"The science is settled because we say so!"

The idea that skeptics of global warming are ignorant of science appears to be a myth.

Are global warming skeptics simply ignorant about climate science?

Not so, says a forthcoming paper in the journal Advances in Political Psychology by Yale Professor Dan Kahan. He finds that skeptics score about the same (in fact slightly better) on climate science questions.

The study asked 2,000 respondents nine questions about where they thought scientists stand on climate science.

On average, skeptics got about 4.5 questions correct, whereas manmade warming believers got about 4 questions right.

One question, for instance, asked if scientists believe that warming would “increase the risk of skin cancer.” Skeptics were more likely than believers to know that is false.

Skeptics were also more likely to correctly say that if the North Pole icecap melted, global sea levels would not rise. One can test this with a glass of water and an ice cube – the water level will not change after the ice melts. Antarctic ice melting, however, would increase sea levels because much of it rests on land.

The rise of "settled science" is a troubling development in science, since it appears to be little more than telling skeptics of a particular theory to be quiet. In reality there is no such thing as settled science: obsolete scientific theories are abandoned by scientists because the evidence no longer supports them, not because some authoritarian-minded group declares the debate over and henceforth heretics must repent. "Settled science" turns the scientific method on its head by replacing experimentation and observation with polling and (sometimes) bullying. In fact, "settled science" advocates sometimes bear an eerie resemblance to religious extremists who feel their beliefs have been blasphemed.

Perhaps the two scientific areas most damaged by the “settled science” myth are the theories of evolution and global warming. There are plenty of good scientists who hold a variety of views on these theories. But you wouldn’t know that if you relied on the popular media and the journalists who are enamored with the “settled science” myth. According to these journalists, there are the rational, intellectual “good guys” (supporters of the theories of global warming and evolution) and the anti-science anti-intellectual “bad guys” (anyone who dares to be skeptical). Unfortunately, there are some scientists – who really should know better! – who take the easy way out and embrace "settled science" to stop pesky debates before they start.

Certainly the history of science shows us that scientific debate can be heated at times, but is stifling dissent in the name of “settled science” really such a good idea? Why not follow the evidence where it leads? And are the theories of evolution and global warming really so fragile they cannot withstand some scrutiny?

A question of origins

More about this video can be found here.

Worship science? Not so fast!

According to the online Merraim-Webster Dictionary there are two definitions of scientism. The first is "methods and attitudes typical of or attributed to the natural scientist". The second is "an exaggerated trust in the efficacy of the methods of natural science applied to all areas of investigation (as in philosophy, the social sciences, and the humanities)".

It was the second definition that I was thinking of as I read this article about fraud in peer-reviewed scientific journals.

Key quote from the article:

Some 120 papers published in established scientific journals over the last few years have been found to be frauds, created by nothing more than an automated word generator that puts random, fancy-sounding words together in plausible sentence structures. As a result they have been pulled from the journals that originally published them.

The rise of scientism in Western society - an outright worship of science, in some cases - is one of the most disturbing societal trends in human history. Science has become a religion to many secularists, and is in danger of ceasing to be science at all.

Two examples of this scientism are the theories of evolution and global warming. Both are asserted to be "settled science" (read: holy scripture) by their more fanatical believers. Advocates of these theories in the scientific community are worshipped as priests or prophets. Dissenters, even if they are scientists, are smeared as heretics and enemies of the True Faith. Science is in danger of becoming a sacred priesthood in which only those who state a priori that everything must have a naturalistic explanation, or whose theories conform to what a handful say is real science, will be considered authentic scientists.

I believe than most scientists are distressed by the fraud uncovered in the aforementioned article. One of the forces driving this fraud is the "publish or perish" mentality in most major universities, in which young faculty members seeking tenure must publish a certain number of articles in peer-reviewed journals. In those circumstances the temptation to cut corners is powerful. But despite what many scientists may have come to believe, publication in a peer-reviewed scientific journal is not part of the scientific method. Perhaps it is time to reconsider the unusual emphasis many universities have on publication in journals.

