypotheses, and all the other parts of the scientific method.

  45. Scientific theories can never be proved, but they can be disproved. As for a method of disproving evolution as a theory, it’s conceptually quite easy to do. An authenticated fossilised rabbit skull in Precambrian rock would do that just fine, for example.

    For evidence of speciation being a real event, the best-known example is one of a new species, similar to two other geographically-close species but interfertile with neither of them and adapted to an environment that didn’t exist until about 120 years ago. I present the London Underground mosquito (Culex molestus). Will provable speciation in recent historical time (almost within a human lifetime of now!) do?

    For another example, Google (or wikipedia search) “nylon-eating bacteria”.

  46. It’s amazing that a critique of Anthropogenic Global Warming as religion, comparable to Creationism, could lead to almost every comment to be about Creationism rather than AGW.

    Rand, if you can somehow work abortion into the mix, you’ll hit a blog comment generator trifecta.

    1. Yet another example of evolution in action: shrinking ice flows from global warming due to greenhouse gas emissions are leading polar bears to abort their pregnancies by absorbing their larger fetuses (and when the pregnancy is too far along, they eat their larger young just after birth). This is selecting for smaller polar bears – if this goes on, wild polar bears will speciate from those bred in captivity. Abortion and evolution: natural. Climate change: a human made disaster.

      1. But the polar bear population is exploding. It’s about triple what it was in the 1960’s, when temperatures were at a low point.

        1. Oh for pete’s sake! I usually post completely sincere comments, and some of the morons here (who shall remain nameless) will call me a troll. This one time, I deliberately trolled (I even stretched the truth), and I got a serious reply from an intelligent commenter. There ain’t no justice!

          You did see the comment I made about Bode’s Law above? Funny, eh?

          Anyway, about polar bears: I think the population statistics don’t tell the whole story. Here’s what appears to be the whole story: http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/essay_schliebe.html
          In particular, click on the table linked at the top. Here’s a direct link:
          http://pbsg.npolar.no/en/status/status-table.html

    2. No kidding. Who dropped-off the church bus? I’ve never seen such a gaggle of supercilious tourists on TTM. WWJD? Continue the Inquisition, it seems.

  47. My wife and myself are both physicists. She’s a Professor at a major university. We have several children, who have experienced the sort of indoctrination you describe while attending both grade school and high school. The children, absorbing my scepticism about ‘green’ issues, become uncomfortable in their ‘science’ classes at school. The trouble is, I have never found a way to influence what the school teaches. When the kids ask me whether the teaching at school is accurate, I use the socratic method to walk them through the teacher’s reasoning. This is a useful lesson in critical thinking, and makes them acutely aware that there is a lot of political agenda out there masquerading as ‘science,’ a realization not without value.

  48. I appreciate this thread. High quality group. Below is my understanding of the competing theories. I appreciate they are not always expressed this way but i believe this illustrates the contrasts. With this understanding it is hard to see how anyone could argue that one is “scientific” while the other is not. Please enlighten.

    Evolution:

    1. Life Happened… (Self replicating semi-complex DNA based biological system emerged)

    2. Filtered for Fitness.. (Combinatorial replication process coupled with environmental pressure shapes organism to environment.)

    3. Design by Mutation…. (Uncorrected errors of transcription occasionally construct useful design features and they are added to the genome leading to a fully complex system)

    4. Man happens… (I think therefore i am)

    Intelligent Design:

    1. Life Happened… (Self replicating fully-complex DNA based biological system emerged)

    2. Filtered for Fitness.. (Combinatorial replication process coupled with environmental pressure shapes organism to environment.)

    3. Expressed by Mutation…. (Uncorrected errors of transcription occasionally express useful design features and they are propagated into the environment)

    4. Man emerges… (I think therefore i am)

    The essential difference is the initial state (semi-complex vs fully complex) and the role of mutation (design creation vs feature expression).

  49. “Now, I have a lot of friends who are Christians.”

    Eerily reminiscent of: “Some of my best friends are Black.”

      1. The truth of the “some of my best friends are …” claim is irrelevant to whether it is about to preface bigotry. The claim is often true when the person claims it. The problem twofold: The person might have bigoted beliefs about their friends, or the person might be a bigot toward members of the category who are not also their friends.

        (But I’m not saying BBBeard is a bigot – on the contrary, I think the Christians here ought to appreciate his engagement, and they shold correct him where they think he is wrong. I also hope this thread goes on forever and ever.)

    2. Eerily reminiscent of: “Some of my best friends are Black.”

      Yeah, eerie, right. Why don’t you include the complete quote:

      Now, I have a lot of friends who are Christians. I think Christianity, for the most part, has arrived at a pretty decent place in the 21st century, and I tend to side with the Christian right on a lot of political issues. But let’s not lie about the Christian history of repression and obscurantism. It is what it is. And to the extent you think creationism is compatible with science, it simply indicates you know nothing about science.

      Is there some part of that that you think is bigoted? Are you of the opinion that Christianity does not have a history of repression and obscurantism? Or are you of the opinion that everyone has lots of Christian friends, so that there is no reason to point this out?

      More to the point, do you understand the difference between “I have a lot of friends who are…” and “Some of my best friends are…”?

      I’ll go further. I live in the South. Not only do I have friends who are Christian, the overwhelming majority of my friends are. And not only do I have black friends, but disproportionately so, because I live in a town that is is majority black and has a healthy black middle class. So what’s your point?

      And I consider myself a member of the “religious right”, except that my religion is Buddhism. One of the aspects of enlightenment, though, is that you are supposed to understand the value, purpose, and limitations of mythology in our lives. I wouldn’t dream of letting Buddhist mythology interfere with my physics research, or my aerospace engineering. But this thread proves that there are a lot of people out there that are ready to jettison the scientific method in favor of their just-so stories.

