More Stars for the Dumb and Dumber Show

Math Is ‘White Supremacist Patriarchy’

So Claims Brooklyn College Education Prof.  

Tom Ciccotta
Breitbart News

Brooklyn College Professor of Math Education Laurie Rubel argued this week on Twitter that the mathematical equation 2+2=4 “reeks of white supremacist patriarchy.” Rubel’s tweet was retweeted and promoted by several academics at universities and colleges around the nation.

According to a report by Campus Reform, Brooklyn College Professor Laurie Rubel, who teaches math education, tried to make the case this week that basic math is “white supremacist.” The tweets are part of a larger trend in recent scholarship by American academics, many of which have argued that “objective truth” is a social construct.

“The idea that math (or data) is culturally neutral or in any way objective is a MYTH. I’m ready to move on with that understanding. Who’s coming with me?” Rubel wrote in a tweet.  “Along with the ‘of course math is neutral because 2+2=4’ trope and the related (and creepy) ‘math is pure’ and ‘protect math.’ Reeks of white supremacist patriarchy,” Rubel added. “I’d rather think on nurturing people & protecting the planet (with math in service of them goals).”

Several academics from institutions around the nation chimed in. Harvard Ph.D. candidate Kareem Carr suggested that math should be reevaluated because it was primarily developed by white men. 
“People say it’s subjectivism to ask if math is Western. I don’t get that. It’s an objective fact that some groups were more involved in the creation of modern math than others,” Carr said. “They may have been *trying* to make it objective but it’s not stupid to ask if they actually succeeded!”

A few academics have pushed back. James Lindsay, one of the academics behind a series of hoax papers that were published in “social justice” journals, reminded Rubel and her peers that mathematical truths are objective.

“It’s certainly the case, and the Woke need to be held firmly to the point, that feats of engineering like space travel and rocketry utterly depend upon accepting stable meanings of mathematical statements like 2+2=4 as objectively true, not mere accidents of culture,” Lindsay tweeted.

A Plague In Its Own Right

Trump Derangement Syndrome

By now we are all be familiar with what is known as "Trump Derangement Syndrome" [TDS].  It designates a state of affairs where reflexively anything which President Trump says or does immediately becomes verboten or subject to ridicule.  

If, for example, Trump were to say on national TV, "I believe it is important for humans to breathe" a phalanx of dedicated Trump Derangement Syndrome types would mock, ridicule, and reject breathing.  In other words whatever Trump says or does, it is is immediately rejected.  Well, hyperbolically at least. 

What follows is a classic example of TDS  First, the story:

The Civilization That Built Its House Upon the Sand

Myths and Just-So Stories

Modern science is a mixture of fact based truth, on the one hand, and speculative story telling, on the other.  Rarely, however, is the distinction made.  If it were, the factual basis of most "science" would crumble to the ground, along with a heap of salaries, academies, and newspapers.

Paul Gosselin writes:

. . . science deals with observable and reproducible processes.  The rest is outside the domain of science (or should be).  But science has gained such prestige that it exerts a quasi-irresistible attraction, seducing many ardent admirers among those who hope to exploit this prestige for their own mythical/ideological purposes. 

When one looks back to the beginning of all things, we find ourselves reaching the limits of our means of observation, either at the macro level (the universe) or at the micro level level (the subatomic world).  Empirical data becomes harder and harder to come by.  But more importantly, finding the means to repeat the processes that we are attempting to explain also become increasingly difficult. The closer we find ourselves to the limits of science, the greater importance we find our theories taking on (as well as the subjectivity involved in choosing their presuppositions) while (proportionally) the real influence of the available empirical data decreases.   [Paul Gosselin, Flight From the Absolute: Cynical Observations on the Postmodern West.  Volume I.  (Quebec: Samizdat, 2012), p. 52.] 

Quantum mechanics has been confronted with Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle.  The sub-atomic academic world has reached the limits of observation of the behaviour of electrons and sub-atomic particles.  When empirical testing and proving up no longer is possible, the realms of speculation await.  The study of the origins of the universe and life within it has rapidly devolved into speculation and "just so" stories.  Anyone care for a "multiverse"?

The Threat Facing Medical Science

The Return of the Witchdoctor

The medical profession stands before the Rubicon.  Either it will defend and stand firm for science-based medicine, or it will not.  If it does not, then the West will progressively return to the witch-doctors.  The latest challenge to the profession comes in the form of trans-genderism.  

