Natusaurus

My answers to jdelphiki42

Mar 31

Posted by Jonathan in Faith and Religion, Philosophy | No Comments

In response to his video asking atheists to challenge his assumptions, enticingly phrased as questions, here are my answers. I chose the form of an open letter, because I felt addressed by the questions and it seemed like the natural way to write this post. Of course I’m also interested in what third parties think.

Dear jdelphiki42,

I am going to consider each question separately. I apologize for not giving definitions up front, but they’re at the points where I considered them most relevant.

Does God’s non-existence imply pure materialism?

No, it most certainly doesn’t, just as religion doesn’t imply some form of anti-materialism. The reason for this is simple: it is possible that God created or is lord over a materialistic world, and it is possible to deny the existence of God and still have a dualistic or esoteric worldview, or some other anti-materialist notion. For example, you could believe that the human spirit is the entity that guides everything in the world and that matter is only secondary to it, if it truly exists at all. If you think God doesn’t exist, you’d still be an atheist even though such a view is not materialist.

History confirms that there is no automatic connection between the two. Most importantly, materialism grew from within christianity, primarily from 18th-century deists. The so-called ‘mechanistic worldview’ (often erroneously ascribed to Newton, but more developed under influence of his work by others) was basically materialistic, even if it did acknowledge God. At the same time, in the 19th century, modernists and spinozists would sometimes move away from religion and materialism through pantheism, which is the opposite of deism. An example would be German biologist Ernst Haeckel, who claimed that atoms had souls.

I want to make an adjustment to your use of the term ‘materialism’. I crudely define materialism as the idea that matter is the only thing that exists and within which all non-material phenomena are virtually present. This does not mean that everything is caused by movement of sub-atomic particles – that would be a specific kind of materialism, namely ontological reductionism. Within materialism, it is thinkable to hold an anti-reductionist position, which I will call holism. This typically entails recognition of processes on certain reductionist ‘levels’. For example, you may say that all my decisions are ’caused’ by collisions of subatomic particles, but if I decide to turn on a particle collider, the collisions are ’caused’ by my decisions. One approach to this is to say that neither causation is more true than the other. Note that this is a very short description of a position that is not my own, so I am doing it terrible injustice and for anti-reductionist philosophy I recommend a book by Stuart Kauffman (At Home in the Universe) and I’m also interested in Nancey Murphy’s Theology in the Age of Scientific Reasoning. When I label such authors as ‘holist’ it is purely to distinguish them from reductionists.

Does materialism allow for free will, or is it all inevitable?

Ontological reductionism, which is the kind of materialism you refer to, is not automatically deterministic. It could be indeterministic. This means at the very least that ‘inevitability’ is not automatic, but that doesn’t save the notion of free will.

On the concept of free will there are two very good lectures on youtube which are both in favour of reductionism but against the kind (in)determinism that excludes free will (more precisely: against the dichotomy). Daniel Dennett argues why, according to him, free will is possible in a deterministic universe. Sysiphusredeemed argues that the question of free will dissolves if the question is deconstructed into bits that can be handled by neurology. Both men make excellent points and the simplified conclusion of their lectures is that your question can be answered with ‘Yes, materialism allows for free will’.

What implications does determinism have for epistemology?

This is the most complex matter and my motivation for tackling your question in the first place. In your explication, you introduce the idea of everything being caused by moving particles (ontological reductionism) again, basically repeating some arguments concerning free will. But this is about epistemology and I think that this makes for a different case.

Coincidentally, I’ve been thinking about the issue since Thunderf00t made a video talking about the ‘rationalist’ community. This made me wonder: is Thunderf00t a rationalist? Actually, I don’t think he is. This is because materialism, in a broad sense, both holistic and reductionist, implies irrationalism.

When we apply rational reasoning, we rely on understanding things. When has understanding been achieved? In a materialist universe, this has been achieved through a cognitive process; the brain does the understanding, reductionist or not. However, when we claim to understand a logical conclusion, we submit ourselves to a law that we consider to be larger than our single minds. We assume that the laws of logic are true and that we cannot change them. We also assume that once we see them, their reflection on our minds causes the sensation of understanding, the feeling of ‘I get it’.

In a materialist universe, this would mean that our brain contains an accurate and objective ’snapshot’ of reality, and that our language for describing that ’snapshot’ is simply an impartial translation. Language would transform the snapshot into a second representation that we can then communicate. This series of events has been severely criticised by philosophers, and I don’t think it’s correct.

One argument I would bring in is that our brain and its cognitive functions were never developed in accordance with impartial logic. They were developed by evolution and aimed at making us survive and reproduce. We know that we have tendencies hardwired into our brain to make us change what we see into a more coherent picture, even when that is not justified. Our sensation that logic is correct is not guaranteed within a materialist universe. The ‘I get it’ sensation can be a hardwired adaptation that takes some shortcuts over reality and that at times misleads us.

There are examples of this. In his lecture, Sysiphusredeemed gives the example of a student who explains the properties of opium by claiming it has a ‘dormative’ quality. What is not touched on, however, is that the student truly believes he understands why opium makes us sleep. This is no small matter; all science contains some measure of this reformulating of problems to make scientists think they understand problems. Some epistemologists of the 20th century have called attention to the ‘psychology of research’, i.e. the fact that understanding is at least partially reliant on cognitive processes.

According to materialism, these cognitive processes are taking place within matter; shaped by evolution, caused by moving particles, if you wish. It doesn’t really matter as a part of what principles of causation you recognise it. In the end it comes down to the sensation of understanding, the feeling one has understood something, rather than the rational thought that our brain and our language are a reliable depiction of impartial logic.

That is why I think materialism implies irrationalism. This doesn’t mean materialists can no longer use rational arguments; rationality is common even among anti-rationalist philosophies. Rather, I would define irrationalism as the idea that there is no true rational mind behind our behaviour. It’s not a comforting thought and surely not a done deal for me either, but I hope it gives you an atheist viewpoint of the kind you were looking for.

