I know that the ubiquity of government grants and the mad scramble for research funding has something to do with the way the scientific culture has developed. While the casually scientifically literate are always a small portion of the populace no matter civilication, I expect more from Americans than I do other nationalities. It’s only right that I hold the citizens of this great nation to a higher standard than everyone else.

I learned early in school that science is defined as “knowledge through causes.” It is knowledge that is learned and tested and proven. It is knowledge that is built from observed data and interpreted and understood using the rational faculties of man.

Climategate (Wikipedia) is proof that scientists are equally fallible human beings, despite their efforts at proving themselves above the rest of humanity. This scandal has blown open the religious and dogmatic nature of the gatekeepers of knowledge; those gates are the peer-reviewed journals that they so jealously guard with thousands-of-dollars subscription fees, obfuscated language and rigorous review processes. In a bygone era, the peer-review process was a great way of protecting false information from being entering the people’s knowledge on a cultural level. Now, with the information technologies available to our species, Open Source Science may be a viable alternative to less rarefied fields, like climatology. The large body of conjecture in the field is built on correlative statistical studies with a glaring lack of proof of causation. Climatology—the hudu behind AGW—is not knowledge through causes; it’s mostly assurances through coincidences.

This mass panic has reached a cacophonous crescendo. It’s become the vehicle for massive governmental waste programs (Cap-And-Trade, Cash For Clunkers), ubiquitous advertisements, ridiculous corporate policies, and in general, the rationalization for misanthropy. How else could you explain the inclusion of “Climate Change advice” as a pseudo-homeopathic treatment to Subjects Of The Crown? The religious approach by which AGW is pushed upon everyone is depressing at the very least. Even assuming the best of intentions, all this climate change bullshit leaves people disliking their humanity. People chase “smug points” for doing the least of commonly-decent actions. By taking the focus away from people, people are distracted from doing good by other people. They’re too busy trying to save the planet, or not caring.

Scientists are people, too

Imagine for a second a fortysomething raindancer who calls himself a “climate change scientist.” He’d have tailored his education and built his career proving the world view that people are slowly turning the planet into an easy-bake oven. This person has gained eminence by banging the drum and preaching the evils of humanity’s ways. He’s created this world around him where he makes money from peddling what he believes to be true, and yet hasn’t really spent all that time discovering the truth. Multiply this by thousands upon thousands of raindancers who have control over the publication and authentication of discovered knowledge and what you have is environmentalism as religion, and the raindancers its high priests.

By cleaving to this orthodoxy, the raindancers are able to get the kind of power that ll people crave. Raindancers and legitimate scientists are human just like the rest of us. They have personal psychological needs to be met, and they have chosen this field to stroke their egos.

The makeshift windmills

I have this theory—in the popular, not scientific sense—that environmental activists, climatologist raindancers, and their ilk do what they do because they have a low view of humanity: helping people is hard work. You might not get the thanks that you expect. People will disappoint. The mental and rational immaturity of these people bother me. It’s a tough, wild world out there, and facing issues such as the Islamic oppression of women, the Chinese repression and “genocide” of newborn girls (“gendercide” sounds tacky), the AGW crowd has chosen “saving the planet.” How else could they justify the vapidity of their cause? There is so much evil to be faced and confronted and for whatever reasons, they build the windmills against which they can tilt to their hearts’content.

To be pitied, but also to be hated

The Climategate documents show that the raindancers are nothing more than scandalmongers. These people have gained so much and caused massive damage in the economic and social realms that have little chance of reparation. Their lies have entered the cultural knowledge—a term I use to refer to the shared headspace of most of humanity—and will take a while to dispel, and not entirely, either.

Their world view is not based on fact. That they have known of this is cause for pity. That they have kept this discovery—true science—from the rest of humanity, whatever their reasons, is cause for hatred. Their actions have damaged not just their reputations, but that of the entire culture itself. The ensuing disrepute of legitimate science by guilt through association is perhaps the greater, enduring crime, one that doesn’t get nearly the attention it deserves.