Yet the real problem posed by scientism is not from those in the scientific community, although hucksters and hotheads like Dr. Michael Mann and Dr. Richard Dawkins don't help science very much. Instead, it is non-scientists in politics and the media who pose a bigger danger. These individuals see science (or, to be more accurate, scientific-sounding jargon) as a weapon that can be used to squelch ideas and opinions they disagree with. The use of the phrase "settled science" is revealing, since it indicates the speaker knows little or nothing about actual science. If they did, they would know that outmoded scientific theories are abandoned because they no longer attract any defenders, and not because some talking head on TV says so. Evolution and global warming are on shaky ground because - contrary to their advocates most fervent beliefs - the scientific evidence for both is weak.

Scientism asserts that science is supreme, the one human pursuit that holds the promise of being completely free of bias and error. The truth is exactly the opposite: science can be just as biased and inaccurate as any other human endeavor - and all the more dangerous because some of its advocates are bogus enough to claim otherwise.

Running backwards

Dr. Granville Sewell (a former mathematics professor of mine) explains how evolution is a natural process that runs backwards:

Read more about Dr. Sewell here.

Reading list

Icons of Evolution, by Jonathan Wells.

The Scopes Trial

A summary of the case:

This month marks the 88th anniversary of the Scopes "Monkey" Trial, a famous legal case in 1925 in which a high school teacher, John Scopes, was accused of violating Tennessee's Butler Act, which made it unlawful to teach human evolution in any state-funded school.

The trial was the subject of a 1960 movie Inherit the Wind. According to some accounts the movie was never intended to be an accurate portrayal of the events of the Scopes trial*. As this article shows, that was something of an understatement. The real Scopes trial was far different from the hazy image of Christianity versus science that is relentlessly promoted by popular culture.

A few important quotes from the article:

When the Butler Act, a law which forbade the teaching of evolution in Tennessee's public schools, caught the attention of the ACLU they sent out a press release stating that they wanted to challenge the act in court. Dayton resident George Rappelyea, who was both a church goer and an adherent of evolution theory, saw an opportunity to garner some attention for the small mining town. After consulting with several town leaders, Rappelyea sent a telegram to the ACLU notifying the organization that they would provide the test case.

Although John T. Scopes was the plaintiff in the famous trial, he was not the regular biology teacher but a football coach who only taught the subject as a substitute. When Rappelyea approached him about being the 'sacrificial lamb' Scopes hesitantly agreed to go along with the PR stunt. Local prosecutors — who were also in on the plan — swore out a warrant for Scopes who was arrested and immediately released on bail pending trial.

The biology book that was used by Scopes was George William Hunter's Civic Biology. Although a standard biology text, it included the author's championing of eugenics and white supremacy, his contempt for people with disabilities, and his dislike of charity for the "inferior."

* - Supposedly Inherit the Wind was really an attack on "McCarthyism", which was (and still is) another name for anti-communism. But that explanation is worse, given what we know about the horrors of communism and the debunked myth of a 1950s anti-communist witch hunt. An anti-anti-communist film would be just like an anti-anti-Nazi or anti-anti-KKK film: an attempt to implicitly rationalize an ugly and inhuman monstrosity. It would be better from a public relations point of view to view Inherit the Wind as botched history rather than a defense of mass murder.

When "settled science" becomes theocracy

David Coppedge, an information technology specialist and system administrator on JPL’s international Cassini mission to Saturn, is suing JPL after being fired. Coppedge charges that he was let go because of his views on Intelligent Design (more on the case can be found here).

The irony is that the same government - which promotes a variety of crackpot ideas such as global warming and insists on "diversity" and "tolerance" in the workplace - is suddenly squeamish about ideas that contradict those held by secular elites. Thou shalt not blaspheme Darwin!

Update on Martin Gaskell

The University of Kentucky has settled its lawsuit with Martin Gaskell.

Gaskell is the scientist who was rejected by the University of Kentucky for the position of director of its Lexington-based observatory. Gaskell sued, claiming religious discrimination. As evidence, he produced emails that detailed how some members of the university were upset with his Christian views.

Gaskell is an astronomer and a supporter of evolution. However, he has expressed support for a dialogue between science and religion. He has rejected a purely materialistic view of natural history that leaves no room for God. Apparently this was too much for some professors at the University of Kentucky, who seem to regard him as some sort of potential Christianist theocrat.

Others worried about adverse media reaction. Here is a quote from the article:

“[A non-committee member] suggested, in particular, that we might one day wake up to a [Lexington] Herald-Leader headline citing ‘UK hires creationist as Observatory Director,’” wrote one member of the search committee in an e-mail. “Such a headline would probably not be a fair representation of Martin’s personal views, which are not simple, but the headline could appear nonetheless.”

