googlef87758e9b6df9bec.html A Sure Word: Stop spouting facts... the science is settled!

Friday, April 28, 2017

Stop spouting facts... the science is settled!

According to Wikipedia, scientism is a term used to describe the universal applicability of the scientific method and approach, and the view that empirical science constitutes the most authoritative worldview or the most valuable part of human learning—to the exclusion of other viewpoints. Followers of scientism tend to be zealots, more devout even than the average followers of traditional religions. What makes them especially stubborn is that they tend to not think of their beliefs as their “religion;” instead, they think scientism is simply the default way of thinking for any person and so they cannot comprehend any argument made from a different point of view. To them, if something can't be examined scientifically, it can't be true.

Now, you would think that people who practically worship science would welcome scientific debate. They say they do. Actually, they brag that they do. In the new Cosmos series, Neil deGrass Tyson offered these five, simple rules for science:

(1) Question authority.
(2) Think for yourself.
(3) Test ideas by the evidence gained from observation and experiment.
(4) Follow the evidence wherever it leads.
(5) Remember: you could be wrong.

Ignore the self-contradiction going on here – like, how can someone test the idea that we should test ideas by evidence? My point in citing these “rules” is to show how skepticism is supposed to be at the heart of science. According to Tyson, I'm not supposed to accept a conclusion just because someone in authority says it's true. I'm supposed to think for myself. Right? I could be wrong but maybe it's the person making the claim who is wrong.

There are real scientists who are skeptics. At the risk of sounding cliché, scientific advancement often comes when people think outside of the box. Science Alert once published a list of 8 scientific papers that were rejected during peer review before going on to win a Nobel Prize. Obviously, these authors were on to something and the scientific establishment just couldn't see it. How often has one radical idea, one that other scientists may have thought sounded crazy, turned out to be true? Maybe we should ask Galileo.

Devout members of scientism aren't skeptics. They claim to be but they aren't. They blindly follow the majority opinion without question. You can often identify them by their frequent use of the phrase, “The science is settled.” To them, truth is whatever is accepted by a majority of scientists. Anyone who disagrees is considered a heretic. Actually, they don't call them heretics – they call them, “science deniers” but, in scientism, it means the same thing. Doubters of some scientific theory aren't ever called “skeptics” or “free thinkers;” they're “deniers.”

Let me give you a few examples of scientism's doctrine. The first is obviously evolution. I cannot tell you the number of times I've heard rabid evolutionists defend their theory by saying no credible scientist denies that evolution happened. Note the use of the word “credible,” but never mind blatant No True Scotsman fallacy. Truth is not decided by popular vote. Evolutionists often refuse to debate creationists on the grounds that “the science is settled,” “there is no debate among scientists whether evolution is true,” and debating the theory with a creationists gives the impression there is still doubt over the theory. Followers of scientism want to squelch any dissent over evolution by suing public schools who want to “teach the difficulties,” rejecting any creationist paper submitted for peer review, and even protesting a privately funded, religious organization like the Creation Museum.

Another long standing doctrine of this godless faith is climate change. Once upon a time, it was called “global warming” but after decades of no noticeable increase in the global, mean temperature, they had to replace “warming” with the much more ambiguous term, “change.” Actually, none of the dire predictions made by these alarmists have happened. In 2008, ABC aired a video montage showing all the terrible things that would happen by 2015 because of climate change: New York flooding, hundreds of miles of scorched earth, and skyrocketing food and fuel prices. I remember 2015. It was nothing like the predictions made by the video but followers of scientism aren't embarrassed by their failed predictions; The “science is settled” concerning climate change and bad things are going to happen unless we do something now. //RKBentley shakes his head//

