The Politicians’ War On Science
As Paula Bolyard noted the other day, the “gotcha” game by the Democratic operatives with bylines to poison Republican candidates’ chances started early, with a loaded question to Marco Rubio:
To read some of the reactions to Senator Marco Rubio’s comments on the age of the earth, you’d think that he’d proposed rounding up scientists and imprisoning them in gulags. Liberals apparently think this is a plank in the vast right-wing “anti-science” conspiracy. At the very least, a man who refuses to swear a blood oath to the current orthodoxy that the earth is 4.5 billion years old is not fit to hold any job that requires any more intellectual heft beyond knowing the proper temperature for grilling burgers.
Now, in fact, I would prefer politicians who are conversant with science and its methods to those not, but even more I prefer politicians who are conversant with basic math, economics, and human nature, and have an aversion to wrecking the nation’s economy. And if they have to occasionally salute the sensibilities of people who believe that evolution is the work of the devil, I can live with that — particularly since we have a current president who does exactly the same thing, while flooring the accelerator toward the fiscal cliff:
How do these quotes stack up? It seems to me that they’re exactly in agreement on four crucial and dismaying points:
1) Both senators refuse to give an honest answer to the question. Neither deigns to mention that the Earth is 4.54 billion years old.
2) They both go so far as to disqualify themselves from even pronouncing an opinion. I’m not a scientist, says Rubio. I don’t presume to know, says Obama.
3) That’s because they both agree that the question is a tough one, and subject to vigorous debate. I think there are multiple theories out there on how this universe was created, says Rubio. I think it’s a legitimate debate within the Christian community of which I’m a part, says Obama.
4) Finally they both profess confusion over whether the Bible should be taken literally. Maybe the “days” in Genesis were actual eras, says Rubio. They might not have been standard 24-hour days, says Obama.
In light of these concordances, to call Rubio a liar or a fool would be to call our nation’s president the same, along with every other politician who might like to occupy the Oval Office. If a reporter asks a candidate to name the age of Earth, there’s only one acceptable response: Well, you know, that’s a complicated issue … and who am I to say?
Yes, as he points out, this is a problem of politicians in general, because a significant portion of the voting public does believe in a young earth, and it’s only damaging to Republicans because only Republicans are called out for it because…Democratic operatives with bylines. But as I noted over at my blog the other day, both parties are at war with different aspects of science. Ron Bailey lays it out in detail:
After analyzing both the Democratic and Republican Party platforms, it’s evident that science is secondary to politics. Politicians of both parties manage to find science that conveniently supports the policies they already favor.
As another example, recall that the Obama administration declared a moratorium on deep-water drilling in the Gulf after the BP spill, citing a scientific report that its authors later claimed had been doctored to come up with a recommendation that they never made. Now that’s what I call a “war on science.”
But getting beyond the bipartisan nature of taking science’s name in vain, I disagree with Slate’s analysis:
So Obama believes in evolution, and presumably he’d like to teach it in the nation’s public schools, while Rubio suggests that “multiple theories” should be given equal time. But even so, both men present the science as a matter of personal opinion. Obama doesn’t say, Evolution is a fact; he says, I believe in it.
Well, he shouldn’t say that, because evolution is in fact not a “fact.” It, like gravity, is a scientific theory. And it is perfectly philosophically legitimate to say [as Rubio does] that alternate theories should be taught in school, but it should be done not in a science class but in one on comparative religions (of which science is one). That there is an objective reality about which we can discover things through scientific methods is not a fact, or “truth,” but an axiomatic assumption. Science is a form of faith, but in terms of understanding the natural world, and forging new artificial creations from it, it is a very successful and powerful one.
Scientists should recognize that their role is not to dethrone God, but to understand the natural world, and part of that recognition would be the essentially religious aspects of their own beliefs. They cannot prove that there is an objective reality whose nature can be determined by asking questions of it in the form of repeatable experiments, or that the entire universe obeys the same laws throughout as in our local neighborhood. These are axioms (among others) on which their faith (and my own) rests. But their faith is not intrinsically antithetical to God; it is orthogonal to it. One can believe in both God and the scientific method (and evolution), and one can believe in neither.
Beyond that, the notions that public policy should be based on science only, or religion only, are both wrong. Despite the attempts to square that circle, ethics issues cannot be determined by science alone (or in some cases at all), while issues of technology, offspring of science, should certainly be informed by it, tempered with the needs of both liberty and public safety. The Founders, in their wisdom, recognized the role of both science and God in public affairs, but too many of their successors don’t seem to. Of course, given the democratic nature of our republic, that, in turn, is largely because their constituents won’t let them. And as long as we have public schools, there will be an ongoing political war on what is taught in them, and by whom.
There is much insight here, but I must take issue with the use of the word prove, as in:
Science is not in the business of proving things. The aim of a scientist is to produce a model of causality that allows for testable predictions. When he arrives at such a model, he tests its predictions by experiment. If its predictions fail his tests, the model will be regarded as disproven, but no matter how many tests the model passes, it is never regarded as proven.
The great edifice of human thought and conjecture is partitioned into three categories:
– That which can be proved or disproved: mathematics.
– That which can be disproved but never proved: science.
– That which can never be proved nor disproved: religion.
Understanding this partition is the foremost duty of a scientist.
Totally agree with what you wrote.
I want to add that mathematics can be proved or disproved because it involves gross human simplification of reality (e.g., 1 apple + 1 apple = 2 apples only when the two completely different apples might appear to the simple consumer to be exactly the same (mathematics) or to the detailed observer not the same at all (scientific reality)).
Likewise science can never be proved because of ceteris paribus (i.e., all OTHER things being the same) assumptions which indicate that something is only provable within a limited framework where all other potential considerations are ignored because they are unprovable. The infinite other things not considered render science unprovable.
You are also correct about religion because a God capable of creating this universe, all life in it, and all associated subtleties could do anything and we could neither prove or disprove the basis of what we see.
Corrilary to your distinctions, all 3 (math, science and religion) still rest on faith. Faith that reason works – which is inductively shown true, not deductively.
