And Yet It Moves

One Reason Why I Am A Christian

2012-01-28T18:07:00.001-05:00

I just finished reading G.K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy, and I have to say the man was brilliant, witty, passionate, and more than a little strange. This makes for very interesting reading. Chesterton's whirlwind tour through his philosophy of life, morality, mysticism, religion, and the universe, among other things, has given me much to think about. Over the years I've come to feel that most people, including me, believe the things they believe mostly for complex emotional, social, and experiential reasons. Intellectual issues are certainly real and play some role, but I guess I've grown tired of the endless, hateful rhetoric between religious believers and non-believers. Still, Chesterton's take on things was lively, engaging, and quirky enough to get me excited again about some of these intellectual issues. Chesterton spends some time on determinism, the idea that the universe is a closed physical system (a viewpoint known as materialism) in which every event is predetermined, or fixed, based on prior events. Determinism is really the only way to think about the universe if scientific materialism, or naturalism, is true (quantum physics does complicate this somewhat, but that is a story for another day; besides, Chesterton and others argued against determinism before anything was known about quantum physics).

Chesterton reminded me of one reason that I am a Christian who believes in free will: I find determinism untenable. Certainly much of the universe is deterministic, or at least appears so. But a complete determinism I cannot accept. Humans are agents, by which I mean they have, within limits, the ability to choose or act in a way that cannot be reduced to the physical, to interactions of matter and energy. For example, if you lob a beach ball at me, there are probably a near infinite number of ways that I could respond. I could catch it. I could punch it. I could stand there and do nothing. I could catch it and eat it. I could karate chop it with my right hand. Or with my left hand. You get the idea. I believe that you could have the most advanced scientific instruments hooked up to my brain, monitoring every last bit of matter and energy, and you could still not predict which ninja move I may perform (or not).

This is fundamentally different than, say, flipping a coin, or predicting the weather. We might be tempted to think that these also are difficult or impossible to predict. But this is only due to incomplete access to information and instruments advanced enough to process the information. The way a flipped coin will land is in fact completely determined, though we may not be aware of the outcome. If instruments were available to precisely track the force applied to the coin, the angle the force was applied, the minute air currents the coin will pass through, etc., predicting how the coin will land is quite straightforward. The coin does not have a mind or agency (free will). The same is true of the weather. It would be an enormously complex practical matter to track all of the air molecules, water molecules, and energy involved to be able to accurately and exactly predict the weather, but in principle this task too is fairly straightforward. The weather is determined by prior events. When it comes to human agents though, I believe that even if we are supplied with complete information about the brain, we will still be unable to predict specific acts, such as a response to a thrown beach ball.

Of course, I don't know any of this for sure. Possibly in the future scientists will be able to perfectly understand and predict your every move before you even decide anything. But I doubt it. There is a healthy debate concerning the nature of consciousness, with strong arguments coming in from many different viewpoints, but I think the strongest case can be made for the idea that consciousness cannot be reduced to physical stuff (e.g. see David Chalmer's The Conscious Mind for rigorous arguments for consciousness having an extra-physical dimension). The idea that the mind has the ability to transcend the physical to make free decisions and feel non-physical things such as pain has strong philosophical support and squares well with each of our experiences as humans.

The thought may have crossed your mind that even if the human mind is partially non-physical, and free will is real, that this does not then point directly to Christianity. This is true. Some Christians believe in a sort of theological determinism, and many non-Christians have argued in support of free will. Really, my point here is that the Christian faith, the way that I see the world, is a reasonable one. I do not believe that Christianity (or any other worldview) can be flat-out proven to be true. But there are perfectly reasonable (and even, gasp, compelling) ways of understanding the world that fit very comfortably within the Christian faith. Many people seem to have the impression that to embrace a religious faith means to abandon any hope of having a coherent, reasonable understanding of our world and universe. I simply do not believe this to be the case, and I am thankful that Chesterton has deftly and happily reminded me of this in his strange little book.

Columbus and the Flat Earth

2011-10-10T18:30:00.002-04:00

One of the great modern day myths surrounding science and religion involves Christopher Columbus and a flat Earth. Most of us were taught in school that Columbus wanted to travel the world despite all the dire warnings about falling off the edge of a flat Earth. He bravely set sail anyway and changed the world through his discoveries, or so the story goes. Many of us were taught in school that throughout the early and late Middle Ages most people thought that the world was flat. In addition, we are told that this state of affairs was the result of the oppressive religious authorities of the time.

The truth, however, is that the West has known the Earth was a sphere since at least the 4^th century B.C., when Greek philosophers like Pythagoras followed by Aristotle and Ptolemy all laid out arguments for a spherical Earth (a few, like Eratosthenes, even took a shot at calculating its circumference). This knowledge survived into the Middle Ages, and virtually all educated people and scholars still affirmed a round Earth. Columbus and company all believed the Earth was round; no one warned him about falling off any edge. He was warned about his faulty calculations, which led him to believe that the Earth was much smaller, and India much closer, than it really was. As we all know, he ended up in North America instead.

So how did we end up believing this fable about Columbus and the rest of Medieval Europe? Historians have traced this flat Earth myth to the 19^th century. One of the first appearances was in the early 19^th century in Washington Irving’s fictional account of the Columbus story, and sometimes Irving is given most of the credit for the flat Earth myth. However, recent scholarship shows that the myth became a staple in textbooks in the late 19^th century after the publication of two books by John Draper and Andrew White. These men were overzealous secularists who wrote distorted (but highly influential) histories of science. Their intent was to provide a narrative involving science and religion where science is struggling for truth and progress and religion is doing its best to hamper scientific advances. The flat Earth myth was one pillar in their overall thesis: religious superstition is always trying to snuff out scientific progress.

How exactly did Draper and White convince us that Medieval peoples believed in a flat Earth? They found two minor figures (no others have been found), Lactantius (245-325 A.D.), a North African writer, and Cosmas Indicopleustes (fl. 540 A.D.), a Christian merchant from Europe, that wrote in support of a flat Earth and made this minority opinion appear to be the norm from the Dark Ages and onward. In fact, from the patristic period to the late Middle Ages (i.e. whenever you look), all church scholars, ranging from the Venerable Bede to Augustine to Aquinas, affirmed a spherical Earth.

Historians of science have dismissed Draper and White’s books as sloppy, selective scholarship that ignores the bulk of the historical data. Unfortunately, the myth persists. When I was teaching, I would ask my students each year if they had been taught the Columbus myth, and each year at least half of the hands were raised (I suspect most of the rest had also been taught it, but had forgotten). This is kind of sad. Here we are in the 21^st century believing that people in the Dark and Middle Ages were fooled by religious authorities into believing in a flat Earth, when in fact we are the ones clinging to a discredited myth.

I Liked the Old Atheists Better

2011-04-30T19:33:00.001-04:00

Stephen Prothero, a scholar of religion at BU, recently wrote a book titled God Is Not One. It is mostly an interesting read and is essentially a brief tour of major world religions with the intent of highlighting their differences. He includes a chapter on atheism which, while not a religion, is nonetheless an important and influential worldview (some contemporary forms of atheism, however, do seem very much like a religion).

Atheism is not new. It has been a significant intellectual viewpoint since at least the ancient Greeks, though atheists have always been in the minority. Prothero points out that some of greatest intellectuals (e.g. Nietzsche, Marx, Sartre) as well as some of the worst dictators (Stalin, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot) have been atheists. The so called "New Atheists" (e.g. Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris) have given a new public face to atheism and have written some of the best-selling books of the past decade. Prothero observes that this particular group of atheists seems to be very religious, holding their beliefs "with the conviction of zealots and evangelizing with verve." Chris Hedges, a former writer for the New York Times, sees the New Atheists as a "secular version of the Religious Right." These self-proclaimed freethinkers end up being just as hate-filled, bigoted, and dogmatic as the religious fundamentalists they usually take aim at.

Prothero writes, "One of history's most dangerous games begins with dividing the world into the good guys and the bad guys and ends with using any means necessary to take the villains out. New Atheists play this game with brio, demonizing Muslims, denouncing Christians and Jews as dupes, and baptizing their fellow "brights" into their own communion of smarter-than-thou saints. Like fundamentalists and cowboys, they live in a Manichean world in which the forces of light are engaged in a great apocalyptic battle against the forces of darkness. They, too, are dogmatic and uncurious and every bit as useful to neoconservative policymakers as right wing televangelists."

Prothero asks why we can't recognize that we can just as easily kill in the name of progress (the French Revolution and the brutal dictatorships of Stalin and Lenin come to mind) as in the name of God. Sam Harris actually writes, "Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them." The problem here is the strange but seemingly attractive notion that it is OK to be ultra-dogmatic and aggressive as long as you are "right." To me, the Spanish Inquisition would still not be acceptable even if the Roman Catholic Church's dogma was correct and the heretics indeed held false beliefs.

Prothero also mentions an interesting tidbit about the French New Atheist Michel Onfray. Onfray accuses fellow atheists like Dawkins and Dennett of being "Christian atheists." In other words, these atheists embrace Western moral values (which are predominantly Judeo-Christian) while rejecting Christianity and Judaism. Onfray, to my mind, is a bit more honest when he follows Nietzsche and insists that if atheism is true then there is no need for man to follow conventional morality. Onfray too recognizes the religiosity of many of today's atheists, writing (quoted by Prothero):

"The tactics of some secular figures seem contaminated by the enemy's ideology: many militants in the secular cause look astonishingly like clergy. Worse: like caricatures of clergy. Unfortunately, contemporary freethinking often carries a waft of incense; it sprinkles itself shamelessly with holy water."

Prothero doesn't only discuss St. Dawkins and St. Hitchens, though. He also tells the story of Amanda Gulledge, an "Alabama mom" and an atheist whose children have been shunned by other neighborhood children because they "haven't accepted Jesus as their Savior." Gulledge spoke at an atheist conference Prothero attended, and he noted the sharp contrast between the apparent goals of the more public New Atheists and "normal" atheists like her. One group wants to eradicate religion from the planet and the other wants atheism to be considered a valid viewpoint "deserving of a fair hearing." Prothero further contrasts the two different approaches in terms of the gay rights movement: "One is like trying to turn everyone gay and the other is like trying to secure equal rights for homosexuals."

I appreciate Amanda Gulledge's story, and I am ashamed that Christians would treat children like they have treated Amanda's children. I find it much harder to appreciate what the New Atheists seem to bring to the table: angry, overblown rhetoric and an astonishing level of close-minded, self-righteous hubris. I like how Prothero closes his chapter:

"I wouldn't walk around the block to hear Christopher Hitchens take cheap shots at Christians. But I'd get on the subway, and maybe even a plane, to hear Amanda Gulledge tell me why her kids are good people too."

Pagans, Sex, and St. Paul

2011-04-26T21:26:00.002-04:00

So a while ago I wrote a little bit about God and sex and attempted to clarify what Christianity actually teaches about sex. In that post I mentioned the apostle Paul.

In one of his letters to the Corinthians, Paul writes that it is good for husbands and wives to have sex and says that it is perfectly all right for people to get married if they want to. I see this as a pretty clear endorsement of sex and marriage, but Paul also states that while it is fine and good if people marry, it is better to be celibate. Paul doesn't say this because he thinks sex is bad, but because those with the gift of celibacy (which, Paul writes, only some possess) have more time to devote to God. Still, in my mind this put a bit of a damper on the endorsement.

I'm currently reading The Oxford Illustrated History of Christianity and came across an interesting note. Early Christians varied in their beliefs regarding whether or not they still had to strictly follow Jewish law or if they were free from the law or other social conventions. According to historian Henry Chadwick, "the pagan world was familiar with the widespread belief that sexual contact between man and woman hindered the soul's rise to higher things." This belief was adopted by some groups within the church, and was one of many reasons Paul wrote to them. Paul was not writing to people who thought that sex was good and telling them yes, sex is fine, but refraining from sex is better. He was writing to people who thought that sex was bad and was telling them no, sex is good, even if being celibate is better. Set in this context, Paul's affirmation that marriage is a good and acceptable thing is a stronger statement than I originally thought.

The Limits of Science: Debating "Denialism"

2011-03-07T22:29:00.000-05:00

Last time we saw one problem with having an exaggerated sense of the objectivity and purity of science. Another has to do with how many scientists and non-scientists (mostly self-proclaimed rationalists) deal with people who disagree with them over one theory or another. This view seems to be epitomized by Michael Specter is his book Denialism.

I haven't read the book, and don't plan to, but I read the introduction and I think that was enough to get a flavor of the book. I'll sum it up for you: if you don't love science as much as I do and disagree with scientists on anything than you are obviously stupid and irrational and should be sterilized. And your children should be kidnapped.

Attitudes like this drive me nuts for several reasons. One, scientists themselves disagree about a great many things in science. There are equally "scientific" papers that argue for either the primacy of astronomical causes (e.g. orbital changes) or terrestrial causes (e.g. greenhouse gases) of past climate change. There is disagreement over the composition and source of the early Earth's atmosphere. Or, think about how many times we've heard things like chocolate is good for you, wait it's bad for you, oops now it's good for you again. There is simply no such thing as "science says this about something and that's the end of it." Within the scientific community there exists a myriad of viewpoints, theories, and interpretations of facts relating to just about any scientific topic. To adopt one particular theory and dismiss everyone else as being part of "denialism" seems to be a bit of a stretch.

Secondly, philosophers of science as well as scientists themselves often write about how science will never truly end, about how there is always more to discover, and that this fact is partly why science is so exciting. Nicholas Rescher lays out rigorous philosophical arguments for this idea in his excellent book Nature and Understanding, and this was also the main topic in a recent editorial in the journal Science. Though frequently acknowledged, many people fail to appreciate what this means for any particular scientific theory: it is subject to revision and/or complete reworking.

A brief look at the history of science reveals the same story over and over again. Proponents of one particular theory demonize, ridicule, or ignore their opponents for daring to question established wisdom. Consider Ptolemy's geocentric universe, Wegener's theory of continental drift, or Newton's theory of gravity. Wegener was ridiculed viciously for his "wild" ideas by the geological community, yet now the fact that continents have moved over time has become the new established wisdom. There isn't any reason to think that we are so special as to be immune to this sort of thing. Our scientific theories are also under constant revision and scrutiny. It is ironic that self-proclaimed rationalists end up speaking of particular scientific theories in the same way others might speak of an unquestionable religious dogma.

Dreaming up some perjorative labels for people who disagree with you is not new. Mike Specter just adds "denialism" to the vocabulary of people who want a way to pat themselves on the back for being right while being comforted by the fact that all those other people who disagree with them are so obviously stupid and irrational. It's not that people can't be irrational. They can be, and many people are. But Specter's particular approach to this problem strikes me as profoundly unhelpful, anti-intellectual, and dare I say it, unscientific.

The Limits of Science: when scientists speak

2011-02-22T21:59:00.002-05:00

Rich Lewontin, in his book Biology As Ideology, writes that science is "a social institution completely integrated into and influenced by the structure of all our other social institutions." Lewontin is a leading geneticist and is certainly not anti-science. He simply calls for a "reasonable skepticism" when it comes to evaluating scientific claims and theories because scientists, like everyone else, can be influenced by a variety of other factors.

Having an exaggerated view of science's objectivity and purity can lead us to make some mistakes. First, it can lead to an exaggerated belief in the objectivity and purity of scientists. We need to be careful to distinguish between science (i.e. empirical claims) and what scientists say. It is common for scientists to express personal opinions within the pages of science texts, and it is also common for these pronouncements to be seen as "scientific" by the public. For example, in his influential book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, E.O.Wilson makes sweeping claims about human nature that go far beyond what any empirical biological studies can tell us. One example, described by Lewontin:

"He [Wilson] says, 'Human beings are absurdly easy to indoctrinate. They seek it...Man would rather believe than know.' That statement is, we must note, found in what is called a scientific work, used as a textbook in courses all over the world, filled with the mathematics of modern population biology, crammed with observations and facts about the behavior of all kinds of animals, based on what Time magazine has called the "iron laws of nature."

For many readers Wilson's statement will be perceived as having the same scientific authority as other claims in the book. Please do not misunderstand my point; I am not commenting on whether this particular claim is true. Rather, I wish to point out that Wilson's claim, though thrown in with the mathematics and science, is not itself supported by that science. It is actually an expression of Wilson's own social and political views.

Another example comes from zoologist (my favorite and yours) Richard Dawkins, who in his book River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life, writes that, "the universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference." Really? Which microscope, telescope, or meter stick did he use to discover this? The content of this statement falls almost completely outside the bounds of science. Science may have something to say about design or purpose in the universe, but good, evil, or "pitiless indifference"? No way. This is his particular view and interpretation of the how things are, and we need to be careful to distinguish between someone's scientific work and the opinions of a scientist in areas outside of their own expertise.

The Limits of Science: is science ever pure?

2011-02-15T21:40:00.002-05:00

Philosophers of science have tried for over a century to establish a rigorous, logical foundation for science, one that justifies science as an objective source of knowledge. No obvious solution is forthcoming. Instead, historians and philosophers of science have come to realize that, despite the protests of self-proclaimed rationalists, science is not the ultimate, infallible source of knowledge we might like it to be.

In case some relativists out there are getting too excited, it is equally clear that science is not merely a social construct or a human invention that has no connection to an underlying reality. As mentioned in a previous post, the success of science is indisputable. Someone once said that thanks to modern science, an elementary school student now knows more about the world and the universe than Aristotle did. Science is a not a social construct, but it is a human enterprise that is influenced by everything that affects humans.

Examples of the influence of culture and ideology on science abound. Probably the most famous example is Darwin's particular theory of evolution by natural selection and sexual selection. Darwin's theory of individuals struggling to survive has an undeniable parallel to Victorian ideas about economic competition and societal progress. His ideas about sexual selection also came straight from his cultural view of men and women. Genetecist Rich Lewontin writes, "In reading Darwin's theory, one can see the proper young lady seated on her sofa while the swain on his knees before her begs for her hand, having already told her father how many hundreds a year he has in income."

Another example involves the religious and philosophical views of James Hutton and Charles Lyell. Together they are often regarded as having started the field of geology and are hailed for their "modern" scientific outlook. In fact, their views on the Earth were rooted in beliefs in Deism and an eternal Earth. This led to the formulation of "uniformitarianism," the idea that everything about the Earth (both in the past and now) can be explained by the sorts of slow, everyday processes that we currently see. This idea proved to be helpful in getting scientists to think correctly about many of the formations we see on the Earth (e.g. mountains, river valleys, etc.).

Uniformitarianism, though, being rooted ultimately in ideology also hindered science in some ways and was flat out wrong in others. The obvious problem is that the Earth is not eternal, and in fact has a history. It has not always been the same, and therefore not everything can be explained through the processes we see at work today. The existence of ice ages and the massive glacial erosion they can cause was at first denied by scientists who followed Hutton and Lyell's methodology. They insisted that "catastrophes" had no place in the science of geology. As we now know, unique, catastrophic events have played an important role in the history of the Earth. These include everything from the formation and cooling of the early Earth, to ice ages, to asteroid impacts. These phenomena were initially ruled out because science had been influenced by a preferred ideology.

This is not to say that the influence of ideology is always bad. After all, most scientists consider Darwin to have been right about a great many things and geology no doubt benefited from Hutton's insistence on paying attention to the slow processes happening around us. Acknowledging the influence of culture on science does not mean giving up on science. It simply means that we must pay close attention to be able to distinguish where the empirical claims end and the ideology begins. In other words, to be aware of the limits of science.

The Limits of Science

2011-02-08T22:41:00.001-05:00

The success of science is indisputable. One only needs to look at modern medicine and technology for convincing evidence that science works. In the approximately 400 years since the birth of what we might recognize as modern science we have undoubtedly gained considerable knowledge of the natural world and its inner workings. In that time science has become a central part of our culture and, in many ways, has replaced religion as a major source of authority.

Since the Enlightenment there has been a steady trend of secularization in public life. Where once the Church wielded tremendous social and political power to uphold their own dogmas (e.g. the flat earth; just kidding, they actually never said that), some critics allege that the scientific establishment has in some ways taken the Church's place, forming a kind of scientific priesthood.

In fact, one famous proponent of science in the Victorian age and one of the first professional scientists, Thomas Huxley, had exactly that in mind. To Huxley and his supporters, science needed to replace religion as the supreme source of cultural authority. Historian Peter Bowler observes that the great museums of natural history built in Britain and America during the 1800s are rather cathedral-like (see the London museum above), and that this "helped confirm the role that science had usurped as the source of moral authority in the modern world."

Leaving aside the problem of "science" being a source of moral authority, what does this mean for us? One thing it means is that science's dominant position in our culture can cause people to accept pronouncements or conclusions uncritically. No doubt it was common in earlier centuries for people to uncritically accept what religious authorities told them, and we can have the same problem with scientific authorities now. In fact, in some ways it is probably worse today because science has become so specialized that it is sometimes hard for other scientists, nevermind lay people, to make sense of theories and concepts outside of their own fields.

As a former science educator, I am interested in helping people achieve science literacy, part of which includes being able to critically evaluate scientific claims and evidence as well as being aware of the nature and history of science. Over the next few weeks I intend to write further on these topics because while science is clearly an important source of knowledge, science (and especially scientists) are hardly infallible. Let's not accord to scientific theories the same blind faith and adherence to dogma that rationalists are so quick to criticize in our religious forebears.

Science and Culture, or, who needs kingdoms and phyla anyway?

2011-02-07T22:22:00.000-05:00

I recently finished reading The Earth Encompassed, a history of the environmental sciences by Peter Bowler. A major theme in the book is to show how all sorts of things can influence the development of scientific knowledge. Commonly viewed as having a lofty epistemic status and often claimed to be the sole source of objective knowledge, science is in fact strongly influenced by culture, political ideologies, religious ideologies, and even geography.

I plan on posting more on these topics later, but I'll start with an interesting discovery made by philosopher Michel Foucault while he was looking through an ancient Chinese encyclopedia. While discussing the history of classification (i.e., the different ways that different cultures have categorized parts of the natural world), Bowler relates the story of how Foucault became interested in questions of language and representation in the first place.

We are probably all reasonably familiar with the Western approach to taxonomy in which we divide plants and animals primarily according to their physical characteristics (kingdoms, phyla, genus, species, etc.). As Foucault discovered, however, the ancient Chinese apparently had a very different approach to classification which resulted in placing animals in the following categories: a) belonging to the Emperor, b) embalmed, c) tame, d) sucking pigs, e) sirens, f) fabulous, g) stray dogs, h) included in the present classification, i) frenzied, j) innumerable, k) drawn with a very fine camel hair brush, l) et cetera, m) having just broken the water pitcher, n) that from a long way off look like flies.

Anyone have a good mnemonic to help memorize that?

Quantum Physics and...the Iraq War?

2011-01-30T11:58:00.001-05:00

The other day I was listening to the radio and heard a surprising story about the toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein in Firdos Square in Baghdad. This event was one of the most memorable of the Iraq War and was replayed ad nauseam by the media (Fox replayed it every 4 minutes or so for almost an entire day). The story has an interesting parallel to one interpretation of quantum physics: that observers have a direct effect on the events they are witnessing.

