More on the Religion of Science July 31, 2008

Science is fast becoming a religion, and a militant one at that.  We talked earlier about science’s broad acceptance of certain principles of global warming as Articles of Faith.  What I said in that post was: look, I accept that those principles may be true.  I even accept that they are probably true.  What I cannot figure out is why the scientific community would shout down those with the opposite opinion, and even those with opposing data.  This vilification of unbelievers — the creation, essentially, of a heretic class — runs counter to the principles of real science.

Similarly vilified among scientists are those in their ranks who choose to believe in God.  I recently read my friend Henry Eyring’s excellent biography of his grandfather, the great theoretical chemist of the same name.  Henry suggests, as many others have before him, that his grandfather’s puzzling failure to receive the Nobel Prize (for his groundbreaking Absolute Rate Theory, a theory on which several Nobel-winning chemists have based their work) was largely because of his religious convictions.

PZ Myers, a biologist at the University of Minnesota at Morris, is a crusader for science against religion.  Perhaps it is because he is at the University of Minnesota at Morris, but in any case Myers has a knack for self-promotion: he recently posted on his blog what he calls the “Great Desecration Caper,” in which he pierces a communion wafer with a rusty nail (acerbically noting, “I hope Jesus’ tetanus shots are up to date”) and throws it in the trash with coffee grounds and a banana peel.  The nail also pierces a copy of the Quran and Richard Dawkins’ “The God Delusion.”  Then he took a picture and posted it on his blog.

Myers is ecstatic.  He wrote, “Nothing must be held sacred.  God is not great, Jesus is not your Lord, you are not disciples of any charismatic prophet.”  He warns us that religion is dangerous, and breeds hatred and idiocy.  The only truth, according to Myers, is in looking at the world with “fresh eyes and a questioning mind.”

Well.  I can’t tell you how invigorated I am to have a 51-year-old associate professor of biology at the University of Minnesota – Morris (school motto: “I’d expound on this concept more, but my lips are frozen together!”) explain all of this to me.

Francis Collins, who once headed up the Human Genome Project, wrote a book called “The Language of God,” in which he attempts to reconcile his belief in God with his knowledge of science.  Scientific American’s review of the book features the following: “What sounds like a harmless metaphor can restrict the intellectual bravado that is essential to science. ‘In my view,’ Collins goes on to say, ‘DNA sequence alone, even if accompanied by a vast trove of data on biological function, will never explain certain special human attributes, such as the knowledge of the Moral Law and the universal search for God.’ Evolutionary explanations have been proffered for both these phenomena. Whether they are right or wrong is not a matter of belief but a question to be approached scientifically. The idea of an apartheid of two separate but equal metaphysics may work as a psychological coping mechanism, a way for a believer to get through a day at the lab. But theism and materialism don’t stand on equal footings. The assumption of materialism is fundamental to science.” (My italics.)

I want to focus for a minute on the italicized portion above, because I think it reveals an important fact about the arguments science is making against religion.  If we assume that the reviewer speaks broadly for the scientific community with that statement, we have a real problem: science is committing a logical fallacy in arguing against religion.

The fallacy is that of the circular argument, also known as “begging the question” or “petitio principii.”  In it, the proposition to be proved (in this case, that theism is an inferior knowledge to materialism) is assumed implicitly or explicitly in one or more of the premises.

The typical structure of the circular argument is as follows:

-   p implies q

-   suppose p

-   therefore q

A simple example would be this: “The study of literature is worthwhile because literature repays close reading,” which sounds okay until you realize that the statement could be rephrased as “The study of literature is worthwhile because literature is a worthwhile subject.”

The structure of Scientific American’s argument can be reduced to the following tautology: “Materialism is a superior way of knowing, because theism and materialism don’t stand on equal footings.”  In other words, it’s better because it’s better.

Oh.  Now I get it.

This hole in the collective logic has given rise to a blindness, I think, to other holes: the scientific community pokes fun at religion’s reverence for the miraculous, then requires its own miracles which need a lot of explaining.  In Oxford chemist Peter Atkins’ wonderful book “The Creation,” he goes back to the beginning.  In a time before time, he says, there was nothing.  Less than nothing, in fact.  He says it was an “absolute void, not merely empty space.”  No carbon, no helium, no matter of any kind.  He borrows from Genesis 1:2 and suggests that “the universe was without form, and void.”  Eventually, of course, stuff appears, and Atkins’ explanation is that “by chance, there was a fluctuation.”

A fluctuation.  In nothing.  I’m reminded of the old joke about the Big Bang: “In the beginning there was nothing.  Which exploded.”

Now, I’m not saying he’s wrong.  I’m really not.  I’m on record as fundamentally believing in evolution.  I’m absolutely not a creationist.  All I’m saying is: there’s a hole there.  This needs explaining.  It’s a little premature to suggest that all the answers are there, when a huge part of the answer is missing.

