Tor has lots of posts with various sci-fi types remembering the Moon landing. Recommended.
With all this comes people advocating a manned Mars mission.
I don’t know. I don’t think getting all starry-eyed when remembering the Moon landing is a reason to go to Mars. The space program is a good thing, but putting a man on Mars? Meh. I can’t bring myself to advocate for policies based on a sense of wonder.
I give you, Amy Sullivan:
It’s not that Obama works himself into a rant when he talks about science. He’s still calm, cool Barack, after all. But for him, it is almost strident. Sometimes it’s his language–today he complained that “We have watched as scientific integrity has been undermined and scientific research politicized in an effort to advance predetermined ideological agendas.” And sometimes it’s just his tone–when I listened to the stem-cell speech, his voice sounded uncharacteristically hard, although in reading the text later I noticed a sensitivity to dissenting beliefs that hadn’t come through in the delivery.
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Whatever the reason, it worries me somewhat because science is one of those areas in which Obama’s generally nuanced intellectual approach would be helpful. The anti-science, anti-expert mindset is obviously troubling. But so too is the idea that science is always an unquestioned capital-G good and that anyone who raises questions stands in the way of progress.
The only way you could get that sentiment from Obama’s speech is if you haven’t been paying attention the last eight years. Or if you’re an idiot. Republicans have relentlessly politicized scientific issues: global warming, environmental dangers, obesity research, stem cells, sex education, etc. Sullivan says “most people who worry about the use of embryonic stem cells [are not] engaged in ‘effort[s] to advance predetermined ideological agendas.’” Setting aside why “most people” is the relevant category, the debate in Washington has been politicized by anti-stem cell research advocates looking to advance their agenda. They lie about and distort the efficacy of embryonic stem cell research, rather than simply argue that it’s not moral, which is what they believe. I assume Sullivan knows this, given that she wasn’t born yesterday. Even if you want to say they have a legitimate moral issue, they’ve very much not stuck to that argument (because it’s patently ridiculous and few agree with them).
We’ve had eight years of Republican abuse of science for political gain and corporate favor. We haven’t had eight years of respect for science and nuanced moral arguments about scientific research. To worry about pro-science “stridency” when Obama forthrightly condemns past abuse is absurd in our current situation.
But Sullivan is really worried that respect for science will make it harder to push religion-inspired policy. If we have to rely on empirical evidence, my absurd superstitions won’t be good enough to justify my preferred policies! Let’s just back up a little on being all pro-science. It’s very important that we allow fairy tales to influence our discourse.
Then again, religious concern trolling is what Sullivan is best at, so should we be surprised?
EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson is confused about science and religion:
It’s not a clean-cut division. If you have studied at all creationism vs. evolution, there’s theistic or God-controlled evolution and there’s variations on all those themes.
Well, yes. There are lots of ways scientific findings can be incorporated into religious beliefs. But it’s pretty clear where evolution stops and religious interpretations of its significance begin.
I think it would help if everyone understood that evolution is a scientific theory and whatever you think of its implication for religion is your own damn problem.
Albert Einstein held some complex views about religion in his time. That hasn’t stopped the religious from trying to use favorable quotes of his to bolster their arguments. Maybe that talking point will go away now:
The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this. These subtilised interpretations are highly manifold according to their nature and have almost nothing to do with the original text. For me the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions.
Sounds a bit like Richard Dawkins, doesn’t he?
The contents of the letter aren’t that surprising, as they don’t really conflict with other quotes of his. He was a pretty vague pantheist, who believed there was a spiritual force of some sort in the universe, which is what drove him to be a scientist: discovering the workings of the universe meant discovering that force. Theism and its incarnations are primitive human inventions. That’s my interpretation, anyway.
What does this all mean? Largely nothing. Quote wars are a sad part of arguments about religion. You shouldn’t believe anything because one smart person said so, nor should you assume an intelligent person holds intelligent views about all subjects. Einstein himself said some pretty stupid things about communism and the Soviet Union. Religion in particular lends itself to compartmentalization; people can require rigorous standards in everyday life and then proudly abandon them when thinking about a higher power. It’s curious, but it’s why our society isn’t overrun to the point of collapse by superstitious nonsense. Religion probably won’t ever go away, but we can make its compartment smaller and smaller.
I don’t get many creationists around here. Even fewer that stick around and strike up a discussion with me. However, there’s one in the comments here.
I point this out for a couple of reasons. The first is that not all creationists are created equal. I had one here a few years ago who debated with me for months, first in comments then over email. He was very wrong, but he clearly was pretty smart and had really thought about the whole of modern science in relation to his religion. No such claims about the current one can be made.
The notable feature of this current discussion is how little discussion there is. I didn’t feel like answering the standard creationist points at the beginning, but I changed my mind after some attempts to turn my claims about not responding back on me and after he built up a list of claims. When I answered them, he dropped the majority of them and came up with new ones. New ones to the discussion, that is, since they were all standard creationist points.