A Role for History

Feb 8

Posted by Jonathan in Faith and Religion, History of Science, Science and Religion | No Comments

- Review of Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion, by Ronald Numbers (ed.), Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts & London, England, 2009. 302 pages plus contents.

Galileo Goes to Jail is a book I would highly recommend, as an accessible and quick-reading introduction to many historical aspects of science and religion. The book will challenge any reader’s presuppositions through a series of nuanced and educated essays.

The historical approach to issues in science and religion is both useful and misleading. Useful, because it gives insights into how the relation between the two has actually developed as opposed to how any single person thinks they are principally related. However, history can be misleading when it is used as a normative benchmark for what should be or even what is normal. Sometimes I fool myself into thinking that extensive knowledge of history will make people act more sensibly. In reality, however, such knowledge is only what it is; it does not necessarily lead to anything.

Still I am convinced that the contributors to Galileo Goes to Jail had a good measure of idealism when writing this book. Surely they are convinced that knowing about the past relation between science and religion will make readers reconsider some radical or absolute views and think more nuanced about the subject. Christianity was not science’s enemy, but neither was it the sole driver of scientific curiosity. Islam has made important contributions to science. Religious scientists did not ‘outgrow’ a set of naïve superstitions in order to become rational champions, but neither were they blessed with a fully worked out research program based on whatever tradition they believed in. The book tries to find a middle ground between views and confront every reader with his or her bias. Nuance can be confrontational, as it turns out.

The approach of the book is chronological. Each short chapter starts with a bluntly formulated myth. In the context of the book, a myth is synonymous with a falsehood. Each myth is accompanied by two or three quotes from reputable or well known sources that, to some degree, perpetuate the myth. These chapters all have different authors.

The first chapters deal with the medieval period, which means that there are no chapters about the classical period. Out of twenty-five myths, Copernicus is already the subject of myth number six, so there is a strong emphasis on the periods known as the scientific revolution, the enlightenment and the modern period. The subjects are not completely balanced. There is only one chapter about Islam, the others are explicitly about or most relevant to the relation between science and Christianity. Another imbalance lies in the myths generally adhered to by Christians and those that live among atheists. I think there are quite a few atheists who think that ‘the scientific revolution liberated science from religion’ (myth #10), that ‘copernicanism demoted humans from the center of the cosmos from the center of the cosmos’ (#6), or that ‘the Scopes trial ended in defeat for antievolutionism’. Christians may be slightly less confronted by ideas alien to them, although they will have to let go the notions that ‘Einstein believed in a personal God’ (#21) or that ‘Christianity gave birth to modern science’ (#9).

This latter myth, dealing with the question of science having been helped or hindered by christianity during the scientific revolution, carries a rather ambiguous message. The author is Noah J. Efron from Bar Ilan University in Tel Aviv. On the first pages of his essay, he makes it clear that there is a kind of consensus among historians that Christianity’s role was ‘crucial’ in the development of science. What then, is his point in debunking the myth that Christianity gave birth to modern science? Efron apparently tries to walk a fine line between considering Christianity irrelevant or damaging to science on one side and giving it too much credit on the other. This kind of message doesn’t lend itself well to a format that gives the impression of bluntly debunking a myth. In this case, the book’s format is hindering the message of the author.

The book discusses twenty-five myths. Out of these, I counted seventeen that are most likely to be held by atheists. The theme that runs through these is: Christianity was not destroyed by science and has never been in conflict with science. This is not an easy message when publishing a book with the words ‘evolution’ and ‘religion’ in its title will bring you death threats, as neurologist David Linden once stated during a lecture. However, hostilities from christians towards science are not typical for history and that should mean something to everyone. Nobody can prescribe exactly how history should be translated to personal meaning, but a good understanding is available. Galileo Goes to Jail offers exactly that.

Godlessons’ challenge

Nov 13

Posted by Jonathan in Uncategorized | 3 Comments

Perhaps he should have thought it through a bit better. But then again – $50 dollars is not an amount that suggests he is asking something impossible. It looks like Godlessons simply wants creationists to really come up with something, rather than continue their parasitic method of criticizing professional science with a mixture of misunderstood popular science and ridiculous assumptions. Is he, however, aware that creationists have in the past done the kind of work he is looking for? And does he understand what it means to formulate research as part of a paradigm?

There is a problem with his challenge. To summarize, Godlessons asks for creationist experiments in the regular scientific mold – hypothesis, experimental test and conclusion. This does not describe all scientific work. In historical sciences, like paleontology or stratigraphy, the ‘test’ of a hypothesis is usually not experimental. Personally I’m not too impressed with the word ‘test’, since it implies that the work done after formulating a hypothesis is intended to decide if the hypothesis is true, when often this is not the case. ‘Articulation’, as Thomas Kuhn calls it, is just as often the practical goal of scientific work.

But creationism is a historical field, regardless of the question if it is an actual field of science. Therefore it might be difficult to find creationist experiments, especially since young-earth creationists (YECs) reject uniformitarianism, or the idea that the present is the key to the past. In the YEC view, the so-called ‘flood geology’, conditions during the flood were so radically different and so influenced by God that normal geological methods cannot describe them. This means that experiments aimed at understanding sedimentology or structural geology better are discarded by YECs. But only, ofcourse, if they seem to falsify the flood geology itself. YECs have no problem accepting experiments that support their position.

Setting aside flood geology, I do think there is a branch of creationism that can be, and has been, tested. It is the kind of creationism that is touched on by the creationist poster boy at the introduction of the video: ‘All we see are variations within the kinds’. It is common for creationists to emphasise the distinction between microevolution and macroevolution, distort its role in evolutionary science, and then claim that one is acceptable while the other isn’t. This particular paradigm, of variation only happening within kinds or basic types, is open to testing and even more to articulation. What is a ‘kind’? If you can find work by a creationist that seeks to define ‘kind’ in a scientific way, you could be on your way to collecting an amazon gift voucher from Godlessons.