Here is what's going down:

Reasonable people would be mystified, if not repelled, by the statements and actions of a leading researcher into transgender treatment. In a study funded by a $5.7 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), researchers including Dr. Johanna Olson of Children’s Hospital Los Angeles are supposedly evaluating use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones on dysphoric children.

As I’ve written with a coauthor, however, the study is fundamentally skewed toward the conclusions transgender activists desire: it contains no control group of subjects who will be spared these drugs, and will expire after five years, long before many negative effects may surface.  [Jane Robbins, The Federalist]

It seems that Dr Olson is more a sales person than a serious scientist.  A fundamental rule of selling is that one must give the client or prospective buyer what they want.  Olson insists that this is the only right way to proceed with transgender teens.

Pseudo-Science

The Myth of the Great Barrier Reef's Parlous State

James Delingpole
Breitbart News

An Australian Professor of Physics is suing his university, which is trying to gag him from telling the truth about the “dying” Great Barrier Reef.

The truth, of course, is that the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) isn’t dying at all. (As we’ve written here and here)  In fact it’s doing just fine and the gagged professor – Peter Ridd of James Cook University – has plenty of solid scientific evidence to prove it.

Ridd has been studying the GBR for 30 years and believes that the oft-heard claims that it is seriously threatened by climate change or pollution are just environmentalist scaremongering. He is also highly critical of those supposedly reputable institutions which have been promoting this alarmist myth, among them the Australian Institute of Marine Science and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies.

But when Ridd pointed this out in a published essay and a radio interview last year his university accused him of serious misconduct.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow (About The Rebellion Against Nature)

A Surgical Rape of Nature

Douglas Wilson
Blog&Mablog

Over the years I have expressed in various ways my great debt to The Abolition of Man. This book was published as a non-fiction companion to my favorite novel, which is That Hideous Strength. Every year that goes by simply reinforces Lewis’s prescience.

In this post, I want to summarize The Abolition of Man in a paragraph, then take issue with a passing reference that Lewis makes near the end of his argument, and then go on to make some observations about Lewis’s profound insight into the precise nature of the modern rebellion.

Lewis begins with the modern effort to debunk statements of value, showing that this debunking spirit is a universal corrosive. It will eat out any container you try to store it in. He shows how our brand of relativism is arbitrary and capricious, tending to select one aspect of traditional morality, and absolutizing it randomly over against the rest. The result of this rejection of the Tao is something that Lewis calls “men without chests.” They have no fixed system of value and so it is that they are adrift in a blind and stupid cosmos.

Now at the same time we are embracing an inchoate hot mess as an ethical system, we are simultaneously making tremendous advances in the technocratic sciences, such that more and more of nature is coming under our authority.

The Ground Hog Day Of Present Discontent

Unholy Triads

Angelo Codevilla sets forth the secular materialist Confession of Faith:  modern life in the West is

based upon the proposition, self-evident to many, that omnicompetent government as the executor of modern science can be the agent of unprecedented wealth, justice, and happiness.  We err at our peril if by focusing on the bloody show of totalitarian regimes, we imagine that they were wholly extraneous to the great trends of our time or to what is happening among us.  [Angelo Codevilla, The Character of Nations: How Politics Makes and Breaks Prosperity, Family and Civility (New York: Basic Books, 1997), p.5.]

One cannot help notice how  the policy directions of the modern secular state claim to be "science based".  This tells us not much about science per se, but the general belief that the government becomes more competent to deliver perfection upon earth when it is guided and justified by "science".  The disciplines of science have become equivalent to a sacred text, above and beyond ordinary centres of authority, by which society will be guided and led to health, wealth, and happiness.

And science has delivered what has been asked of it.

Mistakes We Christians Have Made

Calling Out the Dumbcluck

In the conflict between Christian faith and dogmatic secularist science, Christians are often at the mercy of their own credulity.  They are far too willing to believe consensus science to be the truth, based on hard, established fact.  Therefore, when science and the Bible appear to be in conflict, the text of scripture must be adjusted to accommodate hard science.

However, the more one becomes aware of the assumptions and presuppositions of science, the more one becomes familiar with scientific internal debates, the less one is impressed by consensus science.  Science is a helpful servant.  It makes an exceedingly poor master.

The Enlightenment rationalist argued as follows: if a religious doctrine cannot be established by Reason and/or Empirical Inquiry (science) then it must be dismissed as myth or baseless speculation.  On this basis Christianity, the Gospel, and the Bible become discredited and were eventually rejected by Western society in general--which is where we are today.