This isn’t an uncommon occurrence. There are a list of global warming denialist claims and ones for any pseudoscience. If anything, it’s a defining characteristic of pseudoscience. There’s a list of basic claims that your average believer latches onto and underneath there’s a core of people generating the supporting lies and half-truths that keep it alive. The believers don’t really understand the arguments generated, but if it gives them a quick talking point, it goes on the Internet and never dies.
Well, I went and saw Expelled. I was not impressed.
The first thing that wasn’t impressive was the fact that the theater had the reels out of order. The first two reels were swapped, so there were no opening credits until a third of the way through the movie (right before they mocked panspermia). That’s not the documentary’s fault, though.
The film opens (for most people, anyway) with a discussion of those who’ve been “expelled” by the “Darwinian establishment” for their pro-ID ways. Unfortunately for Stein, he’s almost entirely wrong about these cases. Everyone likes martyrs, but there aren’t any to be found here.
The film talks all the leading lights of the Discovery Institute and the ID movement along with prominent anti-religion scientists. I characterize them like that for a reason, which I’ll return to in a moment. As other reviews have noted, the film’s lack of any real discussion of ID or evolution is striking. People say it’s science, it’s creationism, it has good supporting evidence, it doesn’t, etc, but there’s not discussion of any of those points. Granted, this is a pro-ID documentary and there really isn’t any pro-ID evidence, but you’d think they’d at least attempt to make the case that ID is a legitimate theory, rather just asserting its legitimacy. No one coming out of that film will have any idea if ID is any more credible than holocaust denial. Also, David Berlinski is sitting in the worst chair for talking head footage. Sit up, dammit.
The flow of the film is somewhat incoherent. We bounce around from talking to IDists, scientists, talking about court cases, watching Ben Stein in Germany, etc, all interspersed with footage from the Soviet Union and the Nazis. Much of the film’s message consists of demanding an open debate in academia about ID. Then they starting talking about court cases over the content of science classes in high schools. They avoid explaining how the two are related in order to pile it on as more suppression of ID. Then they go off and discuss how Darwinism inspired the Nazis. Is the message that we need open debate or that Darwinism causes evil? Of course the connection of Darwinism and the Nazis is quite dishonest. Anti-semitism and selective breeding existed long before Darwin. Science gives us descriptions of the mechanisms of how the world works. A scientific theory does not tell us how to act. It’s a description that’s either true or not true. What made the Nazis so bad was not what scientific opinions they held, but how they acted on them and other beliefs. The documentary could have criticized replacing morality with science, but it didn’t. It criticized Darwinism when it was used for illegitimate purposes.
There’s always lots of controversy about how scientists should engage the public on scientific issues like ID, which is grounded in religion. Someone like Dawkins is an outspoken and very open atheist. In the film he reads a passage describing the Hebrew god from The God Delusion. It’s one of my favorite quotes from the book, but it’s not likely to win anyone over. A similar situation exists with P.Z. Myers and Daniel Dennett, though Myers was very soft spoken and Dennett’s comments were limited. This is sort of an issue, but I don’t think it matters in the end. We who dislike religion should talk about it and we have every right to be angry. What does matter is the dishonesty in using almost exclusively outspoken non-religious scientists as the other side in the movie. Talk to someone like Ken Miller? That would just upend their entire argument. Science has certainly deconverted a lot of people (me included), but you don’t have be an atheist to be a successful scientist. You just can’t ignore the facts and try and publish papers that argue for your religious views and expect scientists to have much respect for you.
In any case, the film does appear to be a flop. I went to a late showing, but there were only four people in the theater, at least three of which weren’t there looking to be convinced of anything. I mean, I assume the guy behind the two of us who called Eugenie Scott a “fucking cunt” was already on a side. I know little about filmmaking, but my brother, a film student, said the documentary appeared to be shot by a “third grader with down syndrome,” so I don’t think it was good from a technical standpoint, either. The documentary is very much the Michael Moore formula, with interspersed animations, footage of the documentarian in his search for truth, attempted gotchas, and entering some place uninvited only to be kicked out. None of it’s done particularly well and with the content being mostly lies and distortions, it doesn’t add up to much of a documentary.
I’ve been debating whether I should go see this or not, since it’s playing here in town. On the one hand, I’ve read about its claims elsewhere and I don’t want to contribute to an incoherent anti-evolution movie. On the other, I’ll feel better about criticizing it if I actually go see it.
In any event, here’s the NCSE’s rebuttal page.
So now both Obama and Clinton are pandering to the anti-vaccine crowd, just like McCain.
Obama is the least worst here, though not by much. McCain says there’s strong evidence a preservative in the vaccines is causing autism. This is obviously and dangerously wrong. Clinton’s answers to the questionnaire indicate she is going to work to remove thimerosal from vaccines and fund investigations into the link between vaccines and autism. That’s advocating unnecessary, but not obviously dangerous actions. Obama simply said the science is inconclusive and more research is needed. That’s wrong, but contains fewer unnecessary actions than Clinton’s position (then again, he doesn’t say he doesn’t support removing thimerosal from vaccines).