In 1982, German creationist Siegfried Scherer co-authored a paper called Hybridisierung und Verwandtschaftsgrade innerhalb der Anatidae – eine systematische und volutionstheoretische Betrachtung in the Journal of Ornithology. This paper tests the idea of ‘basic types’ by researching the known hybrids of ducks. The conclusion is that hybrid ducks exhibit traits that are outside their normal cladistic groups and that therefore, they are not descended from a more primitive duck, but from a species of duck that carried the full variation displayed by recent species.

The point here is not that this paper is the definitive tie-breaker between creationism and evolution, or even that creationism is science. What I would like to stress is that the paradigm of ‘basic types’, ‘kinds’ or ‘created species’ within which ‘microevolution can happen’ is a possible generator of scientifically testable hypotheses. And like any paradigm, results of the tests might reject a part of the paradigm, but most normal research will not result in the paradigm itself being challenged. This is true of all normal science. If Godlessons’ aim is to find test-based creationism, I’ve given him one direction to find it.

Alas, the challenge discriminates between ‘creationists’ and ‘atheists’ (as ridiculous a dichotomy as I ever saw) and it appears I’m not eligible for any prize. Professor Scherer might be, but I don’t think he is going to bother with posting a video. He doesn’t like being associated with creationism too much anyway – as far as I can see Scherer is not a YEC and even distanced himself from the Discovery Institute. It will be very difficult for any youtube creationist to perform hybridisation experiments on ducks, and nobody’s going to do it for one chance at a $50 prize.

My suggestion is probably not the most useful for Godlessons. What Scherer’s work shows, however, is that parts of creationism can behave like science, which might inspire a few youtube talking heads. I hope the challenge achieves that.

I will do anything for scepticism, but I won’t do that

Oct 20

Posted by Jonathan in Philosophy | No Comments

In AronRa’s reaction to my previous blogpost, I was struck by his repeated appeal to the concept of dishonesty. Stating as fact something that could not be proven was dishonest, or more precisely, intellectually dishonest. I thought this was a personal thing, indicating a sense of betrayal by people who make assurances when they know or should know that they cannot prove them. But yesterday I came upon the term in one of Imre Lakatos’ papers, Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes (published in Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, eds. I. Lakatos and A. Musgrave, Cambridge, 1970). This is a long quote from pages 94 and 95, all as in the original text:

Justificationism, that is, the identification of knowledge with proven knowledge, was the dominant tradition in rational thought throughout the ages. Scepticism did not deny justificationism: it only claimed that there was (and could be) no proven knowledge and therefore no knowledge whatsoever. For the sceptics ‘knowledge’ was nothing but an animal belief. Thus justificationist scepticism ridiculed objective thought and opened the door to irrationalism, mysticism, superstition.

This situation explains the enormous effort invested by classical rationalists in trying to save the synthetical a priori principles of intellectualism and by classical empricists in trying to save the certainty of an empirical basis and the validity of inductive inference. For all of them scientific honesty demanded that one assert nothing that is unproven. However, both were defeated: Kantians by non-euclidian geometry and by non-Newtonian physics, and empiricists by the logical impossibility of establishing an empirical basis (as Kantians pointed out, facts cannot prove propositions) and of establishing an inductive logic (no logic can infallibly increase content). It turned out that all theories are equally unprovable.

Philosophers were slow to recognize this, for obvious reasons: classical justificationists feared that once they conceded that theoretical science is unprovable, they would have also to conclude that it is sophistry and illusion, a dishonest fraud.

There lies the source of the problem: as an atheist, I agree that religious transcendent or metaphysical claims are exactly the kind of ‘illusions’ that Lakatos talks about. Honest illusions, perhaps, but quite different from the results of science. However, if the criteria used to judge beliefs as illusions also imply that science is one big hoax, I draw the line. The logic of science should not defeat the science itself.

But that is exactly what AronRa did: the barricades he threw up for religion are so high, that no scientific theory can come through as being knowledge. While the term ‘sceptic’ seems appropriate here, his rigorous defence of the theory of evolution betrays otherwise. It is a contradiction that, thankfully, creationists are too dumb to recognize: that the standards set for a scientific theory by scientists themselves are so stringent, that no scientific theory can meet them. One solution is to apply such standards only to creationism, but if anything is intellectually dishonest, that would be it.

The question of demarcation, or how to delineate scientific knowledge, remains, and is as pressing now as it was in the previous three centuries. It has not been solved. In my opinion, Thomas Kuhn gave the most important contribution in the modern era, but not the final word. Lakatos’ work also deserves more influence than it is usually credited with.

If you listen to different youtube bloggers defending science, you’ll inevitably hear the term ‘scepticism’ and derived words thrown around. I like to call myself a sceptic, but it’s good that Lakatos reminds us of the older use of the term, which is very much related to its modern meaning. Consequently, I must conclude that my scepticism ends somewhere.

Proving atheism through falsification

Oct 7

Posted by Jonathan in Philosophy, Science and Religion | 6 Comments

Has God’s existence been falsified? I would like to think so, but before anyone asks the question, it should be made clear what is meant by the word ‘God’.

Dutch atheist philosopher Herman Philipse included this assertion in his book Het Atheïstisch Manifest (‘The Atheist Manifesto’). Rather than coming up with a definition, Philipse chose to sweep all definitions together and bluntly state that whenever some property had been assigned to God, this property had been falsified. The best conclusion is that there is no God. Explicitly, Philipse disregards the possibility for an immanent God – which makes him one of the few atheists to do so. If you go by the Manifest, belief in an immanent God is compatible with atheism, which presents some interesting dilemmas for atheists who reject Christianity as a whole. There may be a lot more Christians believing in such a God than many of us would consider.

But aside from that, the transcendent God has apparently been swept off the table. Evidence suggests he doesn’t answer to prayer, he did not create life on earth, and he did not take on mortal form to consequently die on the cross. At least, this is how I would interpret atheist videoblogger Aronra, who gives particular weight to the argument that God apparently is unable to make his followers better people, even though this would be a typical biblical theme. The Old Testament is full of believers acting in awful ways, even, *gasp*, worshipping other Gods! “Every claim that religion makes that has been tested has already been proven wrong,” is Aronra’s central message.

