Recently in Science Category

Florida friend Larry recently wrote me as follows "One of the odder things I heard this summer is that the reason it is getting cooler this summer is because of global warming. Only someone who believe that Al Gore has their best interests at heart would believe global cooling is caused by global warming" to which I replied as follows:

"One constant throughout my life has been that no matter what happens, with the weather, or really with anything at all, a large group of would-be nannies is right there to claim it was caused by some bad behavior by folks like me, that can only be fixed by handing all the levers of power to them and their friends so they can take better care of us than we are obviously capable of on our own.

Having already lived in a condo, the one thing I know for sure is that I do not want to give such people any power at all."

With Hurricane Gustav headed for the U.S. coast tonight, one of the best suggestions I've heard for how the Republican party should respond at their convention is by showing America what individual Americans themselves can do to help out in a disaster, rather than sitting around talking about how someone else (in the government) should do something.

One of the worst comments is Michael Moore's "I was just thinking, this Gustav is proof that there is a God in heaven..." Another was the similar earlier suggestion by Stuart Shephard that viewers of a weekly video pray for rain during Barack Obama's acceptance speech for the Democratic party presidential nomination.

I learned long ago not to pray about weather. In my first day on the job after seminary, the congregation had just endured a huge flood, and asked me to pray for rain to stop. I did, and it did - for so long that folks feared for their crops and asked me to pray for rain. I did, and floods immediately returned. At that point, I was sure of only one thing - I was done praying about weather!

It isn't that God can't rain on Republican convention plans. It's rather that even asking for such a thing is as Barack Obama might say "way above my pay grade." Only God knows the full implications of weather, and His comment on the topic was that He "sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. (MT 5:45)"

Think you understand global warming? Here's a quick ten question quiz on the underlying science, complete with detailed explanations of what it considers the correct answers. I learned from the quiz, and expect you will too, regardless of your politics on the issue. Hat tip to Rev. Donald Sensing, who got 9 correct. (I only got 8.)

This 5 year later interview in TCS Daily with Bjorn Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist, points out the importance of putting concerns in proper perspective:
"Global warming is an important issue and one which we should address. But there is no sense of proportion either in environmental terms, or indeed in terms of the other issues facing the world.

There is a total lack of a sense of proportion about where we are in terms of the environment but also on non-environmental issues, which is of course what I am looking at now with the Copenhagen Consensus, where we try to look at what are the big issues of the world, and where can we do a lot of good, and where can we do a little good. And the bottom line is there are many problems in the world where we can do much more at much lower cost. So presumably, if our goal is to help people, then there are many other things we should do first. If our goal is to help the environment, then there are also many other things we can do first."

A slogan from the '60s went "Don't just do something. Stand there!" Its point, as I understand it, is that running around like a chicken with its head cut off may be much less useful than doing nothing at all. When we have no actual wisdom to contribute to a situation, our best course of action may be inaction. Lomborg explains:
"The use of DDT is probably the best example of this and its use in the third world was badly mismanaged. DDT is not dangerous to humans, but it is dangerous to some animals. So if you're in a rich country where you have malaria under control, clearly you should ban DDT or severely restrict its use.

So if we stand back, as Al Gore asks us to do, and look at it from the coming generation's point of view, they are going to ask 'what were they thinking?' They tried to do a tiny little bit about climate change at a fairly high cost, but have done very little good, whereas there are many other problems that they could have tackled that would have left a much better world behind."

Five years later, Lomborg sees the hysteria-mongers descending deeper into unreality:
"I think for a while it really was moving in the right direction and people were understanding the issues and the arguments better. But I think what is happening now is that we are increasingly seeing a tailspin into hysteria over the global warming discussion, where it is almost commonplace to say things are worse than we thought.

Perhaps this is most clear when you look at the movie from Al Gore. Everything he says is technically true. He says for instance that if Greenland melts, sea levels will rise about 20 feet. This is technically true. But of course the very evocative imagery of seeing Holland disappear under the waves - or New York, or Shanghai - leaves the impression that this is all going to happen very soon. Where in fact the UN climate panel says that the sea level rise over the next 100 years is going to be 30 cm - about 20 times less than he talks about. So there is a dramatic difference between what we're being told and what we're actually seeing."

Lomborg ends by saying there's really nothing in the Skeptical Environmentalist that he would change after five years. I've touched on these issues before, here, here, and here.

Global warming is in the news again, with a British report suggesting "failure to act swiftly on global warming will have a cataclysmic effect on the global enconomy ... during the current generation if changes are not made soon."

Meanwhile, a book I'm reading now (America Alone, by Mark Steyn) points out that while global warming may or may not be a big problem in our lifetime, declining birthrates around the world among everyone except Muslims is already a huge problem.
"Much of what we call the Western world will not survive the twenty-first century, and much of it will effectively disappear within our lifetimes, including many if not most European countries."

Steyn explains: "...if one part of your population believes in liberal pluralist democracy and the other doesn't, then it becomes a matter of great importance whether the part that does is 90 percent of the population or only 60 percent, or 50, or 45 percent."