Erwin Schrodinger, one of the founders of quantum mechanics, was aware of how absurd some descriptions of the world at the quantum level were. At the quantum level, reality stops making sense. Electrons, for example, the little bits of mass that “orbit” around the nuclei of atoms, seem to be able to do something that most of us are incapable of: be in more than one place at once doing more than one thing at once. Physicists call this being in a superposition of states; the electron has multiple speeds, directions, and spins at the same time. If that’s not strange enough, it turns out that when a human observer is present the electron “collapses” into a more normal state of only being in one place and doing one thing at a time. In order to illustrate this paradox, Schrodinger came up with his famous thought experiment that has become known as Schrodinger’s cat.

My version goes something like this: a cat has been placed in a high-tech box. Inside this box is a laser gun pointed at the cat’s head. A fancy contraption that monitors an electron’s spin controls the trigger on the laser gun. Electrons can either spin “up” or “down,” and the contraption will cause the gun to shoot if the electron is spinning up but will not shoot if it is spinning down. According to quantum theory, the electron is spinning up and down at the same time, so the gun is both shooting and not shooting, and the cat is both alive and dead. That is, until someone opens the box and looks inside.

The presence of an observer changes the reality. A similar thing seems to have happened in Firdos Square in Iraq in 2003. We all saw the footage where crowds of Iraqis toppled the statue of Saddam, a symbol of liberation and victory for the people there. Unfortunately, the real story is somewhat different. Rather than an area full of jubilant Iraqis knocking over a symbol of oppression, it was actually a mostly empty area with a large number of reporters, some Iraqis near the statue, and some American soldiers around the perimeter.

A handful of Iraqis decided that they wanted to topple the statue, but were unable to do so. An American commander noticed what they were trying to do and, seeing the crowds of reporters in the square, thought about how it would look if TV stations showed footage of Iraqis trying in vain to knock over the statue of Saddam. He ordered some soldiers to help them out and, voila, reporters zoomed in on the event and broadcast it around the world. An iconic moment in the war, seen as a symbol of victory by many, was actually more or less manufactured because of the presence of reporters. A full view of the area would have shown that the reporters outnumbered the active participants. This would have lessened the drama, to say the least. Some have speculated that the way the media portrayed this event, as well as the number of times it was replayed, led to a false sense of victory and ultimately disappointment as it became clear that there was a long road ahead for both Americans and Iraqis.

While maybe not as complicated or surprising as quantum physics, it is interesting to think about how the presence of observers changed what happened, how it was reported, and ultimately ended up influencing how many of us saw the war in Iraq.

Can "green" apps save the planet?

2011-01-03T22:16:00.000-05:00

Last Spring I was listening to an On Point program about our ecological footprints and the hidden environmental costs of many of the products we buy. For example, manufacturing an e-reader like an iPad has the same impact on climate change as about 100 old-fashioned books; count the electricity you use for the life of the iPad (which mostly comes from coal-burning plants) and it becomes clear that, as Daniel Goleman and Gregory Norris say, the most ecologically friendly thing to do is to walk to your local library.

Anyway, the show also discussed some "green" apps that are now available for your iPhone which rate various products based on a calculation of their impact on the environment. So, for example, it might suggest buying this brand of vacuum over another because the former company uses more recycled plastic. Now, I have no problem with educating people about the ecological impact of the products they buy (in fact, I'm quite convinced this is a great idea), but, one person who called in to the radio program reminded me of the larger problem we face.

I'm kind of assuming a lot, but from the way it sounded to me, the caller was probably a wealthy suburban housewife who drives a Lexus SUV, goes shopping a couple of times a week, and who purchases the latest, greatest smartphones for herself and her family every couple of months. She described how wonderful the new green apps were and how much they helped when she was shopping for that new vacuum or phone or flatscreen TV and she was very excited that she could be "green" while doing this. Unfortunately, she has completely deluded herself: the problem is not just that we buy new vacuums made without any recycled plastic, or that we buy a new car that gets 5 miles per gallon less than another one; the main problem is all of the constant buying itself. We are consumers through and through, and, while I'm too lazy to look up the exact statistic, Americans have consumed more of the earth's resources in the last century than the rest of the world has throughout all of history, or something crazy like that.

There is something amusing about us driving around consuming everything in sight but patting ourselves on the backs while we do it because we have some "green" apps on our smartphones.

God and Sex

2010-12-27T22:31:00.000-05:00

A few months ago I was listening to a local radio program on my way to a job site. It was one of the morning talk programs where a few guys and one girl talk about and offer un-informed analyses of news and current events. Aside from serving as a strong reminder of the reason I usually only listen to NPR, the chatter that day also offered another example of an amusing / annoying lack of Biblical literacy.

Somehow the topic of God and sex came up, and the three (or maybe four) of them starting going off about how God hates sex and how the Bible teaches this and that about how sex is bad. This belief seems to be very common (Philip Pullman makes it a major issue in his anti-clerical but pretty good series His Dark Materials) yet, as is true of many beliefs about Christianity, it is false.

In their discussion of how God feels about sex, one of the hosts actually said something very nearly like, "have you ever read the Bible, God doesn't want you to have sex or have any fun." Apparently she missed that part of the creation story in Genesis where God creates males and females to join together "as one flesh" and how that union (physical, social, and spiritual) somehow fully encapsulates who God is. They apparently missed the verses in Proverbs emploring young married lovers to rejoice in each other's bodies as well as that whole book of the Bible, the Song of Songs, which is essentially erotic love poetry. Paul, in the New Testament, says that husbands and wives should offer their bodies freely to one another (though he also says he thinks it is better to be single, this is a separate issue and has to do with time rather than sex).

I think this myth probably has a variety of sources. Some Christians throughout history have thought that sex itself was sinful and have even thought that sex was the original sin that occurred in the garden of Eden. However, this view was informed more by certain strains of Greek philosophy (in which physical bodies, by their very nature, were considered corrupt) than the Bible. Also, I think that many of us somehow confuse a strong set of sexual ethics (forbidding adultery, etc.) with condemnation of sex itself. There is also the stereotype (too often true, unfortunately) of Christians as prudes. Lastly, I think a big part of this is willful ignorance: people believe what they want to believe. The radio host asked "have you ever read the Bible" but clearly had not actually read it herself. I was annoyed enough that I almost wrote in to the show to helpfully point them to some relevant passages, but it probably wouldn't make any difference.

Sigh...if only they knew that God thinks rather highly of business time; heck, he created it.

Who designed the designer?

2010-12-11T15:38:00.001-05:00

A common objection to the Judaeo-Christian view that God created the universe involves pointing out that if you explain something by appealing to God you have not really explained anything because you would then need to explain God. Richard Dawkins has often written on this topic and his position is essentially this: by explaining an event or an object through reference to God (or, more generally, a designer), the explanation becomes worthless because you have invoked something that itself would need to be explained. The question would then need to be asked, who designed the designer? It would be much better to have a simpler, natural cause that would not require further explanation.

At first this sounds about right; indeed, walking around explaining everything by saying "God did it" would be about the same as not having any explanation at all. But upon closer inspection the argument breaks down completely.

After all, every explanation requires further explanations. Imagine a simple dialogue between a scientist and a curious inquirer:

"Why did that apple fall?"
"Gravity pulled it to the Earth."
"Where did the gravity come from?"
"Gravity is the bending of space-time around objects with mass. It is governed by natural law."
"Where did the natural laws come from?"

This line of questioning could go on and on no matter what answer the scientist gives. Either the scientist would have to explain one answer in terms of another, further, explanation or at some point the scientist would have to argue that one particular, arbitrary answer was somehow final. This illustrates two main problems with Dawkins' argument. First, just because an answer may require further explanation does not mean that the answer is worthless. No one would, after hearing it explained that the Earth's gravity pulled the apple to the ground, exclaim, "you haven't explained anything, because now you have to explain where the Earth came from!"

Second, an infinite regress of causes or explanations, as philosophers have called it, is an age old problem with explanations in general, not just explanations involving God. People of all worldviews have to take something as fundamental and not requiring further explanation. Aristotle had his Unmoved Mover, Christians have God, and some scientists believe the laws of nature to be "brute facts" not requiring explanation (Neil deGrasse Tyson begins a chapter of one his books with: "In the beginning, there was physics.") It is silly to single out one specific explanation with a criticism that applies to all types of explanations.

So what can we learn from this? My suggestion would be for Dawkins to stick to zoology and maybe stop writing publicly in areas that are so clearly outside his expertise.

Evolution to the rescue: why old men can't dance

2010-06-12T23:42:00.000-04:00

Evolutionary psychology is an attempt to explain human behavior in terms of the evolution of our ancestors. While I do not doubt that who our ancestors were and what they did influence us today, I find many of the "findings" of evolutionary psychology to be hilarious. For example, see this explanation of why men go bald or this essay for a hilarious skewering of some of the claims of evolutionary psychology.

The latest example I, truthfully, had a hard time believing. I mentally double-checked that it wasn't April 1st. But, no, it's real. A psychologist now has an answer for one of the larger questions in life: why do old men dance so poorly at weddings? See his answer here.

Thankfully there seem to be a growing number of people who are properly skeptical of such claims.

Whose animals are more awesome? America's or Europe's?

2010-05-23T19:42:00.001-04:00

I'm finally finishing Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything (I started it a few years ago and for some reason stopped) and I am enjoying it very much. Intertwined in his popular tour of the history of science are interesting and sometimes hilarious anecdotes about the scientists under discussion.

During a discussion of the awkward rise of paleontology, Bryson writes about a surprising dispute between Europeans and Americans over the impressiveness of each continent's natural fauna. The great French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, writing about America, said that the animals and Native Americans were inferior in every way to those of Europe. According to Leclerc, North America was a country of stagnant water, sunless forests, and rotten swamps where the animals and even the Native Americans "lacked virility." "They have no beard or body hair, and no ardor for the female," and their reproductive organs were "small and feeble." Other Europeans joined in the attack, one writing that Native American males were so feminine that they had "milk in their breasts."

Thomas Jefferson was furious with this description and sent a general and some soldiers into New Hampshire to capture a bull moose to send to Leclerc as, in Bryson's words, "proof of the stature and majesty of American quadrupeds." Unfortunately, the moose they brought back didn't have horns big enough for Jefferson's liking, but the general had also included a large rack of antlers from an elk for Jefferson to attach if he would like. Apparently they figured no one in France would know the difference anyway.

At around the same time, other Americans were unearthing "the great American incognitum," a huge creature that would only later be identified as a mastodon (oddly, a Frenchman named Cuvier would be the first to formally describe and name it; even more oddly, mastodon means "nipple-teeth"). I'll let Bryson tell the story:

"In their keenness to demonstrate the incognitum's bulk and ferocity, the American naturalists appear to have become slightly carried away. They overestimated its size by a factor of six and gave it frightening claws, which in fact came from a Megalonyx, or giant ground sloth, found nearby. Rather remarkably, they persuaded themselves that the animal had enjoyed "the agility and ferocity of the tiger," and portrayed it in illustrations as pouncing with feline grace onto prey from boulders. When tusks were discovered, they were forced into the animal's head in any number of inventive ways. One restorer screwed the tusks in upside down, like the fangs of a saber-toothed cat, which gave it a satisfyingly aggressive aspect. Another arranged the tusks so that they curved backwards on the engaging theory that the creature had been aquatic and had used them to anchor itself to trees while dozing."

Unfortunately, Leclerc was not impressed. He insisted that the most telling feature of this animal is that it was extinct, "proof of its incontestably degenerate nature."

Judging an Idea by its Consequences

2010-05-08T12:06:00.000-04:00

David Hume was a well-known Scottish historian and diplomat in his own time, but is better remembered today for his philosophical works. In his An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Hume writes, “There is no method of reasoning more common, and yet none more blameable, than, in philosophical disputes, to endeavour the refutation of any hypothesis, by a pretence of its dangerous consequences to religion and morality.” In other words, the truth or falsity of an idea cannot be determined by whether one likes the idea or its implications. This seems quite obvious, but Hume wrote that it was a common problem in his time, and not much has changed since then.

The theory of evolution has often been the target of such critiques. The beginning of the Christian fundamentalist movement in the early 20th century was in part a reaction to the seemingly atheistic implications of explaining life without reference to a creator. William Jennings Bryan, famously known for his role in the Scopes “Monkey Trial,” opposed evolution largely because he saw it as undermining the existence of the soul as well as any objective basis for morality. Without a Creator-God who was also a Law-giver, morality becomes a personal or cultural choice and “good” and “evil” become euphemisms for whatever we like or don’t like.

Contemporary critics of evolution continue in this same vein, linking Darwinism to the Nazi Party and decrying naturalism for its apparent destruction of the possibility of an objective morality. The problem is that none of this actually has any bearing on whether or not evolution is true. To be fair, I do not usually see critics like Dembski or Behe actually using this as an argument against evolution, but it does seem to come up frequently in their blogs or other venues (e.g. the film Expelled).

Defenders of evolutionary theory are often guilty of the same tactic. From Darwin himself to contemporary philosophers and many evolutionary theorists in between, the argument has been made that if God did create nature he either did a terrible job of it or is an evil being (e.g. for making parasitoid wasps). Leaving aside the oddity of arguing for evolution by engaging in divine psychology, the arguments themselves are of course irrelevant to whether or not nature is a product of a creator. If indeed things like the parasitoid wasp were created on purpose, then it would be a genuine theological problem. But we must first accept that it was created, and then deal with the implications. Evolutionary theorists cannot reject the idea of creation because they do not like the implications. To be fair, no evolutionary biologist has argued for evolution based entirely on such theological objections, but these types of objections are indeed a common part of defenses of evolution.

Judging an idea by its consequences seems to be a natural reaction for most of us. While it may be worthwhile to examine the consequences of ideas one judges to be false, Hume is certainly correct that distasteful consequences should play no role in determining the truth of the idea in the first place.

Pop Culture and the Bible

2010-04-20T15:10:00.001-04:00

My wife and I were talking the other day about how it seems that very few people (at least, in our experience) know much of anything about Jesus and the Bible. Whether or not you're a Christian, it makes sense to be familiar with the basics because of the enormous influence the Bible has had on literature and our culture in general. While studying literature as both an undergraduate and in grad school, my wife was often in the minority in being able to understand or pick out Biblical references or allusions in the novels or plays they were reading.

Sometime last year I came across a great example of cluelessness (I know, not the most charitable word, but oh well) about the Bible when reading a review of Thrice's album, Vheissu. The lead singer and songwriter of Thrice, Dustin Kensrue, is a Christian and his faith often comes through in his lyrics. The song Like Moths to Flame tells the story of Peter and Jesus shortly before Jesus is crucified. Found in the gospels (e.g. Mathew 26 or Mark 14), this story involves Peter insisting he would never betray Jesus and that he would give up his life first. Later on, after the arrest of Jesus, Peter denies ever having known him, and then remembers Jesus' words foretelling Peter's denial. Peter weeps bitterly, having betrayed Jesus' trust.

Writing for Rolling Stone magazine, Christian Hoard gives a negative review of the album. He mistakenly assumes that the lyrics for Like Moths to Flame are about a bad break-up, writing that Kenstrue makes "a romantic betrayal sound like a nuclear holocaust, vowing to die for his lover."

This is despite lines like, "Once again the bread and wine / but it seems the meanings may be deeper still this time / you surprised me when you said I'd fall away / don't you know me? / I could never be ashamed of you." The song goes on to discuss the vow Peter makes that he would die for Jesus (I will follow you / lay down my life / I would die for you / this very night), the horror when Peter realizes what he had done (and calling curses down / from my lips lies, like poison, spill / then that awful sound / the sound of prophecy fulfilled / and then I met your eyes / as I remember everything / and something in me dies / the night that I betrayed my King).

At any rate, by mistaking this story for Kensrue's personal one, Cristian Hoard misses the whole point and comes away suspicious of Kensrue's "epic pain." The whole album is filled with Biblical references, so I guess I was surprised that a writer for a major magazine would have missed it. I don't expect everyone to read the Bible if they don't care about Christianity, but I thought it was a shame that Hoard's lack of Biblical literacy negatively colored his review of the album.

Climate Change News: the Gulf Stream is OK

2010-04-11T21:20:00.000-04:00

For several years scientists have feared that the melting of land-based ice in Greenland would interrupt the flow of warm water from the Gulf of Mexico toward Europe. This could potentially cause severe winters and or even a regional ice age in Europe. At the beginning of Holocene, approximately 10,000 years ago, the melting of the land-based ice in North America disrupted the Gulf Stream enough to cause an ice age in Europe for centuries.

In 2003 one study detected a freshening of the Gulf Stream, a decrease in salinity that was seen as indicator that the meltwater from Greenland was having an effect on the ocean current. Since then, several other studies have suggested much the same thing. Fortunately, new research has found no overall change in the flow of the ocean currents in the Atlantic. This is good news, though some researchers say it may simply be a matter of time before start seeing an effect.

Galileo's Trial: a battle between science and religion?

2010-02-20T15:33:00.006-05:00

Post #4

Galileo’s Trial

Seven years later Galileo’s old friend and admirer Cardinal Barberini became Pope Urban VIII. Urban VIII and his leading academic officials thought very highly of Galileo’s books, and promptly invited Galileo to come visit. During the visit Galileo brought up the idea of his being able to continue writing about cosmology and the question of Copernicanism. Urban VIII, having studied astronomy himself, appreciated the mathematical prowess of Copernicus. Urban did not think Copernicus’ theory to be true, but considered it a useful contribution to astronomy nonetheless. He told Galileo he could resume his writing, provided that he treated Copernicus’ theory as an unproven hypothesis (which, we must remember, it was).

Galileo immediately set to work revising parts of old manuscripts to create a new book on the arrangement of the universe. He wrote the book as a dialogue between three men in which they discuss the merits of the Ptolemaic and Copernican systems. Framing the content in this way, Galileo hoped the discussion could stay at the needed theoretical level, avoiding any direct claims of the truth of Copernicus’ theory. Galileo worked on this book for many years, during which Pope Urban VIII decided to grant Galileo a yearly pension from the Church, merely for being such a valued intellect.

When the book was finally finished in 1630, Galileo sought permission to publish the book and submitted it to the relevant church authorities. It passed inspection with only a few minor changes needed, but due to the plague and other complications the book did not end up being published for another two years. When it was finally published, it became an instant success, selling out wherever it was printed. Cardinals, bishops, and Jesuit academics from all over wrote to Galileo of their praise and awe for his masterpiece, The Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems.

Unfortunately for Galileo, the publication of the Dialogue would also result in a trial in front of the Inquisition and being sentenced to house arrest for the rest of his life. Historians suggest that things would have been very different had Galileo or Copernicus lived one hundred years earlier or later. As it happened, several factors came together in precisely the wrong way for Galileo.

First, it was clear to readers of Galileo’s Dialogue who the victor was in the conversations and arguments concerning geo- and heliocentrism. The person arguing for geocentrism was named Simplicio and was clearly on the losing end of the argument. Galileo’s enemies within the church suggested to the Pope that Galileo was mocking the Church and him personally. While it is doubtful that this was the case (plenty of Church academics greatly enjoyed the book), these insinuations came to Pope Urban VIII at exactly the wrong time.

Urban VIII was a different person than he had been at the beginning of his office. He had made many political enemies around Europe, was involved in several wars, and feared attacks from Spanish assassins, among other concerns. Urban VIII also faced harsh criticism from Rome itself, accusing him of not taking a strong enough stance in defending the Catholic faith in the international arena. His paranoia and concern for his image resulted in determined anger and outrage, “especially if one is opposing, threatening, or defying him,” wrote a friend of Galileo’s who was close to the Pope. When Urban VIII heard remarks “insisting Galileo had played him for a fool by allowing Simplicio to espouse Urban’s philosophy,” he ordered an investigation into Galileo’s most recent work. The three person team told Urban VIII that, in their opinion, Galileo’s work was in fact an argument for the truth of Copernicanism. Urban was furious and summoned Galileo to stand trial before the Inquisition.

Galileo, almost 70 years old at this point, dutifully travelled to Rome to stand trial in 1633. Despite the portrayal of Galileo’s trial one sees in paintings, he stood before only two officials and a secretary. A full record of the transcript still exists (one can find them reproduced in Dava Sobel’s excellent Galileo’s Daughter), and the text is largely concerned not with “science” versus “religion” but with whether Galileo violated the earlier command from 1616 to not teach or write about Copernicanism except as a hypothesis.

But there was a problem: the official records of the Church concerning the incident in 1616 used stronger language then what Galileo had understood from Bellarmino. Galileo was under the impression that he was not to teach or write about Copernicanism as if it were literally true; according to the official records, he had been told not to teach or write about it at all. This came as a surprise to Galileo (and to Urban himself), and is still something of a mystery for historians today. It is possible that Galileo misremembered the original event, or that there was a miscommunication between the Inquisition and Bellarmino about the verbal injunction that had been served to Galileo (some have suggested that the Inquisition forged the document, but contemporary historians consider this unlikely). In any event, the Inquisition considered their own official records to take precedence over Galileo’s memory and letter from Bellarmino and found Galileo “vehemently suspected of heresy” and condemned to “formal imprisonment.” His Dialogue was also added to the Index of Prohibited Books, where it remained until 1835.

Later accounts would say that Galileo was jailed and even tortured, but in fact, after being forced to renounce his belief in Copernicanism, he was “imprisoned” in a sympathetic Cardinal’s palace for 5 months, and then allowed to return home to his villa near Florence. He lived out the rest of his life there, under what we would now call house arrest, with limited visitors and even more limited mobility for Galileo himself. He was crushed by the verdict and sentence, but, in a testament to his resilience, still produced and published (outside of Rome) what is probably his most important book, Discourses and Mathematical Demonstrations Relating to Two New Sciences. This book is considered foundational to modern physics and set the stage for the great scientists of the Enlightenment. Galileo died in 1642 at home, one of the most important intellectuals in history and a figure that still dominates discussion of science and religion today.

Conclusion

While this episode is unquestionably and unequivocally an embarrassment for the Catholic Church, it is also just as clearly not a simple case of science and religion coming into conflict. As we have seen, geocentrism was entrenched in the academy as well as within the Church and there was no clear evidence at the time to support heliocentrism over geocentrism. The main issues seemed to be Church politics (e.g. the Counter-Reformation) and scriptural interpretation rather than scientific progress. The Church was essentially acting as a political body, concerned with its own authority and power. We also must remember that Church is hardly alone historically in initially resisting new ideas. In addition, Galileo did have plenty of supporters within the church, including high ranking Cardinals, priests, and Church academics who clearly saw no conflict between religious faith and scientific discovery. Galileo himself was a devout Catholic who, along with almost every other major scientist in history, including Newton, Copernicus, Kepler, Pascal, Boyle, and Linnaeus, to name a few, saw the universe as being the handiwork of God and saw no conflict between their faith and scientific discovery (indeed, scientists like Kepler saw their scientific work as part of their worship and praise for God and his creation).

It is simply not the case that “religion” has any in-principal conflict with “science.” Have religious claims and scientific claims at times clashed? Absolutely. Have political/religious institutions hampered the publication of scientific work? Yes, they have. Is this the whole story? Not even close. The interactions of science and religion are many and complex, but one thing is for sure: the simplistic “warfare thesis” we have inherited from Huxley, Draper, and White must be discarded. Using their writings and revisionist history, one could argue that science and history are in conflict…

Previous Posts in the Series: Post #1, Post #2, Post #3

For further reading:

Science & Religion, edited by Gary B. Ferngren, John Hopkins University Press, 2002

Galileo’s Daughter, by Dava Sobel, Penguin Books, 2000

Making Modern Science: a historical survey, Bowler & Morus, University of Chicago Press, 2005

Galileo's Trial: a battle between science and religion?