Faulty falsification

However, there is a difference between Philipse and Aronra, a subtle one, which betrays the fact that the first is a professor of philosophy while the latter is not. Philipse has his bases covered better, albeit not completely, but we’ll get to him in a moment. First I would like to state what error Aronra has made.

Falsification is a tricky notion. It is intimately tied to Karl Popper, the philosopher of science who considered it the logical criterion for scientific theories. Popper wanted to know how scientific knowledge could be separated from pseudoscience. So he devised the concept of the ‘critical experiment’, the ultimate test of a theory that would falsify it. He acknowledged that it is impossible to really prove a theory right, but it is possible to prove a theory wrong. If a prediction, based on the theory, doesn’t hold true during an experiment, the theory must be discarded. Science is made up of as-of-yet-undiscarded theories, as Popper saw it.

Yet there is a problem with this. It is a practical one: scientists are not constantly in the business of testing their theories. Rather they assume them to be right and continue working with them. When observations prove the theory wrong, it is usually changed rather then completely discarded. A whole school of philosophers made this point extensively based on historical observations, but suffice to say here that Popper was unable to give a logical definition of what scientific knowledge is. This problem has remained, more or less, although most scientists are unaware of it. Popper’s criterion has proven to be very influential, while philosophy has progressed beyond it.

So falsification doesn’t work that well: scientists, in their normal work, don’t apply it as Popper intended. Should we, as atheists, ask differently from theists? I don’t think so. If we, as Aronra seems to do, discard the notion of God using scientific arguments, referring to scientific experiments, we should also allow Christians to amend rather than discard their beliefs. It’s common courtesy at the very least. Looking at history, this is typically what Christians have done: increases in knowledge have led to different notions of what God is supposed to be. We may not like it, but the debate seems to end here.

Faulty theories

But it’s worse. There is a fact that is more damning to Aronra’s falsification of God: scientists don’t just amend falsified theories, they actually continue to use them. There are dozens of models in science that are known to be incorrect, but are still applied. Why? Because they represent the best knowledge that scientists have? I don’t think that is quite the way to put it. Rather, I would say that falsified theories can still be applied within certain limits. Climate models are typical examples of this: they may not place the exact rise in temperature on the exact year, but we know that their prediction that the earth is warming is right. Different descriptions for the behaviour of light fall in the same category: they are accurate for a certain purpose. Scientific models, which are composed of theories, describe the world for a certain purpose and can be used within their own framework.

Coincidence or not, Christianity works in pretty much the same way. It is quite common in Christian doctrine to consider analogies describing God inadequate for his true nature. For example, one might say that God is a shepherd, but this would only be accurate for describing the relation between him and his people. It should not be taken that God looks like a man with a stick. Perhaps there are more biblical stories that originally were meant to describe relations between God and the world, rather than true events; perhaps Genesis is meant as such a story? But that’s neither here nor there.

Different methods, all the same

What I’ve shown is that theology and science sometimes use the same rational methods to construct their knowledge. Both describe their subjects in terms that have actually been proven not to be 100% correct, but both accept that the descriptions are still useful for certain purposes. However, in theology as well as in science, true falsification is possible. Theories have been abandoned and beliefs have been discarded.

This is where Philipse comes in again. Aronra never makes explicit what he considers sufficient ground for falsifying anything, whether it’s a scientific theory or a theological dogma. He constantly goes back to science, so one would assume that falsification is meant in the scientific context. Philipse operates from a broader base. Or at least, by stating that he cannot falsify the existence of an immanent God, he acknowledges that at least philosophical arguments hold water for him, not just scientific observations. Philipse also considers paradoxes to offer sufficient ground for falsification. In other words, if a theological dogma describing God produces a logical paradox, that dogma must be abandoned.

The more rational types of Christianity – like Catholicism and Protestantism – are sensitive to this argument, but it has less impact in traditions like Gnosticism or the Eastern Orthodox church. This might be because as a Western atheist, Philipse is mostly dealing with rationalist, western Christians. His concept of falsification is philosophically broader than that of Aronra, but not so broad as to include all possible theologies. I expect that would be impossible anyway.

Aronra leaps from one claim to another. Sometimes he seems to state that Christianity is damaging to society, which basically means nothing with respect to God’s existence, and sometimes he seems to dispute religion’s metaphysical claims, which cannot logically be falsified by modern science. Atheism, however, is defined by one claim: that there is no personal God, so Aronra really didn’t have to go to these lengths. However, giving proof for that particular claim, especially given that his falsification has failed, is something that Aronra has not done.

Fail.

Apr 22

Posted by Jonathan in Evolution, Geology | No Comments

“Where are all the failures?” This question was asked by Joe Bruno, on newsgroup talk.origins. Bruno, although claiming not to be a creationist, had trouble believing that evolution is true. This kind of opposition to evolution is difficult, because it could be an argument of incredulity disguised as a valid question. The argument of incredulity entails confusion between “I can’t see how that works” and “That cannot work”. The person using the argument applies the limits of his understanding as a measuring stick for what is possible.

Regardless of whether Bruno was genuinely interested in evolution or not, the most simple way to respond is to answer the question. His question was specifically about fossils. The theory of evolution, according to Bruno, assumes that there have been many badly adapted organisms in the past. Mutations, after all, can be beneficial or not. So where are the fossils of all those past organisms with non-advantageous traits? For some reason, he specifically mentioned pterosaurs. Perhaps he had difficulty envisioning hordes of lizard-like beings trying in vainly to fly with failed mockeries of wings, only to fall in the mud, die, and be found as fossils by an intrepid paleontologist who descended from more successful creatures. Well Joe: this never happened, and evolution dictates it should not happen.