Bill Nye was recently embarrassed by Tucker Carlson when he tried to pull that “the science is settled” crap. Carlson was asking basic questions about climate change and Nye was obviously making up the answers. Before we spend trillions of dollars on this “crisis,” we need to have some answers: the most fundamental question is, is there even any warming? The trend for the last few decades says no. If it is happening, to what extent are humans causing it? If we could stop warming, should we? What is the earth's temperature supposed to be? Every air-breathing animal produces carbon dioxide. Humans produce about 2 pounds of CO2 per day. Even if we converted the entire world to 100% emission-free energy, humans will still produce billions of pounds of CO2 every day just by breathing. How can that be bad? Plants require CO2. What will happen to our forests if we could reduce the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere? These are legitimate questions but they are heresy to dogma-driven zealots like Nye. A real scientist on CNN recently brought up some of these points and Nye scolded CNN for, having one climate change skeptic, and not 97 or 98 scientists or engineers concerned about climate change.

The most recent political discussion which followers of scientism have weighed in on is the transgender issue. Scientists now “know” that things like gender identity or even our biological sex aren't immutable but exist on a spectrum. You would think that after 6,000 years of human history, the science would at least be settled about who is a male and who is a female. Wrong! Now we're being told that doctors sometimes got it wrong when they checked “male” or “female” on a birth certificate. I'm a 51 year old white guy. Why can't I identify as a 65 year old person and start receiving social security? Why can't I say I'm a black guy and maybe qualify for affirmative action programs? But I can say I'm a woman and folks like Nye will rush to defend my delusion as being normal, usual, and healthy. Anyone who disagrees is a hate-filled, homophobic, bigot. Colleges are adopting strict policies requiring the use of gender-neutral pronouns. If I call a female, “she,” suddenly I'm the one who has the problem. Several years ago, I wrote about California's ban on gay-conversion therapy for minors. Really? So after little Johnny was abused by an uncle, he seeks help because he doesn't like the sexual feelings he now has toward men and the only acceptable response is, “You're gay, Johnny, you can't change it. You'd better learn to live with it!”


Bill Nye has said that being a creationist suppresses critical thinking. I believe Nye's religion of scientism is a far worse assault on critical thinking than being a creationist could ever be. He does not want debate. “Science deniers” must be ridiculed and insulted until they have lost all credibility. Maybe they should even be put in prison. Nye and folks like him have their minds are made up. Stop confusing them with facts. The science is settled.

5 comments:

Steven J. said...

Ignore the self-contradiction going on here – like, how can someone test the idea that we should test ideas by evidence?

Well, when you put it that way ... you could compare how long and how well you live when you treat evidence as irrelevant (e.g. "why should I assume this toadstool isn't good food just because the last ten people who ate it died horribly?") to how well you do taking evidence into account -- but then, that's just going by the evidence, and why should that be valid?

I note that the Bible itself seems to accept that evidence is at least occasionally valid ("the God Who answers by fire, He is God" -- 1 Kings 18:24). But I think that some points are axiomatic. You can't prove that a world outside your own perceptions exists, but try getting through life by seriously doubting it. Like the existence of an exterior world, dependence on evidence is axiomatic because it is "incorrigible" -- you can't seriously doubt it as a general principle.

Now, I assume that you're not really denying the relevance of evidence; you're denying that only evidence is a good reason for believing things. But that position is not, I think, quite strong enough for your position. After all, what you believe about, e.g. the age of the Earth is not merely accepted without evidence but in the face of immense amounts of evidence. Even if there are rival grounds, besides empirical observation and testing, for accepting propositions as true, shouldn't those beliefs be compatible with evidence?

Beyond that, of course, most proposed rival methods support radically contradictory propositions (e.g. one set of sacred scriptures contradicts another).

I'm not sure, by the way, that "scientism" under the definition you cite is really the issue with the March for Science or climate change. "Humans are heating up the planet and we need total government control of the economy now" does not deny the validity of extraempirical revelation (unless you have a Bible verse that denies the possibility of global climate change); adhering to a position because it is politically correct, or politically advantageous, or simply because the consequences if it is true are too terrifying to take the risk that it might not be true, is not the same thing as asserting that only science can yield reliable answers to questions.