Unfortunately, far too many of us Christians are willing to concede to the authority of science over the Bible.

Darwinism on the Ropes

A Lesson In What Not to Do

We have argued that the text of the creation account in Genesis 1-3 is pretty straightforward and clear.  But it suddenly became complex and murky when, in the nineteenth century, Christians tried to reconcile the theorising of evolutionists with the plain text of Scripture.  Darwinists claimed to have hard, solid, irrefutable scientific evidence of the world existing for over 150 million years before man appeared here.  What some Christians then attempted was a reconciliation between the text of Genesis and the "evidence" and conjectures of evolutionists.  

The first great attempt at reconciling the two authorities (science and Scripture) was called the Gap Theory.  It posited a vast gap of time between Genesis 1:1 and Genesis 1:2.  Douglas Kelly summarises the theory:

The Great Petard

Try Harder

It turns out that Clint Eastwood is a profound cosmologist.  The best of the best, one may say.

The real question of the ages for the materialists and secularists is, Why does the universe exist at all?  For the Unbelieving cosmolgist it is a question inside a riddle, wrapped in an enigma.

David Berlinski rings the changes:

Oxford's Peter Atkins has attempted to address this issue.  "If we are to be honest," he argues, "then we have to accept that science will be able to claim success only if it achieves what many might think impossible: accounting for the emergence of everything from absolutely nothing."  Atkins does not seem to recognize that when the human mind encounters the thesis that something has emerged from nothing, it is not encountering a question to which any coherent answer exists.  [The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions (New York: Basic Books, 2009), p.95f.]  

How have the materialist cosmologists fared?  About as expected.  The problem is sufficiently complex that the problem itself defies a simple description.  But we will put our materialist hat on and advance one anyway.  Since we know that all being is some sort of combination of time and space and matter and energy and since we know there is nothing else, how did these come into existence out of nothing?

Berlinski points out that physicist Victor Stenger has had a crack at the problem.

Letter From America (About Propagandists' Capture of Science)

Who Are the Real Deniers of Science?

When denying science is a progressive moral imperative

By Jonah Goldberg
National Review Online

Why do liberals hate science?

The Left has long claimed that it has something of a monopoly on scientific expertise. For instance, long before Al Gore started making millions by claiming that anyone who disagreed with his apocalyptic prophecies was “anti-science,” there were the “scientific socialists.” “Social engineer” is now rightly seen as a term of scorn and derision, but it was once a label that progressive eggheads eagerly accepted.

Masking opinions in a white smock is a brilliant, albeit infuriating and shabby, rhetorical tactic. As the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously said, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.” Science is the language of facts, and when people pretend to be speaking it, they’re not only claiming that their preferences are more than mere opinions, they’re also insinuating that anyone who disagrees is a fool or a zealot for objecting to “settled science.”

Put aside the fact that there is no such thing as settled science.

A Canard Atop a Mirage

If It Can Be Described, It Cannot Possibly Be True

Darwin and evolutionism are increasingly under fire from secular scientists.  In 1981, a senior paleontologist of the British Natural History Museum was delivering a lecture to his trans-Atlantic colleagues at the American Museum of Natural History.

He acknowledged that Darwinism was being surrounded by an increasing number of doubting-Thomas scientists.  He argued that,

Darwin's theory of natural selection is under fire and scientists are no longer sure of its general validity.  Evolutionists increasingly talk like creationists in that they point to a fact but cannot provide an explanation of the means.  [Phillip Johnson, Darwin on Trial (Downers Grove, Ill.: Intervarsity Press, 2nd ed., 1993), p. 9f.; quoted by Douglas F. Kelly, Creation and Change: Genesis 1:1 -- 2:4 in the light of Changing Scientific Paradigms (Fearn, Ross-shire: Mentor/Christian Focus Publications, 1997), p.24.]

Others are more blunt.  Take, for example, Lynn Margulis, Professor of Biology at the University of Massachusetts:

She shows that molecular biology has as yet been unable to demonstrate the formation of a single new species by mutations, and concludes that neo-Darwinism is "a minor twentieth-century religious sect within the sprawling religious persuasion of Anglo-Saxon biology." [Kelly, ibid.]

Ouch.  A "minor twentieth-century religious sect"!  Could you put the matter in a less equivocal manner, Professor?