Let me begin with the definition of science as discussed throughout my college years: Science is knowledge through causes. The scientific method, as popularly and academically known, is the process by which causes are investigated and discovered, leading to a scientific theory. From a National Academy Of Sciences brochure, Science, Evolution, and Creationism:

Some scientific explanations are so well established that no new evidence is likely to alter them. The explanation becomes a scientific theory. In everyday language a theory means a hunch or speculation. Not so in science. In science, the word theory refers to a comprehensive explanation of an important feature of nature that is supported by many facts gathered over time. Theories also allow scientists to make predictions about as yet unobserved phenomena.

A good example is the theory of gravity. After hundreds of years of observation and experiment, the basic facts of gravity are understood. The theory of gravity is an explanation of those basic facts. Scientists then use the theory to make predictions
about how gravity will function in different circumstances. Such predictions have been verified in countless experiments, further confirming the theory. Evolution stands on an equally solid foundation of observation, experiment, and confirming evidence

The most ubiquitous, ridiculous and superficial assault on scientific reasoning is the “it’s only a theory” dismissal. Attacking the Theory of Evolution (ToE) on linguistic grounds serves nothing but muddy the waters for students of science. Arguing the validity of linguistic attacks on the ToE is an opening for ridicule as gravitation remains a theory, and so does atomic theory, which while “only a theory” has been knowledge enough to expand our understanding of physics and chemistry.

I’ve spent the past few years on this site keeping mum about Creationism, Intelligent Design “theory” (which by the way is “only a theory,” right?) and general magical thinking simply because of the way its adherents approach the debate. There is something extremely Post-Modern about their approach, especially ID proponents. The sophistries behind concepts such as irreducible complexity boil down to basically, “we can’t explain it to a complete certainty, therefore, Someone, or Something, is responsible.” The whole debacle is too large for me to discuss in a single blog post, and there’s enough resources online to get into detail.

There is, however, one threat worth addressing, and that is the promotion of Creationism in schools, using carefully crafted legislation with the intent to mandate “fair” exposure to different perspectives on the origins of life on earth. These initiatives are motivated and informed by socially and religiously conservative folk whose general argument stems in that the ToE, along with the vast expanse of EvTheo, is an assault on the dignity of man. I don’t get it. The Catholic Church has made peace with the concept, keeping to the spiritual magisterium while acknowledging discoveries in the natural world.

Allow me to paint with a broad brush and stereotypes here. Social Conservatives who find the ToE to be insulting to the dignity of man and against the revelations of the Lord as written in the Word need to take a step back and think of the sheer irrationality of the approach. The push to teach Creationism in schools in such surreptitious means can be construed as an attempt to push religious education in public schools. The same people who go against Leftist indoctrination in the educational system are not so much pushing against indoctrination in school per se; they would rather have it replaced with something else. These people who are unhappy with the school system teaching a system of values (so they would accuse) against what they would want for their family fall too easily to the temptation to replace it with theirs, instead of taking responsibility for values education in their own home.

I think that this is what truly motivates the Creationist attack on scientific education and scientific thinking comes from two fears: one, which I’ve repeated here a lot, is that the understanding of our biological origins somehow diminishes the dignity of man, and two, that an understanding of the world around us is, if not immoral in itself, opens us to great immorality. The second motivation, in as much as magical thinking can be explained, is beyond any facility of mine to explain.

When you think about the way “environmentalism” has grown over the past fifteen years (that I have been aware of, considering my old twenty-six years of age), it all boils down to that statement. One of the reasons I despise the most vocal—squeaky wheels—of the environmental movement is because the gloom and doom with which they pollute their social circles is based on a very basic hatred of humanity.

Let us take, for example, the L.A. Times series called Altered Oceans. For your convenience here are links to the articles in the series: A Primeval Tide of Toxins, Sentinels Under Attack, Dark Tides, Ill Winds, A Plague of Plastic Chokes the Seas, and A Chemical Imbalance. Consider, however, after reading them all, that even this series isn’t as misanthropic as most of the bile that you would hear from some of usual suspects. One of the reasons I actually like Altered Oceans is that while it clearly details the effects of man on the environment and the growing chain reaction of these events, it does not take away the hope that it is still us who have the responsibility to start setting things right.

