Creationism: Snapshot No. 1

Mr. Caruthers and Dawn Summers

Mr. Caruthers was the kind of teacher any kid is lucky to have. He barked out his lectures in outline format and woe to those who didn't keep up. He taught fast and you learned fast and there was no time for the usual boredom and the creep of the clock that characterized most of our classes.

You hated him at first. He had this crotchety-old-man shtick, disdainful of and disappointed by young people these days who were too lazy or too stupid to learn. But the shtick was pretty transparent. Even as we fell for it -- inevitably, all of us -- and worked our tails off to prove him wrong, we came to see it was just a pose, a trick, but an irresistible one. We knew he was actually fond of us, and proud of us, and we felt the same way about him. So we studied, and we learned and we made fun of his awful, thrift-store suits behind his back. And we picked a fight with anybody who picked on his awful suits and seemed like they really meant it, like they didn't realize this this was just our pose, our way of reciprocating the hostile affection Mr. Caruthers had for us.

Mr. C. taught middle-school science and he taught us well, mostly. We had the standardized achievement test scores to prove it.

But this was also Timothy Christian School, a private, fundamentalist Christian school. Hence that "mostly" above. In addition to teaching us about the periodic table of the elements and the solar system and electricity, Mr. Caruthers also taught that the universe was a mere 10,000 years old.

Mr. Caruthers was a "creationist." He believed that God created the heavens and the earth in six 24-hour days as recorded in the first chapter of the Book of Genesis. He did not believe, as observation of the physical world would indicate, that the universe had evolved over billions of years. (Nor did he believe that the heavens and the earth were created in a single 24-hour day, as recorded in the second chapter of Genesis.)

It may seem strange that Mr. C. could simultaneously reject the overwhelming evidence of science and still be, as I maintain he was, a good science teacher, but this is nonetheless true. It was possible because of the elegance of his particular brand of young-earth creationism. Mr. C. believed that the universe was only 10,000 or so years old, but that this was not its "apparent age." Adam and Eve, he said, were created as full-grown adults and the entire universe, likewise, was created ex nihilo as a full-grown, ancient-seeming thing.

This perspective has its flaws, not the least of which is what it suggests about the nature of God. But whatever you make of it, it's logic is unassailable. It would be impossible to disprove this claim. Any evidence that the universe is older than creationists like Mr. C. say is simply reinterpreted as part of God's wondrous handiwork in crafting a young universe that appears so fully formed.

If you've ever seen "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," you're familiar with the idea. The show's fifth season introduces Buffy's 14-year-old younger sister, Dawn. Viewers learn, eventually, that Dawn is not really 14 years old, but was created a few short weeks earlier by magical monks. In creating Dawn's human form, the monks also created in her -- and in everyone else -- the memories of her birth and childhood. Their magic created years of diaries and altered old photographs so that a family of three became a family of four and that everyone in that family believed it had always been so. Apparent-age creationists like Mr. Caruthers think of God as a larger version of those magical monks, and they think of all of us, and indeed of the entire universe, as a magical, old-seeming young thing, like Dawn Summers.

At root, there's a deliriously strange, pot-think aspect to this view. It suggests a radical, unbridgeable, gap between perception and reality. But Mr. C. wasn't worried about such philosophical matters. And so, even as he taught us that the world was not as it appears to be, he also taught us the science of the world we can see. As long as you don't think too hard, apparent-age creationism allows you to pursue legitimate science, to experiment and theorize about the world as it appears to be.

You might be surprised how many legitimate scientists -- PhD.s doing legitimate research -- subscribe to some version of this apparent-age perspective, simultaneously believing the universe is 15 billion and 10,000 years old while managing, through some nimble compartmental thinking, to perform capable science.

Comments

[Rachel Robson]

Fred,
Thanks for this entry. As a scientist who goes to church & lives in Kansas, this is a big issue for me.

Something I've been thinking about a bit lately that I would like your opinion on is the link between creationism and the end-times craziness you've done such a good job covering on this blog.

I see a lot of philosophic links between these two ideas, in addition to the overlap in membership. The most notable link, imo, is the denial of death in both creationism and LaHayeJenkinsism: in my many chats with young-earth creationists like your Mr. C, the most serious philosophic gripe I hear against evolution (aside from "Genesis is literally true") is that it involves an unacceptable amount of suffering and death. I am told by these YECs that God did not create a world with death in it, but that death came on the scene after we humans sinned. The idea that there were untold generations of critters dying before humans even existed to sin & bring death into the world is the idea that my YEC friends have the hardest time with--they say that if humans aren't responsible for death's existence, Christ's sacrifice is unnecessary and thus meaningless.