He adds "...it ought to be the Left's issue. ... When the mullahs take over, ...It's the feminists and gays who'll have a tougher time."

According to Steyn, among Western nations, only the United States is reproducing itself, and even in the U.S., that's happening only in "Red" states.

One of my few regrets in life is that we didn't have more kids. It would have been better to have had more, if only so more in the next generation might be aware of our values.

Steyn makes one other excellent point: "All dominant powers are hated--Britain was, and Rome--but they're usually hated for the right reasons. America is hated for every reason. The fanatical Muslims despise America because it's all lap-dancing and gay porn; the secular Europeans despise America because it's all born-again Christians hung up on abortion; the anti-Semites despise America because it's controlled by Jews. Too Jewish, too Christian, too godless, America is George Orwell's Room 101: whatever your bugbear you will find it therein; whatever you're against, America is the prime example of it."

"That's one reason why its disparagers have embraced environmentalism. If Washington were a conventional great power, the intellectual class would be arguing that the United States is a threat to France or India or Gabon or some such. But because it's so obviously not that kind of power the world has had to concoct a thesis that the hyperpower is a threat not merely to this or that rinky-dink nation state but to the entire planet, if not the entire galaxy."

Our recent trip to the Galapagos Islands provided the perfect opportunity to read Phillip E. Johnson's excellent book "Darwin on Trial". Each day I would listen to our lead naturalist talk about how what we were seeing proved evolution, while being reminded by Johnson how much of Darwin's theory is still unproven in scientific terms and must be taken on faith, like any other religion.

What has been proven, is that varied circumstances (such as selective breeding) can achieve variation within a single species. The term species, to Johnson, refers to critters capable of procreating together. Thus a Great Dane and a Chihuahua are both the same species (dog), even though they differ greatly in size. That dogs vary in size and other ways is quite obvious.

What has not been proven, is that you can get a dog from any other species. Darwin assumed that there is a common ancestor of all species. If true, there should be lots of evidence of intermediate forms in the process of changing from one species to another in the fossil record. Since scientists prefer fully naturalistic explanations, the failure to find convincing evidence of such changes in 150 years of looking has not led to the obvious conclusion that Darwin may have been mistaken about the common ancestor.

Personally, I don't care whether life on Earth sprang from a single ancestor or from many ancestors. It's not even important to me whether or not it resulted from an alien Captain Kirk employing a Genesis device (as in Star Trek II- The Wrath of Khan), because that only extends the question to where the alien species originated. In the end, something started the whole process rolling. I know Steven Hawkings postulates it's all just an accident, and ours just happened to be the only one out of all possible Universes that happens to work, but I find that vastly harder to believe than that some force indistinguishable to us from God created our Universe intentionally.

What bothers me about teaching Darwin's view of Evolution as though all of it were proven is that such a view is unscientific, and likely delays rather than assists our understanding of what really happened.

So long as our scientists refuse to even postulate that life on Earth may not have evolved from a single ancestor, and that a creative force may have been involved, they appear to be repeating the blindness of ancient scientists who refused to consider that the Earth might not be the center of the Universe.

I have no problem with Darwinian evolution being treated as one theory among others. But the blind insistence by scientists that it be believed in despite contrary evidence sounds more like religion than science to me.

Update: A 2-part article by Edward Feser in Tech Central Station does a wonderfully-thorough job of explaining exactly why scientists have behaved so unscientifically regarding evolution, here and here. Here's the money quote: "The real target is the idea of a metaphysically implacable natural order to which one must submit, with all that that implies about human nature and moral law. Its rejection is the deep source of the perversity that so dominates modern intellectual life." (Thanks to Donald Sensing for the alert.)

Update2: Edward Feser reports on and responds to the critics of the above articles here.

Update3: The Ohio State Board of Education gets it. A new 10th-grade biology lesson plan requires students to "Describe how scientist continue to investigate and critically analyze aspects of evolutionary theory." Here's more.

Update4: Rev. Donald Sensing, has a great new post on this topic here. Sample quotes:

"There cannot be a science of randomness, for science depends on repeatability. The conclusion that randomness explains the beginning and history of life is not really a scientific conclusion. It is one thing, and a properly scientific thing, to say that here are processes that seem to explain the evolution of species. But it is not science to say with finality that no intentionality was involved. The exclusion of intentionality is not a scientific conclusion, but an ideological one."

"The Big Bang theory, for example, is not falsifiable, yet astrophysicists worldwide accept its validity."

(Sensing quoting David Mobley, a postdoc researcher in biophysics)
"Let's consider the idea that we've evolved over time as the result of gradual changes which can eventually take something like a fish to become something like a human. How is that falsifiable? Particularly, what experiment could one do that would indicate that this is NOT true? ... Certainly, microevolution is much more falsifiable -- and has indeed been confirmed in some cases -- but that's not what Intelligent Design is dealing with."

Update5: A new book A Jealous God: Science's Crusade Against Religion covers related subjects. I was glad to see its author, a "self-proclaimed non-religious Jew", sees the same problem I do. See also this related post about Michael Crighton similarly describing environmentalism as "a 21st Century religion for urban atheists."