It is an irony that the very people who are creative enough to bring us ManBearPig theories can take something like this and use it as further proof that the only solution to human impact on the environment is the uncreative proposal of total removal of humanity from the planet, which Dean Esmay wrote about more than a year ago. This for me is what saddens me about this so-called “environmental awareness:” it offers nothing useful other than guilt for one’s own existence. I know I won’t kill myself in service of the environment. Whom do you know would do such a thing?

Even from a Biblical perspective of reasoning, humanity’s stewardship of the Earth never required our disappearance. Excuse me for superficially talking about this topic from a Christian point of view, but G-d made this world for us. He let the first man name the creatures of the Earth, which, if I recall a little of what I have learned going to school in Catholic institutions, is the basically the logical start to our dominion of the rest of creation.

Take away any Christian or other religious arguments out, and simply ask yourself the usual question: if a tree falls in the forest, and nobody is there to hear it, does it make a sound? If a rose is in full bloom and no one is there to appreciate it, is it still beautiful? We are the only species whose cognitive ability adds value to all of creation based on more than simply fulfilling our needs. It is this same ability that has led us to brand snakes, sharks, and bats as “evil” in the past, to associate them with phantom imaginings and lead us to try to exterminate them. And yet it is also in us to realize our mistakes and actually stop doing what we have done before and help their populations heal.

If it is in our ability to help heal the environment, why do so many environmentalists simply want us to disappear? I long for the day when any environmentally oriented political proposal is not based on a strong misanthropic principle: one where, not despite of, but rather, by taking advantage of the way we grow as a species, we could responsibly care for the world around us.

You find yourself on a game show called “Let’s Make A Deal.” The game is very simple, as there are but three doors: door #1, door #2, and door #3. Behind one door is a million dollars. Behind the other two doors is a worthless joke prize. All you have to do is pick which door you want to open, and you get whatever is behind that door. But you only get once choice. By simple math, then, you obviously have a 1 in 3 chance of picking the correct door in the first place and becoming an instant millionaire, yes?

You pick a door. As soon as you tell Monty (the gameshow host) what door you want to open, he stops and says, “Okay, you’ve made your choice. Now, I’m going to do what we always do here on this game: I’m going to open one of the other two doors for you that I know has a booby prize.” And he does so. Then he asks, “Okay, now, would you like to stay with your original guess, or would you like to switch to the other door that’s still closed? You only get one shot, so do you want to stay with your original choice, or switch?”

Here’s the question: is there any compelling reason to switch doors?

The answer is “yes.” Dean’s comments has the zoo; Steve Verdon has the math behind it. Quick summary? The probability that your choice is right (1 in X choices) does not change even if all but one of the choices has been eliminated. If you had to pick between a thousand doors and Monty removes 998 as known to be wrong choices, that other door will look mighty appealing.

Why? Because my understanding of ID is that it isn’t even science, despite ID theorists publishing their work in journals and whatnot. It lacks a definite body of hypotheses that could be put through the scientific method. Instead, its body of hypotheses can be distilled down to the following statements: 1. “That couldn’t possibly have arisen randomly, therefore, Evolution is false. Therefore, ID is true.” 2. “Evolution could not explain the origin of a particular structure or species, therefore, Evolution is false. Therefore, ID is true.” I could think of a couple dozen ways we can apply that kind of reasoning in the real world to justify all sorts of falsehoods and chicanery.

The problem with ID theory is that is a philosophical, or metaphysical, concept being peddled as a scientific concept. I have no beef with people who think that God set things in motion. I have no beef with people who think that God created the universe. But for those who believe so, I would ask: “How?” Not many would fall upon what they observe through their day to day lives, because there is that old, Hellenic idea that the physical and spiritual realms are separate: that the tangible world could not possibly lead to a better understanding of the spiritual. It is a concept so ingrained in Western Civ that its influence in the faiths of our civilization is ubiquitous.

Of course, True Conservatives like LaShawn Barber would label as unGodly someone who would answer that what we observe is the process with which God shapes the universe. The True Conservatives who would would like to see ID preached as gospel truth—the manner by which Evolution, too is sold, I resent—are falling towards the same attitude that they accuse proponents of Evolution of exihibiting. Never mind that the biblical Creation Myth was itself a derivative of the Eridu Genesis. Never mind that evolutionary theory does not purport to explain away the existence of a higher power, it is the belief of the ungodly! True Conservatives like LaShawn Barber like to label people who do not believe what she believes as apostates, which effectively kills any debate.