Another philosophic link I see between end-times lunacy and, uh, beginning-times lunacy is a lack of concern for, if not outright hostility towards, the environment. (With some notable exceptions, of course.) Believing as I do that our atmosphere took billions of years to reach the human-friendly balance it's been in for the past few million years, I am very nervous about our doing stuff that might irreparably screw it up--since I accept evolution & deep time, I don't think we'll be getting a new atmosphere anytime soon. Some of my YEC friends, in contrast, are of the belief that, since God created everything from scratch in 6 days the first time around, he'll poof us a new atmosphere if the need arises, so why worry?

I was wondering if you might comment on these connections further. I'm sort of working on something for another blog on this topic I'll send your way if you're interested, pending I get it finished.

Thanks again.

[Donald Johnson]

Do you actually know scientists who work in fields like geology or astronomy who think the universe is 10,000 years old, but think that God made it look billions of years old and conduct their research accordingly? I'm not denying there might be some, but I don't know of any. There was Edmund Gosse (or was that the son?) who started this way of thinking in the 19th century, I suppose, but now?

There's also a Jesuit scientist who believes this in James Blish's SF novel "A Case of Conscience", but that pretty much exhausts my list, and half the people on my list are fictional characters.

[Rachel Robson]

Donald: Creationists who are also scientists hardly ever work in a field creationism has gripes with. So, for instance, you'll see lots of MDs and engineers (not exactly scientists, but they consider themselves scientists and do have to do some scientific-style thinking in their work) who have very strong creationist opinions on geology or developmental biology, but don't work at all with the subjects they're criticizing. Or you'll see creationist biochemists who think that while their field of science is solid, paleontologists and archaeologists are all wrong. Or creationist physicists who believe that particles move randomly, just like their science of quantum mechanics says they do, but that genes do not change randomly, no matter what geneticists say.

And--the writings of James Blish aside--Jesuits have a strong tradition of supporting science. Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit brother who wrote eloquently about his faith, also did great paleontological research in the 1920s-1940s. :)

[animus]

This view is sometimes parodied by reference to "very-young-Earth creationism," which is the theory that the world was created this morning, complete with all our memories of yesterday.

[Ray]

Its the Omphalos hypothesis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omphalos_hypothesis , from Philip Henry Gosse.

[R. Mildred]

Of course, if god is of the opinion that creating a universe that is designed to fool scientists is an integral part of creation, then why isn't he also the sort of god who created everything yesterday including a book that says that sort of hints that the universe was created 10,000 years ago along with a universe that says it was created several billion years ago?

God has already shown himself to be a lier, so why should we believe him on anything?

[R. Mildred]

Animus beat me too it.

but seriously, God has essentially said to us "I'm a Liar, but believe me anyway bitches!"

Gnosticism is the only thing that makes sense in this world view, the person who created the universe would have to be the Prince of Lies, by definition.

[bellatrys]

The Jesuits are caving, btw. There was a really weird article pleading for creationism to be taught side-by-side with science in public schools in America magazine a few weeks back. I made a note of it because I wanted to write about it in the sinister light of the last editor of America getting the sudden papal heave-ho for daring to present both pro and con views (a la Aquinas in the Summa, I might add) of things like gay marriage and stem cell research in objective articles. But I didn't have enough to go on.

Now, with Cardinal Schonborn, one of Benedict's old cronies, dissing the late pope's statements on evolution being "more than a theory" etc, I think I may have enough data points to finish that post on the America wishy-washiness...

[Don Banks]

Does truth always need to be fact in time and space?

[Ray]

No. I wish more people would recognise the higher truth - that I am Harry Potter. My, my magic wand, and my truckloads of (hardback!) books laugh at your 'facts'!

[bellatrys]

R. Mildred, iirc that was Descartes' position on why we could be theologically certain the material world was *not* all an illusion a la The Matrix - any creator who would do that would be an Evil Deceiver and therefore a priori not a god to be loved/respected.

[Johnny Rev]

"But whatever you make of it, it's logic is unassailable. It would be impossible to disprove this claim."

I hate to sound like a curmudgeon or a militant athiest, but this is exactly what makes it entirely inappropriate to teach in a science class.

As wonderful as this teacher may have been, he did his students a huge disservice by teaching them that this is how serious scientist work. Science is all about empirical fact; any hypothesis proffered must be testable by experiment or it should be ignored. Period. Until someone can tell me how to perform an experiment testing the existence or abilities of God, I'm going to keep Him/Her/It out of my scientific work. Anything relating to God more properly belongs in a philosophy or theology class.

