The Season of Madness Is Upon Us Again

Grounded in Unreality

Hah.  You can always tell when the Game of Junk Science is going to make another appearance across our media.  It has been deemed necessary to the survival of the human species to have an annual global conference on the greatest known threat facing the human race--global warming.  About two months before, the frothing and hyperventilating begins.  Climate change is real.  Climate change is evil.  Climate change requires vast expansions of state powers to ensure that it does not happen.  The survival of the human race is at stake, etc.

Yet virtually everywhere public opinion surveys are showing that global warming is regarded as the least of our problems.  The issue has been thoroughly lost on ordinary people.  The reason is that it is a manufactured crisis. It's a made-up bogey man.  It is bereft of any foundation in science. Yes, we make that claim deliberately.

After all, the essence of science is to have recourse to a certain rigorous, empirical heuristic method.  That method demands that propositions be verified empirically, which is to say--at once--that all scientific hypotheses, propositions, and conclusions must be subject to empirical falsification.  If a proposition cannot be subject to empirical falsification, it simply cannot be part of a scientific exercise.

More Gadfly Than Blowfly

Syndrome of the Embarrassing Advocate

Every so often we are treated to one of our resident Unbelievers pontificating away as if his life depended upon it.  Sir Bob Jones is a wealthy man--irreverent, atheistic, and entertaining--who likes to throw together an occasional opinion piece in the NZ Herald with all the panache and thoughtfulness of someone deep in his cups.  In other words, Bob is not to be taken seriously.  Mercifully he does not take himself seriously.  More gadfly than blowfly.

Nevertheless, Bob is a self-professed empiricist.  It's all science for him.  Not religion.  All hard data, not superstitious rubbish.  He bombastically writes:

I'll stick with science rather than fairy tales.  All the primitive praying never saved us from the Creation's syphilis and rabies as antibiotics have, this just one of the thousands of examples of our debt to science.

Except that old Bob doesn't stick with science.  If he were to do so, he would be entirely more believable.  On the contrary, he appears not to understand much about science nor fairy tales for that matter.  As things stand, Bob has convictions about everything as do all opinionated folk.  Yet, for some bewildering reason, Bob has apparently never considered the limitations of his beloved empiricism.

That's Not What I Meant At All . . .

Vaunted Moral Principles

Poor old Richie Dawkins is getting lots of bad press these days.  Most unfair.  The recent furore is over his general advice to any woman pregnant with a Downs Syndrome child to abort--that is, kill--the child immediately.  How odious for anyone to criticise such a patron saint of evolutionism, our established religion.

The Telegraph summarises the "incident":

Richard Dawkins, the atheist writer, has claimed it is “immoral” to allow unborn babies with Down’s syndrome to live. The Oxford professor posted a message on Twitter saying would-be parents who learn their child has the condition have an ethical responsibility to “abort it and try again”. . . .

Now, of course, Professor Dawkins has always suffered from a grossly enlarged sanctimony gland.  One cannot criticise him for this affliction.  It's the way things roll and who can criticise Nature?

One mindless critical response to his "abort it and try again" gaff suggested that he was making killing a Downs Syndrome victim in-utero a moral equivalent to killing a Downs Syndrome adult.  Not at all, insisted the good professor.  Don't you know that infants when born start to have "feelings" and that makes all the difference. Anything that is "unfeeling" is not a human life; once a Downs Syndrome baby has feelings, then he she or it deserves the protection of the law proscribing infanticide.  Whew.  Glad we got to hear that.

Justification of Knowledge and Truth (Part II)

A Bold Plan for Perpetual Ignorance

How do we know that what we know is actually true?  Wittgenstein and the post-modernists argued that we never will know absolute truth; all we can have is perspectives (including this one).  This has not sat well with traditional philosophers, but it has certainly had a field day in the world of academia.  We now have endless lists of perspectives as subjects for study: queer literature, minority art, feminist politics, proletarian ethics, trans-gender discourse, and so on, ad nauseam.  The end result is lots and lots of insignificant jobs for post-modern academics.  Lots of heat, but not much light.

We have argued that rationalism--one of the traditional justifications of knowledge--elides into tautologies and irrationalism.  The second major tendency to justify knowledge as being true-truth is empiricism.  This is probably the tendency which is most popular today--largely, due to the widespread belief that science (which employs the "empirical" method) delivers the truth.  As Frame explains:

Eve Had it Right All Along

Intelligent Design Theories

We have been reading a book entitled God and Evolution, edited by Jay Richards.  Its default position is the promotion of Intelligent Design, with a collection of essays by Protestants, Roman Catholics and Jewish contributors.  In this and some future posts, we will interact with some of the contributions.