Faith that starting points are valid. For instance in Geometry, it is assumed that the dimensions exist as stated (points, lines, planes, space, etc). Without these assumed unproven truths, the rest of geometry falls appart. But again, it is FAITH at the root of it. And as one who has studied this stuff, dang anoying.
It even makes the Descartian statement fustrating ‘I think therefore I am.’ Because at the root, there is still an unprovable beginning.
For instance in Geometry, it is assumed that the dimensions exist as stated (points, lines, planes, space, etc). Without these assumed unproven truths, the rest of geometry falls appart.
The axioms of Geometry are not simply “assumed”; they’re definitions.
Geometry is a logical construct that happens to map in an incredibly useful way to the real world – but it’s not that one could “disprove” points and lines in Geometry as such.
At most one could prove that the real world doesn’t match Pythagoras and Descartes – and then it would “fall apart” in real-world application precisely to the extent that there was a mis-match … but it would remain coherent and not fall apart as a logical system in reference to itself.
(Which in fact it doesn’t actually match the real world! It just doesn’t matter at all in our normal-scale, non-relativistic frames of reference.
Just like Newtonian mechanics is not-right-but-close-enough until you start going real high, real fast, or checking your timings down to the picosecond…
With a little in-flight correction Newton’s physics could probably get you to the moon and back in one piece. With Einstein’s, you can do the whole trip on a program, so to speak.)
“(math, science and religion) still rest on faith. Faith that reason works – which is inductively shown true, not deductively”
Math and logic do not depend on any sort of faith. They do not depend on some underlying “reason” that “works” or “doesn’t work.” They are instances of reason itself.
Truth, in a logical sense, can only be established deductively. Inductively, only a kind of statistical, probable “truth” can be established.
Saying that science can’t/doesn’t prove things is an admission of limitation, not license to act as if it has.
One could equally say that religion isn’t in the business of proving things. That doesn’t lend it extra credibility, it provides reason for healthy skepticism.
All perfectly true, nor have I ever argued otherwise. My beef is with the profligate abuse of the notion of “proof,” not any of Simberg’s other contentions.
We do many things on an assumptive basis. To walk across the floor is to some degree an act of faith: just because it held you last time doesn’t mean it can’t possibly collapse this time. Nor does walking across the floor and living through the experience prove that the next person to try it will survive it.
Proof — certainty — ironclad guarantees that we’ll get what we want: these are things no one can have, outside the realm of completely abstract formal systems. That doesn’t mean our knowledge is no better than guesswork; it does mean that everything we believe we know has some degree of uncertainty about it.
Thus shall it ever be, until each of us stands before the Bar of Judgment. And the certainties we’ll acquire at that juncture are not guaranteed to be pleasant.
Then a scientist should never say that “the Earth is 4.54 billion years old.”
He should say consistent observations of phenomena combined with assumptions that have yet to be falsified indicate the Earth to be 4.54 billion years old.
Scientist: Current theory and evidence suggests that the earth is 4G to 8G old.
Savvy politician: Heh heh, clever gotcha question, Michael Hainey. People today — astrophysicists, geologists, and religious sages alike — believe that the earth has existed for somewhere between 5700 and 10 BILLion years (must exaggerate the B like Sagan and others have occasionally done), but we’re always testing and refining our knowledge. Why, the great Isaac Newton refused to take seriously the possibility that the earth might be older than 5700 years. The count of Buffon estimated it at about 75K years. Lord Kelvin was convinced by the evidence he examined that it was 20M years, while Samuel Haughton thought 2.3G years was reasonable. In 1910, George Becker estimated it as at least 55M years, and in the 1930s, John Joly pegged it at about 89M years. In the 1950s Clair Patterson estimated it as around 4.5G years.
Always express recognition that it’s a gotcha question, and mention the questioner’s name (reporters love to hear their own names and see them in print). Depending on the circumstances, and the particular question, this is done in different ways, not just the straight-forward or long-winded one of my example. And always smile, and laugh at the reporter’s lame attempt (unless you’ve got a dufus laugh like Joe Biteme).
I would LOVE to see one of mainstream hacks get an answer like that.
Sigh. I’m getting tired of this copout. Science most definitely claims to prove things. The more repeated experiments produce the same result, the greater the statistical probability approaches 100%. At a certain point, you call it done and say the matter is proven scientifically. This is why physicists don’t pay any attention to someone claiming to have invented a perpetual motion machine.
The real issue here is that much of what passes for science these days (and, yes, evolutionary theory, I am looking at you) has nothing whatsoever to do with science. THE key to the scientific method is experimentation. That was the revolutionary concept. Every other tenet of the scientific method already existed as part of Aristotle’s philosophy.
Evolutionary theory, and much of what passes for science these days, is simply a return to the methods of Aristotle: Observe, hypothesize, persuade, consensus, where Consensus equals fact.
Consensus can be rigged. Just look no further than the phoney climate “consensus”. We have “social scientists” telling the world what natural scientists think.
Consensus doesn’t mean squat in a politicized environment.
I’d say there have been far more cosmic collisions than apples we have observed falling from trees. So, considering the infinitesimal probability of cosmic dust bumping about in just the right fashion for complex living organisms to happen to form in the right place at the right time, the statistical proximity to 100% “proves” that we can’t exist — with far more certainty than we’ve “proven” that gravity makes apples fall downward.
Science most definitely claims to prove things.
No, it doesn’t. But people speaking in its name do. Think of it like members of mainstream denominations justifying a vote for Obama by invoking the name of Christ.
Science is not in the business of proving things.
I certainly didn’t mean to imply otherwise. My point was that science can’t prove anything, because its own foundations are axiomatic, and ultimately rests on faith. But your point that it’s about disproving things, not proving them, is well taken, and one that I’ve often made myself in the past.
Kurt Goedel:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_theorems
This is the (in)famous theory that all mathematical systems have built-in ‘truths’ that may be apparently ‘true’ but simply cannot be proven.
The corollary to this is that there are ‘falsehoods’ that cannot be disproven.
Thus all mathematical systems have ‘unsolvable’ contradictions / paradoxes.
This is, in the realm of mathematics and apparently applies to science as well.
And by extension, also to religion/theology.
Thus this Theorem is very, very annoying, as it should be.
Especially for all those secularist, agnostics who say only Science matters and that God is dead or doesn’t exist, and that the Universe/Existence is just cold, dead matter.