Science cannot tolerate a God within it; its entire structure depends on the existence of
natural laws that are inexorable. Introducing an all-powerful God who can change those laws at a whim destroys that foundation, and the whole system of scientific thought comes crashing down. Now if we are all willing to give up all of the advances that science has given us, then by all means we should continue to teach this sort of creationist philosophy as science. Otherwise, we should recognize that science, while powerful, is limited in its scope, and need not threaten religious belief. But this may be too much to expect. Just ask Galileo.

[Steve]

Shouldn't there be another term for these people other than "creationists"? I believe God created the world (therefore I'm a "creationist") but I also believe that much of Genesis is metaphor, including the "days" (i.e. He could have created the world over many, many years--remember "For a thousand years in your sight are like a day that has just gone by" Psalm 90:4) and that the process of evolution could be part of His created world.

So should people holding this extreme view be called something other than the basic "creationists"...like perhaps "literal creationists" or something else.

[--susan]

Fred, I'd just like to point out that I love the extent to which the Buffyverse informs your writing. :)

[Nate Silva]

This is creationist claim CH220. A reply to this claim is: “Apparent age is indistinguishable from real age. Why not forget the distinction and just call it age?”

And, of course, it makes God into a liar or deceiver, which I’m sure isn’t the creationists’ intention.

[Andrew]

Re: Johnny Ray: any hypothesis proffered must be testable by experiment or it should be ignored. Period.

If that were actually the case, then Western science as we know it would not exist. Not only have important hypotheses appeared on the scene before they could be tested, but some seemed to have already been falsified by certain experiments.

I think a distinction between how philosophers/theologians think of science and how scientists actually do science should be taken into account in this question of whether or not Mr. Caruthers taught science well.

[Ray]

Care to offer some examples?

[Kagehi]

"As long as you don't think too hard, apparent-age creationism allows you to pursue legitimate science, to experiment and theorize about the world as it appears to be."

This, as the problem in a nut shell. Science is not about simply memorizing unassailable facts. It can take years and multiple changes to theories or even the complete rejection of the more crazy ones in favor of ones that better fit the evidence, before something can be considered *mostly* unassailable. Good science doesn't mean you memorize something, then pass a test on it, it means you can actually *think* well enough to defend your position that the answer is correct. The proper 'test' for good science teaching should be something like:

1. What are genes:

a. Something you wear.
b. Useless junk in cells.
c. The coded instructions that define what you are and how you look.

2. Are you sure? Explain why your answer is correct:

If they can't explain why they picked it, other than, "Well, that's what the book said.", or worse, the explaination is dogmatic, instead of based on examples of observed cause and effect, then they failed anyway, never mind if they would have passed a standardized test. The purpose of science classes is not merely to inform people of some maybe not 100% accurate truth, but to teach people how to think about things in a scientific way. If what you learn instead is that *any* idea is perfectly OK, as long as you, "don't think too hard", then the science teacher is a *bad* teacher and you just wasted a year learning 'facts' instead of learning 'science'.

As for Ray's question about examples... Science 'usually' follows this pattern:

1. Observe something.
2. Come up with a theory to describe it.
3. Invent tests to prove the theory.
4. If 'any' evidence shows up to contradict it, either revise the theory or if that is impossible, start over with step 2.

Philosophers do this:

1. Observe something.
2. Select the default position that spirits, God or some other force did it.
3. Look for evidence.
4. If the evidence doesn't exists, make up excuses.
5. If the evidence contradicts it, throw out most of the 'evidence' and bend the rest into a pretzel until it sounds sufficiently scientific to all those people that, "Don't think too hard", about things.
6. Never revise the initial theory of what caused it, unless it is to jump from spirits to God, or God to demons, or some similar thing.
7. When all else fails, hijack some real theory, wedge God into any hole you find, then argue continuously about all the supposed flaws in the original, usually without having the slightest clue why the flaws are illusiory or the principles being used to attack them are invalid.

A good example of 7 is the arguement by ID proponents that evolution violates the second law of thermodynamics. This is wrong, since the earth is not a closed system. But tell them this and they get even sillier, and try to claim that the universe 'is' a closed system, therefor they are still right. Just one problem... If that was a valid measure of 'closed', then the second law of thermodynamics is being violated by nearly 'everything' in the universe. Why? Because it would not have been necessary to even define such a law to describe closed systems if the behavour of something like a pot of boiling water didn't differ in some fashion from a barrel of room temperature water sealed in styrofoam (to prevent 'outside' heat from disturbing it). So, the entire universe does not count "period". But without invoking the entire universe as such a thing and invalidating the very science that gave rise to the law in the first place (no science = no law = no way to invoke it against evolution. It wasn't divinely inspired people!!), its impossible to describe any part of the universe, including the earth as 'closed'.