Definitions of failure

My first question when trying to formulate an answer was: what is a failure? I could mention many fossils of beings who did not survive, but in order to be called, with at least some justification, an evolutionary failure, the organism must have been particularly unsuccessful in producing offspring. Ideally, this was because of the traits the organism possessed; there is little point in declaring an organism a failure when it died of bad luck. A dinosaur living in Yucatan about 65.5 million years ago had zero chance of surviving the meteor that was going to hit it, but this did not make the dinosaur a failure. Because of this, I will consider those organisms failures when their traits make them less suitable for producing a generation after them. The least fit, if you will.

That still doesn’t quite define the ‘failures’ narrowly enough. In fact, most of this blogpost will be about defining the term. Joe Bruno is obviously not a paleontologist, nor a biologist, and he did not think his term through very well. Because of this, some more work on the definition must be done before I can answer exactly what fossils relevant to Joe’s question have been found.

Extent and type

Are failures groups of organisms or individuals? This is quite significant when fossils are concerned. Most individual organisms don’t fossilize, even if the species is a commonly found fossil. Plankton skeletal remains dissolve or are crushed in a creature’s gut. Bones rot away. Shells fall to pieces through erosion. The chances of finding a specific individual with a specific mutation are small. But perhaps Bruno thought that failure can form entire populations, in which case one should be able to find them, perhaps even repeatedly in the same area. But the question remains open: are the failures individuals within a population or do they form an entire population? I call this the failure’s ‘extent’. If you see problems (or even impossibilities) here, bear with me, because they will be addressed.

The second concern is what a failing property is in itself. How do failures operate? Are they radically different with clear disadvantages, or are they organisms with the same basic traits as their peers, but to a lesser degree? Compare two people who want to go long-distance running: one of them is short and heavy-set, with large muscles and big bones. He doesn’t have a lot of talent for running and will probably never be the best. The other person doesn’t have legs. He cannot run in the normal sense. I will distinguish between these traits by calling the second ‘principal failure’, when the failure is a separate quality that prevents the organism from reproducing most effectively, while the first is a ‘suboptimal failure’, which is a quantative failure, where the organism doesn’t have the trait in as high an amount as other organisms. Creationists sometimes assume that the division I am making here is genetic, but I do not assume any particular method of variation being at the basis of these variants. In a genetic sense, they can all be large or small mutations, or simple parent’s recombination. No assumption in that regard is made, I’m purely referring to how a phenotype’s trait functions in its environment.

The scheme of failures

Combining the two divisions, I came up with a scheme that maps the possible failures one might, perhaps, find as fossils. I gave a name to each variation, resulting in this table:

Failure-Types

I will now discuss each type.

I. The Failed Experiments:

There is a scene in Alien: resurrection where Ripley (played by Sigourney Weaver) walks into a mad scientist’s laboratory. Throughout the room, there are horrible beings on display. The scientist has been trying to clone Ripley and the alien whose DNA she was carrying, or something like that. Point is, he tried again and again to ‘grow’ creatures until he got it right.

The fossil record should be somewhat like this laboratory. Mad experimenting aside, every once in a while you should find the fossil of an organism that was a bad variant. This organism probably didn’t produce offspring, but that didn’t prevent it from living it’s life till the end. However, these beings are not collected by nature and displayed in one room; such fossils are found between the thousands of others that are, as far as we can see, normal. The mutation may also not be visible in the fossil.

The biggest chance of finding such a fossil is when lots of the same species can be found, for example when looking at many microfossils. That is exactly what happens: every now and then, micropaleontologists come upon strange forms that seem to defy the normal morphologies of the species they’re used to. The microfossil seems to belong to one species, but has developed in an odd way. Usually, they will alert a colleague with some ultra-professional claim in the vein of “Hey, look at this goofy one!” and then go on with counting the species they were counting. One microfossil just isn’t enough to base a thesis on.

Dubois' 'Pithecanthropus' bones

One famous macrofossil displaying a principal failure is actually quite a legendary one: Eugene Dubois’ ‘Pithecanthropus’ had a leg bone with an odd growth on it. Surely the creature it belongedto had trouble walking and was in pain. A clear example of a principal failure, since this was a disadvantageous trait.

II. The Monstrous Horde:
Evolution predicts that a population of principal failures should not exist. After all, if a particular trait makes an organism dominate a population, it is clearly not a failing trait. And if a trait is disadvantageous, it won’t spread in the population.

As we would expect from this, there are no fossil populations of failures. This probably hasn’t stopped paleontologists from claiming to have found them – but the reports themselves proved to be failures. The only example I know is A. E. Trueman’s work on the shells of Gryphaea incurva, which he published in 1922. Trueman thought that, in their evolution, these Jurassic oysters became more curved. Eventually, he claimed, the shells became so curved that they could not open anymore, and the species died out. In 1939, Trueman called this a trend “not in harmony with the environment”, suggesting the creatures were evolving themselves to death. This theory was never accepted, mostly because the shells, as research has shown, actually could open.

So the Monstrous Horde has never been found, as evolution suggests. If Bruno expects it should be found, he can be reassured. It never will.

III. The Lesser Beings:
It is actually quite common to find a fossil with a suboptimal trait. In fact, most organisms are not optimally adapted; we can’t all be Olympic decathlon champions with PhD’s. The trouble, however, is recognizing suboptimal beings in a typical sample of fossils. As the term ‘sample’ suggests, it’s a statistical enterprise.

Once you recognize a certain evolutionary trend, as Trueman thought he did with his shells, you can postulate that the descendants are better adapted than the ancestors. Thus, it can be deduced what the optimal trait is – and what is not. At any point in time during the trend, however, there will be statistical variation in the trend; you can test this by gathering the fossils from the same level and then measuring the trait. Apparently, at that moment in time, there were Lesser Beings who did not have the development in the same amount as the others in the population did.

This approach is somewhat politically incorrect, because Lesser Beings suggests these organisms were overall less fit, which some translate to their worth. It should be noted, however, that a fossil is a lousy measure of a creature’s overall fitness. Lesser Beings are measured by one trait. The best that can be concluded is that they existed in one form or another, it is difficult to point to any one fossil.