Take that, all you smarty-pants, know-it-all, Scientists !
P.S. Also all you Mullahs and/or Preachers !
The reason why the GOP has more problems with mainstream science than does the Dems, is that polls show that half of rank-and-file Republicans reject the modern Theory of Evolution and instead believe creationism. And many of those social conservatives have been crusading all over the country to dilute or even remove teaching the Theory of Evolution in public schools.
The Establishment Clause of the Bill of Rights forbids a public school from teaching religious dogma as truth to students. And creationism is nothing but a rationalization for Biblical literalism.
So Rubio is incorrect here. Public schools cannot give families a choice between evolution and creationism. If parents want that for their children, they either have to enroll them in private schools that teach it that way, or homeschool their kids.
The Establishment Clause of the Bill of Rights forbids a public school from teaching religious dogma as truth to students.
Not true. The First Amendment reads, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
Strictly speaking, that means that Congress—and only Congress—may not act to establish a state religion, whether any of the variants of Christianity, or of Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Wicca, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, or any other belief system, including politically-correct atheism. It says nothing about public schools, which did not exist at the time, nor about the states choosing to teach “religious dogma as truth.”
Ah, you say—but the First Amendment has been applied to the states by the courts. Indeed it has—and, for that matter, the federal government, via expenditures of tax money, has inserted its tentacles into local schools. Accordingly, local schools may not appear to endorse a particular religion, lest it appear that this be a state endorsement of such, i.e., an “establishment of religion.”
Does this mean that religion may not be taught in public schools? Of course not. There is no reason why religion(s) may not be taught as a subject, such as “comparative religion.” A religion-based theory of the origin of the world, or of mankind (not the same thing), can, therefore, be taught in a public school—just not in a science class. That does not mean that what is taught in science class is “true” and what is taught in religion class is “not true”—it means merely that they are not the same thing. Any student who is expected to be able to have the analytical skill to be able to absorb the differences between various religions, or be able to comprehend the basics of cell structure, should be able to understand this; certainly those who are paid to teach them should be able to.
Frankly, however, I find the immense amount of heat over this subject bewildering, since I have found, in adulthood, that my knowledge of the age of the world is of far less practical use than the ability to write a coherent sentence or to do simple math—both of which are skills that, increasingly, public schools appear incapable of imparting to those within their charge.
One of the reasons our education system has lost it’s rigor is because these politically correct topics and subjects have captured too much of the curriculum. I accept the theory of evolution, however it is just one speck in the ocean of scientific understanding. There are so many subfields in biology that are both intellectually stimulating and relevant to societies needs. My high school biology class did not even begin to scratch the surface, but we spent a good chunk of time on the boring subject of evolution. In has become a sort of “religion” to some teachers who feel a need to defend it against creationists. I fear the same is probably true today about global warming “science” (I don’t consider it science because it is agenda driven and the “science” is not separated from the authoritarian solutions). We need curriculums that prepare future doctors and engineers, not activists for the United Nation’s agenda.
In terms of pedagogical importance, learning about the age of the Earth and the theory of evolution probably ranks, for most students, below the ability to learn butter sculpture, since far more students will likely find butter sculpture a marketable skill. Evolution and age-of-the-Earth are emphasized because the Left is attempting to use the power of the state to pursue its war on religion.
Back in the early ’60s, elementary school kids in the Chicago area frequently went on field trips to the Field Museum of Natural History. The lunchroom where kids ate their box lunches was decorated with a cartoon mural—of cavemen and dinosaurs, together. Nobody gave it a second thought; nobody got bent out of shape that this mural was sending a “Young Earth” message, or that the cartoons seemingly contradicted the information that was available in the museum proper. The mural is long gone now, a victim of remodeling and renovation. Unfortunately, it appears that the commonsense viewpoint that it represented is long gone, too.
Evolution is no more “emphasized” than is the atomic theory or the germ theory of disease. They’re all modern scientific theories.
The Theory of Evolution is the cornerstone of modern biological science. If you don’t believe that our children need to learn modern science, that’s a separate debate we can have. But if you accept the need to learn modern science, then throwing out evolution makes about as much sense as throwing out the atomic theory. (Most kids aren’t going to grow up to become physicists either. Does that mean they shouldn’t be learning about atoms, nuclei, protons, etc.?)
I am not suggesting throwing it out, just stop putting it on a pedestal.
One of the problems is that when a Leftist refers to “evolution”, he’s referring to “atheistic evolution”. So those of us who think Intelligent Design makes more sense than the “turtles all the way down” creation of the universe theory, and the “all by its own self” evolution theory and that “yom” might have meant “a time” are lumped in with Young Earth Creationists.
I think it’s time to hold Leftists’ feet to the fire when it comes to simultaneously believing in Young Earth temperature models and Old Earth creation models.
Buzzsaw’s perception is right in my book. What is being pushed in most public schools is not a scientific argument but a philosophical one – evolution being taught as superior substitute for religion. The real argument isn’t science but secularism.
This line about evolution being the basis of modern biological science has become popular in many academia circles. However, anyone who has taken a trip to medical school can tell you that the the cornerstone of biological science is cellular biology, being the cell is the basis of all biological science.
And the cell is a subject that the so called unifying theory of biological evolution is woefully inadequate to explain…
Evolution is considered the cornerstone of modern biology because, up until the Modern Synthesis, there was no way to bring together all the observed facts of biology under one unifying theory. Even Darwin could not bring all the facts together, but you should read a biography of his life to understand how fundamentally the idea of Natural Selection transformed natural sciences.
You lost me at “education system has lost it’s rigor…” lol
So sorry. I was not an english major. Glad to know you are perfect.
Oh, come on. Your typo was ironic and I chuckled…
I think Jeanette was merely expressing puzzlement at the notion that the educational system was ever rigorous. It might have been in my parents’ or grandparents’ day. And I would not be surprised if the Roman Catholic schools were still rigorous today. But it has been a long time since the public schools were rigorous.
The Supreme Court ruled on this in 1987.
In the case Edwards v. Aguillard (1987), the Supreme Court ruled that a Louisiana law requiring that creation science be taught in public schools, along with evolution, was unconstitutional because the law was specifically intended to advance a particular religion, and did not have a legitimate secular purpose.