Oh, and Bill Nye and Tucker Carlson are both basically entertainers; neither is a meteorologist, geologist, physicist, etc. Their debates are not especially informative about climate science or the state of the Earth and atmosphere, nor is leaving Nye speechless a rebuttal to any scientist's opinions.

Steven J. said...

I cannot tell you the number of times I've heard rabid evolutionists defend their theory by saying no credible scientist denies that evolution happened. Note the use of the word “credible,” but never mind blatant No True Scotsman fallacy.

And I've lost count of the number of times that creationists have insisted that "good science" supports creationism. But I don't want to settle for a tu quoque. You can't refute a generalization about Scotsmen by citing a Korean counterexample, and then insisting that it's the "no true Scotsman" fallacy to refuse to admit that Koreans are Scottish. By the same token, anyone who signs a statement of faith declaring that no possible evidence could convince him that Genesis (interpreted perspicuously) could be mistaken is not a reputable scientist, and insisting that he is does not make him one. He may have been trained as one, but he's obviously given it up.

Followers of scientism want to squelch any dissent over evolution by suing public schools who want to “teach the difficulties,” rejecting any creationist paper submitted for peer review, and even protesting a privately funded, religious organization like the Creation Museum.

Again, creationists usually insist that there is empirical evidence for creationism, so "scientism" of itself would not automatically exclude evidence about difficulties with evolutionary theory. On the other hand, the alleged difficulties are themselves specious, from blatant fallacies ("the second law of thermodynamics prohibits microbe-to-man evolution") to confusion between "we can't give a step-by-step account of how this happened" and "we know (somehow) that this could not have happened." And the Creation Museum is a nest of fallacies and falsehoods; why should it not be criticized?

Plants require CO2. What will happen to our forests if we could reduce the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere?

Amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere now are higher than they were a few decades ago, and plants seemed to be doing fine then. Plants need water, too, and if climate change results in altered patterns of rainfall, plants currently flourishing in humid regions might end up dying in new-born deserts. This depends on the accuracy of current models of the atmosphere, which granted seem to have a spotty match to reality (and presumably a warmer world would have some areas that are wetter and rainier), but it's certainly not so straightforward as "more carbon dioxide means more forests and crops (and at an extreme, high levels of CO2 are fatal to animals, though I don't think anyone worries about levels getting that high).

RKBentley said...

Steven J,

Thanks for your comments. I'm sorry I haven't been responding to all of them.

One point I was making by citing Tyson's rules of science was to point out that there are axioms that exist that are not consistent with militant science worshipers' demands for evidence. Like I said, there is no scientific evidence for the idea that ideas should be tested with scientific evidence. There is no evidence for Sagan's claim that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. There is no evidence for the belief that we should only believe things that have evidence. I'm not saying that evidence is completely irrelevant. I'm trying to show how the people who make the loudest demands for evidence have a worldview that ultimately has no evidence.

Concerning Answers in Genesis' statement of faith, I think it escapes most secular scientists that they have their own statement of faith to which they subscribe. I've cited it many times on my blog. “A central tenet of modern science is methodological naturalism--it seeks to explain the universe purely in terms of observed or testable natural mechanisms.” Scientific American Magazine, July 2002. Of course, there is no place in the universe that this tenet can be observed or tested. The a priori decision to only ever seek natural explanations causes some scientists to dismiss any evidence for a miraculous creation. How can a person be a “good scientist” if he arbitrarily decides in advance to not consider one possible solution? Take Jesus' miracle in Cana, for example. We have a detailed description of Jesus turning water into wine. It includes the number of jars there were, how much water each jar held, and the steps Jesus ordered the servants to take. Why should I dismiss this eye witness account of a miracle? Because it's not “scientific”? Please!