Paradigm Shifts and Mumblings

What's That Young Kid Saying?

One of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century, Cornelius Van Til once observed that when human beings (of whatever stripe) begin to think about the world and study it they have already made up their minds what they will find.  Neutrality is impossible.  The fisherman's net mesh has already pre-determined what kinds of fish will be caught before it is cast into the sea.

In the eighteenth through to the early twentieth centuries, the ruling theological paradigm was Deism. Sure god existed, but he/she/it was detached and removed from the material realm, far from the realm of creatures, stars, and planets, or, in other words, from the realm of time, space, energy, and matter.  Most scientists, academics, and researchers presumed Deism--consciously or unconsciously--before they began their work.  In other words, they presupposed from the outset that they would find no evidence whatsoever of God's handiwork or presence in the realms of time, space, energy and matter, and, lo and behold, their research "proved" what they had presupposed.

But as the twentieth century progressed the Deistic presuppositions became more and more problematic.  It has become science's "dirty little secret" or its skeleton in the closet.  As Douglas Kelly has written:

Heady Times

Living Amidst a Kuhnian Scientific Revolution

Amongst scientists and the various scientific disciplines, evolutionism--as a cosmology--is collapsing.  The evolutionist paradigm is falling apart.  The more strident the secular evolutionists become on the matter, the more they betray their deepest doubts and uncertainties.  

Most scientific paradigms do not collapse due to a full scale frontal assault from a competing paradigm.  Usually they collapse from within.  Those who once held the reigning paradigm, who had been card carrying members of the Association of the Ruling Paradigm, begin to find data and results and research that just "does not make sense" in view of current received wisdom.  The disquiet grows gradually.  Usually, the stridency of the ruling paradigm is toned down.  Folk don't discuss it much in polite scientific society.  It becomes a bit of an ugly cousin no-one talks about much any more.  It takes on the characteristic of a myth, a just-so story which no-one really believes "nowadays".

The textbooks used in schools and colleges which teach the incumbent paradigm are the last to change.  They represent the "establishment", particularly the State establishment.  It is here that the incumbent paradigm becomes "official".  State schools use state approved textbooks.  State textbooks teach the dominant paradigm.  State schools and state textbooks are usually the last to hear about a scientific revolution overthrowing the existing paradigm because neither the State, nor State schools are engaged in real science.  Rather, they represent the propagandists for the incumbent view.  As a paradigm is being overthrown, real scientists distance themselves, grow quiet, and adopt a "yes, but" mien towards the ruling official view.

This is the state of the current evolutionist paradigm.  It is crumbling from within.

Scientists Discredited--Again

No, Stephen Hawking 

Science Doesn’t Need Any Help From The European Union

James Delingpole

Breitbart London

Stephen Hawking and 150 other distinguished scientists – all fellows of the Royal Society – have written a letter to the (London) Times saying that if Britain leaves the European Union it would be a “disaster for UK science.”

No it wouldn’t.

Only 3 per cent of science R & D funding in Britain comes from the European Union. And it’s not as though we should be grateful for this sop: not when you consider that Britain puts far more into the EU than it gets back in return. If we were out, we could decide for ourselves how much we want to spend on science – and on which projects – rather than having a bunch of incompetent foreigners decide for us.

When I say “a bunch of incompetent foreigners” I mean just that.

No Other Good At All

Fearsome Clown 

David Berlinski writes about the arrogance of the modern secular scientist--at least those who hold to its religious form of atheistic scientism.

Curiously enough, for all that science may be a very good thing, members of the scientific community are often dismayed to discover that, like policemen, they are not better loved.  Indeed, they are widely considered self-righteous, vain, politically immature and arrogant.  This last is considered a special injustice.

"Contrary to what many anti-intellectuals maintain, " the biologist Massimo Pigliucci has written, science is "a much more humble enterprise than any religion or other ideology."  Yet despite the outstanding humility of the scientific community, anti-intellectuals persist in their sullen suspicions. Scientists are hardly helped when one of their own champions immerses himself in the emollient of his own enthusiasm.

The Just-So Stories Purporting to Comfort Unbelief

Miasmic Swamps and Wilting Reeds

When Christians seek acceptance from Unbelief and unbelievers, the slope is likely to turn very slippery very quickly.  One such way to gain the "respect" of Unbelief is to adopt some version or other of the "day-age" theory of the world's existence.  This is an attempt to make the first three chapters of Genesis "conform" to secularist evolutionary theories.  Basically, the objective is to get more time into the Genesis account so that a long, evolutionary process can be accommodated.