Still, this is all very annoying. Stop pandering to obnoxious idiots, please.
As I said a couple posts ago, I’m nothing if not current. I find it curious how often global warming deniers equate belief in human caused climate change with faith. This post from one of Montana’s newer conservative blogs (and so far, what appears to be one of our better ones) is a good example. Cody’s list of “truths” is a bit muddled.
The first point (which seems to conflict with point 8 ) claims man made global warming is a scientific theory. Well, sort of. The mechanisms causing it are the province of scientific theory, but whether the Earth is warming or not is a factual question (a difficult one, of course). This is similar to evolution, where we have the fact that evolution that has occurred and the theory detailing the mechanisms driving it. I’ll return to this in a moment.
Points 3 and 4 seem to address the claims of those who accept global warming who bring up the fact that science is based on consensus. Cody is right that science isn’t democratic. If you’re a scientist studying global warming and someone counters your research by claiming the consensus says otherwise, that person is an idiot. However, we aren’t scientists studying global warming, so this is largely irrelevant. We’re people who don’t have adequate expertise to fully judge these issues. We have to rely on and respect the consensus to some degree. We base public policy on scientific consensus. Scientists who explain the consensus are educators and those who advocate policy solutions are practicing politics. Seems pretty clear to me.
The next two points are the big ones, I think:
# Man-made catastrophic global warming is not a hypothesis, it cannot be tested or falsified via experiment. Similarly, it cannot be proved true. Only time will tell.
# The acceptance of things unproven by scientific method relies on faith; faith is not restricted to matters of religion. Nor is faith a bad thing – it allows us to function in a world about which we do not know everything.
Let’s take the first one. It’s strikingly similar to what creationists say about evolution. Climate scientists create models based around our current understanding of the physical processes that contribute to our climate. These models make predictions about what we should see in certain situations, past or present. We then test the models by comparing their predictions to data from those past situations or on data that comes from those future scenarios as they move into the past. If they don’t match, the models are changed. Real Climate explains this quite well (and they’re actually climate scientists, so that helps).
Of course, Cody is right that these models can’t be proved true. That Cody thinks this is a relevant point reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of science. The scientific method doesn’t prove things. It provides evidence (it can disprove hypotheses, of course). There’s always uncertainty. We’ve done lots of experiments, but can you really prove you aren’t going to wake up tomorrow and the acceleration due to gravity is 4.3 m/s2 instead of 9.8 m/s2? Nope. However, we can use the inductive reasoning central to science to say that’s vanishingly unlikely. We use similar reasoning when we accept a climate model’s predictions of future temperature. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot more uncertainty here, but it’s the same basic principle. And the process is science. It’s just not 7th grade biology science.
The second point above (and those following) seems to fall away after that. Faith is a loaded term. It doesn’t mean belief in things that we don’t know for certain but which we have good evidence for, as we do with global warming. In means belief regardless of evidence. Now, some who accept global warming do describe their belief as faith; Mark T has done so. This is slightly different than Cody’s claim. Mark has chosen to rely on scientific consensus because he doesn’t have the competency to judge the science (which is much more honest and humble than a lot of us who like to talk about his issue are). It’s not blind trust, though. Science has a pretty decent track record and much of this seems superficially true anyway. Mark has chosen a position based on a line of reasoning that’s pretty valid. I don’t think that’s really faith, but it’s not necessarily rational inquiry, either.
Cody doesn’t seem to be a fan of environmentalists, either. Much of global warming denialism seems to be sustained by that same antipathy. I’m right there with them, for the most part. Lots of environmentalists are shallow and have only a superficial understanding of these issues. They’re stuck in a mindset that causing them again and again to prescribe the same policy solution. It’s more theological than rational. They deify nature and view any human intrusion as wrong, rather than something to be debated on a case by case basis. If we cross nature, if we try to control it, we’ll be destroyed. They’re so narrow-minded they refuse to look outside their belief that we just have to limit humanity’s impact; instead of trying to push society to a position where we can preserve nature without hurting people’s livelihoods, they play prophets of doom, warning us to repent. They’re suckered by any crisis that fits their theology.
That said, they’re not always wrong. We did burn a hole in the ozone layer (and we were able to fix because we had viable alternatives to CFCs). Pollution and mining have had negative impacts on our environment. It’s not enough to define yourself in opposition to them. Global warming is certainly the in style crisis right now. There’s over the top alarmism. But it is real and we do need to do something about it.
Another thing denialists seem to be afraid of is liberals pushing their politics as solutions to this issue. Yes, that’s going to happen. Guess who’s fault it is? It’s the people who have better ideas who cling to denial because we’re not absolutely sure and because the annoying environmentalists believe in it. As long as we liberals are committed to this problem, our solutions are going to become policy. Don’t like that? Stop debating what’s already been debated and start talking about policy. Start promoting solutions.
That’s right, Earth is 6,011 years old as of two days ago.
I heard Roger Koopman threw a big party around here, but my invitation must have been lost in the mail.