I do have a question for anyone who insists that ID is the truth: what if the Intelligent Designer that the scientists “discover” (how they will, I do not know) is not the god that you believe in? What if ID theory ends up pointing towards the intervention by intelligent, extraterrestrial life? Or how about a “first iteration” of humanity? (Sorry, the Stargate dork in me had to ask.) Because if the only acceptable outcome from ID is that God—the Christian capital-G God—did it, then your support of ID has little to do with the free flow of ideas at all, and has more to do with crowding out an idea that may challenge what flimsy faith you have in what you believe in. How insecure some of you are in your faith that such an idea as Evolution, one that unfolds right before our eyes, could shatter what you believe in, and make you accuse unbelievers of being ungodly.

When spirituality of any sort encroaches on the magisterium of finding facts—instead of dealing with their moral impact—you get quotes like this:

“They are offering an answer that may be in conflict with religious views,” Harris said in opening the debate. “Part of our overall goal is to remove the bias against religion that is currently in schools. This is a scientific controversy that has powerful religious implications.”

“Sometimes the jokes write themselves,” as my friend said. But mocking aside, these Faithful have lost their way. Faith and Religion deal with the moral implications of discovered facts, not with impeaching facts on the basis of whether the facts fit the literal reading of the Bible.

[Personal note: I've tried, hard to share what I have read from Stephen Jay Gould's writings about Science and Spirituality and how there is NO conflict, but I have been engaged in discussion wherein the premise is that there IS conflict, no matter what attempt is made to show that there isn't, or at least there shouldn't be.

Abiogenesis and the "loving work of God" go hand in hand, in the magesteria of fact-finding, and faith. It's all a matter of admitting that scientifically we can't have an airtight explanation in both verbal and mathematical form on the origins of life, and, on the side of the Christians, a little bit of humility is actually good. That God, or Fred, or whoever, didn't directly create Adam our of dirt isn't an insinuation against our position of being his beloved. That maybe, what these damned scientists who keep trying to prove that there is no God, is actually discovering His work.]

But then there’s lots that’s puzzling about the science textbooks used in American classrooms. A sloppy way with facts, a preference for the politically correct over the scientifically sound, and sheer faddism characterize their content. It’s as if their authors had decided above all not to expose students to the intellectual rigor that is the lifeblood of science.

Thus, a chapter on climate in a fifth-grade science textbook in the Discovery Works series, published by Houghton Mifflin (2000), opens with a Native American explanation for the changing seasons: “Crow moon is the name given to spring because that is when the crows return. April is the month of Sprouting Grass Moon.” Students meander through three pages of Algonquin lore before they learn that climate is affected by the rotation and tilt of Earth–not by the return of the crows.

Houghton Mifflin spokesman Collin Earnst says such tales are included in order to “connect science to culture.” He might more precisely have said to connect science to certain preferred, non-Western, or primitive cultures. Were a connection drawn to, say, a Bible story, the outcry would be heard around the world.

Yee-haw. Why not introduce smallpox as the disease that new American settlers used to wipe out Indian tribes? Then again, the article doesn’t stop there. There’s the usual fare of affirmative action as well.

[...] I have made the general argument in my book Rocks of Ages (Ballantine, 1999), a book that expresses the consensus of a great majority of professional scientists and theologians, not an original formulation from my pen. In briefest summary, no dichotomous opposition can exist in logic because science and religion treat such different (and equally important) aspects of human life—the principle that I have called NOMA as an acronym for the “non-overlapping magisteria,” or teaching authorities, of science and religion. Science tries to record and explain the factual character of the natural world, whereas religion struggles with spiritual and ethical questions about the meaning and proper conduct of our lives. The facts of nature simply cannot dictate correct moral behavior or spiritual teaching

— Gould, Stephen Jay. The Hedgehog, The Fox, and the Magister’s Pox. New York: Harmony Books, 2003.