2010-02-20T15:31:00.002-05:00

Post #3

So we have seen in posts one and two some corrections to a few common myths surrounding the Copernican Revolution. Geocentrism, for example, was not a Christian idea but a Greek one adopted by the church. Also, the contrast between geocentrism and heliocentrism, which was proposed by Copernicus, a devout Catholic, cannot be seen as a contrast between science and religion because Copernicus did not have any scientific evidence for his views.

Now we come to the main event: the trial of Galileo. This episode has come to symbolize the conflict between science and religion, specifically between the Christian church and Western science. My intent in this post is not to defend the medieval Christian church or its behavior. There are dark spots in the church’s history, and I have no interest in pretending otherwise. Rather, I intend to show what contemporary historians have discovered upon a closer look at the trial of Galileo: that it was a complicated affair that cannot be reduced to a battle between science and religion.

Galileo

Galileo Galilei was an Italian philosopher and mathematician who was born in 1564 and passed away in 1642 at the age of 78. A full history of his life and interactions with the church is impossible in a blog post, but I wish to focus on a few important points.

First, Galileo was a brilliant philosopher and scientist, as well as a devout Catholic. He is rightly regarded as the father of experimental science, being among the first to insist on empirical work in scientific investigation rather than reasoning from first principles as was standard in universities at the time. Galileo’s brilliance and willingness to question accepted wisdom brought him both international acclaim and some enemies in the academic and religious establishments.

Galileo first garnered international acclaim through the publication, in 1610, of his book The Starry Messenger, which contained the newfound astronomical knowledge he gained through use of telescopes he designed himself. This new knowledge included the discovery of the four moons around Jupiter, new stars, and the fact that our Moon had craters and valleys. This last bit was interesting because within Aristotelian natural philosophy, then dominant, everything in the heavens was perfectly spherical and smooth. Galileo did not hesitate to proclaim these new discoveries, but some devoted Aristotelian academics refused to acknowledge his work (some even claimed that the images seen in Galileo’s telescopes were illusions or tricks).

Contrary to the impression one might get from the standard story, Galileo gathered many friends and admirers within the church. He was befriended by Father Clavius, a leading Jesuit astronomer and the chief mathematician of the Collego Romano, a church institution which endorsed Galileo’s work and joined him in studying the heavens. Even Pope Paul V and Cardinal Barberini (the future pope Urban VIII) became fans, and Barberini a personal friend, saying to Galileo, “I pray the Lord God to preserve you, because men of great value like you deserve to live a long time to the benefit of the public.”

It is worth noting here that there were many university academics who objected to Galileo’s work and many within the church who embraced it. There is more to the story here, but in short Galileo’s disregard for academic tradition (i.e. Aristotelianism) earned him some enemies within the academy and, eventually, in the church as well.

Science and Scripture

Copernicus’ book which proposed the heliocentric (sun-centered) theory, De Revolutionibus, had been published in 1543, some 60 years before Galileo’s Starry Messenger. The heliocentric theory had never caused an uproar; many academics and theologians thought it interesting, a few embraced it as literally true, and others ignored it. Part of the reason for this was that at the time mathematics and astronomy were considered to be concerned with “appearances.” For example, as long as an astronomical theory could, say, accurately predict the motions of stars and be useful to navigators, it did not matter whether the theory was physically true. Part of Galileo’s legacy would be to elevate mathematics and astronomy out of the realm of “appearances” and into natural philosophy proper. This change, however, was difficult for his contemporaries to accept.

Galileo had embraced the heliocentric theory by at least 1597, but it was after he became famous in 1610 that his views on the matter became more widely known. In both public dialogue and a few published letters, Galileo made clear his preference for Copernicus’ heliocentric theory over Ptolemy’s geocentric one. This became one point among many for sharp disagreement between Galileo and other prominent university academics. Galileo appears to have had a gift for making enemies, for he applied his brilliance not only to academic topics but also to decimating and humiliating those who publicly disagreed with him. Within the church, also, there began to emerge some people who thought Galileo to be a problem, a mathematician encroaching too far into the domain of the philosophers. A priest friend alerted Galileo that a “certain crowd…put their heads together in a mad quest for any means by which they could damage you.” For those within the church who disliked Galileo, his heliocentric leanings provided a good target for them to attack.

As we have seen, geocentrism was the dominant cosmology and had been for centuries. While there were exceptions, most people at this time thought that both natural philosophy (science) and scripture supported an earth-centered universe. Scriptural passages such as Psalm 19:4-6 and Joshua 10:12, where Joshua commands the Sun to hold still, were seen to support a stationary Earth. This idea, that Holy Scripture supports the Ptolemaic geocentric universe, would prove to be central in the trial of Galileo.

The Catholic Church at this time was recovering from the sudden loss of power and authority caused by the Protestant Reformation, which began in 1517. In 1545 the Council of Trent had declared, among other things, that only popes and bishops were allowed to interpret Scripture. Galileo’s enemies, then, could cast his espousing the heliocentric theory as being against Holy Scripture. They did exactly that, and attracted the attention of the Pope, who ordered Cardinal Bellarmino, an important Jesuit intellectual, to look into whether Copernicanism might be heretical. Bellarmino was an admirer of Galileo’s work, but was skeptical of heliocentrism and believed that it did contradict scripture. The Catholic Church had a long history of distinguishing between literal and figurative language in the Bible, but, due to the Reformation and the Council of Trent, Bellarmino was obliged to defend the current interpretation of the church fathers. The Catholic Church was in an extraordinarily defensive frame of mind, and in the words of historian Richard Blackwell, “[I]t was in no mood to adopt a new and revolutionary model of the heavens.”

This was especially true since neither Copernicus nor Galileo had offered clear evidence for their views. Galileo went to Rome to argue his case, but his main piece of evidence was an erroneous theory of his about the cause of the tides. His other astronomical observations cast doubt on some of Aristotle’s claims about the heavens (e.g. their immutability) but failed to comment on the truth of the heliocentric versus geocentric theories. Since both natural philosophy and scripture appeared to support geocentrism, Bellarmino sided with tradition, seeing no good reason to do otherwise. In March of 1616 a formal proclamation was issued, declaring the Copernican position to be “false and contrary to Holy Scripture” and De Revolutionibus was ordered to have a few passages “corrected.” Bellarmino had a private meeting with Galileo to give him a warning to only treat Copernicanism as a hypothesis, but did not put any restrictions on his published works.

Gossip and rumors spread by Galileo’s enemies suggested that Galileo had been denounced and forced to repent, but Cardinal Bellarmino wrote a public letter declaring otherwise, and the Pope even met with Galileo to assure him that he had their full support against his slanderers. Even so, Galileo took the warning seriously (as the Church had meant it seriously) and was quiet for many years in his public affairs concerning the arrangement of the universe.

Next Post: Galileo's Trial

Galileo's Trial: a battle between science and religion?

2010-02-20T15:27:00.002-05:00

Post #2

The Copernican Revolution

In the first post in this series, we covered the standard story of the Galileo Affair and discussed one of its flaws. In this second post we will look at a few more.

In 1543 a specialist in Catholic law who dabbled in astronomy on the side published a book called De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres). Nicolas Copernicus had been working on his book for several decades, and in it he laid out a new cosmology. The standard cosmology, as we have seen, was geocentric or earth-centered. Copernicus departed from this and instead proposed a sun-centered (or heliocentric) universe where the planets revolved around the sun. Though it was slow to start, the publication of De Revolutionibus would lead to a paradigm shift in cosmology known as the Copernican Revolution.

In the standard story, it is common for the Copernican Revolution to be cast as a battle between science and the Church or between reason and dogma. Copernicus was the brave rational soul who dared to defy those stuffy Christians and their religious dogma.

In fact, as we have already noted, Copernicus himself was a Catholic who specialized in canon law. The very source of the Copernican Revolution was a Christian who believed the universe was the handiwork of God. Copernicus also appears to have had some strong Neo-Platonic sensibilities. He had an almost mystical reverence for the Sun, and his motivation for proposing the heliocentric theory appears to have largely been due to his philosophical preference for simplicity and mathematical harmony. Ptolemy’s geocentric theory, while elegant, was extremely complicated. A common myth is that as time had elapsed since Ptolemy’s day astronomers had needed to add more and more epicycles (a feature of his model) in order to make sure Ptolemy’s model matched up with astronomical observations. The myth continues that Copernicus, realizing the evidentiary problems with the Ptolemaic model, took the needed theoretical leap to a new model. In fact, no new epicycles had been added, as Ptolemy’s theory was not easily modified. Indeed, Copernicus actually did not have any evidence, astronomical or otherwise, to support his model over Ptolemy’s. The heliocentric model, as proposed by Copernicus, was not any more accurate than Ptolemy’s (a testament to Ptolemy’s genius). Instead, it satisfied Copernicus’ devotion to mathematical harmony.

Copernicus’ theory did not stem from scientific observations but from his philosophical (and even mystical) preferences. We have already seen that geocentrism was not a product of religious dogma, but of Greek philosophy. Therefore the idea that the Copernican Revolution was a story of reason versus dogma or science versus religion is false.

But did Copernicus have to battle the Christian Church? Let us look at how the Church responded to these ideas.

First, we need to realize that there was no monolithic Christian response. It was certainly not the case that Christians in general rejected Copernicus’ ideas. In fact, several bishops of the Catholic church had written to Copernicus to encourage him to publish his work (this is before De Revolutionibus was published), thinking he would make a valuable contribution to astronomy. On the Protestant side, Lutheran scholars were responsible for finally convincing Copernicus to publish his book, helping him to do so. Afterward, Lutheran universities became the central institutions teaching heliocentrism.

Copernicus himself died within a few weeks of his book being published, and contrary to what one sometimes reads, was never persecuted by anyone. The initial response overall was rather muted, with many scholars, both Catholic and Protestant, thinking that the heliocentric theory was interesting but not clearly superior to Ptolemy’s model. A few key thinkers, Kepler and Galileo among them, did embrace the heliocentric theory wholeheartedly, eventually leading the latter into conflict with the Catholic Church.

It would be almost one hundred years, though, from the publication of Copernicus’ book in 1543 before the Catholic Church would add De Revolutionibus to its index of prohibited books. At first, some thinkers within the Church embraced the book’s ideas and others ignored it, but some within the Church began to build a resistance to the heliocentric theory that would culminate with the trial of Galileo. This is a complicated episode in the history of science which we will attend to in later posts. To close this post, though, let us compare how new theories have usually been received throughout the history of science. A major component of the standard story is the suggestion that religious belief is an especially potent force against new scientific theories. No doubt religious belief did play some role in the Church’s official rejection of heliocentrism (more on this later), but just how well do new theories usually do?

In 1915 Alfred Wegener proposed his new theory of continental drift. Did the scientific community welcome him and his new knowledge? Wegener was ridiculed (viciously) by the geological community, despite having some notable evidence for his views. As we have seen, Copernicus didn’t have any new evidence. Wegener’s theory was only accepted some 20 years after he died. This was in the 20th century and did not involve the church.

Einstein’s work on special relativity was largely ignored for several years. It was only when Max Planck, a giant in the field, started paying attention to Einstein’s papers that his theory got any traction. The theory was revolutionary, and therefore a tough sell for most scientists.

The big bang theory, now the standard model, was rejected or ignored for decades by the scientific community (in fact, some of the more zealous secular astronomers rejected it as being religiously motivated, but that is a story for another post).

Alexander Fleming made advances in proper medical treatment of deep wounds having to do with a correct understanding of the role of bacteria. The scientific medical community rejected his work, and many World War I soldiers died needlessly.

Thomas Kuhn’s work on paradigm shifts within science is well known. A dominant paradigm in science is difficult to overturn. A prominent scientist (I cannot recall who) was once asked how it is that new theories become accepted. The answer was something along the lines of: the old scientists die out and the new ones grow up to be more accepting of it.

Rejecting or resisting new theories is clearly not unique to the church.

Next post: Galileo’s Trial

Galileo's Trial: a battle between science and religion?

2010-02-20T15:24:00.002-05:00

Post #1

The Standard Story

One of the most famous episodes in the history of science and religion is the Copernican Revolution, which began with the publication of Copernicus’s book in 1543 and culminated with the trial and conviction of Galileo in 1633. It did not end there, but that is as far as we will go in this series.

The standard story goes something like this: medieval Church doctrine held that the Earth was at the center of the universe, as it should be, since this is the most privileged location in the universe and Earth, being the home to mankind, is the most important planet. Copernicus and other scientists like Bruno and Galileo challenged this doctrine with scientific evidence showing that in fact the Sun was in the center. The Church, furious that scientific progress was being made (progress which challenged its own doctrines), persecuted these brave souls who dared give voice to reason and evidence. In short, this episode is an archetypal example of the conflict between science and religion.

I cannot recall how many PBS or Nova TV specials have been aired on the trial of Galileo, pitting Galileo the brave scientist against the oppressive anti-science Church. This version of the story is simply assumed by a great many people. For example, in an article for Slate magazine, Nathan Myhrvold wrote:

“Ptolemy (second century) was the first and boldest in a long succession of spin doctors for the primacy of human beings. The whole universe, he postulated, rotated around us, with the Earth sitting at the center of heaven itself. Any marketing consultant will tell you that positioning is everything, and center-of-the-universe is hard to beat. A Polish astronomer named Copernicus (1473-1543) rudely pointed out: Sorry earthlings, we spin around the sun, not vice versa…Bruno's crime, like Galileo's, was to undermine the uniqueness of our planet, and by doing so, to threaten the intellectual security of the religious dictatorships of his time. People get cranky when you burst their bubble. Over time, advances in astronomy have relentlessly reinforced the utter insignificance of Earth on a celestial scale. Fortunately, political and religious leaders stopped barbecuing astronomers for saying so…”

Slate magazine, a well-respected publication, is part of the Washington Post and has associations with National Public Radio. The standard story, however, as well as Mr. Myhrvold’s particular version of it, contains serious historical errors. Historian Richard J. Blackwell writes, “An oversimplified and false view is that Galileo became a martyr of science because of the Roman Catholic Church’s opposition to science, but it is now commonly agreed that the facts are quite otherwise.”

This will be the first in a series of posts intended to correct this common, but false, view of the Copernican Revolution.

Geocentrism and Greek Philosophy

The first myth we will tackle is the idea that geocentrism (the belief that Earth was at the center of the universe and everything revolved around it) was a Christian doctrine that entailed believing the Earth was special. In fact, geocentrism was an idea from Greek philosophy, not the Church. The Greeks devoted a lot of time to pondering the nature and structure of the universe, or cosmology. The geocentric theory was developed according to reason, evidence, and philosophical principles, not religious dogma or a special view of humanity. The geocentric model of the universe inherited by the medieval Church was the culmination of careful Greek thought, with Aristotle supplying the metaphysics and Ptolemy the mathematics. Ptolemy’s geocentric model was a masterpiece that matched up very well with astronomical observations. This model was adopted by Church scholars as well as by practically all the natural philosophers (i.e. scientists) of the time.

The geocentric view did not entail thinking the Earth was special. When Mr. Myhrvold, quoted above, asserted that the Earth was thought to be “at the center of heaven itself,” he could not have been more wrong (though at least he acknowledged the Greek origins of geocentrism). Within Aristotelian cosmology, Earth was thought of as corrupt and base, while the heavens were perfect and, well, heavenly. A more accurate description of Earth’s status at the time is that it was seen as the garbage dump at the bottom of the universe. Things were thought to fall to Earth because they were “heavy” and corrupt, and the Earth was the designated place for such unworthy things to fall. Indeed, Galileo saw his own work as elevating the status of Earth, not demoting it, writing:

“For I will prove that the earth does have motion, that it surpasses the moon in brightness, and that it is not the sump where the universe’s filth and ephemera collect.”

Next post: The Copernican Revolution

Review of Christianity, Climate Change, and Sustainable Living

2010-02-06T11:30:00.003-05:00

Christianity, Climate Change, and Sustainable Living is a relatively small book that tackles a broad range of issues. As the title states, the authors cover everything from the science of climate change to the appropriate Christian response to climate change. They also offer some practical advice to help both individuals and communities live more sustainably.

Though the flow of the book suffers a little due to the wide range of topics that are covered, I think the book is successful on all fronts. The summary of climate change is concise and accurate, giving a good overview of past, current, and projected future climate change and its many effects on our planet. I especially like how the authors frame anthropogenic climate change as a "reckless experiment." This is an appropriate way to think about climate change because, though the authors do not mention this, this century might be the first time that CO2 emissions have risen far ahead of temperatures (ice core records indicate that, in the past, the temperature changed first, followed by changes in CO2 levels). While we have sophisticated computer models that can project future changes based on current levels of knowledge, by emitting large amounts of greenhouse gases we are essentially taking part in a global experiment with a complex, poorly understood climate system. This fact alone should be enough to warrant caution when it comes to our fossil fuel use.

After laying out the evidence for the reality and potential severity of climate change and its effects, the authors turn to the question of how Christians should respond. Their answers are both wide-ranging and compelling. Through a much-needed evaluation of our unsustainable (and unhealthy) consumer culture, a Biblically-based call to take care of God's creation, and a reminder of God's charge for us to care for the poor (who will be most affected by climate change), the authors articulate a vision of a total Christian response to climate change. They cast this response as an important part of bringing God's kingdom to Earth. As Christians we are familiar with the spiritual aspects of the transformation of old to new, but Spencer, White, and Vrobleskly challenge us to think about how this applies to the whole of God's creation.

Also integrated into the book are plenty of practical principles to help guide our response, updates on national and global policies, quick analyses of alternative energy sources, and a helpful list of Christian organizations devoted to realizing the vision of responsible, sustainable living.

Christianity, Climate Change, and Sustainable Living is being published in the U.S. by Hendrickson and can be found here. Christians looking for a substantive, thoughtful response to the often heated (and politicized) issues regarding climate change and what to do about it need to read this book.

Climate Change News: everyone has an agenda

2010-01-30T13:45:00.000-05:00

A recent admission by the IPCC that part of their 2007 report on climate change was false has been getting, rightly, a lot of attention. The International Panel on Climate Change said in their report that the mountain glaciers in Himayalas could melt by 2035, an exaggerated claim without a scientific basis. Actual scientific estimates (e.g. Ren et al. (2007) in the Journal of Applied Meteorology) are that around 67% of the glaciers are shrinking and have the potential to disappear by 2100. Other glaciers are actually growing. The IPCC statement on these glaciers was apparently politically motivated.

Perhaps some people are shocked that the IPCC would include a false report to support an agenda. But why should we be shocked? It perhaps seems more clear that conservatives that reject climate science do so because of a particular political agenda, but, frankly, it's a bit silly to assume that other political groups do not also have a political agenda to pursue. As I read dozens of peer-reviewed climate change articles last spring, it became clear to me that Al Gore's pop-science presentation of global warming had quite a few flaws, perhaps born out of his desire to motivate people to change, or perhaps for more self-serving purposes. Either way, we should not be surprised when political parties end up distorting an issue in order to further their own ends.

All of this, to me, highlights a basic need when it comes to presenting climate change science to the public: nuance. This is something I try to achieve in my own treatment of climate change in the classroom. Response to news like this is predictable from both sides of the political spectrum: conservatives see it as reason to believe that all climate change science is fake while others wave it away as an error that somehow sneaked through. Is anyone else as tired of this as I am? We seem to have an unreasonable aversion to nuance. Climate change education should simply an honest look at what we know (and what we don't know). The evidence for anthropogenic global warming is strong; carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and will undoubtedly warm the planet. However, the "alarmist" spin on climate change is also scientifically inaccurate; the Earth has been much warmer and has experienced more dramatic climate change in the past than it is now. By ignoring genuine uncertainties in the science and by exaggerating the immediacy of the threat, we open ourselves up to corrections by total skeptics, who then gain ammunition for their dismissal of anthropogenic warming. If we could just stick to being accurate in the first place, if we were the ones who openly admitted where the largest uncertainties are, if we could discuss the negative impacts of climate change without pretending that the Earth may not survive, it seems to me that there would be less room for disagreement in the first place.

Perhaps then we could stop pretending that only our political opponents have an agenda, partisan rhetoric could be replaced by (gasp) science, and we could reach a consensus about steps to take to curb our influence on our planet's climate.

Done with Bart Ehrman

2010-01-10T11:06:00.002-05:00

The other day I posted on how I started listening to Bart Ehrman's book God's Problem: how the Bible fails to answer our most important question - why we suffer. I returned it to the library yesterday after getting a little over half way through it, not because I wouldn't have finished it but because it was overdue and the library was closed so I just dropped it off.

First, let me say that the book felt a little bit to me like a stealth attack. The book is ostensibly about whether the writings in the Bible can satisfactorily answer questions about why suffering exists. While this is certainly a major theme, the real point of the book seemed to be a long (and angry) argument that God himself, if he exists, is a despicable, evil tyrant. The tone of the book was often angry and condescending; Ehrman's disdain for both God and Christians was evident.

While this was grating, the real problems with the book involve strange misrepresentations of Biblical passages. For example, as part of a discussion of the idea that suffering can lead to redemption, Mr. Ehrman relates the story of when Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead. In this passage, Lazarus, a friend of Jesus's, becomes very ill. Lazarus' sisters, Mary and Martha, send word to Jesus that their brother is sick. Jesus does not visit right away, though, but leaves to see them two days later. When Jesus arrives, Lazarus has already died and has been in the tomb for four days. Mary and Martha are of course greatly distressed, and Jesus himself begins to weep with sorrow. Jesus turns to those there and tells them that he is the resurrection and the life and that those who believe in him will have eternal life. Jesus then, demonstrating his power over death and suffering, raises Lazarus from the dead. The fact that he had been in the tomb for four days made it clear that he had been dead.

Mr. Ehrman's interpretation of this passage is that Jesus wanted Lazarus to die so that Jesus could then show off his power. To me, this a surprisingly immature, even purposely obtuse reading of the passage. Mr. Ehrman tells us how his students are always surprised when he tells them that Jesus wanted Lazarus to die. Indeed, they should be surprised, as there is no reason to believe this. Mr. Ehrman conveniently leaves out the little verse "Jesus wept." Jesus wept with sorrow when his friend Lazarus became ill and died, but utilized the situation to teach an important spiritual lesson about nothing less than eternal life and salvation, demonstrating that suffering will not last. If Jesus had caused Lazarus to die, or if he had been happy when Lazarus died, then perhaps Mr. Ehrman's interpretation would be tenable. But it is not.

There are a few other examples from the book I was going to write about, but I don't feel like spending the time. On a positive note, Mr. Ehrman does a nice job of giving an overview of the Old Testament books and writers. It is clear his knowledge of the Bible is extensive; it's too bad his anger seems to color all of his thinking about it.

Will the planet survive?