And this wasn’t the only such case.
Every time the creationists have brought this issue up to the courts, they have lost.
You miss the point. Religion is not science, and should not be taught as such—but neither is science religion. And, frankly, the Leftist obsession with “the age of the Earth” and “evolution,” in both the political and pedagogic spheres, is a matter of their trying to pass “science” off as a superior substitute for religion.
Bingo.
Atheo-Scientism is the new religion, complete with it’s own creation myths. And challenging this new orthodoxy will earn you punishment, censure, ridicule, ostracization, persecution, excommunication.
Then again, I tried to tell my liberal aunt that over the past several billion years, there have been temperature cycles just like this latest one (related to sunspot cycles) and that Greenland used to be green during a previous warm cycle, and that AGW proponents only show the last 12,000 years or so on their temperature chart so that previous warming cycles aren’t shown; either AGW guys are misleading her, or they’re Young Earthers. She didn’t believe me because of course because “billions of years of temperature cycles” doesn’t fit with the Liberalist dogma. IIRC, Rubio alluded to this; we need to keep pointing out that the AGW crowd appears to be Young Earth believers.
Even for young earthers they’re lousy.
Just tell them that until they explain the Medieval Warming Period and the Little Ice Age you’re NOT going to take them seriously.
Perhaps if they delve into the information in order to convert you they may learn something and become converts in return.
What scares me a lot more though is when the Democrat leaders start quoting the Bible.
I suspect that the vast majority the Democrat Party leadership, much less the rank and file, cannot even articulate the modern synthesis of The Theory of Evolution. They accept it not because they know what it means but because they want to hang out with the “cool kids”.
If we actually taught TOE properly in schools with all its flaws and horrible science and problems, it wouldn’t have nearly the traction it does. TOE is more accurately a hypothesis, and a pretty poor one at that. But it has become the holy grail and litmus test among self-proclaimed intellectual. You must believe or you will not be allowed into the club of “the intelligent.”
Oh, and the establishment clause of the Constitution was talking about a state church. Like the Church of England or the Lutheran church in Germany. It was NOT talking about a religious ideology like Christianity. Even Jefferson’s famous letter liberals love to quote for it’s wall of separation was him assuring the Baptists the state would not be interfering in their religious activities.
But the public schools have for decades been teaching faith based topics. Manmade global warming due to carbon dioxide emissions anyone? And for people of faith, if the public schools are now dabbling in the faith based stuff they choose to promulgate, they can bloody well dabble in different faith based stuff that some parents demand they promulgate. Cheers -
When a big part of the Dem push to gain a permanent majority involves literally using its control over education, K-12 and higher ed, to change the way minds work, bringing up Science is a “can’t lose” strategy. The typical Republican politician does not know the Government agencies are now pushing the idea that social theory is Science for Policy Making purposes. They will not have read the report on the EPA”s “Road Ahead” released yesterday where they want to use Systems Thnking which is political social theory to make predictions about the future. They will not know that federal grant making for science and math, STEM, and the upcoming Common Core Science Standards are all grounded in social constructivism. A view of the world and science that traces back to that non-scientist theorist, Karl Marx.
http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/we-need-a-radical-change-in-our-mode-of-consciousness-even-a-new-sense-of-being-human/ describes the education, science, ecological, and economic vision the Dem bureaucrats and their constituent interest groups are quietly trying to make a reality. Every Republican politician with aspirations for the future, their own or the country’s, needs to get these fundamental facts now about “Science.”
Before it all becomes a fait accompli and Big Data, computers, and models are being used by the EPA and other federal agencies to plan the economy and our individual behaviors and what we are allowed to know every bit as much as Anything the Kremlin ever aspired to do.
I would never have guessed how handy a history major would become to accurately perceiving reality. Probably why the liberal arts and the transmission of accurate knowledge itself, has now come under such organized attack.
I haven’t ever heard gravity referred to as the Theory of Gravity. Rather, I believe it is considered a scientific law. Am I incorrect here?
The theory of general relativity (as it is often called) is the modern theory of gravity. But one must distinguish between a scientific theory of gravity and gravity as a name for an everyday experience.
Of course, the adjective “general” modifies “theory,” not “relativity.” So the above should read “the general theory of relativity.”
That’s actually not true, “general” distinguishes between “general relativity” and “special relativity”.
What is not true?
Come to think of it, either placement of the adjective is defensible: “the theory of general relativity” means the theory known as general relativity, which is also shorthand for the general theory of relativity. The drawback of the phrase “theory of general relativity” is that it gives some persons the false idea that “general relativity” is a thing which the theory is about, when in fact it’s just the name of the theory.
From memory, it’s only a law if it is always true with no exceptions. For a long time, Newton’s laws fit the bill. However, more accurate measurements found special cases where Newtonian physics were inaccurate. Relativity was a better description for what was observed. Despite 100 years of tests, relativity has held up remarkably well but it still isn’t called the Law of General Relativity. I think they got away from advancing theories to laws over 100 years ago. Offhand, I can’t think of any new scientific theories being declared “laws” for a very long time. It’s quite possible that someday someone will find a flaw in the Theory of General Relativity where it breaks. If that happens, someone will eventually come up with a new theory to better explain the discrepancy or perhaps general relativity will be modified. Until then, general relativity is the best thing we have.
The same applies to the theory of evolution; it’s the best description for explaining the change of species over time and/or changing environment.
No, just the opposite. A physical theory is a model that accounts for (or tries to account for) how or why some set of observations occurs. A physical “law”, on the other hand, is merely a formula or rule of thumb that summarizes some set of observations without necessarily giving any insight into how or why the observations should be as they are. This is the sense of the term when we refer to, say, the Law of Gravity (the force due to gravity between two objects is proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them), or Boyle’s Law relating the temperature and pressure of a gas, or the law relating the angle of refraction of light to the refractive index of the materials involved, etc.