Examples of Lesser Beings can be found among larger foraminifera, which show a clear trend called nepionic acceleration. Foraminifera grow as a spiralling series of chambers, and nepionic acceleration entails the gradual fusion of the inner chambers into one large chamber. It can be quantified by counting the number of inner chambers. At one point in time, some individual foraminifera will have more and some less chambers, leading to the conclusion that there are some failures known as Lesser Beings among them.

Opabinia regalis

IV. The Discontinued Products:
The final class of failures can be compared to a commercial product that is conceived, put into production, produced for a few years, and then discontinued for some reason or another after initial success. You might think that the Discontinued Products have the same problem as the Monstrous Horde, i.e. that evolution predicts they should not exist, but I think they might have existed. Discontinued Products are possible if you stretch the definition somewhat: I define them as populations that developed for a certain reason, but that were ultimately doomed to failure. This means that the selection pressure changed during their growth. What made them successful to begin with, couldn’t make them last.

Is there a reason to believe Discontinued Products ever existed? Maybe there is. There have been species that were never able to produce a strong lineage of other species or belonged to such a lineage. Take, for example, some of the Burgess Shale species. A species like Opabinia regalis could be regarded as belonging in this class.

In order for Discontinued Products to have existed, there has to be a kind of evolution on the species level, like the ‘species sorting’ proposed by Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould. Evolution may tinker on the species level, putting forth designs and then discarding them when they don’t work in the long run. It’s not a widely accepted model, but I think it holds water, because selection pressures could change as a species develops from one small population to a larger group of multiple populations.

Many more possible examples of Discontinued Products can be mentioned, like early Tetropods with multiple digits (like Ichthyostega and Ventastega), or even whole groups, like Placoderm fish. Once you recognize evolution taking place on higher levels than the gene, it is possible.

Knowledge feedback

With the Discontinued Products, I’ve come to the end of my definitions of evolutionary failures. As I pointed out, all failures except type II (the Monstrous Horde) are probably expected by evolution, and in all cases have I mentioned specific examples. What this means is that evolution gives us a reliable image of the evolution we know from biology, but fossils can also give biologists an idea about how evolution works. There is a feedback process from both fields contributing to the knowledge about the history of life.

Returning to Joe Bruno, I would ask him if this has given him the feeling that he has come to grips somewhat more with evolutionary theory in paleontology. Both the incredulity argument and the lack of knowledge should be removed. Unless he never wanted them removed in the first place, that is.

This does not need debunking!

Apr 18

Posted by Jonathan in Philosophy | No Comments

This video had me fooled. ‘It sounds like AronRa!’ I thought, and it seems like it is the man himself, a debunker of creationism with expertise on taxonomy and paleontology. What I particularly like about AronRa is that he stays away from silly reverse bible-thumping of the sort Thunderfoot engages in.

AronRa’s depiction of a Texan creationist preacher must cause the persons who are parodied to cry foul. “Straw Man!” they are surely thinking. “He is making a straw man argument of what we are truly saying!” A sensitive accusation, since making a straw man is exactly the thing that scientists and other adherents of evolution accuse the creationists of.

However, I don’t think the parody is far off. In fact, to me it looks like, between the lines, AronRa has actually formulated a quite reasonable critique of the scientific worldview. His central message, “I don’t want to believe science is right,” actually touches on a the foundations of epistemology, or the knowledge of knowledge itself.

The video reminded me of a book by Dutch physicist and psychologist, Ewald Vervaet. In 1197, he published his study about faith healer Jomanda. Being a skeptic, Vervaet’s conclusion about her was not remarkable: Jomanda is not actually able to heal anyone through supernatural powers. All supposedly ‘healed’ persons that had been documented were either not ill to begin with (“We never noticed she was blind”, etc.), were effectively being treated by a doctor, or simply did not improve, regardless of Jomanda.

The first half is taken up by this sort of research, a kind of sceptical ‘mopping up’ of myths and half-truths. The second half, however, is about what Jomanda does do: provide people with, as Vervaet calls it, heldere kennis. Literally translated, this means ‘clear knowledge’, but I think the best English translation is ‘inner knowledge’. According to Vervaet, inner knowledge is not produced by interaction with the object we’re supposed to know something about, but esoterically, by some kind of subjective inward journey. People possessing inner knowledge know something because they strongly feel it is true.

Inner knowledge is terribly unreliable compared to scientific knowledge, especially when it claims to be objective. On the other hand, it’s the only way people can claim to learn something about angels, or spirits. Vervaet claims that increased reliance on hard, numerical facts has increased the demand for knowledge that ‘feels right’. Inner knowledge meets that demand.

From an epistemological viewpoint, inner knowledge presents us with an interesting problem: is the rejection of normal criteria for knowledge acceptable, and if so, within what domain? It’s certainly not acceptable to rely on inner knowledge for discovery of scientific facts, as creationists do. The basic creationist assumption, which has never been developed in interaction with nature, is that the biblical story of creation presents a factual account of nature’s history and that the theory evolution is at odds with this account. They can call this a hypothesis, a basic belief, a paradigm, or many other things: it remains a conviction that is fuelled from within. It is inner knowledge.

But how does inner knowledge hold up if you start from an a priori rejection of science, or even logic? Science’s tendency to position itself as a specific, delineated, human enterprise has made such rejection possible. In other words: because it is possible to divide between science and non-science, it is possible to reject science as something that provides knowledge, even if you do drive a car or applaud a rocket as it is being shot into space. Sure, you’re ‘pissing in the fountain of knowledge,’ but from a philosophical point of view, this is not impossible.

Which brings us back to AronRa’s evil twin, who obviously rejects science in such a manner. He is quite frank about why: he doesn’t want to accept it, which is one way to phrase he prefers to resort to inner knowledge. It is very diffcult to find a principal fault in this, since all counterarguments rely on factual, scientific or hard knowledge; all outside the inner realm. And if that just doesn’t feel right, there is considerable epistemological freedom to say “No thanks!”

No, not everyone.