2009-12-15T19:17:00.006-05:00

As the climate talks in Copenhagen take place, public awareness of issues surrounding climate change is undoubtedly growing. Climate change is considered by some scientists to be the most important scientific and political issue of our time. Unfortunately the issue has been heavily politicized, resulting in partisan rhetoric rather than clear thinking in public discussion of the matter. Conservatives tend to doubt the science and liberals tend to believe everything they hear from Al Gore or other pop-science sources. Both parties could benefit from actually looking at the data.

For example, one commonly hears things like, "our planet is in peril," or, "if we don't act soon, we won't have a planet at all."

The history of our planet says otherwise. For example, the Earth was about 15 degrees C warmer than it is currently around 50 million years ago, during the Eocene. Our planet was very warm and largely ice-free, even at the poles. Yet it survived. Carbon dioxide levels have also been much higher in the past, perhaps even a dozen times higher in the deep past. What does this mean? It means our planet is not in peril; it has experienced much warmer temperatures than today, and even being ice-free does not somehow spell doom for planet Earth.

Climate change does threaten the specific species we have currently on Earth. In other words, some of the life on Earth is put in danger by climate change, not the Earth itself. Living things will have to adapt to a changing climate or diminish and possibly go extinct. The obvious example is the polar bear, as at least some polar bear populations are declining. If the Arctic ice does completely disappear, as some scientists are predicting, they will indeed have to adapt or perish.

So, while talk of the destruction of our planet may be rhetorically useful, it is inaccurate to say that the planet itself is somehow in danger, or to say that it will become uninhabitable. Rather, the planet itself will be fine, as will its ability to support life in general. For many species though climate change will be a growing threat, and if we desire preservation of our current ecosystems we will have to take the necessary steps to curb our influence.

Bart Ehrman: God's Problem

2009-12-10T18:26:00.004-05:00

I've started listening to Bart Ehrman's book God's Problem on cd on my way to work. His book explores the (in his view) inability of Christianity (and specifically, the Bible) to satisfactorily answer the question of why there is suffering in the world. It's an important and difficult question for Christians to face.

One interesting thing is the subtitle of the book: How the Bible fails to answer our most important question - why we suffer. While it is certainly an important question, it is not clear that this is the most important one; it is also not clear that the Bible's purpose is to answer this question. In this sense, I wonder if the whole premise of the book is slightly off. Usually it is the Christians who are accused of viewing humanity as all-important, but if Mr. Ehrman thinks the question of why humans suffer is the most important question there is, it would seem it is he who as an elevated view of humanity.

Another bizarre idea of Ehrman's is that he believes that to say the problem of suffering is beyond our ability to comprehend (i.e. a mystery) is the same as saying there is no answer to the problem of suffering. Just because humans may not know an answer does not mean there is no answer. It would seem that Ehrman is elevating humans to a level where if we cannot arrive at a solution to something or cannot comprehend it then it must not exist.

Still, I am interested in hearing him out. The books seems like it will be a passionate articulation of both a difficult intellectual problem and the reasons for Ehrman's loss of faith (he used to be an evangelical Christian).

Augustine and Astrology

2009-09-05T20:50:00.003-04:00

As we’ve covered earlier, Christianity often gets a bad rap for its supposed detrimental effects on scientific work, particularly during the medieval period. Many contemporary thinkers similarly dismiss astrology and alchemy as worthless nonsense despite the fact that historians of science, such as David Lindberg, have shown that modern astronomy and chemistry would likely not exist (or would be very different) without these medieval precursors.

Astrology throughout the Middle Ages was not simply the horoscope and zodiac obsessed practice that we know today. It was a branch of natural philosophy dealing with the physical influence of the cosmos on the earth. Casting horoscopes, etc., was a part of astrology, but a contentious one. Many medieval thinkers criticized this part of astrology while accepting the idea that celestial events have an influence on earthly ones. And they had good reasons for doing so. For example, it was clear that the sun had a profound influence on the earth, bringing heat and light and causing the seasons. The moon also had a clear influence by causing the tides. Several Greek intellectual traditions considered the investigation of the connections between the heavens and the earth as a legitimate and rational enterprise. Interest in astrology was also in many cases the primary motivation for the expansion of astronomical knowledge. Astrology played an important role in the development of modern astronomy and was not entirely wrong in its descriptions of the causal influence of the heavens on the earth.

Also, it turns out that long before modern secularists dismissed astrology as a pseudoscience, the Christian church was its major critic. Some of the common tenets of astrology included the idea that celestial bodies were divine and could influence or determine the fate of human beings on earth. The church objected to both of these doctrines, asserting that humans have free-will and that celestial bodies were not gods that could determine events on earth. St. Augustine was the most influential of these critics, writing against “vulgar astrology” and condemning its practitioners as frauds and imposters. He did not deny that celestial bodies had some influence, but rejected the determinism inherent in astrological predictions concerning fate. Augustine's influence freed later church writers to be similarly critical of the claims of astrologers; it was common for the church to denounce them as charlatans. In short, we find the early and late medieval Christian church cutting astrology down to pretty much the same size a modern scientist would: acknowledging that celestial events have a physical influence on the earth while denying the divinity of stars and planets and their ability to determine the fate of human beings.

Computers, DNA, and the Origin of Life

2009-08-10T19:38:00.006-04:00

Evolution and intelligent design are controversial, complicated topics. I am not a creationist, but I am sympathetic to some of the criticisms leveled at evolution (some from intelligent design theorists, some from within the field itself). Research on the origin of life, in particular, has some difficult conceptual issues to face. Here is one that I find interesting:

First, I want you to look at the computer that you are using right now to view this page. Whether it is a laptop or a desktop computer, you are looking at something rather special. Here's what I mean: your computer is made of ordinary elements. Silicon, aluminum, iron, carbon, etc. The elements in your computer are not any different from elements you could find anywhere else. But, in this case, they are allowing you to connect to a world-wide network of information and view things like this webpage. Why? Nothing in the elements themselves dictate this sort of function. One could have all the appropriate elements and compounds together, but there would be no tendency for a computer to emerge. This means that these elements, along with the physical and chemical laws that govern their behavior, allow a computer to be built out of them. However, the raw materials themselves along with the natural laws that govern them are not capable of creating a computer. We can therefore say that computers are contingent; that is, the existence of computers cannot be explained by any known scientific laws, and nothing in the universe requires that they exist. Contrast this to, say, the gravitational attraction between the Earth and the Sun. In our universe, the laws (of gravity, in this case) demand a force of attraction (in Newtonian terms) of a certain magnitude between these two masses. They have no choice in the matter. A computer, on the other hand, is entirely contingent. Your computer's elements have been organized in a complicated, specific arrangement that results in the functional computer you have in front of you, but nothing in the physics or chemistry of those elements led to this specific arrangement.

OK, so what does this have to do with the origin of life? It turns out that biological life, as we know it, is contingent. DNA, for example, contains the genetic information that you or I or any living thing are built according to. DNA can be said to contain the blueprints of an organism. It consists of long strands of what are called nucleotides, major parts of which are made of nucleobases such as adenine (A), cytosine (C), guanine (G), and thymine (T). The arrangement of these nucleobases is largely responsible for the information contained in the strands of DNA. For a simple analogy, think of the words in an encyclopedia, or in this post. The arrangement of the letters (of the English alphabet, in this case) determines the information contained in a written entry. Different arrangement, different meaning. Different arrangements of the four "letters" of the genetic language (A, C, G, T) are responsible for all of the different organisms we see on earth. Now, this is not merely an analogy; DNA is not like a language, it is a language. Contemporary biologists have come to realize that when they speak of genes, they are speaking of information, not something physical. Here's where it gets interesting: information transcends physics and chemistry.

I don't mean this in some mystical, metaphysical way. Think about it. When you write a journal entry in your notebook, you are using ink and paper to represent information. But the ink and paper itself cannot be responsible for the information content, nor can the ink and paper itself said to be the information. Rather, the ink and paper happen to be the physical medium for embodying that information. The information itself transcends the physical and chemical. At first the information was in your mind, then on your paper, and then could be typed into a computer document, then transferred onto a thumb drive, etc.

In each case the information was being physically stored in a medium, but it is clear that the physical media are not themselves responsible for the creation of the information. In fact, the physical medium must be neutral, or flexible, in order for it to usefully store information. Consider your ink and paper again. If whenever you wrote the letter "t", the physical properties of the ink and paper forced the next bit of ink to form the letter "s", then you would have a very difficult time writing anything meaningful. The physical and chemical properties would determine the content of the paper, and your journal entries would be limited to repetitive strings of letters. Physical and chemical laws are good at repetition (a rock will always fall the same way, bits of lava will crystallize again and again in the same pattern), but cannot explain the origin of complex, specific information.

Let's get back to biology: our DNA strands, with the arrangement of our bases (letters) A,C,G, and T, cannot be explained by any physical or chemical laws. Like the ink and paper, the physical laws of the DNA strand itself allow a near infinite variety of arrangements of DNA letters. How then, can the materialist explain the origin of genetic information? If one is a materialist (i.e. one who holds that the physical, or nature, is all that exists), one is stuck trying to explain the origin of genetic information in terms of the known physical and chemical laws of the genetic molecules themselves. This is very literally like trying to explain this essay by appealing to the physics and chemistry of the molecules in the computer screen, or like trying to explain a newspaper's information content in terms of the physical and chemical properties of the ink and paper. As we have seen, the physical medium itself must remain neutral on the arrangement of letters or else the medium is useless for information storage. A neutral physical medium cannot explain why we see one particular arrangement and not another.

[In case the reader is wondering, chance cannot explain the first bit of genetic information; the probabilities of accidents resulting in even the "simplest" self-replicating cell are incredibly low (a single cell in your body contains vastly more information than Encyclopedia Britannica). Origin of life researchers do not consider chance to be a viable explanation, but are investigating scenarios where unique chemical conditions can hopefully explain the emergence of the first self-replicating machine.]

I am not trying to suggest that materialists are stupid; I am merely drawing attention to an important conceptual problem. If you are familiar at all with origin of life research then you know that scientists have investigated a huge range of possible scenarios leading to the origin of the first cell with some genetic information. While this research is extensive and informative, it is also above all strongly inconclusive. See Shapiro's Origins for a devastating critique, or Schopf's Life's Origin for an optimistic but honest assessment of the research. I am not calling for origin of life researchers to quit and say "God did it." I am, however, suggesting that researchers should pay careful attention to criticisms like those discussed above. It is possible that new laws will be discovered that can shed light on this problem. Only time will tell if the origin of life will eventually be explicable in physical and chemical terms. I will enjoy following along to find out.

Climate Change Mystery

2009-07-20T10:01:00.003-04:00

New research on a temperature spike that occurred in earth's climate around 55 million years ago supports the idea that past climate change has been caused primarily by factors other than carbon dioxide levels. In this case, the increase in CO2 that accompanied the temperature spike could only account for a little over a third of the warming. Most of the warming was caused by something else. In most of the research I came across while I was writing a paper on climate change, CO2 was a secondary forcing, often following the temperature change, not causing it. This does not mean that CO2 cannot cause warming (it does), but that Al Gore's simplistic presentation of "in the past CO2 varied with climate, therefore CO2 is causing the current warming" is incorrect. Today's warming is rather unique in this sense, as CO2 might actually be the primary cause in this case.

"Baby Einstein" May Actually Make Your Babies Dumb

2009-07-02T20:39:00.005-04:00

Oops. It turns out that the currently trendy (among middle and upper-class parents) push to start teaching little babies and toddlers how to read, write, and do basic arithmetic may do more harm than good. This article in the Boston Globe details some of the latest findings. It's quite long, so I'll summarize some of the stuff I remember.

All of these efforts to start making kids smart earlier are wrongheaded because the education is not developmentally appropriate to those age groups. Research has found, for example, that children who learn how to read later on, around 6 or 7, actually become better, more enthusiastic readers in the long run. If they are "taught" too early, the children learn how to associate symbols with sounds, but that's it (that's all their brains can do at that point). Though parents may think their kids are reading, they are actually just parroting back noises, and any "advantage" in reading the kids may appear to have disappears around first grade. And kids who are part of normal kindergarten (not super-academic kindergarten), with good old-fashioned play time, become the better students over the course of their education.

Research has also shown that for every hour of things like "Baby Einstein" babies and toddlers watch, their vocabulary decreases by some percentage. Their brains are simply not ready for that, and it does not help to try and force it. What then should parents do to encourage good brain development? Keep it simple: love your kids, provide a nurturing environment, let them play, and read to them. Read to them a lot. And don't worry if your child seems like they are developing a little late...the research shows that these children often have the more advanced brain down the road.

P.S. the commonly heard "Einstein was just an average student" is misleading; though he sometimes earned average grades, he was actually a brilliant student. The problem was that he was kind of a rogue and his instructors often didn't like him. He was reading Immanuel Kant at age 14 and loving it (for context, one of Kant's books remains untranslated because the scholars who have tried have stopped for fear of losing their sanity).

Darwinism, Racism, and Victorian Anthropology

2009-06-28T23:43:00.004-04:00

Contemporary critics of Darwinian evolution (e.g. over at Uncommon Descent) are often also interested in criticizing Darwin himself, as well as making connections between Darwinism and racism, eugenics, and the view of social progress known as Social Darwinism. There are indeed connections between these ideas, but neither those who would demonize Darwin nor those who hold him up as a sort of saint have got the full picture. The truth is, of course, more complicated.

The idea of evolution undoubtedly had a strong effect on Victorian beliefs and attitudes. An evolutionary idea of progress permeated Victorian culture; one might say it was the zeitgeist of the 19th century and even the beginning of the twentieth. Europeans saw themselves as the pinnacle of progress, while nonwhite peoples were seen as inferior and less intelligent, with the primates just below them, and so on. But, this cultural bias towards other races existed before Darwin and his theory of evolution. As early as the 17th century (Darwin published The Origin of Species in 1859) naturalists were studying human skulls from various cultures and concluding that whites were the superior race. Louis Agassiz, Samuel Morton, and Robert Knox were prominent 19th century writers/scientists who, before Darwin, concluded that blacks were an inferior race, even the “lowest grade of humanity.”

While we certainly cannot blame Charles Darwin for these prejudices, his theory was seen to provide scientific support for them. His specific theory of evolution, suggested that all life forms compete in the struggle for existence. The more fit will survive while the less fit die out. It was clear, then, that European culture, having survived and progressed far beyond any others, was superior to other cultures. In other words, Darwin’s mechanism could explain, scientifically, how some races could come to be superior to others. It was also used to validate slavery. For example, it was argued that if blacks were set free that they would inevitably go extinct. Blacks, being inferior to other races, would lose in the struggle for existence; it was therefore charitable to keep them as slaves and preserve their race (besides, it was also well-known that blacks became vicious when given freedom and an education). We must remind ourselves again, though, that the idea of evolution did not originate with Darwin and was already quite well-known by the time Darwin published his book. The idea of a struggle for existence, both biological and social, had also already been made popular by Thomas Malthus and Herbert Spencer. In other words, Darwin’s theory was built upon, and was in some sense a product of, preexisting Victorian values.

Victorian anthropologists, before Darwin, were ethnocentric: Europeans were seen as the highest, most advanced race, while other races were viewed as lower and inferior. However, these anthropologists were largely monogenist, meaning they viewed all races as being part of the same human species. In the late 19th century, after Darwin published The Origin of Species, many physical anthropologists became polygenist, viewing other races as separate species from Europeans. Eventually a developmental view of society emerged. In short, this developmental viewpoint saw native peoples as relics of our evolutionary past; people who had not evolved much higher than the apes, and whose adults had intelligences similar to that of European children (a side note: many Victorians also saw European women as having intelligences similar to a child’s). This evolutionary, developmental view of culture did not exactly encourage an equitable view of races and cultures.

It is safe to say that Darwin’s theory was used to support the ethnocentric and racist Victorian view of other races. It also perhaps tilted physical anthropology into a slightly more racist mode (it also eliminated previously strong ties with missionary work). But we cannot place too much blame on Darwin. Racism was a general prejudice of the time, and cannot be linked solely to Darwinism (even the general idea of evolution cannot take all the blame: Louis Agassiz, mentioned above, was a creationist who viewed blacks as having been separately created and inferior to whites). Darwin's theory may be responsible for adding scientific credibility to racism, but not its genesis.

Darwin himself, on the other hand, was an abolitionist and was convinced that the differences between races was one of education and upbringing, not inherent natures. This was made clear to him through his experiences with "civilized savages," men from primitive cultures who had been raised in England and whose behavior and intellect were indistinguishable from Europeans.

Information Theory and Biological Evolution

2009-05-02T17:35:00.005-04:00

The question of the origin of species, which Darwin was concerned with, or the origin of the first life form can be more broadly stated as the question of the origin of biological information. Whether one is interested in the origin of the first protein or in the development of new structures such as an eye or a wing, a successful explanation of these requires an accounting for an increase in biological information (e.g. DNA, RNA, or proteins). Darwin's theory of natural selection and mutation became famous because it proposed a natural explanation for such increases in information (though Darwin of course would not have phrased it quite that way), which previously had been widely regarded as requiring an intelligent agent (which would have been God, for most).

Darwin's combination of chance and natural selection was crucial; chance by itself (random mutations in the genetic code or random conglomerations of organic chemicals) is a hopeless approach to constructing even the simplest biological molecule. Take a small protein which consists of a chain of around 100 amino acids; the chance for a small functional protein to form in a random search is around 1 in 1270000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
00000000000000000000000000000000000. This is well beyond any reasonable probability limit, as would be the probability for any other biological feature (e.g., a strand of DNA). But, with natural selection preserving the individual random changes that are beneficial, larger changes can gradually accumulate. Richard Dawkins illustrates this with the following scenario: take the phrase "METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL." Imagine a computer randomly generating phrases out of the 26 letters of the English alphabet; the probability of producing this phrase through random letter generation is practically zero. However, if whenever a letter that is part of the phrase appears, the computer keeps that letter, then gradually (in fact, quite easily) the target phrase will be generated. In the biological world, natural selection and mutation achieve something similar: natural selection preserves the beneficial random mutations, resulting in new biological information.

But can information really be gotten so easily? It turns out that Dawkin's illustration is fatally flawed. Consider: the computer had a target phrase, and preserved incremental changes by comparing the randomly generated letters to this target phrase. In nature there can be no targets; natural selection and random mutation do not have a goal in mind. In nature, only beneficial changes can be preserved, not changes that will be beneficial in the future. An intelligent agent (Dawkins, in his illustration) may know that the gibberish is gradually turning into something that makes sense (METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL), but blind natural forces cannot possibly be shooting for such a target. So it turns out that the illustration meant to show how blind natural forces can generate information actually contains the target information ahead of time, put there by an intelligent agent.

William Dembski and Robert Marks II are working on what they are calling the Law of Conservation of Information. Essentially, it states that you cannot get more information out of a computational algorithm than you put in initially. If this is true, nonteleological evolution cannot in principle explain the origin of new biological information. See their paper here: http://www.uncommondescent.com/evolution/life%E2%80%99s-conservation-law-why-darwinian-evolution-cannot-create-biological-information/

The Big Bang Theory and Christianity

2009-04-26T21:40:00.003-04:00

In my astronomy class we will be discussing the origin of the universe soon; this of course includes discussion of the currently accepted theory of cosmological origins, the big bang theory. Just in mentioning some upcoming topics, I've already had one student (a Christian) raise her hand and protest. I cringe when this sort of thing happens, for two reasons. One, I don't believe Christians should be in the business of not allowing the current theories to be taught, and Two, Christians are often very misinformed about the big bang theory.

Christians often associate the big bang theory with an atheistic explanation of the universe (atheistic in the sense that the explanation does not require invoking a creator; the universe, in other words, has a naturalistic explanation). In fact, one of the big bang theory's original formulators and proponents was a Belgian priest by the name of George Lemaitre. While he based his theory on science, not his religious beliefs, there was a clear consistency between the traditional Christian view of the origin of the universe and the big bang theory. The establishment view of the time was a static, eternal universe; this preference can be traced back to the Greeks and was often considered the more appropriate, secular way of viewing the universe. Several decades after Lemaitre's initial proposal, some other astronomers had gathered some observational and mathematical support for the big bang theory. While the evidence was not conclusive, it certainly was worth paying attention to. However, this scientific work was largely ignored and ridiculed by the scientific establishment. Some scientists ridiculed the big bang as being a thinly disguised attempt to bring religion into the fold by characterizing God's initial creation event in scientific terms. The Pope also noticed the congruence between Christianity's creation event and the big bang, formally declaring that science had vindicated Christianity's long standing belief that the universe had a beginning. This of course further enraged the more zealous of the secular astronomers and probably further delayed acceptance of the theory.

So, in contrast to what people often seem to believe, the big bang theory actually can quite easily be seen to support (or at least be compatible with) the initial creation event of Christianity. In fact, there is more tension between an atheistic worldview and the big bang than there is between Christianity and the big bang (a side note: I do not consider it wise for Christianity to ally itself too closely with any specific theory). After all, an eternal universe does not require a starting point, and therefore, no creator. The big bang theory posits that the universe itself (including space, time, and all known laws of physics) originated during this singular event. The implication is that something outside of space, time, and the known laws of physics must be responsible for the initiation of this event. This has not gone unnoticed by secular astronomers, hence the efforts by scientists such as Stephen Hawking to escape the conclusions of their own work by mathematically wriggling their way out of a universe with a beginning (Hawking uses imaginary time to circumvent an actual beginning, preferring instead a self-contained universe with no possibility of a creator).

To sum up, Christians need not fear the big bang theory (or embrace it too closely). Rather, we can observe the shared characteristics that it has with Christian beliefs and watch where the science leads.

Child of Dust

2009-04-25T21:40:00.002-04:00

Dear prodigal, you are my son and I
Supplied you not your spirit, but your shape.
All Eden's wealth arrayed before your eyes;
I fathomed not you wanted to escape.

And though I only ever gave you love,
like every child you’ve chosen to rebel;
uprooted flowers and filled the holes with blood;
ask not for whom they toll the solemn bells.

A child of dust to mother now return;
for every seed must die before it grows.
and though above the world may toil and turn,
no prying spade will find you here below.

Now safe beneath their wisdom and their feet,
Here I will teach you truly how to sleep.

Listen here.

Climate Change #2: Recent and Future Change

2009-04-19T22:50:00.003-04:00

Here's another part:

Recent and Future Climate Change

While past climate change remains somewhat enigmatic, there exists a stronger consensus regarding current climate change (IPCC, 2007). As discussed above, the earth has warmed approximately .75 degrees Celsius over the last 150 years (Maslin, 2009). While around 26% of this warming can be accounted for by solar forcing, the majority of the warming is due to anthropogenic CO2 emissions (Karl, 2003). Each year human activities add around 6 gigatons of CO2 to the atmosphere (Eubanks et al., 2006). Approximately 4/5 of these emissions come from the combustion of fossil fuels, with the remaining 1/5 coming from deforestation or other land-use changes (Maslin, 2009). Anthropogenic influence on the warming of the 20th and 21st century has now been detected through the modeling of the recent climate change (Hegerl et al., 2007). Separating out anthropogenic warming from natural variability is necessary because we are currently in a naturally warm interglacial period known as the Holocene (Maslin, 2009).