    3. Eerily reminscent of [something or other]

      You left out the part where I claimed to know a lot of physicists 😉

      In fact, some of my best friends are physicists….

      I know, I know, it’s eerie. I must really, deep down, hate physicists.

  50. If you are talking about the creationism vs evolution argument, you need to differentiate between young earth creationism and intelligent design. Young earth creationism has clearly been proven false, by the geological record. Intelligent design is another thing. If you just say that intelligent design states that any evolutionary transitions that have not yet been proven with a defined mechanism, must be due to God, that is not clearly proven false or true. But the problem with intelligent design is its position, if no proven mechanism then God must have done it, ignores another equally likely explanation, that the mechanism has not been proven YET, but will be someday, as more facts are discovered.

    If intelligent design proponents were to come up with a complete list of all things that must be in the “God Did It” category, with the list agreed to by all major intelligent design proponents, and then concede, that if an evolutionary mechanism for any item on that list is someday proven, then Intelligent design would be proven false, then it becomes both testable and falsafiable, and may be treated as a real scientific theory. They should also be prepared to specify the God Did It mechanism with some detail, other than God Works In Mysterious Ways, and have a way for somebody to prove that God Did Not Do It. But as it exists now, it is not falsifiable, and therefore not real science.

    Climate science has a similar problem. They are predicting both warmer climate due to increasing CO2, and colder climate due to Gulf Stream disruption, and are therefore not falsifiable. If the whole climate change community agreed to a set of definite worldwide temperature predictions for the next 20 yrs, and then agreed that if they did not happen, then climate science was false, or at least required major revision, then they would be falseifiable, and would be a real theory. They should also agree to release all raw data and the computer algorithms used to make their predictions, to allow replications and critique of the data handling and algorithms, another fundamental principle of real science. Until Climate Science does these things, I will continue to group them with Intellligent design, as more of a religious beleif than a science.

    1. “If you just say that intelligent design states that any evolutionary transitions that have not yet been proven with a defined mechanism, must be due to God…”

      Your logic is fine but your premise is false. This is a common strawman and you torched it as expected.

      Here is an upgraded version of your premise:

      “If you just say that intelligent design states that any evolutionary transitions that are probabilistically unlikely to have come about through a random process, suggests the possibly of an intelligent process…”

      This would get you started down a more productive road. Contrary to your assertion Intelligent Design theory is a search for “more facts to be discovered”.

      1. “If you just say that intelligent design states that any evolutionary transitions that are probabilistically unlikely to have come about through a random process, suggests the possibly of an intelligent process…”

        Then we run into the problem of whether or not evolution is an intelligent process. For if it is, then there is no longer a critique of evolution. The vaguer the definition of “intelligent designer” is, the less meaningful the theory becomes.

      2. Karl, I am not following your argument.

        Perhaps evolution could be considered an intelligent process in some sense of the word but it is fundamental that evolution is based on chance events filtered through environmental pressure. I call that a “random process”.

        1. it is fundamental that evolution is based on chance events filtered through environmental pressure. I call that a “random process”.

          Intelligent processes and random processes aren’t exclusive sets. For example, genetic algorithms, the computer science version of evolution has been used to generate adequate solutions to certain types of fairly hard problems (such as a good shape for an airplane given constraints on that airplane’s performance).

          Whether to call that sort of thing an “intelligent process” is a matter of taste, but it does remain that genetic algorithms, though not usually the best tools out there, do reduce the work it takes for people to do certain types of problems that otherwise take a lot of intellectual effort. And when your algorithm is solving problems that are generally considered deep within the purview of intelligence, it’s reasonable to consider that algorithm an “intelligent process” as a result.

        2. Karl, When i call evolution a “random process” it is just a label. Like when one says “let x equal”. Labels aside i assume you agree that products of an intelligent process are usually distinguishable from naturally occurring products.. (Think… pocket watch, arrowhead, Mount Rushmore)

          1. Seems to me that’s not so, else we wouldn’t have an argument here about evolution versus intelligent design.

            Karl, When i call evolution a “random process” it is just a label.

            A label with a meaning. I merely pointed out that it is possible for a process to be both random and intelligent. This is especially true in competitive games where being predictable can harm your strategy.

          2. That’s interesting. I didn’t realize the question was so basic. Do you think it is difficult to distinguish the origin of an arrowhead and a stream pebble, Mount Rushmore and a mountain top.

            How would you describe what an archaeologist does?

          3. No, but we’re not speaking of humans being made by accident through erosion. Some random processes are a lot more random than other random processes.

            I do think it’d be difficult to distinguish a human developed through evolution from a human developed through intelligent design.

          4. Agreed, but there is an interesting parallel. Evolution claims that humans were designed by accident through uncorrected transcription errors (mutations). Seems just a little suspect.

            Difficult, yes but perhaps not impossible. Seems like a worthy project.

          5. Evolution claims that humans were designed by accident through uncorrected transcription errors (mutations).

            Selection is the “design by accident” part of evolution not mutation. For example, suppose that there’s a trait, say a longer or shorter snout, that an animal could have. If the trait has no benefit or disadvantage to the animal, then it’ll tend to stay in the population at the current fraction. But even a slight advantage or disadvantage, and it will grow or shrink as a fraction of the population. Over the generations, that can result in replacement of one trait by the more advantageous one. Selection has “designed by accident”, the longer or shorter snout.

            To use an analogy from signal processing, mutation provides noise which selection damps down in particular ways to create signal (that is, information which describes how to create the organism).

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