Now, on one level--the broadest referent--nobody denies "evolution"--the concept of development, change, and adaptation is  universally taught in the Scriptures and self-evident everywhere in the creation.  In a similar fashion, all Christians acknowledge "intelligent design" of the universe.  To believe that God created all things of nothing necessarily requires a belief in intelligent design.  After all, "in the beginning was the Word. . . . All things came into being through Him; and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being."  (John 1:1-3)  the Greek noun, "logos", used here for the Word, means rational, verbal expression. 

But Intelligent Design protagonists want to say something more.

The Suborning of Science

Modern Science Takes On The Garb of the Alchemist

The Scientist magazine carried an article in its most recent edition entitled "Promises, Promises." No, it was not bemoaning the verbal legerdemain of a febrile politician on the hustings. It was commenting on the growing tendency of the science establishment to misdirect, mislead, exaggerate and otherwise sensationalise scientific work. In other words, scientists are increasingly sounding more and more like the hucksters and charlatans amongst the alchemists of medieval Europe.

The article by Stuart Blackman explores why this has come to be the case. We reproduce the highlights:

At its most enthusiastic, science has always been prone to promise rather more, and sooner, than it has managed to deliver. It can sometimes feel as if cures for diseases are forever 10 years off, while nuclear fusion seems to have been 50 years away from practical reality for about half a century now. It might be easy to look back and laugh at claims that eugenics would spell the end for not only heritable diseases, but also of social problems such as vagrancy and crime, but a 1989 Science editorial’s claim during the run-up to the human genome project that the new genetics could help reduce homelessness by tackling mental illness1 is perhaps fresh enough to make biologists’ toes curl with embarrassment.

Meanwhile, in bleaker moments, scientific authorities have predicted the end of the world and civilization as we know them at the hand of pandemics or environmental catastrophe. And yet we are still here, in defiance of Thomas Malthus’s eighteenth-century warnings about overpopulation and ecologist Paul Ehrlich’s prophesy in his 1968 book The Population Bomb that “In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.”

Why does modern science have a tendency to over-promise and exaggerate. After all, at the forefront of research and scientific breakthrough normally the field is clouded with unknowns and yet to be verified implications. Normally breakthroughs are initially surrounded with a thousand qualifications. This is to be expected. But no longer, it seems.

Sir Ian Wilmut, leader of the Roslin Institute team that cloned Dolly the sheep, says that a “soundbite” media culture that demands uncomplicated, definitive, and sensational statements plays a significant role. “It’s [the media] who put the most pressure on scientists to make predictions,” he says. And in a radio or TV interview that allows perhaps only 10 or 20 seconds for an answer, “it’s very easy then to inadvertently mislead.”

But it might also pay scientists—financially and politically—to go along with such demands, and to indulge in what Joan Haran, Cesagen Research Fellow at Cardiff University, UK, diplomatically calls “discursive overbidding,” whereby they talk up the potential value of work for which they seek the support of funds, changes in legislation or public approval.

“Since the late 20th century, scientists no longer quite have that quality that we used to speak of as scientists being disinterested. They are now very interested,” says Hilary Rose, professor emerita of the sociology of science at the University of Bradford, UK and Gresham College London. “Many clearly manage to rise above this, but the basic culture of science has changed.”

Previously rigour and integrity were hallmarks of the professional scientist. Disinterested research following the facts and data as they emerged was the order of the day. But no longer it seems. Firstly, there is the influence of money.

Various developments such as the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act in the United States, and the rise of the spin-out companies from universities, mean that research has become more intrinsically bound up with the commercial world. Many biotech companies are now led by financial directors rather than scientific directors, says Nik Brown, co-director of the Science and Technology Studies Unit, University of York, UK. The past decade has seen a rise in the number of financial experts appointed to influential positions in biotech companies, for instance. And since the end of the Cold War, he says, the central role of science has become less about security and more about economy, with science and technology becoming central to many nations’ economic strategy.

It’s a changing role for science that finds formal expression in the scientific funding process, says Brian Wynne, professor of science studies at Lancaster University, UK. “Every research proposal these days, whichever field you’re in, has got to include a statement on the impact your research is going to have. And that isn’t just intellectual impact; it’s also economic impact. And that is basically requiring scientists to make promises, and to exaggerate those promises.”

Then there are the career interests of scientists who seek funding, tenure, and a prestigious career.

Central too is the desperate competition to get funded and published, which forces scientists to emphasize the potential impact of their work, introducing further temptation to exaggerate.

Then, there is the increasing pressure placed on scientists by politicians who want definitive certainties (even though there may be no evidence for them) so that they can have something hard, fast, and concrete (the facts!) to whip up political support for costly or unpopular measures. In almost all cases the politicians are of the pro-big-government, liberal wings who are looking for some significant expansion of government power and authority over society and the economy.

Moreover, at a time when the pressures on scientists to “rhetorically overbid” is increasing, politics is becoming more reliant on science to provide predictions to guide policy.