The Holocene began around 10,000 years BP (Maslin, 2009). This marked the end of the last ice age, which reached its maximum around 21,000 years BP (Carlson, Clark, Raisbeck, & Brook 2007). Following the last glacial maximum (LGM) earth has been warming steadily (Maslin, 2009, p. 42). Approximately 19,000 years BP there was a 10+ meter rise in sea levels that took place within ~500 years (Clark, McCabe, Mix, & Weaver, 2004). Within a period of ~500 years at the beginning of the Holocene there was a rise in temperature of 8-13 degrees Celsius (Birks & Ammann, 2000). The Laurentide Ice Sheet, which covered much of North America, retreated between 9,000 and 8,400 years BP. This resulted in a further ~5 meter increase in sea levels within a ~1000 year period (Carlson et al., 2007). Within the Holocene there have been periodic cooling and warming episodes, some of which were dramatic, but the last 1000 years have been relatively stable (Thornalley et al., 2009; Maslin, 2009, p. 45). Starting in the late 19th century temperatures have begun to rise once again (IPCC, 2007; Maslin, 2009).

Rising temperatures will bring a host of other changes, some of which will further modify earth’s climate. These changes include melting ice cover, rising sea levels, and shifting oceanic and atmospheric circulation patterns (Maslin, 2009). Changes that could further influence earth’s climate are called feedback mechanisms; these could either accelerate or buffer global warming, and are one of the largest sources of uncertainty in future climate predictions (Bony et al., 2006; Raisanen, 2007).

Effects of Global Warming

The first effect of global warming discussed by Al Gore in the documentary An Inconvenient Truth is the melting of mountain ice caps, or glaciers (Bender, 2006). The first example given is of the retreating glacier atop Mt. Kilimajaro in Africa. Kaser (2004), however, found that this particular glacier’s retreat is due to factors other than global warming; this is in part evidenced by that fact that temperatures never rise above freezing at the glacier’s altitude. However, other glaciers are retreating due to global warming (Kaser, 2004). Approximately 67% of glaciers in the Himalayan mountain range are currently retreating (Ren, Karoly, & Leslie, 2007). According to Ren et al. (2007) glaciers in the Himalayan mountains, a source of fresh water for approximately half of the world’s population, may disappear by 2100.

Another concern as the earth warms and ice cover melts is that global sea levels will rise and threaten the coastal communities of people around the world (Alley, Clark, Huybrechts, & Joughin, 2005). From 1961 to 2003 sea level has been rising at an average rate of 1.8 mm per year; from 1993 to 2003 the average rate increased to 3.1 mm per year (IPCC, 2007). This rate is low compared to some episodes of past climate change; during the Holocene melting of the LIS (discussed above) sea levels rose at rates up to 10 mm per year (Carlson et al., 2007). Two particular melting episodes between the LGM and the start of the Holocene had peak rates perhaps greater than 50mm per year (Alley et al., 2005). While current rates are historically low, even small increases in sea level rise could have a substantial impact on coastal areas through erosion, groundwater contamination, and increased vulnerability to storm surges (Alley et al., 2005).

Approximately half of the recent sea level rise comes from thermal expansion of the water itself; the other half is due to the melting of land-based ice sheets (Alley et al., 2005; IPCC, 2007). In An Inconvenient Truth Al Gore does not mention thermal expansion, only the melting of ice caps on mountains and the ice sheets over Greenland and Antarctica (Bender, 2006). Gore uses computer models to simulate a 20 foot sea level rise to demonstrate the future effects of melting ice cover (Bender, 2006). However, current melting rate estimates for Greenland and Antarctica are, respectively, +0.5 mm per year and -0.6 mm per year; this results in a total net contribution to sea level of around zero (Alley et al., 2005). Contributions to sea level rise from mountain glaciers are projected to be < 1 mm per year through the 21st century (Raper & Braiswaite, 2006).

While current sea level change from ice sheets may be negligible, large uncertainties exist concerning ice-sheet dynamics and the possible responses to global warming (Alley et al., 2005; Huyberys, 2006). An increase of glacial earthquakes in Greenland has been detected, and overall melting rates are increasing (Alley et al., 2005; Ekstrom, Nettles & Tsai, 2006). During the last interglacial period (129,000 years BP) sea level was 4-6 meters higher than present (Otto-Bleisner et al., 2006; Overpeck et al., 2006). Greenland is thought to have contributed > 2 meters to sea level rise at that time (Overpeck et al., 2006). A current rise in sea level of that amount could cover some low-lying countries (Overpeck et al., 2006). Dramatic past changes in sea level raise the possibility of such dramatic change happening during the present warming; more research into ice-sheet dynamics is needed (Alley et al., 2005).

Another effect of global warming that has received high media attention and was featured in An Inconvenient Truth concerns changes in hurricane patterns (Curry, Webster, & Holland, 2006; Bender, 2006). Studies have shown an increase in SST over the past 50 years (IPCC, 2007). This rise in SST correlates with a rise in the frequency of intense hurricanes since 1970 (IPCC, 2007). Al Gore uses the example of Hurricane Katrina, which struck the Gulf Coast in the U.S. in 2005, to illustrate the impact of global warming (Bender, 2006). Some studies, however, indicate that the effect of global warming on hurricanes is uncertain: Landsea, Harper, Hoarau, and Knaff (2006) argue that the database of past hurricane activity is too short and unreliable to use to detect trends in intense storms. In addition, there is evidence that as temperatures increase so will wind shear over the Atlantic and Pacific oceans (Vecchi & Soden, 2007; Wang & Lee, 2008). Wind shear is an atmospheric phenomenon that could result in a decrease in hurricane activity and the number of hurricanes making landfall (Vecchi & Soden, 2007; Wang & Lee, 2008). A statistical analysis by Dailey, Zuba, Ljung, Dima and Guin (2009), however, found that increasing SST will likely increase the number of hurricanes making landfall at least in the Southeastern United States. More research in this area is needed, as storm risk is also an important policy issue for coastal communities (Curry et al., 2006).

Ocean circulation is another variable likely to be affected as global temperatures rise. The Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC), an important transport mechanism for moving heat around the globe as well as an important part of the carbon cycle, can be affected by both temperature change and salinity change as fresh glacial meltwater is added to the oceans (Thornalley et al., 2009). Changes in Atlantic currents can have significant regional climate impacts (Clark et al., 2004). In the early Holocene a regional (and possibly global) cooling event was caused by meltwater disrupting North Atlantic Deep Water (NADW) formation (Rohling & Palike, 2005). Disruption of NADW formation can paralyze the Gulf Stream, an important transporter of heat to Northern Europe (Maslin, 2009). There is evidence of meltwater and other factors already affecting the current salinity of the Atlantic Ocean (Curry et al., 2003). If meltwater disrupts the Gulf Stream, Europe could expect much colder, more extreme winter weather (Maslin, 2009). More research is needed in order to accurately model future changes in ocean circulation and its potential effects on climate (Curry et al., 2003).

Biodiversity will also be affected by climate change; some species will benefit and others will be adversely affected (NRC, 2008). Some forests may be threatened by rising temperatures (Scholze, Knorr, Arnell, & Prentice, 2006). Other plant species, such as soybeans, will have increased vulnerability to predation as CO2 levels rise (Zavala, Casteel, DeLucia, & Berenbaum, 2008). Some grasslands, on the other hand, seem to be mostly immune to climate change (Grime et al., 2008). Overall, animal biodiversity is projected to decrease due to global warming, particularly for species that cannot easily migrate or adapt to a changing climate (Maslin, 2009).

Several other areas will also be impacted by global warming, including agriculture, the spread of certain diseases, increases in wildfires, and an increase in extreme weather events such as floods and droughts (Maslin, 2009; Scholze et al., 2006). Some models and observations suggest that human influence can already be detected in a change of precipitation patterns; precipitation is increasing at middle latitudes in the Northern hemisphere, while it is decreasing in the Northern hemisphere subtropical regions (Zhang et al., 2007).

Climate Change

2009-04-19T10:03:00.003-04:00

The following is part of my research into climate change. I do not consider it complete; some sections need to be fleshed out a bit, but it's what I've got for now. Also, I had some formatting problems with the last half or so, hence the breaks instead of indents between paragraphs.

Climate Change

Climate change may be the most important scientific issue facing the global community (Maslin, 2009). In the past few decades several international organizations have formed to meet the need for scientific, political, and economic analysis.[1] Climatology and paleoclimatology are relatively new fields of research; the development of more sophisticated global-scale observations is needed to validate and refine existing atmospheric models (Crutzen, 2000). The large uncertainties surrounding climate change remain current areas of research (Raisanen, 2007).

Global climate change is thought to be primarily due to variations in the Earth’s orbit around the Sun and varying levels of greenhouse gases (Maslin, 2009; Stanley, 1999). These influence the Earth’s energy budget by affecting, respectively, the amount of energy received from the Sun or the amount of energy lost due to radiative cooling (Maslin, 2009).

Variations in the earth’s orbit thought to be responsible for climate change include changes in the earth’s precession, obliquity, and the eccentricity of its orbit. Planetary orbits are elliptical, and the eccentricity of a planet’s orbit is the ratio of the two foci to the major axis of the ellipse (Morrison, Wolf, & Fraknoi, 1995). In other words, eccentricity describes how stretched out the oval-shaped ellipse is; this determines the range of distances between the planet and the sun that is experienced during a revolution.

Obliquity describes the tilt of the earth on its axis (~23°) and precession is the approximately 26,000 year cycle in which the earth “wobbles” on its axis like a top (Morrison, Wolf, & Fraknoi, 1995). These variations affect the amount of incoming solar radiation (or insolation) received from the sun and therefore affect Earth’s climate (Maslin, 2009).

Orbital variations (sometimes called Milankovitch cycles after the scientist who popularized the theory) are an example of external forcing on earth’s climate. Greenhouse gases are an example of an internal forcing (Maslin, 2009). When the Sun’s radiation reaches the Earth, around 30% of it is reflected back out into space and the other ~70% is absorbed. Earth’s atmosphere absorbs around 20% of the energy and the earth’s surface absorbs the remaining 50% (Karl, 2003; Maslin, 2009). The energy absorbed by earth’s surface is then re-radiated in the form of infrared light (Karl, 2003). This infrared light (or heat energy) is mostly released into space; greenhouse gases, however, absorb some of this energy and re-radiate it within the earth’s atmosphere. This is the “greenhouse effect” from which greenhouse gases (hereafter GHG) receive their name, and the presence of GHG results in an increase in the earth’s average temperatures (Maslin, 2009). The greenhouse effect keeps earth habitable, as without any GHG the earth’s average temperatures would be around -18° C, over 30 ° C colder than current averages (Ward & Brownlee, 2000, p. 207).

Examples of GHG and their relative contributions to the global greenhouse effect include water vapor (60%), carbon dioxide (25%), ozone (8%), methane, and nitrous oxides (Karl, 2003). The atmospheric levels of these gases have varied throughout the earth’s history and contributed to past climate change (Maslin, 2009; Stanley, 1999).

Orbital variations and GHG are only two of a myriad of variables involved in earth’s climate system (Rind, 2002). Others include the ocean circulation system, variations in solar output, aerosols, vegetation, and various feedback mechanisms (Rind, 2002). Scientists are divided over the relative importance of each of these mechanisms, and the sheer number and dynamicity of these variables make accurate reconstructions and models difficult (Bony et al., 2006; Maslin, 2009; Raisanen, 2007).

What is clear is that the earth has experienced dramatic climate changes in the past; these changes include natural cycles between ice ages and warmer, interglacial periods as well as the corollary changes in sea level, temperatures, precipitation patterns, ocean circulation, atmospheric circulation, and ice cover. The exact mechanisms responsible for past climate change are a source of debate and uncertainty within the scientific community (Maslin, 2009; Paillard, 2006).

Past and Current Climate Change

The global average temperature of earth has increased by approximately .75 degrees Celsius over the past 150 years (Maslin, 2009; IPCC, 2007). According to the IPCC (2007) the consensus among scientists is that the primary cause of this global warming is anthropogenic (human-caused) carbon dioxide emissions. Since the industrial revolution humans have been burning fossil fuels (e.g. coal, oil, gasoline) for energy. The combustion of fossil fuels results in the formation of carbon dioxide, which is released into the atmosphere (Eubanks et al., 2006). Pre-industrial levels of carbon dioxide (CO₂) in the earth’s atmosphere were around 280 parts per million (ppm). Current levels are ~385 ppm, an increase of over 100 ppm (Maslin, 2009). Since CO₂ is a greenhouse gas, rising CO₂ levels result in an increase in the amount of outgoing infrared radiation absorbed within the earth’s atmosphere. This additional heat energy causes an overall warming of the earth (Eubanks et al., 2006).

In An Inconvenient Truth, the popular documentary[2] about global warming, Al Gore makes the claim that earth’s past ice ages and intervening warm periods are due to the rising and falling of carbon dioxide (CO₂) levels (Bender, 2006). Gore points to reconstructions of temperatures and CO₂ levels for the last 650,000 years drawn from ice cores in Antarctica. In this ice core record there is a clear correlation between high CO₂ levels and high temperatures and vice versa (Maslin, 2009, p. 7). Gore claims that these records offer evidence that CO₂ levels have driven past climate change; therefore, the dramatic anthropogenic increase in CO₂ levels seen over the last century will have a correspondingly large increase in global temperature. In the ice core records, however, a clear cause and effect relationship between CO₂ levels and temperatures does not exist (Caillon et al., 2003). In fact, the Vostok ice cores from Antarctica show that in the past temperatures have risen around 800 years before the CO₂ levels rise (Caillon et al., 2003; Maslin, 2009; Soon, 2007). The rising CO₂ levels are thought to amplify the warming that is already taking place, but are not the ultimate cause of the fluctuations between ice ages (Caillon et al., 2003; Maslin, 2009). Past ice ages and interglacial periods were caused by orbital and solar variations (Maslin, 2009).

In the Miocene period, 13.9 million years before present (BP), a global cooling episode was initiated by a change in earth’s obliquity (Holbour, Kuhnt, Schulz, & Erlenkeuser, 2005). This resulted in the extensive ice sheets that continue to cover Antarctica today (Holbour et al., 2005). Sea surface temperatures were high during this ice buildup; this is consistent with an orbital variation being the cause rather than a change in GHG levels (Holbour et al., 2005). CO₂ levels did decrease during this cooling episode, but this was due to orbital influences on the carbon cycle; this in turn led to further expansion of the Antarctic ice sheets (Holbourn et al., 2005).

In the past 2.5 million years orbital variation has been the dominant forcing involved in the transitions into and out of ice ages (Maslin, 2009). Over the past 423,600 years, during the late Pleistocene, Milankovitch cycles account for the majority of climate change (Meyers, Sageman, & Pagani, 2008). Both precession and obliquity cycles were involved in these changes (Huybers, 2006; Meyers et al., 2008).

During the last interglacial period, ~129,000 years BP, orbital variations caused a warming episode that resulted in extensive open water in the Arctic (Otto-Bliesner et al., 2006; Overpeck et al., 2006).

The current interglacial epoch, the Holocene, began around 10,000 years BP (Maslin, 2009). There is evidence for precessional forcing of climate change during this period, including changes in both ocean hydrology and atmospheric circulation and precipitation patterns (Partin, Cobb, Adkins, Clark, & Ferndandez, 2007; Shin, Sardeshmukh, Webb, Oglesby & Barsugli, 2006).

Milankovitch cycles correlate well with past climate change (Maslin, 2009; Meyers et al., 2008; Soon, 2007). The relationship between GHG levels and climate, on the other hand, is a source of controversy among scientists (Kerr, 2001). Historical records indicate a strong correlation between GHG and climate (Alley, Clark, Huybrechts, & Joughin, 2005). A reduction in GHG may have caused glaciation during the Carboniferous period 354-290 million years BP (Came et al., 2007). There is evidence that ~35 million years BP a reduction in CO₂ levels may have contributed to global cooling (Garzione, 2008; Stanley, 1999). Retallack (2007) found paleosol evidence indicating that CO₂ levels were a controlling factor throughout the Cenozoic (~65 million years ago - present). In contrast to these findings, reconstructions by Rothman (2002) show that CO₂ levels do not correlate well with warm or cool periods over the past 500 million years.

It is likely that both orbital variations and GHG levels have contributed to past climate change (Paillard, 2006). Other mechanisms such as varying solar output and shifts in ocean circulation also play an important role in regional and global climate change (Curry, Dickson, & Yashayaev, 2003; Rohling & Palike, 2005; Thornalley, Elderfield, & McCave, 2009). The earth is a dynamic interconnected system and further research is needed for any certain conclusions about the mechanisms that can explain past climate changes (Paillard, 2006; Rind, 2002). In particular, research into the interactions between orbital forcing and other mechanisms, such as ice-sheet or cloud feedbacks, is needed (Huyberys, 2006; Bony et al., 2006).

[1] E.g., the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Alliance of Small Island States (AOISIS), and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

[2] An Inconvenient Truth won multiple Oscars and is currently the 4^th highest grossing documentary

(see Box OfficeMojo.com)

Equifax Sucks

2009-03-31T17:18:00.005-04:00

On the way home I was listening to NPR and heard part of a program about customer service and how companies are increasingly making it a priority. Companies are more sensitive now about word of mouth due to the growth of social networking and other internet related communication. Well, that made me think of the Equifax credit monitoring service and how crappy their customer service is. So I think I'll use this newfangled internet thingy to share my feelings.

A few months ago I signed up for a free trial of their credit monitoring service to check my credit score. I canceled it the following day and didn't give it another thought. One month later I get a charge from Equifax out of my bank account. I called and explained what happened and I was told that it would be fixed. A few weeks later I called again to see what had happened and to ask why my money had not been credited back to my account. I was told some reason or other and that it would be fixed within 48 hours. Another few weeks later and still nothing. I'm going to call again now and see what happens.

Update: I was just told that I was given the refund on March 10th. It is March 31st, and I just looked through my bank statement; no refund is there. I was advised to call my bank about it. Great. I love this stuff.

Update #2: I just contacted my bank and they are crediting my account while they investigate the issue. I will be notified of the results within 90 days. Equifax will be sorry now...I will get my money back! My 12 dollars and 95 cents!

Update #3: It's been over a year since all of this, and at this point I don't even remember what happened in the end...I know I received my refund, but I'm not sure if it was from my bank or from Equifax. Either way, the whole thing was a pain.

Ideology and Science

2009-03-09T19:19:00.003-04:00

President Obama today announced his lifting of the ban on stem cell research imposed by the Bush administration. During the announcement he said that ideology had been allowed to win out over science and that he was fixing that by letting the science guide decisions instead of ideology. This is nonsense. Now, I am not here arguing one way or the other about whether or not the ban should be in place. Rather, I want to point something out: namely, that science cannot say anything. People say things. When Obama says he doesn't think that ideology should guide policy, what he means to say is that the wrong ideology should not guide policy. For example, it would undoubtedly help further scientific research to begin experiments on human beings. Perhaps we could use prisoners, or the homeless. We could make great advances by inflicting them with certain ailments and diseases and then carefully monitoring and studying them (indeed, this happened not too long ago, with doctors inflicting STD's on African-Americans). "Science" cannot tell us not to do this. Only ideology (in the form of moral principles) can tell us not to do this. Therefore Obama's claim to be liberating science from ideology is nonsense; what he really means is that his ideology is the better one.

Global Warming #4: More problems

2009-02-28T21:15:00.005-05:00

While researching climate change I have discovered a host of new facts and observations. I have yet to synthesize it into something coherent, so most of it will have to wait. I will note a few interesting things though and then close with comments on science and policy.

Those of you who have seen Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth (or turned on the TV or surfed the web) will likely have heard about two of global warming effects: increased hurricane activity and the drowning of polar bears. It turns out that while there is some truth in these claims, the reality is quite complicated.

Hurricanes are powered by warm ocean surface waters evaporating and then condensing, releasing latent heat. The warmer the water, the more evaporation, and therefore the more heat released to power the storm. As sea surface temperatures rise then, so should the number and intensity of hurricanes. Al Gore quite bluntly lays the blame for hurricane Katrina at the feet of global warming. Climatologists, however, point out that it is impossible to pin a local, specific event like Katrina as being caused by global warming. While it is true that some theoretical studies have linked rising water temperatures will increased hurricane activity, the observations are that the number of hurricanes have in fact not increased at all. What has increased is the relative number of intense (category 4 or 5) hurricanes. There has been some controversy over this claim, however, as our reliable records only go back around 30 years. In other words, how can we be confident that the number of intense storms has gone up when we don't have a reliable long term record to compare it to? In addition, several studies have shown that as the planet warms, wind shear over the Atlantic and East Pacific will increase. This atmospheric phenomenon prevents hurricanes from forming at all. Yet other studies have shown that this increased wind shear will result in less hurricanes making landfall in the U.S. So, the jury is certainly still out on exactly how global warming will affect hurricane activity.

As for polar bears, I have discovered that populations are indeed on the decline (down 20% or so in the last 30 years). While this is probably influenced by climate change and the decline of arctic sea ice, it is not yet true that we have found drowning polar bears because of a lack of sea ice. The study that seems to have sparked all the media interest (and led Al Gore in his movie to show a CGI clip of a polar swimming in an endless ocean searching for ice) is one where four polar bears drowned due to a fierce storm off the coast of Alaska. Not global warming; an intense storm. While it is hypothesized that the bears may have been swimming longer than usual due to less ice, Al Gore's portrayal hardly seems appropriate. This seems to be another example of misleading information around what will likely be a real issue. If global warming continues, polar bears will have to adapt or perish. It is disappointing though that the facts were twisted to support an agenda.

OK, so in this and the last three posts it will hopefully have become clear that much of the science surrounding past and current climate change is both complicated and tentative. So what should we do? There are those who advocate doing nothing in the interest of preserving our economy, and those who advocate radical change. For myself, the uncertainty of the science can be separated from policy decisions. Why? Consider our current source of energy, fossil fuels. These fuels formed during the Carboniferous period 300 million years ago. The processes that formed all of the coal and oil is slow, somewhat mysterious, and only seems to occur under certain conditions. This is why coal and oil are considered non-renewable resources. World population will likely hit 9 billion in the near future. Developing economies, like China's, are increasing consumption of fossil fuels at tremendous rates. Besides the fact that fossil fuel emissions are probably contributing to climate change, there is another perfectly good reason to develop alternative sources of energy: we are going to run out of fossil fuels (in as little as 30 years by some estimates).

You may have heard of Pascal's wager, a philosophical oddity that suggests that it is a better logical bet to believe in God than not to believe in God. After all, if you believe in God and you're wrong, nothing really happens to you when you die. But, if you don't believe in God and you're wrong, you may be sentenced to eternal damnation. Therefore, it is a safer bet to believe in God. Putting aside the merits of this theological wager for a second, consider the current crisis. If we act to stop global warming, and it turns out to be a complete hoax, what do we get? Some time and money will be spent, but we will also find ourselves with reduced pollution (fossil fuel combustion results in environmental damage besides global warming), zero dependence on oil of any sort (plus it will run out anyway), and the development of new, clean, efficient energy sources. Now, consider the flip side: if we do not act, and the less nice predictions about future warming are true, we could find ourselves with a host of problems, including: sea level rise, habitat devastation, increased floods and droughts, changing atmospheric and ocean currents, and others.