But, in spite of this basic and fundimental error in application of that law, ID proponents do not abandon it. Nope, they continue to argue it as a reason to follow their version. This is philosophy. Just because something is invalid, doesn't apply, doesn't work or is totally impossible, does not mean it can't be used to 'support' a theological theory. There are plenty of people who have been taught, like Slacktivist, to, "not think too hard about it", who have been specifically taught to flat out ***not*** understand the difference by teachers that don't grasp why science is a way of thinking, not merely a mess of facts that the church finally got around, after hundreds of years of rejecting them, to admitting were right all along.

[B-W]

R. Mildred said: "

Of course, if god is of the opinion that creating a universe that is designed to fool scientists is an integral part of creation, then why isn't he also the sort of god who created everything yesterday including a book that says that sort of hints that the universe was created 10,000 years ago along with a universe that says it was created several billion years ago?

God has already shown himself to be a liar, so why should we believe him on anything?"

I don't think the "appearance of age" requires that God deceive anyone. For example, say that God creates a tree ex nihilo. That tree would look like any tree that had been there for years. But no effort to make the tree look "old" is required. It is simply a necessity of making the tree look like a tree instead of, say, an acorn.

Of course, this argument opens itself up to the fact that fossils exist, and that if God didn't intend deception, there should be no fossils, but I'm not really trying to defend YEC. Just to keep our arguments against it consistent. ;)

[Brennan]

Maybe God just created billions of years of time during those six days. Not deception, but a completely different relationship to the nature of time.

[Ray]

Hey Kagehi, stop dissing my degree. Science is an outgrowth of philosophy, just a particular way of loving knowledge. There's plenty of good philosophy out there, which is more than an attempt to bend logic in circles to prove the existence of fairies. The problem is not philosophy, the problem is idiots.

[Kirala]

Kagehi:
Philosophy is necessary if science is to remain pure. Science cannot answer questions which involve non-falsifiable theories. We cannot answer whether there is a God scientifically; we cannot answer why people fall in love; we cannot answer whether we can know anything. The Omphalos Theory, for instance, cannot be disproven scientifically, only philosophically. And unless philosophy clears the ground, science cannot tackle its limited (though immense) sphere. After all, science itself is a philosophy.

[hf]

Maybe God just created billions of years of time during those six days. Not deception, but a completely different relationship to the nature of time.
Ah, the alternate-continuum explanation!

I agree that it doesn't seem honest to teach this in science class. But otherwise I see no problem here. Gosse didn't see it as God lying -- he thought God used evolution as a model while creating the world. And he thought that God chose him, Gosse, to explain all this.

[Ray]

Let's not go overboard with the philophilosophy either...

"We cannot answer whether there is a God scientifically"

Nor can philosophy answer the question.

"we cannot answer why people fall in love"

Science is actually getting a lot of information about that. To an extent, science can answer - we fall in love so that we'll form pair-bonds and have sex, so that we'll have kids.

"we cannot answer whether we can know anything"

Philosophy can't either, though it can present some interesting arguments about what knowledge means.

"The Omphalos Theory, for instance, cannot be disproven scientifically, only philosophically"

It can't be disproven philosophically either - its perfectly logically possible that the universe was created _now_, and everything up to a few seconds ago created with it.

[Kagehi]

Sigh. Heard the 'why people fall in love' argument before. The truth is we have the basics of it, but those basic facts are not for most people "emotionally" acceptable, even if they are 'right'. I do agree that some form a philosophy is inevitable, since we are not likely to, nor probably want to, reject emotion. However, this doesn't mean that the answers it gives are in any way reasonable or anything but an emotional crutch. The problem with crutches, as the whole ID/Creationism vs. Evolution argument shows, is that some people refuse to abandon that crutch, even when failing to do so might mean falling off a cliff or breaking the other leg. They may even keep them so long that they *can't* give them up. So, while you agree that philosophy must remain seperate from science for science to function. Logic is the fuel of science, as such philosophy is like dumping shampoo into the gas tank of your car, because your offended by the way the gasoline smells. Your not only probably not going to get far as a result, you might just destroy what you already have. The two have no place in each other.