So, the text in Genesis 1 & 2 tells us that God created the heavens and the earth, right up to the crown of His creation, Adam and Eve, in six literal 24 hour days.  That's what the text actually says.  Moreover, somewhat embarrassing for those who want to accommodate a multi-billion year evolutionary process into the text, is the Hebrew style employed in the description.  The text employs a literary form which is quite distinct: it uses what Hebrew grammarians refer to as  historical narrative--a sequence of imperfect verbs, coupled with a sequence of waw-consecutive-conjunction--employed whenever the Old Testament is describing a sequence of actual historical events.

Why would we not accept this at "face value"?  Well, science allegedly tells us something different.

Isaac Newton Left Shaking His Head

Latter Day Step Children

One of the negative conditions under which modern scientists labour is "groupthink".  To be fair, it has always been the case that consensus science, which is sometimes referred to as the ruling paradigm, substantially controls the contemporary settled scientific views of the day.  [See Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1962,1970)].

However, the power and control of the ruling consensus varies over time.  There is evidence that at present the power of groupthink in science is waxing, rather than waning.  On the other hand, it is precisely when the reigning paradigm begins to crack and falter that the establishment's opposition to challenges becomes both frenetic and febrile. And it certainly has at the moment. So, it is possible the frenetic character of attacks upon the non-consensus view betray the insecurity of the establishment.

We have just had a small indication of this in New Zealand.  NIWA--a government run and funded science agency--representing "official science"-- announced that it will no longer fund its employees' membership subs to an independent association of scientists called The New Zealand Association of Scientists. (NZAS)

NIWA is refusing to pay membership fees for its staff to belong to the Association of Scientists, saying the group actively lobbies against science and the integrity of scientists.  The National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research notified its staff of the policy change this month. [Radio NZ]

Re-read the quoted paragraph.

Scientists, Demagogues, and Lysenkoism, Part III

Far Worse Than the Dark Ages

Science used to be respected as a discipline which, although restricted to empirical reality, could be relied upon to discover truth with a high degree of truthfulness and reliability.  Then, as materialism took hold and the West came to believe that the only reality was brute matter, science necessarily had to expand.  It became an authority literally upon everything, since matter alone existed.

At this point, the integrity of science began to decline rapidly.  Science was made a serving girl to realms and issues way outside its competence or ability.  The inevitable consequences were the rapid rise of junk-science and its capture by powers and authorities to serve their venal ends.  It is rapidly getting to the point where to claim science as an authority on any question is to invite sniggers from not just the back seats, but even in the reserved section. 

Our third example of faux-science comes courtesy of Quadrant Magazine.  Whilst this is a fairly lengthy article, every paragraph is of importance.  It demonstrates that Lysenkoism is rampant in our academies, schools, and laboratories--let alone in our media, Cabinet rooms, and halls of bureaucracy.  Science has become thoroughly politicised.  It risks a rapid loss any final shreds of credibility.  Would the last scientist in the room, please turn out the lights. 

Scientists, Demagogues, and Lysenkoism, Part I

Not Well Suited to the Task

If we were scientists we would be hanging our heads in collective shame.  These days whenever an utterance commences with the words, "Scientists say . . . " it seems a collective groan arises from the bowels of the body politic.  Not again!  The fruit loops have been scattered from the packet again.

Now this is not to be construed as a verbal barrage against the empirical scientific method.  Not at all.  Empirical research and investigation has been a great boon to the race.  It's just that in our generation, science has all too frequently become the preserve of demagogues and charlatans.  For the most part these folk are exposed, contradicted, and refuted--by other scientists.  However, it is becoming more and more the case that politics and power overtake the issues and science and scientists become the hand maiden of the demagogues.  Think Al Gore.  Barack Obama.  And even, most recently, the Pope--who should know a great deal better.

We have three examples of how science has been degraded to the status of a useful tool for demagogues.  We will deal with the first example in this piece.  Two additional examples will follow respectively.

The first is the Pope's woeful ignorance of the alleged most dismal of sciences--economics.  The editors of the National Review, an excellent rag, representing some of the best Christian social analysis and thought emanating from mainly Roman Catholic convictions, have taken the Pope to task for promoting the faux cause of global warming.  His ideology has trumped reasoned common sense and led him to embrace pseudo-science.