A law does not necessarily have to hold 100 percent of the time, although the more often a law does hold, the more well-known, well-used, and trusted it tends to become, primarily because you can use it to reasonably predict the behavior of things. When a proper scientist says that some observation “violates the laws of physics”, he is merely saying that it does not fit one or more of these well-known formulas or rules-of-thumb. That does *not* mean that the observation necessarily contradicts known science. However, a non-scientist will use the same phrase to imply that the observation was impossible and therefore mistaken or fraudulent.
What you learned as the “Law” of Gravity is just an abstraction; the underlying mechanism of gravity is still under vigorous debate.
To this day, there is no theory of gravity which is consistent with both relativity and quantum mechanics. We know it’s there, but not exactly why. That doesn’t mean we can’t make predictions based on what we do know, though.
This is different from climate science, where we don’t understand what’s going on, and can’t make predictions, either. Effectively, we don’t have much useful knowledge about it at all, even though we know a lot about the underlying physics.
No, the Law of Gravity is the mathematical equation describing the attractive force experienced by any two or more masses Gm1m2/r^2.
A Theory of Gravity (there are several) is an attempt to explain why the law exists.
That’s Newton’s “law”. It’s close, but not perfect. Einstein’s law does better. Nothing is perfect. That is not “the” law of gravity. That is an equation that is pretty good, but not in any way “the law of gravity”.
Go learn some physics.
The effects of gravity are observable and repeatable today … as opposed to a theory that assumes time-invariant natural processes that are NEVER exposed to intelligent intervention, all of which is beyond our ability to observe today.
But the greater reason that gravity does not cause the controversy evolution does, is that gravity does not conflict with the alternative worldviews held in our society … and therefore it is not being used as a simplistic litmus test for one’s intellect by those who hold a particular ideology – who seek to promote their view EXCLUSIVELY as the One True Way by using this litmus test to brand their opponents as “ignorant”, and with the help of a loophole in the Establishment Clause that exists because blind faith in one’s own omniscience does not fit the traditional definition of “religion”.
I guess I’m thinking as an engineer and not a physicist.
I’ve got to pick this nit…
Evolution is a fact in the same way that things falling are fact.
What is theoretical (i.e. – what exists as a descriptive model to best match available data) about each is the method by which each phenomenon occurs. In the case of evolution, the more complete description of the theory should be “evolution by natural selection and random genetic mutation”.
I was “taught” evolution is school and had no problem believing – as a Christian – that God set things up in a petri dish and just stood back and let it rip. Now I think it’s a bunch of garbage.
If anything, their prescious fossil record shows that things didn’t “evolve” – they died out because they couldn’t even adapt to a slight change in their habitat. Then – suddenly – a HUGE explosion of NEW stuff arrives on the scene.
They can’t explain it so they just ignore it and everybody that brings it up is a caveman science hater.
That’s the least accurate description of evolution I’ve ever read. You might want to think about what you mean by “slight” changes causing extinction and new species “suddenly” appearing.
“suddenly” is a relative term, when you’re talking about 4 1/2 billion years (~ 20,000 years iirc). And of course, for God a moment is like a thousand years since He’s infinite.
Not all that inaccurate, as she is referring to punctuated equilibrium, which is the notion that periodic catastrophes – extinction events – from time to time clean house in a percentage of evolutionary niches which are quickly (a few tens of thousands to millions of years) refilled by new species adapted to the new openings. There is an ongoing argument between those that believe they have evidence of catastrophic events over geologic time that drive evolution and those that do not. Fun argument. Cheers -
No, the existence of species and variations within a species are fact. Evolution is an attempt to explain why that exists. A task that it actually fails quite miserably at, since it has never made a valid prediction, has never been experimentally verified (no evolutionary path has ever been reproduced in a laboratory), is mathematically absurd (specified complexity, information theory, Haldane’s dilemma) and is invoked to explain diametrically opposed observations (junk DNA, lack of junk DNA).
Evolutionary theory is just about as big a piece of junk science as you can get.
Ah, you’re a Dembski adherent…
It’s a good summation of the problem, unless somehow being able to pin a label on it magically dismisses the case.
ChrisC – thank you. Yes, evolution is a fact. “Theory” does not mean “conjecture” when referring to theory of evolution, theory of relativity, quantum theory, etc. The theory is the body of knowledge regarding the observed facts. And if God chose evolution to bring us into existence, who are we to question Him?
I like to use the term Language.
Math is a Language. The words in Math are the Numbers.
I say 2+1=3 because enough people around me also say it, and life is too short to wake up every morning and decide what what every Word or Number means all over again.
Humans can have conversations and do business because we have agreed on how we will measure everything, including time. We have even sorted out how to synch up the various calendars that are out there. There is a table in my edition KP Standard Catalogue of World Paper Money and in my KP Standard Catalogue of World Coins (I collect currency and coins) that lists 10 different calendars.
Were any of us to travel to another planet, where another sentient species has arrived at their own Language and Mathematics, we would learn quickly enough that 2+1=4+7, and that on Earth their 4 is our 2 and on their planet our 7 is their 1.
We already know enough to not be confused when someone calls your cat a gato. We already know that a month in the Jewish Lunar calendar is not the same as a month in the Gregorian or Western calendar.
Why is it so difficult to accept the idea that 1 will not always be 1, and that a year on Earth may not be the same as year on the third planet around Alpha Centauri?
And why do we not focus on what is truly important: we are all here on this Earth, helping to shape our own futures and the futures of our children’s children not yet born.
And why cannot people understand that there are some conversations simply not worth starting because they bog us down in disputing the minor points of lawyers & accountants [this latter is how I see the question of whether or not Planned Parenthood or any Non-Profit should get federal funding - with all the good work they say they do surely there are enough good-hearted people out there freely willing to support them out of their own pockets], and of LAB TECHNICIANS [as opposed to people exploring the universe using the Scientific Method].
The aliens would have different names for the numbers, just as different human languages have different names for them. But otherwise there had better be no difference. Who needs an arithmetic that doesn’t predict real world outcomes?
Of course, I think a lot of this anxiety over teaching this or that idea about how the earth came to be among other things would die away if we just instituted a comparative religions credit as part of our core curriculum standards to be taught to all students. I’d could even see an atheist segment to it. I’m sure the left would never allow it, but I can always dream.
Evolution is not just a ‘theory’, there is so many different kinds of evidence for it from so many different directions that it is as close to a fact as science can get, considering that everything in science is subject to change when new evidence appears.