That said, the philosophers are being quite silly with the, "God of the gaps", nonsense. At least one persons editorial on the subject redefined it, "The incredible shrinking God.", and stated that only an idiot would take something 'outside' the known universe and effectively erase it from practical existance by arguing that its real presense in the world can be find in gaps in the man made theories, which 'tend' to shrink the more information we have. lol Such a God is already pretty close to running out of room to exist in. Which is a good reason why the philosphical anti-science types want so badly to redefine science as, "Any crazy idea we can provide stories or anechdotal evidence for, even if its impossible to test it."

Your 100% right Kirala, the two are mutually exclusive, but the people fighting over what gets to be science are either going to destory science as we know it or destroy their own philosophy and take down a lot of less crazy people's in the process. I hardly think this is something which, even the people that consider philosphy as something other than a strange method of rearranging personal desires and prejudice, would want to to have happen.

[Kagehi]

Actually, Ray's comment is better than mine. The problem with philosophy is it doesn't generate knownledge, it merely provides a means to make up useful excuses for why we don't yet have an explaination for something. This is a serious problem when its used to specifically prevent people from looking, by declaring something unknowable and thus not worth examining. Or has everyone here missed the whole, "there are some things we are not meant to know!" speal? The problem with stuff like using it to prove God is you can't exclude aliens, leprechauns, spirit animals like Raven, narrow thing to any one God, expand to multiple Gods or even prove with it that anything crazy idea of such a being we have come up with is valid at all, let alone more valid than anyone else's.

"We can be knowledgable with other men's knowledge, but we cannot be wise with other men's wisdom." - Michel de Montaigne

[Ken]

How do we explain the natural world and the Word of God that appears to contradict it?

The simplest explanation is that the ancient Jewish rabbis and scribes that talked about the Creation didn't know jack about geology, paleontology, or biology, and neither did the early Christians charged with selecting ancient Jewish texts to include in the Bible. And the most reasonable explanation for that is that God never whispered an exact account of the creation of the world into anyone's ear. Or at least anyone who then wrote it in any document that we've discovered to date.

(Although, suppose someone dug up an ancient Hebrew text on the origin of species, complete with a discussion of the mechanics of mutation and natural selection and an exact description of the primate family tree for the last 10 million years? Or maybe one discussing the Big Bang and revealing what exactly preceded it and how it came to be, along with the details of galaxy, stellar system, and planet formation, and told of the Last Judgement to come after the Universe reached maximum entropy? That would certainly get everyone's attention!)

[inge]

Kahegi,

your first post leaves me quite baffled. How on earth would you explain *why* a certain definition of a word (in this case, "genes") is the correct one, except, "that's how we decide to define it, it's in the dictionary"?

Second, all philosophy I've read and been taught so far started roughly with observing something wrong or strange about people or society and phrasing it as a question: why are so few people happy? what is just? how can we know anything to be true?. It then went to defining words and concepts from there ("what is justice?") and then permutated the ideas and tried to find some optimum through thought experiments and reality checks.

There may be philosophies which answer the question of why there's, say, injustice in the world with "God wills it so" (Leibniz comes to mind, with his "God couldn't do any better") but I doubt they make up a majority of philosphical systems, if only for their general uselessness.

[kristina]

To what extent can 'intelligent design' really be considered 'philosophy'? IDers may claim to be philosophers, but I wouldn't consider them to be representative of philosophy or philosophers as a whole. I would consider them rhetoricists (is that a word?) I suspect that you may insult some philosophers by lumping ID'ers in with them.

I doubt any working scientist goes straight from a single observation to a "theory." At a minimum you need repeatability and at least some idea of what are the independent variables, and then it's just a hypothesis that some causal relationship exists.

On the other end, the "one experiment disproves the theory" claim is also a gross oversimplification. Repeatable exceptions to established theories are usually the boundary to an orthogonal domain. A good example is the "ultraviolet catastrophe" of the 19th century. There was a serious disconnect between Maxwell's equations and reality - warm bodies should radiate most of their energy in the hard ultraviolet. The answer lead to quantum mechanics. Yet few electrical engineers need to worry much about QM - just the ones designing cutting-edge computer chips where QM effects start to become a significant concern (or the key to the device working at all).

[Nate Silva]

"The Omphalos Theory, for instance, cannot be disproven scientifically, only philosophically"

Ergo, it is not a theory.

(Theory in the scientific sense that it must be falsifiable, not the colloquial sense of "a hunch".)