Mar 8

Posted by Jonathan in Creationism, History of Science | No Comments

A frequent argument made by creationists is that in the past, everyone was a creationist. This is not true; apart from the fact that creationism as we know it now is a recent invention, species being related has in antiquity and medieval times been accepted, like barnacle geese being related to…well, barnacles. And then there were, according to T-rex, giraffes.

Is climate change denialism comparable to creationism?

Feb 24

Posted by Jonathan in Creationism, Philosophy | 3 Comments

Why would anyone ask? Well, the question struck me after looking at some creation-evolution and climate change debates on youtube. The atheist youtubers, and I’m a fan of some, are generally supportive of mainstream science and therefore tend to choose sides in these matters quickly. But are both matters clear-cut cases of misguided laypersons and hidden agendas versus level-headed scientific knowledge? In this blogpost I want to make a short assessment of how the debates and debaters compare. The danger, ofcourse, is that either side is offended; denialists are most likely to take exception to called as scientifically backward as creationists. However, may aim is not to give any side a rhetorical weapon, but rather to take a bird’s eye view of the debates. I am, however, writing from the viewpoint of what I regard as accepted science.

Two kinds of dissent
The reason for comparing denialism and creationism in the first place is because of the fact that both go against scientific consensus. The observation that climate is changing and that greenhouse gases are to blame has become the paradigm of climate science in the last decades, and evolution has been biology’s paradigm for at least 150 years, especially considering the fact that before Darwin published the Origin of Species, there already was a strong sentiment for any mechanism that could explain why different species would be related.

The time difference here illustrates that denialism can be expected to have a stronger foothold within the scientific community. The climate paradigm probably hasn’t been around long enough to be as dominant as evolution. This seems to be confirmed by the fact that climate deniers can find sympathizers within accepted scientific institutions; an indication that denialism hasn’t separated itself completely from the scientific community. Creationism, however, has become a separate community, with its own magazines, institutions and conferences. There is even a case of a creationist, Andrew Snelling, having to maintain two ‘scientific identities’ to participate in the different communities. Not accepting evolution has made it almost impossible to communicate with life or earth scientists, an observation Snelling easily confirms, without realizing how indicative this is of the robustness of evolution as a paradigm.

Popular sciences
So the both denialism and creationism behave like paradigm-dissenting fields, albeit in different phases of development. A second similarity is how they relate to professional science. Michael Ruse, in his book The Evolution-Creation Struggle, makes a distinction between pseudoscience, popular science and professional science. I find these classes useful here, because both creationism and denialism seem to want to operate purely on the level of popular science. There really are very few scientific papers that debate the physical basis of the climate paradigm; the often quoted Science article by Naomi Oreskes has for the largest part held up to scrutiny. There is no true ‘denialist research program’; the closest some papers come is by suggesting that factors like solar influence could have yet-unknown effects or that their variability is larger than previously thought. There are no research papers presenting evidence that greenhouse gases are not currently warming the climate.

It might make sense to postulate that there is a sceptical rather than a denialist movement within professional science; a group of scientists that, being unable to convincingly falsify the accepted theories of climate science, is tending to a different paradigm and that will either disappear when the scientists do not find successors, form a new community or abandon its position and be subsumed by the largest community. Only the second option leads to a true program of research that could actually contain the ideas of the climate denialists.

Currently, denialism is not formulated coherently enough to produce a paradigm. Some denialists say the climate isn’t warming. Others say it is, but that solar influence is the cause for it. Some say the IPCC reports are unreliable because they are manipulated to make it look like the climate is changing, others say the reports do not convincingly argue the climate is changing. These matters, however, do not matter in popular science, which is where denialism finds its arena. Denialist popular media expressions are easy to find. Rather than bring forward a general argument about climate, the documentaries, articles, blogs and videos about denialism try to promote a general sentiment that ‘the science is not trustworthy’. Such a message does not require internal coherence. In fact, incoherence makes the message even more immune to scientific arguments, because they’re so difficult to bring in line with the exacting manner in which scientists formulate their conclusions.

Creationism is also largely sold through popular media. My impression is that the selling of DVDs has become the primary way to distribute information for creationists (apart from the internet), more than books . Creationism is not making a serious effort to gain a foothold in mainstream science. Related to its development as a community, creationism has been able to formulate its own research questions, like Siegfried Scherer’s theories about the basic ‘kinds’ of ducks, or William Dembski’s attempt to formulate specified complexity as a recognizable phenomenon in nature. However, these efforts have not been followed through as is necessary for a true research program. Creationists don’t seem to be interested in spending their considerable funds that way. Kent Hovind has something he calls a ‘theory’, but he doesn’t dream of testing or even applying it. Rather than not being able to support a research community, creationism doesn’t want to do so in the first place, for reasons I will explain later. Like denialism, creationism has some coherency problems, but creationists are very effective at formulating a common ground that they all agree on. The typical creationist magazine requires commitment to a series of viewpoints, indicating that creationists know they share enough common ground to communicate and work out differences within a common paradigm. Major groups of creationists – young earthers, old earthers and ID theorists, can be recognized both by outsiders and insiders. The terms of communication and relationships within creationism are pretty much clear to everyone.

Politics
So the similarities between denialists and creationists in producing research results are only superficially similar; neither go far beyond producing popular science, but the particulars are different. Their goals, however, fit well to their ways of spreading information. Both denialism and creationism have political goals that require support from a significant number of non-scientists. Climate denialism tries to reduce support for climate mitigation measures. Creationism tries to limit the teaching of evolution in schools.

These political goals trump the wish to add to the body of scientific knowledge. This could be why both creationists and denialists frequently try to dissuade people from concerning themselves with science at all, when they try to make large groups of scientists suspect. The IPCC is portrayed as something bordering on a conspiring group, that tries to make working impossible for scientists who do not agree with ‘alarmist’ conclusions. Creationists accuse scientists accepting evolution of clinging on to it like a religion and not acknowledging a supposed ‘controversy’. The groups have nothing to gain by continuing research, since their minds about their political goals are pretty much made up. This hierarchy of politics and popular science works to the disadvantage of any development of their scientific communities. In the case of climate change denialism, this disadvantage is less pronounced, because their political goals are better served by having a respected group of scientists serve it. In the end, politicians will need some kind of experts to refer to and the large-scale goals of climate denialism make shifting the public trust from, for example, the IPCC, to other experts, a more viable strategy.