But really, what is the fuss all about? Why are SOME Christians so exercised on the subject of evolution? Why can’t they just be good Christians without freaking out about an established scientific discovery, even to the point of suggesting that evolution somehow is the work of the Devil? This exhibits a serious misunderstanding of the meaning of religion and the difference between spiritual and material. If you want advice about the meaning of life, how to relate to your fellow man, what is your relationship to the Almighty, you go to religion, science has nothing to say about those topics. If you want to know about the natural world you use science, you look at the physical world to learn about it, not some book written 2000 years ago by desert tribal people. Looking to the Bible to find out about how the physical world works is about as smart as believing that astrology tells you anything useful about your own life. How hard can that be to understand? MOST Christians don’t have any problem accepting science and religion on their own terms.
I respect people who are Christians. I hate the atheist attacks on religion because atheists may think they’re for science when in actuality they’re just mean people trying to make other people as miserable as they are. Why get into the weeds with people like that? Being hip to science is important in this day and age. And by the way, I live in a community of ‘progressives,’ a motley crew of doddering old hippies and senile leftists and you wouldn’t believe the crap they believe: homeopathy, chemtrails, that radio waves will scramble their DNA, that GMOs will poison their food. They get cancer ant try to heal it with natural herbs and die. Conservative Christians have nothing on those wackos and shouldn’t be defensive. And of course there’s AGW. I think Christians should just throw the question back at them: what ridiculous nonsense do YOU believe, and see what comes out of the woodwork.
You should dig into what the word “theory” means.
That is a very good question.
But it is a grown-over sideline into a town that dried up a hundred years ago when the mine was spent.
I am a proud Anti-Intellectual.
I have learned and cast aside as useless more knowledge than many of my supposedly Intelligent Intellectual friends.
This is a nation of people who think that being smart means being able to win at Jeopardy or Trivial Pursuit.
For it is written:
“I will destroy the wisdom of the wise,
And bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent.”
My point exactly. Don’t confuse mere knowledge of the material world with spiritual understanding.
Yes. “Theory” is just a synonym for “model”. A model can be regarded as “true” (or some would say, “factual”) exactly to the extent that it accounts for observations and allows us to make predictions. It is true while it “works”, until it doesn’t.
Note that it is entirely possible for there to be many “true” models for a set of observed phenomenon. The job of Science at the point is to winnow down the list, or at least hold a beauty contest among them (which is more elegant or more practical for calculations, etc)
Basil…the biggest objection many Christians have is that it is incompatible with many important biblical doctrines. If you toss God out of creation, you must also toss out a swath of other beliefs. For example, the doctrine that some refer to as “original sin”: “Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned…(Romans 5:12 ESV). For many people, these are precious, sincerely held beliefs that are not just casually discarded (or tortured into submission to mean something completely different.)
I am not Christian. I am Jewish and if the purpose of teaching Creationism in school is to buttress beliefs like Original Sin then we are definitely in the realm of state sponsored religion. I really think the important thing to teach is that under true critical thinking there is no reason to believe evolution or the big bang theory have any special importance in discussing religion. They seem scientifically important only because they seem to point a dagger at a religious narrative. That is not science at all. That is polemics and people need to see it that way. The true scientific method would have an hypothesis of prove there is no Creator and then in a controlled environment prove it. Not going to happen therefore science has no opinion on the matter.
You should remember that once upon a time racism and eugenics were established science and anyone who didn’t believe in them suffered the same ostracism that happens now with evolutionary theories. If they taught the real conflicting and contradictory evolutionary theories in school it wouldn’t bother me, but they don’t; they teach cosmic nihilism and call it science.
I disbelieve evolution because I refuse to be forced to believe anything. I’ve read all the major works on evolution and remain skeptical but persuadable. But I will not bow to coercion, whether by law or society. More importantly, evolutionary psychology shows the same penchant as most religions, political movements and philosophies of history: it tries to convince us all that we don’t have free will. Blame bad behavior the Norns, fate, destiny, absolute predestination, kismet, karma, society, class, race, instinct, etc, but never ever accept that I behaved badly because I chose to. Since the cosmic nihilist version of evolution I learned in school has no basis in science, I feel no need to even engage it intellectually, as it is utter bunkum. There is no evidence that the universe and everything in it came into existence by random accident; it is nothing but assertion, yet I’m expected to just swallow? Not happening.
This is not a matter of Christians attacking science; it is a matter of nihilists attacking science and Christians by using junk science as a wedge.
And for the record I am agnostic about the life of the Earth; it doesn’t matter in the slightest to my religious beliefs whether she’s 10,000 years old or 4.3 billion. It’s irrelevant; time is measured only unto man. I don’t care whether God built the world in 7 literal days or 4.3 billion of our subjective years. Irrelevant. He exists outside of time, which is an intrinsic paradox anyway. I can be persuaded, but nobody’s trying even slightly. Only Gould made a small effort at stretching evolutionary theory to fit known facts; everyone else, from Darwin to Dawkins, works the other way, stretching the facts to fit the theory, and commanding us all to believe.
I don’t really respond to commands very well. I’m an American.
How could eugenics be considered a science? It was, and is, a prescriptive program for the betterment of a biological population. Perhaps one ought to think of it as a kind of engineering. Like all engineering, you can’t “debunk” eugenics with verbal arguments. It either works or it doesn’t work.
As for evolution, you need not accept the dubious assertions of modern evolutionary psychology to be persuaded that Darwin’s account of the origin of species is basically right. The one can’t be deduced for the other by strict logical reasoning.
(Lest someone think my calling a theory only “basically right” is an evasion, I’ll try to define precisely what I mean. As far as I’m concerned, any scientific theory is “basically right” which is the most useful known guide to the class of phenomena that it studies and which is not contradicted by any known observation. Of course, inherent in this formulation is the understanding that science is not a literal description of reality, and that all scientific theories may sooner or later be supplanted by better theories.)
This, as usual, is a soup of science, religion, education and politics. The chefs have varying levels of education in one or more fields of study. Thus it is worthwhile to consider the taxonomy of the fields of knowledge. The first consideration is authority. Never, never, never, assume. When a scientist expounds about religion, put a question mark next to his thoughts. Never assume he knows of what he speaks. Ditto a priest discussing quantum computing. Hard wire the question mark next to any politician’s words.