[Beth]

For example, say that God creates a tree ex nihilo. That tree would look like any tree that had been there for years

Not quite. Every tree is unique, the result of a unique set of genes and unique enviornmental factors. That tree might look like any tree to you or me, but a biologist who was an expert at analyzing trees would be able to "read" the tree's history and tell us how shaded the tree was in its earlier years, when it experienced drought, a particularly harsh winter, etc. If the evidence were contradictory -- say, the depth of the taproot revealed early drought while the rings told of plentiful water -- the biologist would recognize it as a fake. If I were God, my ex nihilo tree would be internally consistent, not because I'd want to fool biologists, but because I'd want to create an authentic tree.

If God created the earth ex nihilo, He would probably strive for that same authenticity. He would try to create the earth exactly as it might have been if it had developed naturally, and being omniscient and omnipotent, He would naturally succeed.

That's the real irony of the IDers who search so desperately for something that cannot be explained by natural law. If they were to succeed, they would prove God's existence, but they would also prove His fallibility. They're so eager to burn down the "Church of Darwin" they forget that such a fire would consume their own church as well.

[cjmr]

IDers may claim to be philosophers...

Actually, IDers don't claim to be philosophers--or at least not the ones I've read. I've read excerpts from a couple of IDers who present themselves as scientists or "Creation Scientists", but never as philosophers. It's mostly other people (not the IDers themselves) who describe Intelligent Design as a "psycho-philosophical overlay" to make the evolutionary process acceptable to people who are creationists.
(Boy do I wish that I remember whose blog it was that I got that term from, but it was several months ago so it isn't in my cookies anymore. It was an excellent and elegant argument!)

[Kagehi]

Actually, Inge you are entirely missing the point. What genes are goes 'past' a mere definition. It represents how they work, what the individual sequences are, the mean by which we determined that they effect the way we look or act, etc. Its not enough to know the dictionary defintion of the word. Its necessary to understand how we concluded that defintion was valid. You can know facts and not be a scientist or even understand how to be one. Its not about 'knowing' the definition of words, it is about the means by which such defintions where determined. Its not about memorizing information for a test, it is about starting out with some basic facts and experimentally reaching the same conclusion everyone else did. A 'good' science course is not one that hands you answers, its one which says, "Here is some odd things, I am not going to tell you what the answer is, you figure out what is going on." However, since this is hardly practical, we instead attempt to show how other people took those odd bits, formed an idea of what the rules where that governed them, then testing that idea to see if it worked. The teacher Fred describes doesn't do this.

Rather he hands them a dictionary, tells them its some sort of dogmatic fact, then not only, apparently, fails to explain the scientific process, he instead implies that anything can be acceptable, as long as you don't test it or, "think to hard about it." This is anti-science, not science. Its no more useful that knowing how to fix a stereo by replacing wires and parts, but lacking the basic knowledge of how it actually works, rendering you incabable of fixing anything more complex, or where there are no convenient modular bits to trade out.

Do you understand the problem? Science classes should be about 'how' to conduct science, not just a history lesson. Because they are not, people end up lacking the basic understanding of what science actually is. They conclude that enough people believing in is sufficient, without getting the fact that it **must** be testable in controlled conditions, never mind testable at all. I don't care if you call them genes, computer code or giblesnotch, nor do I particularly care if the 'general' definition is right. This is irrelevent if you don't understand how and more importantly **why** they came up with that definition in the first place.

[Kirala]

Kagehi: Your proposal is noble, but how do you think it can be carried out? We cannot afford to erase all memorized facts when teaching science. Do you believe that the sun is approximately 93 million miles away from the earth? Why? Have you done the measurements? Have you also looked under the microscope at the stages of cellular development? Personally checked the relationship between genotypes and phenotypes?
If science is to advance, there has to be a delicate balance between taking facts on faith - avoiding endless duplicate experiments - and questioning, testing, probing, ensuring that these premises are justified.

On an almost completely irrelevant note, can anyone tell me how, say, the theory of relativity or the Heisenberg Principle differ significantly from philosophy? Or would it require too much physics for the layman to ever grasp?

[Ray]

The theory of relativity isn't 'philosophy', in the sense of armchair speculation. Einstein worked out the math that proved the theory, and then experiments were conducted that supported the math. Heisenberg's work is, similarly, based on math and experiment, not meditation.

[cjmr]

Now the Schroedinger's Cat Problem--that's a philosophical construct!

[Kagehi]

Apparently Kirala, you missed where I said that rerunning the experiments was impractical, so part of the education must be to show 'how' they reached certain basic conclusions. You don't have to repeat 'every' experiment to show how 'any' experiment is conducted of explain that it took many repetitions of that experiment to have the theory accepted. And the mere fact that you can even ask the question of how philosophy differs from relativity proves it.