When it comes to modifying the Earth's climate with greenhouse gas emissions, an experiment in which the outcome cannot be predicted, it just seems to be to be a safer bet to start phasing out fossil fuels now and perhaps keeping reserves for emergency situations. I have called this "Gore's Wager" in the past, but as I find out more about climate change, the less enthusiastic I am about using his name. I'll have to think of something else...

Global Warming #3: New Territory

2009-02-18T20:00:00.005-05:00

So we have seen that Earth has had dramatic climate changes in the past caused by both variation in the Earth's orbit and varying levels of greenhouse gases. Al Gore's attempts to link current climate change with past changes do not quite work. What is happening currently has no analogue; for the first time CO2 levels are rising on their own, ahead of other normally synchronous changes.

We are currently in the Holocene, which began around 11,000 years ago, marking the end of the last ice age. Glaciers covered many of the continents during the last glacial maximum, but beginning around 20,000 years ago Earth has warmed. The glaciers have retreated and left only arctic and Antarctic ice as well as mountain glaciers. The retreat of the glacier covering North America left behind the Great Lakes as well as the many kettle ponds here in New England. Cape Cod and Long Island are remnants of the debris left behind by the glacier's movement.

In other words, melting glaciers are nothing new. However, beginning with the industrial revolution humans have begun to add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere in appreciable amounts. From around 280 ppm (parts per million; within 1 million air molecules 280 of them would be CO2) before 1900 CO2 levels have risen to around 390 ppm. This is still an extremely small part of the atmosphere, but CO2 is a greenhouse gas that absorbs heat radiated from the Earth (originally from the sun). Venus, for example, has an atmosphere almost entirely made of CO2 and has surface temperatures around 400 degrees Celsius. While the Earth has many sinks for excess CO2 (only around half of total human emissions actually stay in the atmosphere), humans are adding enough to slowly but surely increase global levels.

Over the 20th century global temperatures have risen around 3/4 a degree Celsius or a little over one degree Fahrenheit. This may not sound like much, but remember, a lot of heat is needed to warm the entire planet by even 1 degree. Is all of this warming due to humans? Probably not; remember, Earth has been warming for the last 20,000 years (with a few notable exceptions), and sea levels have been rising steadily at about 2 mm per year over the same period. Most likely humans are accelerating the warming of the current interglacial period. And here we come back to the main point: this is essentially new territory. We simply do not know exactly what will happen as we add more and more CO2 to the atmosphere.

The Earth has various feedback mechanisms that have acted to stabilize climate throughout Earth's history. These seem to have prevented both an irreversible global icehouse as well as an irreversible runaway greenhouse effect. Can the Earth deal with the amount of CO2 we are adding? There are studies showing that even if we stopped adding CO2 today, climate change might continue for centuries. While modeling future climates is extremely difficult, there seems to be a general consensus that, in the words of the IPCC, "very likely" humans are contributing to the current warming and that warming will continue as long as we keep adding greenhouse gases.

Next: science vs policy.

Global Warming #2: Past climates

2009-02-16T21:05:00.003-05:00

So last time I ended with the question of how to present complicated data to 9th graders. Global climate change involves extremely large amounts of complex data. The literature on past climate change is vast, but single or simple conclusions are absent. From what I can tell, climate change poses an ill-structured problem, the kind educational researchers tell us are important for students to be exposed to. Real world problems are complex and often lack a single answer or one correct approach.

Climate change in the past seems to have been caused by a combination of orbital variations of Earth (Milankovitch cycles) internal forcing by greenhouse gases (including water vapor, CO2, methane, ozone, etc.), and various feedback mechanisms. Scientists disagree about the relative importance of each. It is clear from ice cores and other records that CO2 and methane vary along with global temperature, but a clear cause and effect relationship is absent, despite what Mr. Gore might tell us. We are also led to believe that CO2 levels are off the chart compared to Earth's past. This is not quite correct. Current levels of CO2 (around 385 parts per million) are certainly the highest in the last 650,000 years, and while this might seem like a long time, it is very brief compared to the 4.6 billion year history of planet Earth. There is evidence that CO2 levels have been up to 15 times higher than current levels around 400 million years ago and at least 5 times the current levels more recently (geologically speaking). Of course, people weren't around back then, and there were no coastal cities, but still, sometimes Mr. Gore makes it sound like planet Earth itself couldn't survive. This is of course nonsense; as recently as 60 million years ago Earth likely had average temperatures 15 degrees Celsius higher than current averages. And Earth survived, as did its plants and animals. There have been times where there haven't been any glaciers anywhere, and as recently as 120,000 years ago sea levels were 4 to 5 meters higher than current levels.

So if you hear that current warming is unprecedented, that is simply false. Point this out to 9th graders, though, and you see some of them glaze over and start to dismiss the possibility of anthropogenic climate change. The problem is that Mr. Gore and others try to use past climate change as a simple analog to explain what is happening now. This doesn't work for several reasons; as mentioned above, past climate change involves dozens of factors that are not fully understood by any climate scientist. The current scenario is actually new in the history of the world.

Next: uncharted territory

Teaching Global Warming #1

2009-02-15T20:27:00.004-05:00

I'm researching global climate change, ill-structured problem solving, and constructivist methodology for a paper/project. I know a decent amount about climate change, but expect I will learn a lot more over the course of the next few months. I think I will post a series of posts on what I find.

As of now I am kind of torn over this issue and how to teach it. It is one of my favorite parts of the year for several reasons: I find it fascinating, and most of my students find it interesting as well. The problem is that climate change has become a partisan issue. Democrats and liberals tend to believe every word Al Gore says about global warming, while conservatives dismiss it as junk science. As usual, neither are correct. My dilemma is how to teach a nuanced view of climate change to my 9th graders, or rather, to have them arrive at a nuanced view through critical thinking.

I usually start our time on climate change with a viewing of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. The reason is that Mr. Gore actually does a pretty good job explaining much of the science of global warming and its potential effects on Earth. The collection of images and animations are top notch, and Al Gore seems to sincerely care about our planet. Most students are impressed and come away totally convinced that anthropogenic (human-caused) global warming is real and that we must act swiftly or else the world will end. This sort of thinking is encouraged by junk science movies like The Day After Tomorrow. Al Gore isn't quite that far down the alarmist spectrum, but he's pretty close.

After the video (my students take notes) we summarize as a class the various current and future effects global warming may have on the only habitable planet that we know of. These include glacial ice caps melting (which are an important source of fresh water), sea levels rising, a redistribution of precipitation patterns, ocean current changing, and many others. We discuss the basic science of the greenhouse effect (various gases, including CO2, absorb infrared light radiated from Earth and warm the atmosphere) and that humans contribute around 6 gigatons of CO2 to the atmosphere each year (for reference, around 3 million fully loaded 747's would equal 1 gigaton). Then I go on to point out some of Gore's mistakes and/or glossed over complexities.

For example, Gore's first illustration of massive glacial retreat is atop Mt. Kilimanjaro. Unfortunately, studies published by reputable scientists in peer-reviewed journals have shown conclusively that global warming is not the cause of the retreat. Rather, it is a pre-industrial revolution change in atmospheric moisture patterns that is responsible (also, the temperatures at that altitude never rise above freezing). This is not to say that other glaciers are not retreating due to warming temperatures, but Mt. Kilimanjaro was a poor choice by Mr. Gore, and in the interest of truth I feel compelled to point this out.

One example of uncertainty/complexity that Gore overlooks is the relationship between past CO2 levels and temperature. We are shown the data from ice cores from Antarctica that show the past several ice ages and the correlation between CO2 and temperature over the past 650,000 years. When CO2 levels are high, temps are high, and when CO2 levels are low, temps are low. You see, says Gore, CO2 levels control climate, and he goes on to show how our current CO2 levels are rapidly going off the chart in a vertical direction. The problem is that the published studies of these ice cores show that historically temperatures always rise first, followed around 800 years later by a rise in CO2 levels. Also, it is fairly well accepted that these climate changes, the change from ice age to interglacial period and back again, are ultimately caused by variations in the Earth's orbit, known as Milankovitch cycles (though various other factors also come into play). Gore's point though, or so it seems to me, is that in these ice cores we have clear evidence that CO2 has caused drastic climate change in the past and that we are about to experience apocalyptic levels of change due to anthropogenic CO2 emissions. This, to me, is a gross misuse of the ice cores to argue for a valid point: that rising CO2 levels likely will contribute to global warming. How do you explain this to freshmen in high school?

More coming soon.

Multiple Realities?

2009-02-07T16:41:00.003-05:00

I'm taking a research class and the professor reviewed qualitative and quantitative approaches and the thinking behind them. Quantitative analysis of course involves variables that are strictly measurable; everything must be measured using numbers. The qualitative approach is more personal and may rely on data like recorded interviews. She explained that the qualitative approach emerged in the '60's as a counter to the quantitative, masculine, everyone can be explained as a number approach adopted first by the military and then everyone else. A qualitative approach recognized that it is difficult to reduce people to numbers and statistics, and that maybe research should start collecting data directly from the people instead of inferring data from quantitative tests. This would allow researchers insight into the people themselves and allow us to recognize the multiple realities of peoples' experiences.

The quantitative approach assumes a single reality, an external reality that is independent of people's experiences. There is a right answer to every question, and a quantitative approach allows access to that solitary truth. Qualitative researchers on the other hand assert that there is not one reality, but multiple realities that we can only discover through a qualitative approach. Each person has their own reality, and these would be missed or ignored through a strictly quantitative approach. This thinking is part of what might be considered postmodernism (or relativism): the belief that there is no absolute truth but instead there are multiple truths. For example, many see Thomas Kuhn's work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, as showing that even scientific knowledge of that one reality is suspect and that therefore not one reality but multiple realities exist. The reality of any given person then depends on culture, language, and so on.

I believe that the language used in this sort of dialogue is all wrong. When relativists (or qualitative researchers) say that there are multiple realities they are simply mistaken. What they should say is that there are multiple perspectives. For example, on an episode of the radio program This American Life the story of a missing boy was told. When a boy was found, two families claimed it was their boy, as both had indeed lost their son. Each were convinced that the boy belonged to them; in other words they each had their own realities. But clearly the boy could only have been from one family and not both, and therefore perspective is the more appropriate term. I think perhaps the fear is that perspective is not a strong enough word, and that different people's experiences will be ignored unless they are described as a reality. I hope no relativist would actually claim that the boy actually was both of the boys that had gone missing. It seems clear that there is only one external reality: the boy could have only been from one family or the other.

How then do we interpret the clear value of qualitative research and ideas like those of Kuhn's? The answer is that relativists were wrong about what is relative. They would claim reality itself is not singular. They are making a claim about ontology, or what actually exists. The proper claim should be about epistemology, or what we can know. There is one reality, but our access to it is fuzzy at best. Even scientific knowledge, which usually enjoys a vaulted epistemic status, is far from certain, as the work of Kuhn and others has shown. It is a mistake however to confuse what I will call epistemological relativism (the uncertainty of all knowledge; even scientific, quantifiable knowledge) with ontological relativism (that there actually exists more than one reality).

To sum up, we should replace talk of "multiple realities" with talk of multiple perspectives, being sure to appreciate and take seriously how people perceive reality. For example, my perspective right now is that it's time to order a pizza. How can I be sure that this is actually a reality, not just my perspective? My wife has told me so.

The Miller-Urey Experiment

2008-12-13T16:31:00.004-05:00

The Origin of Life

Though Darwin’s theory of evolution applies to the diversification of biological life, not the origin of biological life, scientists have nonetheless attempted to find a naturalistic explanation of life’s origin through recourse to Darwinian type events. Competition between the first self-replicating molecules is thought to have led to increasingly efficient and complicated bio-molecules until the first primitive cell emerged. The question then is: where did these first self-replicated molecules come from? Every living thing known to science utilizes the same set of bio-molecules to reproduce: DNA, RNA, and proteins. These are enormously complicated molecules that, respectively, contain genetic information, the ability to translate and transport genetic information, and the ability to construct molecular machines (including other proteins) based on that information. Without all three components in place and functioning, there is no self-replication. The difficult task facing origin of life scientists is to discover which bio-molecule came first, and how, and then to show how the other bio-molecules developed to form the first reproducing organism.

Darwin himself thought that life may have arisen from a “warm little pond,” and in the early 20th century the scientists J.B.S. Haldane and A.I. Oparin independently speculated that a pre-biotic organic soup must have arisen early in the Earth’s history. Haldane and Oparin postulated a reducing atmosphere for the early Earth, an atmosphere containing abundant hydrogen, methane, ammonia, and water vapor. It was a logical assumption, as hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, and methane and ammonia are both hydrogen containing compounds. In this environment organic molecules were thought to naturally accumulate into the organic soup, and eventually, into life itself.

Miller’s Experiment

In 1953 a graduate student name Stanley Miller decided to test what may be called the “Oparin-Haldane Hypothesis.” Working under his advisor, Harold Urey, Miller created an experimental set-up to explore whether synthesis of organic molecules was possible in the hypothetical atmosphere of the early Earth.

Miller’s device (see Figure 1) contained three main compartments filled with water, methane, ammonia, and hydrogen. The water was boiled and electrical charges were sent through the vapors, which then passed into the next compartment and cooled and condensed. He ran the device for a week and then analyzed the resulting compounds. Miller discovered that among the compounds were some amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. This result sent a ripple through the scientific community. Miller had uncovered experimental evidence demonstrating the first steps of how life could have arisen purely through natural means. The experiment has become a staple in science textbooks, often accompanied by words like "the Miller-Urey experiment has shown that biological molecules can accumulate through natural means, and events like these led to the formation of life on Earth.1" But just how significant were Miller’s results?

Figure 1

First, it had been known for a century that organic compounds could be synthesized from inorganic ones, so the fact that organic materials can result from reactions with non-biological materials had already been discovered (Schopf 2002).

Second, it turns out that Miller’s experiment has several problems. One major problem with the Miller experiment is the assumption of a reducing atmosphere. Electrical sparks in an oxidizing atmosphere (like our current atmosphere) do not lead to any organic compounds. As mentioned above, the atmosphere was originally thought to be reducing (composed of hydrogen, methane, and ammonia) because of the abundance of hydrogen in the universe. The problem is that hydrogen is too light for earth's gravity to hold it, and it escapes out of our atmosphere (Brinkman 1969)(Catling et al. 2001). Geochemists and atmospheric scientists currently believe the Earth’s original atmosphere was neutral, not reducing (Miyakawa et al. 2002)(Shapiro 1986)(Schopf 2002)(Stanley 1999). The atmosphere came from the interior of the earth through volcanic outgassing. Small amounts of oxygen also had to be present due to photodissociation2, though the exact levels at which oxygen was present remain unclear (Brinkman 1969)(Stanley 1999). What is clear is that oxygen is present as far back as the rock record goes (Rosing and Frei 2003). In any case, it is now recognized that the early atmosphere was neutral and consisted of nitrogen, carbon dioxide, and water vapor with trace amounts of hydrogen, oxygen, and other gases (Schopf 2002)(Shapiro 1986)3.

In addition to hydrogen not being present except in trace amounts, the existence of methane and ammonia on the early Earth are also problematic. Since there was little oxygen on the early Earth, there was no ozone (O3) layer to absorb ultra-violet light. In addition, the younger sun would have produced ultra-violet light levels 30 times stronger than current levels (Schopf 2002)4. Methane and ammonia are both rapidly decomposed by UV rays and plausible suppliers of large amounts of these gases on the early earth do not exist. Neither could have been present on the early earth except in trace amounts (Schopf 2002)(Shapiro 1986). So, hydrogen, methane, and ammonia could at best be trace gases in the early atmosphere, but Miller's experiment postulated an atmosphere containing only them and water vapor. Clearly this is a fundamental flaw. Neutral atmospheres when sparked create only the simplest biological molecules, and this only with considerable hydrogen sources (Schopf 2002.) Since there are no plausible significant hydrogen sources for the early Earth's atmosphere, Miller’s experiment is something of a non-starter. However, there are other problems still.

Though it may seem trivial, the spark itself in Miller’s experiment is problematic, as there is no natural counterpart to the type of spark Miller used. He actually has tried simulating a lightning-type spark and, in his own words "very few organic compounds were produced and this discharge was not investigated further” (Shapiro 1986).

Miller's apparatus also contained a crucial piece: a trap which separated some of the resulting compounds, saving them from further exposure to energy. In nature, there is no such convenient trap, and the same energy that caused any molecules to bond would just as quickly (and in fact more commonly) break down those molecules. Energy is far more likely to break things down than to build them up. Effectively harnessing energy requires delicate, complicated, specific processes carried out by appropriate molecules. These processes do not occur in organic soup, and the soup would have moved toward equilibrium (the breakdown of all biological molecules is energetically favored in water) (Shapiro 1986)(Schopf 2002).
Interestingly, the specific arrangement of the device itself is in part responsible for the result of biological molecules. Miller had previously done the same experiment, with the same chemicals and spark, but with the pieces of the apparatus in a different arrangement and no biological molecules formed. The design of the apparatus favored the production of certain types of organic molecules, but in nature the process would not be so ordered (Shapiro 1986).

Ignoring all these problems, let us consider Miller's results anyway. The majority (85%) of the result can be referred to as tar, or organic goo, bearing no relevance to biological life (Shapiro 1986)(Schopf 2002). Of the approximately 50 major small organic compounds relevant to life, two were produced in Miller's experiments in a meaningful amount. These were the two simplest amino acids, glycine and alanine. There are twenty amino acids relevant to life, and though six were produced in Miller's experiment, only the aforementioned two were present in more than a miniscule amount. In addition, around half of the already small amounts of amino acids that were present are irrelevant to life due to the chirality problem (Shapiro 1986)(Schopf 2002). The chirality problem is that amino acids come in two forms, mirror images of the other. Only one type (the left-handed ones) are relevant to biology, and amino acids which spontaneously form will end being about half one type and half the other.

Miller’s results consisted of small amounts of a few of the molecules needed for life.5 The majority of a simple organism like a bacterium is composed of proteins (microscopic molecular machines), nucleic acids (DNA and RNA), polysaccharides (sugars), and lipids (fatty membranes). "None have been detected, in any amount, in a Miller-Urey experiment" (Shapiro 1986).

Conclusion

In short, even if the Miller experiment had turned out to simulate realistic conditions on the early Earth, its results are truly a most insignificant step toward figuring out how life arose. It is clear that the significance of this experiment has been grossly exaggerated. Miller himself has said as much. The severe problems with the experiment have led to interest in a variety of other ideas to explain the origin of life, including hydrothermal vents, meteorite seeding, and even panspermia (the idea that extraterrestrials planted the first life forms here).
So then, students should be taught that the Miller experiment is what it appears to be: a historically important but outdated and flawed experiment.

A further note: even if Miller’s experiment had generated every last biological molecule known to man, present in exactly the right proportions, we still would not have solved the origin of life. One could have all the right pieces together, in any conditions, and still “life” would not emerge. Scientists are unable to re-create any kind of cell even with all the right materials and controlled conditions. How then did it happen by accident on the early Earth?

1. Some modern textbooks do acknowledge the deficiencies in Miller’s experiments, but the Miller experiment remains an icon of pre-biotic evolution.
2. Photodissociation is the breakdown of H2O into hydrogen and oxygen by sunlight.
3. Scientists estimate that oxygen levels just 1% of current levels would prevent organic molecules from forming at all on the early earth.
4. The strong UV rays would have also instantly destroyed any biological molecules that had formed.
5. Subsequent Miller-type experiments have resulted in the production of almost all of the 20 amino acids found in proteins. While interesting, see the rest of this essay.

Works Cited

Brinkman, R.T., 1969, The photodissociation of water vapor, evolution of oxygen and escape of hydrogen in the earth’s atmosphere. PhD. Diss., California Institute of Technology, http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechETD:etd-10062004-120013

Catling et al., 2001, Biogenic Methane, Hydrogen Escape, and the Irreversible Oxidation of the Early Earth. Science, 839-843

Miyakawa et al. 2002. Prebiotic synthesis from CO atmospheres: implications for the origin of life. PNAS, 14628-14631

Rosing, M.T. and Frei, R., 2003. U-rich Archaean sea-floor sediments from Greenland – indications of > 3700 Ma oxygenic photosynthesis. Earth and Planetary Science Letters, 237-244.

Schopf, W., ed. 2002. Life’s Origin: the beginnings of biological evolution, California, UCAL Press

Shapiro, R. 1986. Origins: a skeptic’s guide to the creation of life on earth, New York, Simon & Schuster Inc.

Stanley, S. 1999. Earth System History, New York, W.H. Freedman and Company

My Job

2008-12-12T21:33:00.003-05:00

I am a manager, administrator, secretary, and accountant.

I am an evaluator, psychologist, counselor, and diplomat.

I am a scholar, scientist, historian, and student.

I am a teacher, and I don't get paid enough for this job.

The Omnivore's Dilemma

2008-12-04T19:20:00.004-05:00

I'm almost through the audiobook version of The Omnivore's Dilemma, and it's one of the most interesting books I've read in a while. If you eat food (and I'm pretty sure you do) you must read this book.

The Problem of Evil Solved

2008-11-23T20:57:00.004-05:00

Hey, if Daniel Dennett can write a book called Consciousness Explained (though it does nothing of the sort) why can't I pretend to have solved the problem of evil? The intent of this post is not, of course, to actually solve the problem once and for all, but to demonstrate that the argument is less weighty than its proponents might think.

The standard formulation of the argument goes something like this: if God is good and all-powerful then evil should not exist. If evil exists, then either God does not exist or God is not like the traditional Judaeo-Christian view of him (i.e. either not all good or not omnipotent). It is usually taken as a given that evil does in fact exist and that this is a problem for the Christian God.

I admit that the problem is difficult from both an intellectual and an emotional viewpoint. Examples of evil (or suffering, as some philosophers might prefer) are easy to call to mind. The atrocities of the Nazi concentration camps, the victims of the tsunami of 2004, or the children from around the world who are abused each day are only a few of the examples one can provide. How could a loving, good, all-powerful God allow such things? It is a difficult question, but I think a few considerations significantly soften the force of the argument.

In the Christian worldview, God created the universe and then life to occupy it. Because God desired a rational companion he created humans. He created them in his image, and he created them male and female. Humans are unique among the animals, being the only ones able to think abstractly, use language, and act rationally. By granting humans agency, or free will, God was able to have a relationship with them. Now, God, or humans, can have relationships with dogs, cats, pigs, or whatever. Clearly, though, the relationship is very different than one that is between two agents. That is, between two beings able to choose among different actions, a relationship acquires meaning. The reason why your relationship with your mother, spouse, or brother is meaningful is because both parties have a choice in the matter. Having someone love you is meaningful only if they have the option to not love you. God then, was taking a risk when he created human agents. Apparently he thought it worth the risk to have the possibility of meaningful, reciprocal relationships. So then, the possibility of love entails the possibility of hate. The possibility of performing acts of love and grace towards others entails the possibility of performing acts of hatred.

One might respond that, yes, in general God has reasons for allowing free will, but what about those concentration camps, did God really have to allow that? This seems reasonable at first glance, but consider: where exactly should God draw that line? When someone wants to kill 100 people, should God step in and stop him? What about 10 people? How about just one? Killing one person is evil, just as killing a thousand is. A husband striking his wife is also evil. A child who is bullied at school can be damaged physically and emotionally. Should God step in each time a bully is about to act? How about the next time you are about to lie to your spouse about something? Or spend an extra hundred dollars on a new TV while children starve to death in another country? I suggest that if we head down this path, soon we will find ourselves unable to hate, dislike, steal, lie, or in short, do anything short of perfect acts. We would find ourselves automatons, blindly, unthinkingly acting “good.” But these acts would be meaningless, as we would not have any other choice. This is exactly what God did not want.