Religion is the study of man’s relationship with a supernatural Being, God. No scientist can put a meter on love, and quantify it. Yet we know that a young Marine will smother a live grenade for his buddies. Love is the willing of the good of another (St. Thomas Aquinas); it has little to do with sex. The Marine wills his buddies to live. A scientist studies the natural universe; he, normally, is ignorant of theology.
I have no problem with a Rabbi, nun or Imam, teaching Trig to kids. I have enormous problems that most Americans are just dumb about math. Yet many pontificate about a post doctoral topic, climate change, as if they knew something. In the recent election, America commited suicide due to energy, as stupid people, by the millions, voted to destroy their future. Elections have consequences.
A Supreme Court ruled that there is a wall between church and state, a sound policy based on our Constitution’s First Amendments. Centuries of slaughter have occurred due to religious wars. It has not happened in the USA, yet. Why? Any brick layer can tell you. Every wall has a top course, above which, the air flows freely back and forth, unrestrained. Schools should teach science, math, and civics, which means being considerate to those who hold different beliefs than you, and survey the major religious beliefs. I took a comparative religion course in a Catholic University, studied Atheism, Buddhism, Islam, a host of different beliefs, including Darwin’s theory of evolution. I learned facts, which is the purpose of education. America’s conflict on religion vs. evolution is primarily a power struggle among stupid people; it has little legitimate content.
i do not care what Obama’s, or Rubio’s views on evolution. I care greatly that my federal government not dictate education policy to the states, other than fostering some measurable national standard defining educational levels. If a college graduate is incapable of signing his name on a check, because he was an All American football player, or if a coach, teacher, or priest, rapes children, I want federal action.
Well, the federalli ARE in your schools dictating what is fact and what is fiction with no evidence or standing to dictate either.
“Theory” of Gravity?!? Let me know when things start falling up for you. Or if they start slowing down for that matter. I guess that they don’t teach that the LAW of gravity is a mathematical relationship that was established in 1686. No? Anybody? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton%27s_law_of_universal_gravitation
We sent men to the moon and back with those calculations, and every ballistic missile from snowballs to ICBMs relies on it being true. Must just be a theory though. I DENY THIS FALSE PROPHECY! Hmmm, I guess I don’t get my own facts.
You really should spend more time and be getting angrier worrying about what Obama’a Tax & Fiscal Policies will have on your Retirement Savings and the value of your home.
Apples fall from trees and provided you duck them there’s no harm done.
Moody’s decided that US Treasury Notes need another downgrade, or Ben Bernanke launches Quantitive Easement XXXVIII and your ability to hold a job now or not have to eat dog food in your old age is jeopardized.
As for sending men to the Moon, the way we’re going you won;t be able to catch the 4 train to Midtown Manhattan.
You need to educate yourself on the use of the word “theory” in science.
The “Law” of gravity is an abstraction; citing Newton is cute, because Newtonian physics hasn’t been the primary model for, what fifty years? More?
(As I understand it, Newton’s model falls down at high relative velocities or in unusually strong gravitational fields.)
You need to be told twice, don’t you, boy.
You are far too Sophisticated for your own good.
For it is written:
“I will destroy the wisdom of the wise,
And bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent.”
Newton’s theory is still valid, it has been elaborated, not overthrown.
Stupid in America
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bx4pN-aiofw&feature=related
On the separation of church and state in the US plus the feds not supposed to be dictating education curriculum, things just got massively more complicated.
http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/are-the-new-3-rs-and-the-student-centered-inquiry-driven-classroom-a-means-to-eastern-spirituality/ . It turns out the actual Common Core implementation is completely permeated with all these practices that track back to Alice Bailey.
It’s also behind the push for unscripted, untaught, non-linear indeterminate situation problem solving being mandated now in both college and K-12 classrooms.
There turned out to be mountains of declarations on this point. Apparently the separation of Church and State involved getting JudeoChristian beliefs and values away from US classrooms. I would be surprised if Madalyn Murray O’Hare were not familiar with Alice Bailey and her work when she started her suit over prayer in the classroom.
I’m amused by the number of people who huffily declare their shock at finding the word “theory” applied to gravity. Way to expose your scientific illiteracy, folks!
This silly boy likes to repeat himself.
He thinks like people who go to a foreign country and expect them to speak their language speak: saying the same things over and over again, louder and louder, thinking the people he is speaking to will do anything other than ignore him.
I’m not deaf, silly boy, and no one else here is.
I am just ignoring you from now on.
The mistake that you’re making is assuming that the theory had to come before the law. It doesn’t work that way. First you observe something, then you develop the theory. The fact that you don’t have a theory doesn’t nullify the law.
Newton came up with a “pretty good” theory (model would probably be a better word) for gravity that provided no insight into just exactly what was causing the attraction. So after Newton, we had a law, and a useful description that allowed astronomers to calculate the paths of bodies pretty well, but not perfectly. Einstein came up with a better theory, which produces Newton’s theory if you make some simplifying assumptions. After Einstein, various people tried to make Einstein’s theory consistent with quantum mechanics. Nobody has taken that all the way.
So here we are. We know gravity exists. We have a good theory, that is useful as long as you don’t try to apply it to the microscopic universe. We don’t have a complete and falsifiable theory of gravity. Deal with it.
Conservatives are better and smarter than this self-imposed Inferiority Complex.
We know what matters.
We know what chickens are already coming home to roost.
We know why more people in academia are essentially working as Temps (Associate Professorships and short-term Lecturers are cheap – using grad students is cheaper still).
We know why retirees are more and more likely to be eating cat food out of the can in the presently foreseeable future.
We know how the rest of the world is going to be laughing at us more and more moving forward.
And we should know enough to point out that Evolution vs Creationism and the rest of this Pseudo-Scientific Squabbling is Bullshit, plain and simple.
We know this, but are too cowed by having gone to college to have the stones to say what I once said to a particularly ineffective English professor at my Alma Mater (to which I still owe a $40 pledge to their Alumni Drive made in 1986):
“I would rather blow my brains out than do with the what you have done with yours.”