The way a lot of science classes go is:

1. Teach people a lot of facts.

2. Tell them its all true.

3a. They never take another class on the the subject and a week after graduation they are asking the fraud John Edward to talk to Grandma for them and oohing and awing over his 5% success rate of 'guessing' the right answers based on basic statistics. They will never beleive you about him being a fraud even when you prove how he did it.

3b. The go on to a college and enter a science course.
4a. The professor wastes a year just getting them to understand the basic foundations of science and logic they missed by only memorizing facts, thus they become reasonably competent at the specialized field they are in, but still believe in the Loch Ness monster and Bigfoot.

4b. The professor 'tries' to teach them basic science, which they missed, however they have already developed a wide range of crazy ideas, refuse to believe half the stuff taught in the class, never learn proper research techniques, barely pass the class and become paranormalists, who are too stupid to realize that running water with metal content, metal of any kind when you or it is moving, wiring, electric lights, etc. all produce, "Strange fields!", when they go out hunting 'ghosts'.

See the point? Science is a means to circumvent the inherent errors of philosophy, which are a) circular logic and b) belief in the untestable.

A scientist is the guy who, in the dark, walks to the nearest wall, and follows it, in hopes of finding a way out of the room. He might be wrong, but he has 'proof' that he is. A philosopher is the idiot that standing in the middle of the room, turns around and around in one place and declares, "there are no walls!", because he refuses to walk the five feet needed to run into one and because in his personal philosophy its enough to know that they don't exist, because he can't touch them. Problem is teachers like the one described are not teaching people to look for a wall, they are teaching them to stand in one spot and spin around until they fall over or 'decide' the believe they are a) not in a room, b) its not actually dark, c) there is no escaping the nonexistant darkness, etc. Such a person is more likely to willfully 'choose' to declare themselves blind, than try to figure out if there is a perfecetly valid reason why they can't see anything.

[cjmr]

Science is a means to circumvent the inherent errors of philosophy, which are a) circular logic and b) belief in the untestable.

I'm sure Ray will have a much more brilliant post than mine to answer this, as one of the only bona-fide philosophers (and athiests) that frequents Slactivist.

[John]

(Theory in the scientific sense that it must be falsifiable, not the colloquial sense of "a hunch".)

Should we be taking Popper as gospel here? I think a lot of people find his views problematic at this point.

[Ray]

"A scientist is the guy who, in the dark, walks to the nearest wall, and follows it, in hopes of finding a way out of the room."

I can't help but be reminded of Plato's story of the cave. Most people just watch the shadows cast on the wall, but the philosopher leaves the cave to go find the light.

Its a little unfair to accuse philosophers of circular logic given that logic is something developed by philosophers. As for belief in the untestable, its more that there are still plenty of things that are untestable (ethics and aesthetics are uncontroversial examples), so any discussion about these things has to take a different form. But science really is just an outgrowth of philosophy, the application of particular types of reasoning to certain problems where that reasoning has proven useful.

[inge]

Kagehi,

I agree with your general direction re:Science education, but I'm extremely literalist when it comes to class tests. In mathematics, I could reply to "what is y" with some "f(x)", and if asked in the follow-up "why?" formulate a mathematical proof. But if the answer can not be proven by symbol manipulation, this type of "why", if not answered flippantly, is opening a can of worms.

IM (limited) E science classes start with overloading you with data, because without data you're unlikely to see the pattern, and without seeing the pattern you're unlikely to grasp the theory. Meta-science ("what can we know and how do we know it?") is, if at all, taught in philosophy or history -- whereever you happen to read at least excerpts of Aristotele, Decartes, and, if you're unlucky, Hegel.

I'd say that your arguments against philosophy would work better against mathematics, which is the one field of knowledge that works entirely from axioms. ("An experimental physicist and a mathematician are in a dark room and told to find a way out. The experimental physicist walks in a straight line until he finds a wall, follows the wall until he finds a door and gets out. The mathematician defines the room as 'outside'." -- usually these jokes also include an electrical engineer and a social worker, but I do not remember their lines.)

[Nate Silva]

((Theory in the scientific sense that it must be falsifiable, not the colloquial sense of "a hunch".))

(Should we be taking Popper as gospel here? I think a lot of people find his views problematic at this point.)

Well, I guess you don't have to, but what good is your "theory" if it isn't falsifiable? It won't make any predictions that are useful.

The object is not to find "the truth" but to find useful explanations which can be used to make predictions about the world around us. Perhaps I have been brainwashed by the acolytes of Karl Popper, but I don't understand how you could make useful predictions using such a theory.

[cjmr's husband]

Apparently I'm unusual in having learned The Scientific Method in eighth grade physical science. Granted, it's out of fashion these days.