Finally, in regards to climate change, I see how you're hedging by using conditional words like “if” and “maybe.” Is the science settled on this or not? All prior predictions of things like altered rainfall or rising temperatures have not happened. In 2015, NASA reported there hasn't been any receding of the polar ice caps since they began measuring in 1979. But even if some of these things were happening, what exactly is consequence? There used to be glaciers covering most of North America. Their retreat certainly wasn't caused by driving automobiles and it wasn't the end of the planet. What if we could farm in the arctic? Why should we spend trillions of dollars trying to halt something that might be inevitable? If coastal areas are going to flood, maybe we should spend that money on development further inland. Climate change isn't settled. Not by a long shot. Besides the fundamental question of whether it's even happening, there needs to be a lot of discussion about what is causing it and what should be done about it. It does not help science at all to label critics of the establishment as “science deniers.”

Thanks for visiting and for your comments. God bless!!

RKBentley

Steven J. said...

A central tenet of modern science is methodological naturalism--it seeks to explain the universe purely in terms of observed or testable natural mechanisms.

That's redundant: "natural" is effectively synonymous with "testable." I've run across an analogy that, e.g. considering only "natural" hypotheses and excluding "supernatural" ones is like considering only black suspects in a crime and not even looking at white ones. But that's misleading: obviously you can check for fingerprints or DNA or eyewitnesses implicating white suspects, but how do you do an experiment involving miraculous causes? How do you distinguish the "fingerprints" of a miracle from those of a different miracle (by, say, a different supernatural agent) or those of an unknown cause?

If you can say what effects a cause is expected to produce, if you can tell what observations will support or disconfirm such a cause, it is "natural" in the sense that methodological naturalism can deal with it. Ghosts would be a "natural" phenomenon if we could find evidence for them and distinguish effects caused by real ghosts from effects of other causes. Ditto for telepathy, or vampires, or global floods. These things are not excluded by science because they are somehow "supernatural" but because the "evidence" for them is grossly inadequate or self-contradictory.

Take Jesus' miracle in Cana, for example. We have a detailed description of Jesus turning water into wine.

We have detailed descriptions of how Herakles killed the Hydra, or how Theseus killed Medusa and then used her head to kill the sea monster. Detailed descriptions are a dime a dozen; accurate ones are slightly rarer. I suppose most historians and scientists follow David Hume's dictum that one should consider whether it was more likely that someone actually observed this event than that the observation was fiction.

But accepting that Jesus turned water into wine does not, of itself, imply that the Trinil skullcap is not a valid transitional fossil between nonhuman apes and humans, or that shared GULO pseudogenes are not good evidence of common ancestry of humans and other primates -- or that human-caused global warming is not true.

Finally, in regards to climate change, I see how you're hedging by using conditional words like “if” and “maybe.”

Well, yes. I am no expert on global climate or changes therein. I am indeed unconvinced that many of the measures recommended will have greater benefits than costs. But I was critiquing your argument rather than the overall issue of global climate change.

RKBentley said...

Steven J,

In spite of Sagan's claim to the contrary, even extraordinary claims only require ordinary evidence. What evidence do we need to prove Jesus rose from the dead? We have the eye witness accounts of people that saw Him in life, saw Him die, then saw Him alive again. We have a record of Him being pierced through the heart with a spear and being examined by a Roman soldier who confirmed He was dead. Later, He was alive again. He invited His disciples to touch Him and examine His wounds. He walked and talked and ate with them. He was not a ghost. He was not an hallucination. I'm sorry that you weren't there to put a stethoscope to His chest but, in the case of history, this is about as compelling evidence as we can hope to have.

But you've ignored the point I was making by citing Scientific American. You chide groups like Answers in Genesis for having a statement of faith yet scientists have a similar statement of faith. They only ever consider a natural explanation for any phenomenon. I've given you evidence for the resurrection. According to “science,” the usual response is that the written account of eyewitnesses cannot be true. Why? Because people cannot rise from the dead! That would be a miracle and miracles don't happen! Without any evidence to the contrary, people summarily reject the possibility of a miraculous event solely because of their a priori commitment to the natural.

I know I always say thanks for visiting and for your comments. It probably sounds a little practiced and not genuine but I really mean it. I sincerely appreciate your comments. God bless!!

RKBentley