“… it should be done not in a science class but in one on comparative religions (of which science is one).”
No, you are mistaken. Even if most people would frame it like that, the correct place is philosophy or history of ideas. But we don’t teach such courses in the schools.
There are plenty of professions, including Rocket Scientist that don’t require you to study Philosophy or the History of Ideas.
Mind you, you’re probably a better Rocket Scientist if you have studied those two subjects. But you could study them outside of your degree programs, and pay a lot less for the classes.
The same applies to Art, Art History, and Literature.
Far too many people pay far too much for classes that do not give them a good return on their investment.
My degree is a BA in English. I’ve followed up with Pre-Engineering (I stumbled over Mechanical Physics) and Economics (my BS detector was off and blaring halfway into the first year). Also, a lot of language studies (German, Japanese, Spanish).
I have to say, my education did not begin until after i graduated with that BA in English.
And that the degree was printed on paper too stiff to even serve as toilet paper.
It is time to put Higher Education back in its proper place.
“…evolution is in fact not a “fact.” It, like gravity, is a scientific theory.”
I would quarrel with this. It seems to me that evolution, like gravity, is an “observation”. Pharmaceutical companies do not need a definitive theory of evolution to know that new vaccines are needed every flu season. Theories are proposed is to account/explain observations and the most widely known theory of evolution has been a variation/updating of Darwin’s Theory of Natural Selection.
So far as I know, we don’t have much of a theory of gravity except that it’s a property of matter.
Badly phrased. Pharmaceutical companies actually do need to know what to expect in the next season’s flu bug. They DO need a reliable theory of evolution.
Legal liability has a remarkable tendancy to focus attention on the bottom line.
Evolution of microbes, not of major species. And none of this tells us what happened in the past.
Evolution, whether true or not, seems to break one of the main rules of science; it cannot be falsified. Every time it’s disproved, they just rework the theory. And we don’t have time machines.
I DO count the color change in birds, possibly in response to environmental changes (coal smoke, as an example of “observing evolution”.
There ain’t no such thing as a “missing link”. Evolutionary changes are incremental and only in the passage of sufficient generations does one species supplant another. Also note that humans create such catogories as “species”.
That all being said, evolution is not a substitute religion. It does not address cosmology mcuh less theology. Years ago I attended a lecture by Dr. Stanley Jaki. Dr. Jaki was a Benedictine priest and chairman of the Physics Department at Seton Hall University. His was a voice of both spirit and reason.
creationism cannot be falsified, either. The seven-day creation period is affected by human constructs; who knows what those “days”, if they occurred, were really like?
I continue to be amazed at how the pieces in nature fit so seamlessly and how species either adapt to changing circumstances or die. However, I do not presume to know why that is.
Never assume the good intentions of anyone from the press, especially the main stream media.
This is backwards:
“Now, in fact, I would prefer politicians who are conversant with science and its method”
Yes, but people like Rubio and Palin tend to be MORE conversant with science and its method that their inquisitors (and that i s what they are) who simply accept current dogma. To question the current orthodoxy requires study. Read Palin’s description of her “heresy trial” (my term) by Steven Schidt and others regarding this.
I repeat – enough heresy trials! Sarah Palin did not tell the oil exploration experts in Alaska not to use fossil layers in looking for oil, so what she believes is none of our business.
the point of science is discovery – to test out hypotheses and see if the evidence supports or refutes them. Each step in either direction is one step closer toward finding an answer. Unfortunately, mainstream science has adopted the Queen of Hearts approach: conclusion first, supporting data later.
Perhaps something Rubio and other Repubs should never lose sight of is that there is no such thing as a friendly interview; there is no mainstream media forum in which their views will be treated as legitimate and worthy of debate; there is only the effort to minimize and marginalize, to render the person as unworthy of being taken seriously. That Rubio’s and Obama’s views would so closely mirror one another, yet Marco’s are amplified while Baracks’ are buried is all the evidence anyone needs.
Does the RNC ever do media training for these folks? When asked an obvious gotcha question, serious consideration and a batch of atta-boys to the first politico who answers: “Seriously? This country faces enormous problems and you’re asking about (something like the age of Earth)? I get that your job is not to hear me out but to try and paint me as someone to be ignored; pardon me if I don’t play along. Now, do you have any questions on issues of substance?”
Science really cant disprove anything, because it is based on a set of unproven assumptions.
It is an imperfect tool for acquiring knowledge and understanding, nothing more.
Im not Anti-Science, but rather Anti-Scientism.
Not exactly. In fact, faith is the opposite of science (that is, faith is the avoidance of knowledge, while science is the pursuit of knowledge). OBJECTIVE REALITY is what we actually have — it is not a myth, fantasy, or assumption. Just try doing anything without it. You cannot leave home without objective reality, and you can’t stay home without it, either. You’re nowhere without it. You can’t even wish it away.
Well maybe, depending on how you interpret Bell’s inequality
You can’t interpret reality away any more than you can wish it away. Reality is independent of wishes and interpretations. To be is to be something in particular — regardless of what anybody thinks or wants. (The moon is out there — precisely somewhere — even if you are not looking at it.)
I’d love to have seen someone toss the “how old is the Earth” question right back at the reporters. “How old do YOU think it is, and why? Have you examined the evidence? Do you understand the science behind it? Why don’t you define an ‘isochron’ for me, and tell me how it’s used to give the age of a rock? Oh, you don’t know? Then I guess you’re taking it on faith, just as much as anyone else.”
I think a much more important question would be, “Where would you go to find out the age of the earth, and why?”
Fact-based should always be preferable to faith-based.
Unfortunately for you, metaphysics are what they are.
I admit I haven’t kept up with the developing arguments, but I’m somewhat mystified as to why the now-generally-admitted Big Bang no longer seems to be regarded as a big deal in debates of this sort. Once we’re agreed that space, time and matter can be traced to an origin at a particular point, it seems to me that other religio-scientific issues sink to a lesser level of significance.
Kudos to Basil for pointing out the gullibility of the Whole Foods crowd, who are at least as credulous as your average fundamentalist, and in no position to pose as defenders of “science.” Can’t be said often enough.