Been reading a biography of Galileo; when he was granted his title of Court Mathemetician, he insisted that he had to be given the title of Philosopher, too. And remember, PhD doesn't *only* stand for Piled High and Deeper. (which I learned in 9th grade biology; guess I just went to a better school in those days)

The electrical engineer either has a flashlight, or finds the light switch.

[cjmr]

And the social worker asks, "But how do you feel about being trapped in a dark place?"

[ProfessorPlum]

I work in drug discovery, and for many years I worked with a very smart medicinal chemist, working with protein sequences and structures within a family of related drug targets. It was only after I left the company and was talking with him about some things later that I discovered that he doesn't believe in evolution. It was pretty stunning to me - the evolutionary relationships between proteins are pretty obvious, and even easy to explain, at the sequence/structure level. And the power of using evolution as the basic framework for certain problems of drug discovery is something that would be difficult to abandon. But hey, he was a smart, succesful guy, good at drug discovery. I have no idea how many others like him are lurking around.

[Kagehi]

That science is an off shoot of philosophy is no more relevant than the fact that chemistry is an off shoot of alchemy, that astronomy began with astrology, paleontology with cyclops and griphons, geology with the worship of poseidon, or the pharmacology of narcotics with the smoke breathed by the Oricle of Delphi. To in modern times equate the ignorance of any of these ancient practices with practical, let alone accurate knowledge is irrational. Yet, with regard to science and philosophy, somehow this is acceptable? As Nate point out, its not about coming up with any explaination, a comfortable one, or even a convenient one. It is about coming up with one that is useful.

I don't BTW consider sociology or related fields 'science'. There are aspects in the pharmacological branch of Psychology that are and even in parts that deal with brain structure and 'basic' characteristics, but a lot of it is still based on, "This is what society thinks is normal, so this is what we are going to try to shoehorn the patient into." In both sociology and psychology, experiments are usually impractical, considered immoral, given how they would need to be conducted, and last the life time of the victim (er... patient). This hardly provides 'useful' information. I have even been known to describe the application of both by people who assume X is the utopia of human existance, so they are going to force it one everyone as the, "chaos theory of social engineering".

Point is, philosophy is unavoidable when dealing with purely human constructs that arise 'because' of philosophical arguments. At best such fields are weak sciences, at worst, they may not qualify as anything but wishful thinking on the part of people deluded into believing their utopia is of better quality than everyone else's. The irony being that every generation forgets how screwed up the prior on really was and insists it would all be better if we just return to X, usually by imposing more taboos, rules, limits, etc. on behaviours they themselves won't admit to, but did themselves at the same ages... Then they wonder why human nature takes over and a) they get lazy and assume the rule enforcers will successfully keep everyone in line, b) they suddenly don't have a clue what is going on and c) everyone rebels against rules no one can enforce 24-7. If the result wasn't so disturbing, it would be hilarious. But the point is, once you know why a car engine works, it refers to all car engines. Sociology is based on pure philosophy, so it doesn't involve usable rules. It is philosophy, piled on philosophy, piled on philosophy, with one 'idea' trying to adjust the next, like some elaborate house of cards, being built using wet toilet paper. The result is seldom pretty, tend to collapse for no obvious reason, from the perspective of the builders, and even when it works, there are 50 different contradictory opinions as to *why* it worked or how long it will continue to do so. Forgive me if I don't see 'science' as still being legitimately part of such a mess. lol

[Emma Goldman]

First off, the trashing of philosophy (and sociology and whatever else doesn't meet K's Purity Test) is really unnecessary. Not to mention annoying. Every field has its quirks, but unless you can show that every practitioner in a field has those quirks that most annoy you--i.e., that the quirks are a fundamental part of that field--then you're mostly just name-calling, and that's not much of an argument, either.

Second, though, doesn't anyone else see the similarity between these theories and "Blade Runner"? (Or Dick, I suppose, but I haven't read the story, only seen the movie.)

[Mark]

Kagehi:
1. Not all car engines work the same way. There are diesel engines, rotary engines, electric motors, hybrids, and so on.

2. A house of cards is, by definition, made of cards, not wet toilet paper.

3. Your complaint about the shining gemlike purity of science being sullied by a "mess" that is "seldom pretty, tends to collapse for no obvious reason ... and there are 50 different contradictory opinions as to *why* it worked" suggests that you've never done any actual science.

[Ray]

Okay Kagehi, you obviously haven't studied philosophy, psychology, or sociology. (What have you studied, incidentally?) You might want to crack open a university textbook on one of those subjects before telling us what they're really like.