Creationism, on the other hand, is mainly held up for religious groups and to reassure their worldviews. Small-scale goals, like the school curriculum, hardly necessitate large scientific institutions or a foothold in major universities. Creationism exists for people who are predisposed for creationism, but denialism exists for a range of goals beyond the immediate concerns of its adherents.

The direction of debates
So I see broad similarities in three aspects: dissent from the paradigm, level of professional science and political goals. Do these similarities ensure a similar behaviour of the adherents? This would be expected. One thing I would look for is a general disdain for scientific references; neither group can use them to its advantage and therefore has to resort to ‘quote mining’ and references in popular science. Another thing that I think will happen is that denialism is going to organize itself more, possibly around a think tank or a media publication like a magazine or website. From such a central point of communication, the adherents can agree on common ground and their own principal points of dissent. The latter would also serve to practice internal communication within the group. Depending on the professionalism such a group is able to bring forward, they might produce a coherent research program that will eventually be able to contribute to science. This also depends on how the modern climate science paradigm deals with its own problems.

Creationism will probably not contribute to science in the future. Intelligent Design is more indicative of a retreating paradigm than a mature one, because it tends to reformulate itself as a philosophical position that can coexist with any kind of scientific experiment or observation. The soft version of Intelligent Design isn’t really different from untestable guided evolution and this does not, to most scientists, represent a different paradigm, because the rules for doing research don’t change.

Debates with climate change deniers are similar to debates with creationists in terms of literature used by the denialists. The difference, at the moment, is in the background from the denialists: they are unlikely to reason from a completely different, non-negotiable viewpoint, because they don’t have a paradigm. My conclusion is that this is mainly because of the phase that climate change denialism is in its development, rather than a true consequence of scientific credibility.

An anchor for Genesis

Jan 17

Posted by Jonathan in Faith and Religion, Geology, Science and Religion | No Comments

A few days ago I met someone who told me something remarkable: the bible, he said, was an accurate description of the way life on earth had actually developed. My first gut reaction was: “That can’t be right”.

Assuming he was talking about the book of Genesis and the order in which the different groups of animals and the plants appear, I did not recall any similarity to the order with which organisms first appear in the fossil record. In fact, the two creation stories (and yes, there are two) can be interpreted with so much ambiguity that one has a lot of elbow room when projecting them on the real world. Having read Robin Lane Fox’s The Unauthorized Biography, I am also wary of a claim that these creation stories contain any singular message, since they contradict each other.

Still I was wondering what a comparison between chapter 1 of Genesis and the fossil record would bring. That would be the first story of creation, since any attempt to make such a comparison with the second story seems doomed even as an intellectual exercise. If you start reading from the second half of Genesis 2:4, you’ll see what I mean.

The creation in six days however, is from the viewpoint of a geological timescale very ripe for comparison. The stepwise introduction of groups is not unlike the way my geological time table (by Haq and Van Eysinga) places the appearance of each clade in its respective period. Of course the big difference lies in the process of evolution: while the bible does not describe what the earliest animals and plants looked like, the earliest members of some groups were hardly recognizable as such. The first fish did not look like your typical salmon.

The dimension of time is also clearly different; modern life is about 3,8 billion years in the making, but recognized groups did not appear at a steady pace. According to the creation story, it took ‘days’ and at a steady rate, almost staccato.

But let’s, for the sake of the exercise, ignore all such issues and see if the authors of the bible really were so inspired that they basically ordered things correctly.

First come the plants, in Genesis 1:11. But not just any plant: the word ‘seed’ always comes back, no matter what translation I bother to read. Using seeds for procreation is, however, a fairly advanced adaptation for plants. The first plants on land used spores, like ferns. That was of course after there had already been a lot of development in marine plants and algae, who did not bear seeds.

Fossil plant remains from the Carboniferous. Scale: width is about 6 cm.

Were the first organisms plants? No, certainly not. Even stretching of what a ‘plant’ is as far as it will go, the first organisms were not advanced enough to be called a plant. There is no word for a prokaryote in the bible.

Disregarding the peculiar appearance of stars after plants, the next living beings to appear in Creation are the creatures of the sea and the birds. While we all know that the oldest fossils are those from marine creatures, birds are another matter entirely. Birds descend from dinosaurs, so there were creatures walking around before any bird took to the air.

Genesis, however, describes how God creates the animals that crawl and the cattle next. Describing cattle as a relatively recent addition to creation is a safe bet, but the bible did get right that the groups of plants, aquatic beings and birds were firmly in place before animals were domesticated.

Going over it, I think Genesis scores rather badly on biostratigraphy. I cannot see how anyone would mutilate this story to such a degree that it is taken to be in relative accordance with what we know from fossils. To shoehorn Genesis into science takes more interpretation than the story can bear.

But there is a very serious reason why the comparison between Genesis and the actual history of nature is important to some Christians, and I think this reason can say something about atheism as well. By recognizing the creation story in nature, Genesis becomes ‘anchored’ in the real world. By an ‘anchor’ for religion, I mean a tangible, universally identifiable thing that gives the reassurance that a certain kind of faith is not just a personal illusion. A relic is a different kind of anchor, but it basically does the same thing: one can point to it and say, that object, that thing, is the bridge between what I believe in and the material world. Isn’t it spiritually immensely fulfilling if all of nature can have such purpose?

The relevance to atheism is this: atheists often deny to have any kind of faith, but I do think they look for anchors for what they believe in. After all, no atheist is defined just by what (s)he doesn’t believe in. Atheism may be reactionary, it is not purely negative or negating, despite the word beginning with an ‘A’.

What else can the atheists’ anchor be, other than science itself?