“There are probably more issues than there were where there is political concern about issues—often global issues—which have a scientific content,” says Sir Martin Rees, astronomer and president of the United Kingdom’s Royal Society. “Climate change is one. Pandemics are another. These are both issues where the science is uncertain, but it’s better to listen to the best scientists than to the man in the street.”

But according to Dan Sarewitz, director of the Consortium for Science, Policy, and Outcomes at Arizona State University, a consequence of this reliance on science is that politicians are able to “fob off responsibility to scientists” when making difficult policy decisions. That politicians are looking to science for certainty regarding complex political issues is illustrated by an address to the Copenhagen Climate Conference earlier this year by the then Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who appealed to scientific delegates for simple, unambiguous accounts of the science. “[Don’t] provide us with too many moving targets, because it is already a very, very complicated process,” he said. “I need fixed targets and certain figures, and not too many considerations on uncertainty and risk and things like that.” Such demands, says Sarewitz, can tempt scientists into providing simplistic and unqualified extrapolations from the current state of knowledge to possible future scenarios.

It is becoming increasingly apparent that the liberal-academic-media complex has an awful lot to answer for. The longer this goes on, the more science will be seen as a modern form of alchemy: science in support of wishful thinking. The upshot will be to the detriment of everyone.

Meditation on the Text of the Week

Things Are Never What They Seem

For we walk by faith, not by sight.
II Corinthians 5:7

The Unbelieving world interprets faith to be no more nor less than wishful thinking. The dominant world-view or religious system in our day is “scientific” materialism. This espouses the belief that the only reality which exists is that which can be known through the investigation by the five human senses. If it cannot be seen, touched, smelled, heard, or tasted directly, or if it cannot be deduced from what those senses perceive, it probably does not exist. Any suggestion that something exists besides matter is nothing more than speculation—and, therefore, wishful thinking.

This means that the dominant religion of our day, which requires that all things be subject to the reifying senses of man, is at the same time a religion with persistent overtones of scepticism, agnosticism, and atheism.

In our text, Paul contrasts faith and sight. He lives by faith and not by his senses. “Ah hah”, says the Unbeliever, “this is what I am talking about. Faith belongs to that which is beyond the senses—it is concerned with the unknowable, the speculative, and the unreal.” The modern Unbeliever insists that the only reasonable course is to do the exact reverse of what Paul does: man must walk by sight (and the other direct and derived senses) alone. Faith is for children. The Unbeliever of our age consistently places the Christian faith in the same category as believing in garden fairies or Santa Claus. To “partake” you have to engage in a willing suspension of disbelief.

The Believer comes from a different mental “planet”. The Believer knows that nothing in this world makes any sense at all (if you would pardon the pun), including the data received via the senses, without presupposing the God revealed in the Scriptures. Therefore far from being wishful thinking or speculation, faith in God is the only ground which gives sensory perception any meaning. The fact that Unbelievers do find the senses give meaningful information evidences the Living God; the fact that Unbelievers still deny His existence tells us much about their sinful rebellion and culpability and nothing commendable about their particular religious speculations.

So when Paul says that we Christians walk by faith and not by sight he is not telling us to deny the veracity of our senses; rather he is reminding us that our human experiences are reflective of what is going on, but not determinative. In particular, Paul in this passage is discussing aging and approaching death—which is both very real and extremely tangible. Every day of aches and pains is a day of groaning, a vivid reminder of mortality.

But the tangible is the effect, not the cause. The cause, at the end of the day, is the decree and command of the Living God concerning all things. Because God is the Creator of all things out of nothing, what my senses and experience tell me is going on is a very low order type of knowledge. It is real, but unreliable. It is true, but not definitive. It is actual, but tentative.

The Believer knows that in the end experiential reality will conform to the decrees and directions of the Living God, not the reverse. Believing God—that is, believing that what He has said will indubitably and infallibly come to pass—is the highest order of knowledge and truth, because it is determinative of everything else.

Therefore, Christians walk by faith and not by sight. Far from meaning that Christians live in vain hope, wishful thinking, and empty speculations, the opposite could not be more true. When Paul says he walks by faith not by sight, he means that he is living according to that which is infallibly definite, certain,and true, rather than by that which is ephemeral, uncertain, weak, and transitory.

Believers live according to the way the world is coming to be, not according to the way that is now is. They mould their lives around the promises and declarations of God, not around the finite and feeble information of current human experience. Abraham lived his life according to what the Lord promised him was going to happen. He conformed and shaped his present existential experience of ephemeral and temporary reality to that coming certainty. He knew that God's Word was more certain than anything in existence. He knew that even if he were to sacrifice Isaac at the express command of God, Isaac would yet be raised up again and restored to him, for God had promised that his heirs would be numbered through Isaac. This is why Abraham is the father of all Believers. When we also walk by faith and not by sight, we are walking after Abraham, in his steps.

To walk by faith is to believer that existential and sensory reality will finally be completely conformed to the declarations and promises of God. It will be as God has said it will be. Anything else is the height of folly and madness.