In the movie, The Truman Show, Jim Carrey plays a character named Truman who has unwittingly become the star of a TV show. The TV show simply follows his every day life, but Truman has no idea he is being filmed. He also has no idea that his entire life, from his birth up to his present day, has been staged. Everyone he thinks he knows are just actors. The town he lives in has been created solely for the purpose of the show. Truman's life is very "nice." He has friends, a wife, a steady job. The problem? Since his whole life is an artificial construct Truman eventually begins to suspect something is up; something doesn’t feel right. His life, though encountering little direct evil or suffering, lacks meaning and Truman can feel it. A universe where God orchestrated what we are and are not allowed to do would be similar. Without the risk of evil, we cannot have the possibility of true goodness and beauty.

What about natural disasters, then? Free will may explain why humans are allowed to cause other humans suffering, but why would God allow earthquakes to kill? First, I think that the natural disaster problem of suffering is much less powerful than the original argument. When I am distraught about the evil in the world, it is not usually the hurricanes and earthquakes I am worried about. That said, it is still a challenge for a Christian to answer, as obviously free will has nothing to do with natural disasters.

As someone who studies and teaches the earth sciences, I am quite familiar with natural disasters of all kinds. Interestingly, all major natural disasters have their roots in processes that contribute to the overall habitability of planet Earth. The molten core of Earth, for example, drives plate tectonics and generates the Earth’s magnetic field. Without the magnetic field, life could not survive on Earth’s surface due to intense solar wind (charged particles from the sun). Plate tectonics, among other things, creates livable surfaces above water (continents), replenishes nutrients to the Earth’s surface (through volcanic eruptions), and helps regulate global climate. Side effects of plate tectonics (a result of the molten core) include earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. These events can pose hazards for life on Earth. But without them Earth would probably not be habitable at all. Hurricanes are essentially release valves for the global climate system, distributing heat and moisture away from the equator to the rest of the world.

But couldn’t God have designed a habitable world without all of these dangerous side effects? I don’t know. But just the fact that they do play an important role weakens the force of the argument. A completely useless catastrophic occurrence would be a more difficult problem.

So where does this leave us? I don’t think the argument succeeds in showing that the Christian God cannot co-exist with evil, as God may have good reasons for allowing evil to exist. Natural disasters can still be difficult to accept, but there is at least a good reason for them to exist as well. I’m sure these answers won’t satisfy everyone, but I like to think it’s a start. I hope to read more contemporary philosophers’ take on this problem at some point (it’s been a few years). Comments?

Karate and Friendship

2008-11-20T22:28:00.001-05:00

Apparently you need to practice something for at least 10,000 hours to master it. Also, we are all made of corn.

The Da Vinci Code

2008-11-09T20:11:00.004-05:00

I just watched the last part of the movie The Da Vinci Code on TV. I watched it in the theater back when it first came out to see what all the fuss was about. It was OK as a movie: not terrible, not great. As history, though, it's kind of silly. I really can't believe that people take this book so seriously. Christians often get criticized for having "faith" in ancient texts, which may or may not be true or accurate. But a novel from some guy in New Hampshire happens to contain all these previously unknown secrets of history? Is this plausible?

There is no evidence that Jesus had an intimate relationship (nevermind children) with Mary Magdalene. I heard an interview with a scholar on NPR back when the movie was first out, and he discussed the texts which people suggest describes Jesus and Mary kissing, an indication of a physical relationship. The problem is that the texts are incomplete: many or most of the words are actually not there. The scholar quoted the sections in question. It was something like: ...and they were on their way..........from.......over to...........Galilee......Jesus.......lunch.....walking near the.....and then........Mary.......Jerusalem.....in between the........kissed.....returned from...etc etc. I'm obviously being facetious here, but it was something like that. The speculative leap from text like that to Jesus and Mary were lovers and had children is so large that, again, I find it hard to believe that people take this stuff seriously. The scholar said that there is no textual evidence for this stuff; people routinely kissed as a greeting back then, and Jesus and Mary were not the only ones mentioned in the text.

The assertion that Mary was in Da Vinci's painting of The Last Supper is also problematic. The painting is of Jesus and his disciples. There were twelve of them. If Mary is in there, John, a disciple, is not. I'm no art historian, but don't you think someone would have noticed if a disciple was missing before now? John, the disciple that is claimed to actually be Mary, is portrayed as feminine, and this is supposed to be evidence that it is a female. The problem: the character is wearing male clothing and it was not uncommon at the time (or in other works of Leonardo) for a subservient male to be portrayed as feminine. John's femininity is suppose to imply his lower status (compared to Jesus)and love for Jesus. The evidence for Mary being in the painting is therefore thin. Besides, are we really supposed to believe that Dan Brown (or the book he got this idea from, Holy Blood, Holy Grail) uncovered this secret that scholars have missed for the last 500 years?

Among other things, the movie stated that Newton was persecuted by the church. This is completely false. Newton was the leading man of one of the most conservative universities. He was a firm believer in God and believed his scientific work was uncovering the secrets God had used to create the universe. He also wrote extensively on theological matters (more than he did on science, actually).

The movie also laughably stated something along the lines of...did you ever wonder why the most talked about object in Christianity, the holy grail, is missing from Da Vinci's painting? The "holy grail" is never mentioned in the Bible, and I have never heard any Christian talk about it. It was probably an invention of some church in the Middle Ages who wanted a relic to draw pilgrims.

Anyway, if nothing else, The Da Vinci Code is an interesting example of peoples' propensity to believe nonsense as long as it somehow challenges orthodox views within Christianity.

Warm hands make you nice?

2008-10-23T17:59:00.006-04:00

In a study from Yale University, researchers found that people who held something warm in their hands were nicer towards others than those who held something cold. The lead researcher says that subtle clues from our environment can impact our psychological disposition; warm hands help you have a "warm" heart. But...this study seems to overlook something. Something icy in your hand is uncomfortable; something warm is close to your natural body temperature and is therefore more "normal" than warm. It seems to me that merely the discomfort caused by the chill in your hand probably explains why people might be more irritable towards others, not some connection between physical warmth and psychological "warmth." In order to show that, people would need to hold something uncomfortably hot in their hands and still have the same friendliness towards others. If the comfort level is different between the two groups, then we don't know if it's really the temperature that makes the difference or the discomfort that makes the difference. Since more than one variable is involved, the results of the study are suspect. Thoughts?

The Postmodern Church

2008-10-19T21:32:00.003-04:00

The following is an essay I wrote a number of years ago:

The Postmodern Church
A Museum or a Theme-park?

In Dinosaur in a Haystack, the late great paleontologist Stephen J. Gould spends an essay discussing the book and movie Jurassic Park, the rise of what he calls “dinomania,” and the subsequent commercialization of museums of natural history. He laments the introduction of the commercial world into the academic world. Gould’s discomfort with the mixing of the two worlds parallels my own reservations about current trends in the church, where business-like tactics are employed in order to attract certain demographics or higher general attendance.

After attempting to trace the roots of “dinomania,” the current fascination with dinosaurs found among children, and evaluating Michael Crichton’s book and Steven Spielberg’s movie Jurassic Park from the viewpoint of a professional paleontologist and longtime dinosaur fanatic, Mr. Gould describes the ambivalence he feels “about the Jurassic Park phenomenon, and about dinomania in general.” Natural history has always “been a beggar’s game,” Gould writes, the work of which “has never been funded by or for itself.” Natural historians have always had to work to convince patrons to support their work, often through arrangements resulting in the patron gaining something in return, like rare fossil specimens to add to their collection. Similarly, modern museums of natural history have found themselves far from the center of the public’s attention and looking for ways to increase attendance and interest. Mr. Gould writes:

"[C]onsider the plight of natural history museums in the light of commercial dinomania. In the past decade, nearly every major or minor natural history museum has succumbed (not always unwisely) to two great commercial temptations: to sell a plethora of scientifically worthless and often frivolous, or even degrading, dinosaur products by the bushel in their gift shops; and to mount, at high and separate admission charges, special exhibits of colorful robotic dinosaurs that move and growl but…teach nothing of scientific value about these animals. (Such exhibits could be wonderful educational aids, if properly labeled and integrated with more traditional material; but I have never seen these robots presented for much more than their colors and sound effects [the two aspects of dinosaurs, that must, for obvious reasons, remain most in the realm of speculation].)"

The idea is, of course, to bring more people in to the museums than would normally come. “These folks can then be led or cajoled into viewing the regular exhibits, and the museum’s primary mission of science education receives a giant boost.” Gould continues that he “cannot fault the logic of this argument,” but fears that his “colleagues are expressing a wish or a hope, not an actual result, and not even an outcome actively pursued by most museums.” He fears that what may have started simply as an attempt to increase interest in education could eventually become the main attraction, replacing and washing away the very reason those museums exist in the first place.

The postmodern church exists in the same culture and predicament as the museums. The culture (especially of the younger generations) is one of extreme commercialism and ubiquitous gimmicks; media of all kinds are designed to get your attention and to convince you that you need what they’re selling. This commercial mentality has allowed companies to be successful, and it is seeping into institutions normally unconcerned with savvy business practices. Museums and churches alike have seen the light, and both, it seems, have jumped on the marketing bandwagon. Like successful corporations, churches and religious groups try to capitalize on current trends and create programs or marketing they think will be appealing to whatever demographic they are targeting. This marketing mentality can be found in all sorts of church services and activities. Donald Miller, in his book Blue Like Jazz, writes about some of his experiences within the church:

"I felt like people were trying to sell me Jesus. I was a salesman for a while, and we were taught that you are supposed to point out the benefits of a product when you are selling it. That is how I felt about some of the preachers I heard speak. They were always pointing out the benefits of Christian faith. That rubbed me wrong. It’s not that there aren’t benefits, there are, but did they have to talk about spirituality like it’s a vacuum cleaner. I never felt like Jesus was a product. I wanted Him to be a person. Not only that, but they were always point- ing out how great the specific church was. The bulletin read like a brochure for Amway…I felt like I got bombarded with commercials all week and then went to church and got even more."

Worship services seem to be especially susceptible to commercialization. Worship services seem designed specifically to attract young people by having the trendiest music and by repeating established formulas which young people seem to respond to. Christian college conferences are no exception, and are perhaps leaders of this type of programming. At one particular conference I attended, the worship band tried entirely too hard to replicate the worship experience of a concert of the popular worship band Passion, imitating everything from the specific Bible verses read in between songs to the intonation the speaker used while reading them.

A few years ago, a friend was attending a Christian college to study music. She took a class on music in worship settings and was instructed in various methods of “emotional manipulation.” I know a musician and singer who, though talented and far from elderly, was replaced as worship leader at his church by someone younger in order to have maximum appeal to the younger crowd. That church is also one of many that now employ smoke and light shows during their worship services. A pastor I know has, in meetings with other ministers, been advised to implement various technologies into his church worship in order to increase appeal with the college-age crowd. A friend who graduated from college a few years ago was recently invited to visit the church of his middle-aged future mother and father-in-law. They were very excited to tell him about the worship band in their church and insisted he would love the worship service. The church had obeyed all the current trends, and therefore they were confident that this young person would buy right into it.

At issue here are two things: authenticity and purpose. These are the same two things Stephen J. Gould is concerned with in his essay. He writes:

"I may epitomize my argument in the following way: Institutions have essences – central purposes that define their integrity and being. Dinomania dramatizes a conflict between institutions with disparate essences – museums
and theme parks."

One institution exists to educate and enrich; the other to entertain. Gould goes on to say that both have their place. He happens to like theme parks. But museums are not theme parks. It is the same with the church. What is the central purpose of the church? The church of Jesus Christ does not exist to entertain, to attract people through gimmicks, or through marketing. The church exists to preach Christ and forgiveness and redemption. It seems reasonable to say that people should not be going to church for the show. My friend, at the church service with his in-laws, was not able to worship. The band seemed to be performing rather than leading worship. It seemed an act designed to impress people and to manipulate their emotions. The result is a simulation of an encounter with God, and what many young people would call a good time. Churches do not of course do this purposely. Just like the museum curators, the church leaders started out simply trying to think of ways to draw more people in while still having the goal of authentic teaching. However, the church loses something when the mentality changes from spiritual to commercial. Stephen J. Gould writes of museums:

"If we have no other aim than to attract more bodies…than we might as well convert our museums to theme parks and fill the gift shop with coffee mugs.
But then we will be truly lost…with no defining integrity of our own."

Should churches become theme parks in order to bring in a larger audience? Or should the church be offering what only a real church can: authentic spiritual teaching, prayer, and worship. Gould writes that museums should not despair of closing due to a lack of interest because they refrain from cheap marketing tactics, for:

"We have an absolutely wonderful product to flog – real objects of nature. We
may never entice as many visitors as Jurassic Park, but we can and do attract multitudes for the right reasons. Luckily – and I do not pretend to understand
why – authenticity stirs the human soul."

Donald Miller writes, “The problem with Christian belief – I mean real Christian belief, the belief that there is a God, and a devil, and a heaven and a hell – is that it is not a fashionable thing to believe.” Attempts to make the Christian church fashionable in order to increase attendance compromise the beautiful, timeless truths of Christianity and instead hook people by offering a good time and a chance to get absorbed in the current trends. Why should the church waste its time advertising superficial experiences when it has the real thing to offer? Mr. Gould is right: authenticity does stir the soul, and if the church is interested in helping people establish a meaningful connection with their Creator rather than a fleeting connection with their emotions, we must steer away from dependence on mere fashion. We are called to worship in spirit and in truth, not in good marketing and trendy performances. Don Miller writes:

"A friend of mine, a young pastor who recently started a church, talks to me from time to time about the new face of church in America – about the postmodern church. He says the new church will be different from the old one, that we will be relevant to culture and the human struggle. I don’t think any church has ever been relevant to culture, to the human struggle, unless it believed in Jesus and the power of His gospel. If the supposed new church believes in trendy music and cool Web pages, then it is not relevant to culture either. It is just another
tool of Satan to get people to be passionate about nothing."

The church should strive for excellence in their music and teaching, but it cannot worry about following every trend. Technology can be wonderful, but it is not central. We live in a culture obsessed with superficial thrills, gimmicks, and promises. The church should stand out as an institution with a profound disinterest in the superficial.

Mr. Gould ends his essay by observing that the commercial dinosaur phenomenon cannot last, but can only be ephemeral, “for they have no support beyond their immediate profitability. “This too,” he writes, “shall pass, and nothing of human manufacture can possibly challenge the staying power of a dinosaur bone – 65 million years (at least) in the making.” Trendy music and slick presentations may get people inside the church, but it is our responsibility to ensure that people realize such things are irrelevant to Christianity, that the church is not a theme-park, and that nothing can compare to a genuine encounter with God.

Obama or McCain (or Joe the plumber)?

2008-10-15T22:33:00.002-04:00

I don't like politics, and I can't say I'm particularly well-informed politically (though I do hear quite a bit on NPR). I'm normally apathetic, and usually don't vote. I know, I'm not being a responsible citizen blah blah blah. Well, I am going to try to vote (hopefully my registration will go through) this time. The problem is I'm not sure who I'm going to vote for. As far as policy goes, I am divided between the two. As far as the candidates themselves, I have grown to like McCain less and less. It just seems that in both the debates and his campaign he has grown more desperate and silly. I did not like McCain's attempt to question Obama's character. It just seemed lame.

Interjection: I am watching the post-debate stuff, and just heard Mitt Romney ramble about how McCain obviously won and Hillary Clinton ramble about how Obama obviously won. This sort of blatant rhetorical spin is why I can't stand politics...

Ok, continuing on:
When McCain got really aggressive, it totally drove me away. If he had had something really substantial to be aggressive about maybe it would have been alright. But, he didn't (in my opinion). Obama was smooth as usual; he certainly stays more calm and collected. The result is McCain coming off as more negative (as his campaign has been) and more desperate. Obama seems intelligent and thoughtful; McCain, of course, has more experience.

On the issues, I am pro-life (I believe abortion is about convenience, not "reproductive rights", with the exception of special cases; for some reason, the special cases for most people justify the general case. The fact is that most abortions have nothing to do with health threats, rape, or incest. Most abortions have to do with girls, boys, and their parents not wanting to deal with the consequences of sex. In other words, if a fetus is unwanted it is not human; if it is wanted, it is human, as illustrated by cases where if a pregnant mother is killed the person may be charged with two murders. But this is another topic...). I also believe nuclear power would be a huge step in the right direction; most people are needlessly afraid of this. Nuclear power has enormous potential for affordable, immediate, and efficient alternative energy. No other alternative energy comes close to being able to break our dependence on fossil fuels. As far as taxes and health care, I feel underqualified to judge: I am not an economist. I wonder sometimes how people can be so quick to support this plan or that plan when they actually have no idea exactly what kind of effects it may have. Only economists and other scholars would have a clue; the rest of us are stuck towing the party line, it seems. That being said, I lean towards Obama's tax plan over McCain; I don't really care if businesses don't get tax cuts. They can manage like the rest of us. As far as education goes, both candidates sounded reasonable to me, and I am of course both for reform and more funding for education (being employed in this field). Ok, I am getting bored of my own ramblings now. I'm going to bed.

Alternative Energy Hype #3: BioFuels

2008-10-03T23:10:00.004-04:00

Biofuels are a growing part of the movement to replace fossil fuels as our primary energy source. The idea is that fuel made from crops like corn, sugarcane, and switchgrass is sustainable and lowers greenhouse gas emissions by reabsorbing CO2 when the next batch is grown. Unfortunately biofuels are not quite the easy solution they seem. Over the past few years experts have identified a number of negative side-effects, including increased food prices and , surprisingly, an overall increase in greenhouse gas emissions.

First, the production of fuel from sources like corn is not (currently) terribly efficient anyway. One gallon of corn ethanol provides less energy than a gallon of gasoline, making it more expensive per unit of energy. Production efficiency is only around 23%, meaning that it costs you 1 unit of energy to get 1.3 units of energy. Even in ideal conditions this process only results in a 22% reduction in CO2 emissions.

In a recent article in Science magazine, Searchinger et al. discuss how the land-use change associated with producing biofuels actually leads to an overall increase in greenhouse gas emissions. The land needed to grow crops for biofuels has to come from somewhere, and this inevitably results in increased CO2 emissions. Converting forest or grassland for biofuel use releases all the carbon stored in that land as biomass. Searchinger et al. estimate that corn ethanol use will indirectly double greenhouse gas emissions. Converting existing cropland has the same effect, and has the added effect of raising food price. This in turn, according to an article by Morton et al. in PNAS, has increased deforestation by farmers responding to the increased food prices and needing to clear more land for food crops. Deforestation also, of course, adds more carbon to the atmosphere. Increased grain prices have also had a detrimental effect on poorer countries, leading to food shortages. In an article in this month's Science magazine, Robertson et al. write that in addition to increasing greenhouse gas emissions, grain-based biofuels (like corn) also lead to increased soil erosion and nutrient loss, decreased air quality, and decreased biodiversity.

So, corn ethanol fuel, the current leading biofuel, is not quite as green as it may appear. This is not to say that biofuels in general do not have promise; they do, but they must be approached with caution. Certain crops (e.g. perennial grasses) and certain methods may have greater potential for reducing greenhouse gases. Careful research will be required to effectively replace fossil fuels with biofuels. For now, I think it's fair to say that, like the hydrogen fuel cell, biofuels create more hype than help. On the other hand, we've got to start somewhere, and biofuels probably should play (and will play) an important role in our energy economy.

Kepler Is My Hero

2008-09-23T16:29:00.004-04:00

Johannes Kepler, the German mathematician who formulated the three laws of planetary motion (a foundation for Newton's ideas later on), is my hero. I am in the middle of a biography on him, and though I don't think it is particularly well-written, I am enjoying it nonetheless because Kepler is an interesting character. What impresses me the most is not his genius but the way in which he approached thinking. Whether it was a theological, scientific, or philosophical issue, he approached it with an open mind and a keen sense of truth.

He was a devout Lutheran, and attended seminary to become a preacher and theologian. But he never just towed the party line. He was critical of both Catholics and Protestants on various issues, pointing out where each had gotten something wrong. Most of his close friends and colleagues would reject any view or opinion from a Catholic, but Kepler would aggravate them to no end by highlighting parts of the Catholic position that he thought were true. This kind of talk, as well as criticism of certain doctrines of Lutherans, resulted in Kepler being excommunicated from his own religious group. Later, in the midst of the counter-reformation, despite intense pressure (and danger) Kepler refused to abandon his core Lutheran beliefs to appease the angry Catholic authorities. His nuanced view of truth and theology was a rarity in the 16th century. Kepler was a non-partisan voice in the midst of the crazy religious wars of his time.

Kepler's Lutheran approach to science may have also helped him break from long-held assumptions about the universe. Theologically, Luther suggested stripping away centuries old dogma and established interpretation to allow the individual to read the Bible for themselves and form their own interpretation. In science, Aristotelianism had long dominated how the world worked and how the heavens were arranged. Kepler, though, didn't just accept this dogma and work within its framework; he approached the heavens too with an open mind. He was a Copernican (Copernicus was the canon law priest in the Catholic church who suggested the planets revolved around the Sun rather than the Earth) when few were, and went on to formulate cosmological laws which went against the received Greek wisdom. Kepler's willingness to seek truth whether or not it went "against the grain" led to scientific work that became a huge stepping stone to modern cosmology.

Kepler was also a neo-platonist, obsessed with mathematical beauty and harmony (so was Copernicus). Kepler thought that he could discover God's laws and the underlying harmony of the universe; this, and his exceptional mathematical gifts, are part of the reason why he ultimately pursued science instead of theology. Kepler saw his science as a branch of theology; the study of the order God had put in his creation. Kepler's story runs straight against our own received wisdom that science and theology are opposed and that religious belief is incompatible with science or scientific discovery. On the contrary, religious convictions were a primary motivation for men like Kepler (and Newton) to study the universe. Both saw themselves as uncovering the mathematical secrets God had used to make the universe run.

Kepler's intellectual approach to difficult or contentious issues is one I hope to emulate. Rarely is one person or one person's viewpoint entirely correct (including our own); we would be better off if we could admit this and, like Kepler, keep an open mind while searching for truth.

Battle of the Blogs

2008-09-20T00:59:00.003-04:00

Unwisely, I commented on someone's blog and ended up probably wasting way too much time in an exchange of comments concerning science and religion. That person's view is typical of the so called "new" atheists like Richard Dawkins. If you're interested, our exchange can be seen here.

Early Life: not so simple after all

2008-09-16T16:25:00.006-04:00

I haven't posted on evolution yet, though it is one of my main areas of interest. Quite frankly I don't know where to start. It's also so complex that I fear that I would find individual blog posts inadequate. Maybe in the future I'll change my mind. For now, I'll just post interesting tidbits.