Thanks for the strong but civil discourse whenever our paths cross.

Now, there is a purpose to showing how diseases look like, superficially. For one, pictures should help you see if that little discoloration on your skin is a mole or something more insidious. Or, let’s take goiter for example. Wouldn’t it be more educational to show students how a “young” goiter would look like, so that it can be caught at its earlier stages, than to show a morbid example? How about the case of syphillis, or necrotizing fasciitis photos? I have a hunch that either of these two diseases get treated long before they get morbid, so I just wonder why the medical literature uses the most bombastic examples in their photos.

Could it be because the median pathology is just too “boring?” Describing disease isn’t supposed to be entertainment, and a little bit of “disease porn” isn’t exactly a class act in medical lit. Just wondering out loud, y’know, and all that.

I could not remember everything he said, there are two points that he put forth. First, disbelief in a “god” is as much an act of Faith, a proposition that is impossible to prove using the faculties of Reason, as belief in a “god” is.. Second, he mentioned the fact that until “four hundred years ago,” which I assume would be the time of the “Enlightenment,” Faith and Reason were intertwined and synergistic. Science, back then was the way with which humans learned to understand, and appreciate the majesty of God.

There is no contest to that particular historical fact, and nugget of philosophy of science. I have not looked into the details of the history of scientific study, but I have a big hunch that the “divorce” between religion and science “four hundred years ago,” as Guillen said, was more the fault of the religious establishment than it was of those whose empiricism revealed that not all that is written in the holy texts were to be taken literally.

No proud “true religion” at the time, I am pretty certain, would be so humble as to admit to the existence of fossils older than the age of the world as gleaned from the annals of the bible. No “true religion” at the time would be so humble as to admit to the fact that the earth moved around the sun, and that it was not the orbital center of the known universe.

No “true religion” whose faith was grounded in the acceptance of the Bible as the literal Truth would be able to withstand the awful, cold hard logic of empirically observed data. And no vanguard of the Truth would be so humble as to admit that maybe, just maybe, taking the word of God literally is the wrong way to approach it. (Take note that it isn’t even that the word of God itself is wrong, but the approach to it.)

And so, four hundred years ago, faced with foundation-crumbling doubt about the accepted view of how the world is, the vanguard of the moral order declared war on the scientific method. I am also pretty certain that the scientists, discoverers of Reason, said “the feeling’s mutual, bitch!”

The reconciliation of Faith and Reason is something that the Catholic Church has already done ahead of most of the other Protestant Churches that many of the liberal elite find so delightful to deride.

“Science is the way with which the creative work of God is further discovered and appreciated.” In one form of another, the Doctors of the Church past and present, starting with St. Thomas Aquinas, described science as such. While I certainly believe that the rejection of the works of the Doctors of the Church by the Protestant Churches as “ungodly” — saintly those works may be, to the Catholic, but they were not divine by any means — is a blow against the philosophical wealth of the Protestants, I most certainly know that the latter’s philosophies are already affected by the here and now, which is, beyond acceptance for many a devout Christian “literalist,” quite influenced by a couple thousand years of the Catholic Church.

That the concept of science itself is often ill-defined in the popular parlance is a challenge to a discussion like this. “Science is knowledge glened through causes,” as I learned on my first day of my Philosophy Of Science course. It is knowledge gleaned using the Scientific Method, which at its very basic is “Observe, Guess, Test, Conclude.”

Science is hostile to matters of Faith within its own methods because the latter do not answer anything; but it is not necessarily hostile to matters of Faith outside that which needs to go through the method. This is the confusion that plagues the rhetorical arena today, and yet the truth can be so simple. Plenty of scientists ascribe to a religious belief system. That they keep their religion out of their methods is a testament to their discipline and adherence to the Scientific Method itself. That one ascribes to a belief system does not hinder one’s ability to reason, it is only a matter of intellectual discipline to discern where one’s Reasoning ends and where one’s Faith begins. It is this discernment that makes or breaks a scientist.

This long post is not an address to such hot-button (the fact that they are perplexes me though) issues such as the craptacular concept of “intelligent design,” which I will dsicuss soon enough. Next: Theories, Laws, and the Scientific Method.