I do not think that fear is unfounded. The secular media, whose scientific and technical knowledge is poor at best, seems more interested in eradicating every single possible idea that even suggest that God may exist than in giving the public the facts and letting them decide.

On the other hand ... whatever happened to courage in the face of ignorance and superstition? I am sure that many of these professors would have trampled each other to be first in line to stand up to (say) a preacher who criticized the university's position on homosexuality or the hiring of an avowed terrorist (William Ayers). It appears there is a difference between courage and, you know, courage!

Regardless, the University of Kentucky did not exactly cover themselves in glory with this debacle. Whether it was fear of the secular media that motivated the rejection of Gaskell, plain religious bigotry, or a combination of both, no one in academia can be happy with this.

Creation vs. Evolution debate

Actually, it has been more of a monologue than a debate:

Scientist rejected for post at University of Kentucky because of possible skepticism of evolution.

I do not know the merits of this particular case, so it is possible that Martin Gaskell does not have a legal leg to stand on. But it is clear that evolution - whose scientific foundations are shaky at best - is more of a cult than a science. Skeptics like Gaskell are heretics who will be punished.

Faith & Science

One of the most fascinating aspects of living in the 21st century is watching the growing animosity between science and Christianity.

By "science" I mean the use (or misuse) of science by individuals when attacking religious beliefs they do not agree with.

In recent months we have watch the unfolding of "Climategate". To recap: much of the scientific evidence underpinning Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) came under fire when it was revealed that some of the leading climate scientists behind the theory had been falsifying data to make the planet seem warmer that it actually is. Worse still - there were active attempts by many of these same individuals to silence critics by preventing them from publishing in scientific journals.

AGW, we have been told, is "settled science", and that even raising questions about it makes one some sort of ignorant barbarian. Although NASA scientist James Hansen and scientists at University of East Anglia have been leading proponents, the loudest voices supporting the "settled science" claim have arguably been Hollywood stars and journalists the media, whose scientific credentials are meager at best.

The debate about evolution is eerily similar to the AGW debate. Like AGW, evolution is considered "settled science". Like AGW, evolution has its most vocal (and unprincipled) support outside the scientific community, particularly in the media and Hollywood. Just as AGW skeptics are portrayed by the media as tools of the oil industry, evolution skeptics are labeled as Christianist theocrats determined to cover the world in a second Dark Age. And like AGW, there is no room for skepticism in the evolution debate.

In both the AGW and evolution debates, there are scientists of good will and integrity on both sides. And - this must be pointed out - the ill behavior of a James Hansen or a Richard Dawkins does not disprove either AGW or evolution.

My background is in engineering and mathematics, and I am a skeptic of both AGW and evolution. A scientific theory is supposed to be experimentally verifiable or directly observable, and evolution is a theory spectacularly lacking in this regard. To accept evolution one must believe that life arose from purely natural causes, although no one can yet demonstrate how this might have happened in a scientific experiment, much less seen evidence for it in Nature. These simple life forms then changed over time (evolved) into more and more complex organisms - again, without any way to observe or experimentally verify whether this has happened or not.

Evolutionists point to the fossil record that they say shows more and more complex organisms coming into existence over time as one organism changed into another, but this is conjecture. How do they know (for example) that fish crawled out of an ocean millions of years ago, and these fish somehow became land-dwelling animals? As evolutionists will admit, fossils suggesting one species changing into another are rare, and none are without controversy. For this reason evolution has to be considered a "safe" theory since it is forever beyond proof or disproof by experimentation or direct observation. I have to ask: is this really science?

When pressed, many non-scientist (and some scientists) who subscribe to the theory of evolution claim that scientists are motivated by a dispassionate search for truth, while Christians are motivated by less intellectual goals (or worse). In short: naturalistic science is true while religion is false.

The cold, hard truth is this: science can become a "religion" (meaning as system of metaphysical beliefs). Naturalistic science starts with the assumption that everything in the Universe can be explained without resorting to the supernatural - a metaphysical argument, not a scientific one. And the suggestion that science is engaged in a dispassionate search for the truth misses the point - science may be a lofty ideal, but is also a discipline practiced by all too human scientists. Scientists, as recent events in the Climategate fiasco has shown, can be just as biased, reactionary, bigoted, close-minded and dishonest as non-scientists.