That standard view of evolution includes the understanding that life started out simple and grew more complex as time went on. We can now understand the biology of organisms as arising from the information contained in the genes of that organism (though epigenetics is now complicating that somewhat). Evolutionary biologists then would expect simple life to have simple genes, and complex life to have more complex genes. As time went on natural selection and mutation (primarily) would add to and modify those genes, resulting in better adapted and often more complex life forms. Nevermind that even the "simplest"organism and its genes are incredibly complicated, a new study published in the journal Nature has found that the genetic code of of the Trichoplax adhaerens, thought to be one of the earliest animals, is about as complicated as the human genome. Not only is it close to being as complicated, this animal contains genes that code for organs, specialized cells, proteins, and body parts of more complex animals. In other words, this animal contains genes for body parts, organs, etc. that it doesn't have and that only animals in the future (relative to the time of this animal's origin) would have. It would seem that instead of evolution generating complexity, the complexity has preceded evolution. Likewise, in a study published this past July in the journal Science the genome of a tiny sea anemone was also found to be quite complicated, containing thousands of genes identical to those of humans.

This throws a huge monkey wrench in the standard developmental picture of life's history. The fact that there is such a huge discrepancy between the DNA of an organism and the morphology of an organism should give us pause regarding just how much we really understand about biology. As for evolution, a scientist once said (I don't remember who) that all we would need to disprove the general theory of evolution is to find a rabbit in the Cambrian period rock strata. Well, what if we've found (in a sense) a human?

Alternative Energy Hype #2

2008-09-11T15:16:00.006-04:00

First up: the Hydrogen Fuel Cell. The next big thing in cars, we are told, is the hydrogen fuel cell. Claims of zero emissions and environmentally friendliness abound (see here or here). It's too bad then that hydrogen fuel cells can actually produce more greenhouse gases than our good old internal combustion engines. How can that be, you say? They couldn't be lying to us, could they? Well, in a sense, no, they aren't lying to you. The cars themselves would not produce any greenhouse gases. But whence comes this hydrogen to fill our cars?

Back to that question in a second; first, how does a fuel cell work? Basically, a hydrogen fuel cell works by combining hydrogen and oxygen to form water. Hydrogen enters from one side of the cell, and oxygen from the other. The hydrogen atom is split into a proton and an electron; the proton crosses a membrane toward the oxygen while the electron is forced to go around to meet the oxygen. That travel by the electron produces some electricity (electricity essentially is the flow of electrons) which can be used to power the car. The proton, electron, and oxygen then meet up to form water.

Ok, back to hydrogen. Hydrogen is not a normal part of the atmosphere: it is too light and gravitationally escapes from Earth. Oxygen is readily available and is produced by photosynthesis. Hydrogen, though, needs to be extracted from some hydrogen-containing source. There are two primary ways to acquire hydrogen for fuel cell use. The first, and worst, is through straightforward electrolysis. An electrical current is run through water to spit the molecules and produce hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen is then stored for use in the fuel cell. This is incredibly inefficient; almost 80% of the energy is lost, leaving us with an efficiency of 20%. Compare that to the processes of extracting and refining oil etc., which has an efficiency of 80%. The fuel cell vehicle itself is very efficient (almost 40%) at utilizing that energy once it gets to the car, but the process to get the hydrogen fuel is so costly that the overall efficiency of electric grid hydrogen fuel cells is actually less than your average combustion engine. Besides being so inefficient, a lot of the electricity needed to split the water comes from coal plants (around 50%). This leads us to an overall greenhouse gas emissions rating that is actually higher than normal cars (~440 grams per mile compared to ~380 grams per mile). Unbelievable.

Fortunately, there is a more efficient way to produce hydrogen. It's called steam reforming. The process involves using steam to break down natural gas into its components, which include hydrogen. The hydrogen can then be stored for use in a fuel cell. This process is way more efficient than grid electric (~60% efficient compared to ~20%). The high efficiency of the fuel cell combined with the good efficiency of the production method leads to the highest overall efficiency of the major engine types in automobiles, around 22%. This does not sound very impressive, but compared to normal gas engines (~16%) it's a good step up. Unfortunately, this method of obtaining hydrogen requires natural gas. This is, of course, a type of fossil fuel. One byproduct of the steam reform process is, you guessed it, carbon dioxide. At least this second method actually does produce less greenhouse gases (~140 grams per mile compared to the ~380 grams per mile) than gasoline engines. Still, we will eventually run out of natural gas, except for the relatively small amounts that are produced biologically (in swamps, etc.).

The larger message here is that despite the hype surrounding hydrogen fuel cells, they in fact do have emissions (indirectly, through their fuel sources) and in some cases are actually less energy efficient or produce more greenhouse gases than gasoline engines. And the more efficient method may only be sustainable on a small scale (e.g. using biological natural gas).

Next: biofuels (or maybe hybrids).

The God Gene and John Cleese

2008-09-10T19:27:00.001-04:00

You've got to check out John Cleese's take on the gene that makes us all believe in God...here.

Alternative Energy Hype #1

2008-09-09T16:48:00.005-04:00

Each year I teach my students about the two major biogeochemical cycles (carbon and nitrogen) and their ecological importance. We discuss the human impacts on these cycles through the use of fossil fuels or other activities, and we also of course talk about alternative sources of energy. I assign a small research project which they work on in groups. They have to learn in some detail the idea behind and specifics of a particular source (wind, solar, bio, etc.). Then they have to present it to the rest of the class with some sort of visual illustrating efficiency, costs, etc. I believe developing these other sources of energy is crucial to our future (solar and nuclear seem the most promising to me; solar is the ultimate renewable energy, nuclear is pretty close and is extremely efficient). It's important that today's students develop an understanding and appreciation of these endeavors. However, as we attempt to develop and manage the processes required to access, store, and utilize these sources of energy it's also important to ensure that these processes actually are beneficial, actually are in some real way better than fossil fuels. Some processes have unacknowledged, unpublicized side effects or costs; others are having suprising impacts where we didn't expect. There are a number of misconceptions floating around that need to be clarified. This will be the first in a series examining some of the major players: biofuels, hydrogen fuel cells, hybrids, and nuclear.

Gullibility and Politics

2008-09-08T20:50:00.003-04:00

Why are people so gullible when it comes to politics? Intelligent people on both sides of the political spectrum seem to go crazy when it comes to their beloved candidates. On one blog I read, in which most posters lean toward the conservative side, there are constant references to "Barack Hussein Obama," obviously trying to imply something negative from the guy's middle name. I've heard of lots of rumors about his supposed Islamic beliefs and training and all that. Now we have all sorts of crazy rumors about Sarah Palin. First was that her daughter actually gave birth to Palin's latest child, with all sorts of evidence about how they looked etc. which turned out to be bogus. Now there are rumors about book bans which apparently also turned out to be bogus, with some of the books she was supposed to have banned not even being published yet at the time of the alleged banning. My wife got an email forwarded to her from a fellow grad student (in earnest) regaling her with crazy stories about Palin from "someone who really knows her." Uh-huh. And Barack Obama is actually Saddam Hussein; when was Hussein toppled in Iraq: 2003. When did Saddam, I mean Barack, begin his campaign for the senate: 2003. It all fits!

The Rise of Modern Geology

2008-09-06T20:29:00.008-04:00

In most modern texts the credit for the development of modern geology goes to folks like James Hutton and Charles Lyell. Perhaps the term "uniformitarianism" rings a bell, describing the approach that "the present is the key to the past." In other words, all geologic phenomena, past and present, can be described by the same processes we see today acting over long periods of time. Earth's history is therefore uniform and accessible to scientists today. Proponents of the other historical tradition , the catastrophists of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, are dismissed as religiously motivated quacks. Their theories only retarded science, while Hutton and Lyell paved the way for our modern understanding of the Earth. Historians have shown this common narrative to be yet another myth (see here or here) concerning science and religion.

This time, Charles Lyell in the 19th century and C.G. Gillespies in the 20th may be blamed in part for perpetrating this myth. Lyell, in his Principles of Geology, spent some time in the introduction framing the catastrophists as religious folk whose theories were based on religious bias and miracles rather than scientific evidence. Gillespies in his 1951 book Genesis and Geology set up the narrative describing certain early geologists (Hutton and Lyell) as the true founders of the discipline while ignoring the contributions of others. Catastrophists were portrayed as religious and as only impeding science by, among other things, sticking to a Biblical time scale and invoking supernatural events like Noah's flood.

The truth, of course, is more complicated. In an attempt to keep this short, I will bullet the main points:

First, it is true that 17th century Protestants argued for a young Earth and influenced the study of natural history in a way that did not exactly parallel our modern approach. However, the priests and theologians were studying natural history and were certainly a major part of the tradition which led to our modern approach.
Some catastrophists were Christians; others were not. Many made significant contributions to geology. Most were not concerned with the exact age of the Earth at all.
Those catastrophists who did argue for a natural history more in line with scripture were British; in other words, this was an isolated phenomena, not representative of the tradition as a whole.
Neptunism, a movement within catastrophism which invoked water and floods to explain geologic phenomena often had nothing to do with supernatural events like Noah's flood. Most catastrophists, Christian or otherwise, were perfectly content invoking natural events to explain natural history.
Catastrophists like Cuvier, Hooker, Humbolt, Sedgwick, Murchison, Werner, and de Maillet all made contributions to modern geology, including the understanding that the Earth's crust is made of ordered layers of rocks (the stratigraphical sequence). The importance of this cannot be overestimated.
George Cuvier was an eminent paleontologist and catastrophist who established the fact that extinction events had occurred on Earth through catastrophes, not the slow everyday processes of Hutton and Lyell.
Hutton and Lyell, far from being paragons of objectivity, were influenced heavily by their own religious beliefs. They were deists.
In their theories, the Earth was eternal and ahistorical. This is a direct result of their religious beliefs and is in flat-out contradiction with our modern understanding of the Earth.
The catastrophists got it right; our Earth had a beginning and has had major, different historical periods. The Earth and its history is not as "uniform" as Hutton and Lyell would have liked.
Catastrophists believed that the Earth was hotter back when it formed and therefore geologic processes like earthquakes and volcanoes have differed throughout geologic time. They were right. We now know that the Earth was originally molten and has been cooling ever since.
In short, our modern understanding is a combination of uniformitarian and catastrophist theory. Our Earth is shaped both by slow, everyday processes like weathering, erosion, movement of tectonic plates, and by catastrophic, historical events like the original formation and cooling of the Earth, extinctions, ice ages, and asteroid impacts.

This myth is illustrative of the ambition of people who would like to rewrite history in favor of a chosen few scientists whose taste in worldview more closely mirrors their own. Even non-religious scientists get lumped in with the religious ones and dismissed if they don't fit the desired narrative.

Darwin's Face Seen In Stain

2008-09-06T14:34:00.004-04:00

DAYTON, TN—A steady stream of devoted evolutionists continued to gather in this small Tennessee town today to witness what many believe is an image of Charles Darwin—author of The Origin Of Species and founder of the modern evolutionary movement—made manifest on a concrete wall in downtown Dayton.

"I brought my baby to touch the wall, so that the power of Darwin can purify her genetic makeup of undesirable inherited traits," said Darlene Freiberg, one among a growing crowd assembled here to see the mysterious stain, which appeared last Monday on one side of the Rhea County Courthouse.

See the rest here.

Terri Gross and Catholic Priests

2008-09-05T22:39:00.005-04:00

Terri Gross is the host of NPR's Fresh Air radio program. It is one of my favorite shows, and I appreciate her skill and style as an interviewer. However, there was at least one show where her "liberal" bias shown through in such a way that I thought it diminished the quality (and a little bit, the integrity) of the show. My intention in this post is not to argue one way or another if the media are on the whole liberal or not. But a show last year (or maybe a few years ago) where she interviewed two Catholic priests was illustrative of a liberal approach to homosexuality and the church. One priest was gay (not sure if his employers knew or not) and another was a priest who thought that homosexuals should not be part of the priesthood. Terry interviewed each person individually. At this point I don't remember the entire conversation with either priest, but one thing, or rather one question has stuck in my mind. Terri, speaking to the priest who opposed gay priests, asked, who are you to say whether or not a priest can have a different sexual orientation? Who are you to pronounce judgement on another's choices? Fair enough. The priest answered very calmly and explained that he was not anyone to judge or decide what's right or wrong. But, he said, God's moral nature determines moral laws. His (the priest's) opinion is not what makes the gay priest unacceptable; rather, it is God who has set up moral law, which is now Catholic doctrine. Now, I am not a Catholic, and it is also not my intent here to argue whether or not gay priests should be accepted by the church. I would like to point out though, that Terri asked no such challenging questions of the gay priest. I can't help but think that to be fair she should have asked a similar question. How about, who are you to judge and condemn a millenia old institution no one is forcing you to join? Who are you to tell a whole community of people that they must change their beliefs to accommodate yours? Or, more to the point, who are you to tell God (for in the view of Catholics, and Christians in general, it is God who has established Christian morality) that he must change his views? Why didn't Terri ask the tough questions to the gay priest? It would only be fair. But her assumption from the start was that the gay priest was correct and the other one wrong. Just an observation.

P.S. If I have any liberal readers gnashing teeth over this post, don't. The main reason you won't find much criticism of conservative authors/bloggers/talk show hosts here is that I can't stand most of them and don't waste my time reading or listening to them.

The Mythical Monkey Trial

2008-08-28T22:54:00.007-04:00

The Scopes trial, or “Monkey” trial in the early 20^th century is one of the most famous modern clashes between science and religion. Specifically, it was a clash between progressive, educated liberals and a bunch of religious ignoramuses over whether evolution should be taught in public schools. At least that’s the usual story, most famously portrayed in a play (and movie) called “Inherit the Wind.” In this version of the trial of John Scopes, in trouble for teaching evolution, we witness a brilliant agnostic lawyer take on a foolish religious bigot, John Scopes sent to jail, and mobs of angry Christian folk antagonizing anyone who disagrees with them. If one wishes to discover the real story, Edward Larson’s Pulitzer prize (in history) winning book Summer for the Gods is there to help.

In the 1920’s there was indeed a push (misguided, in my opinion) by religious fundamentalists to pass laws that would ban the teaching of evolution. The reasons for the stronger negative reaction from religious folk are complex, but included a growing scientific acceptance of Darwin’s particular naturalistic mechanism of evolution, natural selection (which had been almost universally rejected by scientists throughout the 19^th century), the perception that naturalistic evolution would lead young folk astray by convincing them that the human soul and morality are illusions, and a growing discomfort with the teachings of eugenicists. This latter reason was one of the most important to William Jennings Bryan, the politician who famously represented the prosecution in the Scopes trial, defending the Bible and Christianity from the perceived evils of evolution and dying a few days after the trial ended. He is generally portrayed as an ignorant religious bigot and fundamentalist, but this is hardly an accurate description. He was of course a Christian, and he was not exactly a sophisticated intellectual, but he was a champion of the common people (his nickname was “the Commoner”), an advocate of women’s rights, an advocate for peace, an anti-imperialist, and he frequently railed against what he saw as the growing, rampant greed of capitalist corporations in America. In fact, his most famous moment was a speech delivered to the Democratic National Convention in the late 1800’s where he argued against policies that would only help larger businesses to the detriment of the average businessman. But of course you’d never know any of that from his portrayal in “Inherit the Wind.”

Bryan saw evolution (specifically the evolution of mankind) as an idea that undermined morality. He was particularly opposed to eugenics (sometimes called “social Darwinism), that idea that it would be wise for humans to exterminate the “inferior” members of their species while encouraging the reproduction of intellectuals and other “more fit” members in order to further the evolution of mankind. Bryan saw this as morally despicable; the rest of the world came to agree with him after the atrocities of Nazi Germany. He therefore became involved in the movement to ban the teaching of evolution in public schools.

What most people don’t realize about the Scopes trial is that it was in fact simply a publicity stunt. Organizers in the little town of Dayton, Tennessee were looking for a way to increase business and publicity for their town. A law banning evolution had been passed but had not really been enforced. They contacted the ACLU to set up a test case. John Scopes, who was not actually a science teacher but a substitute teacher and coach, volunteered to be the defendant despite not even being sure he had actually taught evolution. So, far from being an example of religion persecuting science, it was actually an example of a small town purposely stirring up controversy for its own benefit. John Scopes ended up convicted of breaking the law and was fined $100. Whoop-de-do. Bryan even offered to pay the fine himself. While I can appreciate people being opposed to the ban on evolution in the first place, this episode is hardly the clash of science and religion that it is commonly assumed to be, and the play and movie “Inherit the Wind” is quite simply a deceptive piece of propaganda (regardless of the original intent of the film's creators) that Draper and White would be proud of (see earlier post on the flat earth). This film is still shown on college campuses, and I'm guessing most people in the audience have no clue just how much artistic license was taken by its creators.

The Flat Earth Myth

2008-08-21T20:39:00.009-04:00

Carbon Dioxide Levels

2008-08-21T14:52:00.003-04:00

I want to clarify something I said in the nitrogen post about carbon dioxide. I mentioned that anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions still can't compare to natural carbon dioxide emissions. This may have given the impression that human contributions aren't the biggest problem since nature gives off more each year (by a factor of around 11 for just plants and animals alone). This is actually a common argument: we needn't worry about our emissions since nature is emitting a lot more than we are. This is in fact a deep misunderstanding. While it is true that plant and animal life give off far more carbon dioxide than we do, vegetation absorbs slightly more carbon dioxide than the total given off naturally. In other words, nature absorbs slightly more CO2 than it gives off, so each year planet Earth breaks about even. Human emissions, then, are on top of that balanced cycle, leading to an overall increase in CO2 levels each year.

Consider a large water tank connected to a pool by two hoses: one hose delivers water to the pool, the other hose brings water from the pool back to the tank. Let's say that each day the tank delivers 1000 gallons to the pool, and 1000 gallons are also returned to the tank throughout the day. A little boy playing with a bucket and a garden hose decides to fill up his bucket and dump it into the pool. His mother comes out and, after watching him dump bucket after bucket into the pool, warns him to stop or else the pool will overflow. "Don't be silly, Mom!" the boy yells as he fills up another bucket, "that water tank puts way more water in the pool each day than I do, how could these few buckets of water make any difference?"

The Secret Life of Nitrogen

2008-08-19T22:36:00.002-04:00

Putting "the secret life of" in front of the title of your book topic or tv show is pretty trendy right now, so I figured I'd join in. Nitrogen, as part of the nitrogen cycle, is a little known player in both global warming and the formation of acid rain. Both the carbon and nitrogen cycles are extremely important biogeochemical processes. Carbon dioxide gets a lot of press nowadays, but you don't hear about nitrogen very much. An ecology professor I know likes to call nitrogen "carbon's ugly little step-sister" who nobody pays much attention to. While total anthropogenic (human caused) carbon dioxide emissions are significant (somewhere around 6 gigatons per year if I remember correctly), we still have not come close to the annual output by natural processes. Due to the enormous growth of agriculture, however, human contributions of nitrogen actually passed natural contributions back in the 1980's. That's pretty impressive. Unfortunately, as industrially fixed nitrogen (for fertilizer) cycles through the ecosystem, the resulting reactive forms of nitrogen can have a variety of effects including: increased acid rain which damages soils and plant life, an enhanced greenhouse effect (warming the atmosphere), interference with natural ozone forming processes which occur in the stratosphere, and increased smog in some areas. The burning of fossil fuels also contributes reactive forms of nitrogen to the ecosystem. So, for those of you concerned with carbon footprints (yours or our nation's), don't forget about carbon's neglected little sis, nitrogen.

On Omnipotence

2008-08-18T16:07:00.001-04:00

The following essay was written in late spring 2008 during an episode of Lost. A master's student at UConn (where my wife is studying English lit) found out that I was a Christian and promptly asked questions like "can God create a square circle"? My quick answers needed some fleshing out, hence this essay. I don't think I have actually read any professional philosophers' take on these questions, so I welcome any comments or corrections.

A traditional objection to the possibility of God’s omnipotence (and therefore the existence of the Judaeo-Christian God) comes in the form of a question: can God create a rock so big that he can’t lift it? Or, another: can God create a square circle? The fact that it is difficult (or impossible) to answer these questions is supposed to demonstrate that an omnipotent being could not exist. How serious are these objections? Let’s take a look at the latter question first.

Wittgenstein, the 20^th century Austrian philosopher, took the view (for a time, at least) that many of the problems of philosophy were actually problems with language. While it seems obvious that not all problems of philosophy reduce to a matter of unclear language, at least some problems can genuinely be seen as merely illusions due to language. The idea of a square circle is supposed to pose an unsolvable problem for an omnipotent being, demonstrating that such a being could not exist. Upon closer inspection, asking an omnipotent being to create a square circle is very much like asking them nothing at all. What is a square circle? It is not a thing. These two words joined together in the English language simply do not mean anything. We should not be bothered, then, by the fact that an omnipotent being cannot create a non-thing we pretend exists by stringing together two words. I can imagine someone demanding that God create a square circle, or else they won’t believe that he is omnipotent. One may as well stand before God and demand that he “couch shave while plant big in beer toe.” If he can’t, so much for God. I think the problem is that "square" and "circle" are such simple words that it is easy to pretend such a small phrase is intelligible when in fact it is no more intelligible than the above beer toe example. The phrase is literally nonsense and as such cannot tell us anything about God.

What about the first question? Can God create a rock so big that he can’t lift it? This objection seems to be the stronger of the two. Assuming the existence of such a being, obviously the answer must be either God can create a rock so big that he can’t lift it, or that God can’t create a rock so big that he can’t lift it. So perhaps the question should be which answer should be true for God to be as omnipotent as is logically possible. Let’s see. Would it be more impressive if God could create a rock that he then could not lift, or if God created the heaviest rock possible but could still lift it?

First, the very form of this question is problematic, as we are assuming that God has a physical body subject to physical laws (e.g. gravity). The heaviest rock possible? There is no logical limit to how massive an object may be; infinite mass is a possibility. This makes the question difficult to answer sensibly. I suggest a reformulation; this question, at its base, is asking: can an omnipotent being impose limits of power on itself? Imagine it this way: an omnipotent being creates maximally strong unbreakable (and let's say metaphysical too) handcuffs for itself and then cannot escape. Or, the being creates maximally strong unbreakable handcuffs for itself and then breaks them. It is clear that if an omnipotent being could impose limits of power on itself that it would only be taking away from its own omnipotence (e.g. if it could not break the handcuffs). Logically then, an omnipotent being cannot take away its own power without violating its own omnipotence. On the other hand, why couldn’t such a being willingly impose limits on itself? If it then decreases its own power, so what? How does any of this suggest that such a being could not exist? At best it suggests that we should approach the term “omnipotence” with care. Perhaps an omnipotent being’s omnipotence is tentative, contingent on its will. Or perhaps no matter what God does he could always later undo it.

Either way, it is not clear to me that these objections go very far in arguing against the existence of God (or superbeings in general).

Introduction

2008-08-18T15:22:00.000-04:00

Hello,

The purpose of this blog is to share and discuss ideas. Some posts will be essays that I would love feedback on. I find that the best way to understand an idea (my own or another's) is to write about it. The process of fully articulating the idea often brings out flaws or nuances not previously seen. There will probably also be some random posts about my life or other random things, but my life is not terribly exciting, and I am not much of a "talker" so I don't know how common those posts will be. Thanks for reading, and thanks for your feedback.

Jeff L