Finally: one of science’s (and more generally, mankind’s) arguments against religion is simply that it has produced bad results.  People kill each other in the name of religion, so we’d be better off without it.

There is some merit to this argument, though it involves a weighing of good and bad results that could take us forever to calculate.  But the fallacy in this argument is that of the non sequitur (Latin for “it does not follow”).

The absolutely true statement that religion has been the cause of much suffering in the world does not show that the suffering would not have arisen from another origin, if religion were not around.  It is clearly possible, as we see in Darfur right now, that ethnicity or tribalism (as we saw in Rwanda) or jealousy over resources or any number of other factors could have produced the same results as we have seen (or worse).  A scientific concern for the diversity of all life could lead to vegans blowing up the Safeway meat department using the tortured logic that drives religious nutjobs to do the same to abortion clinics.

Scientists and religionists will need to get comfortable, I think, with this critical notion: religion will never be proveably false, just as science will never be proveably false.  It is silly to enter into arguments that cannot ultimately be won.

To Whom Should we be Listening to Solve the World’s Problems? July 4, 2008

We’re hearing a lot these days from climatologists.  They are telling us that global warming is the world’s largest problem.

Meanwhile, other scientists think it’s malnutrition, or the harvesting of the rain forests, or the lack of safe drinking water, or…

The list is long.

Which branch of science should we look towards to help us decide which of these problems is the most important of all?  None of them, it turns out.  We need to listen to the economists.

Economics is a science of choices, really.  The job of the economist is to assess impacts.  And it turns out that a number of economists have now begun to turn their attention toward these problems of science.  The problem is a little different from the economist’s viewpoint: he doesn’t really assess the science — he simply determines what impact a dollar spent to help solve one problem would have, versus a dollar spent to help solve another.  It’s not just an evaluation of how big the problem is — it’s an assessment of how much impact we can have toward solving the problem, of how effective a dollar spent here can be, versus a dollar spent there.

Economist Bjorn Lundberg has taken a lot of well-deserved hits for his book The Skeptical Environmentalist because he overstepped his bounds and spent a lot of time assessing environmental science.  Unfortunately, that has caused too many people to ignore his fundamental premise: that global warming is one of our most intractable problems, and perhaps therefore it is one on which our efforts do us the least good.  When he has his head on straight, he admits that global warming is a huge problem, and it’s an important one.  It’s just that we can do a lot more good with a lot less money if we focus elsewhere.

The question isn’t: what’s a big problem?  It’s: How can we best apply scarce resources to alleviate suffering?

A lot of economists agree on this way of thinking.  The 2004 Copenhagen Consensus was a “dream team” of economists set to the task of assessing the solutions to our world’s biggest problems and producing a prioritized list.  The economists, including Lundberg and eight others (three of them Nobel laureates), produced the following list:

1. Controlling HIV/AIDS
2. Providing micronutrients (iron, zinc, etc.) to malnourished populations
3. Liberalizing trade to even out world prosperity
4. Control of malaria
5. Development of new agricultural technology
6. Improved water delivery and sanitation technologies
7. Reduced governmental corruption
8. Lowered barriers to migration for skilled workers
9. Improved infant and child nutrition
10. Scaled-up basic health services
11. Guest-worker programs for the unskilled
12. Climate control measures (carbon taxes, Kyoto protocol, etc.)

Note that this is not a prioritization of the world’s biggest problems.  It’s an assessment of how effective we can be in solving important problems.  Malaria, for example, can be hugely limited in the world through the wide-scale use of treated mosquito netting, each of which costs a couple of bucks.  Tremendous suffering could be alleviated very cheaply.

Meanwhile, hundreds of billions of dollars spent toward implementing the Kyoto Protocols would simply move the point in time when a coastal family in Bangladesh has their home flooded from 2100… all the way to 2106.  It’s not that it’s not a huge problem.  It’s that we’re not very effective (at least with what we know currently) at solving it.  More suffering can be alleviated if we focus elsewhere.

Isn’t this the way we should be thinking about our problems?

How Baking Soda May Save the Environment June 28, 2008

Some of you, my friends, don’t think science is super-interesting.  But you’re wrong.  Human beings are endlessly inventive, and given a good reason (and the promise of enough money in the bargain), smart people will do the most interesting things.

Take, for example, Austin-based Skyonics Corporation.

Somebody at Skyonics is a really creative chemist, because they looked at the by-products of the world’s biggest producers of carbon dioxide (the chief culprit in global warming) and, instead of seeing a mass of pollutants, thought: Hey, I could freshen my refrigerator with that stuff.

You see, (to vastly simplify it) if you add salt and water to carbon dioxide, it produces sodium bicarbonate (baking soda), hydrogen and chlorine.  Seriously.  Totally usable baking soda.  You could brush your teeth with it.

They are in the process of inventing a system called Skymine that does the following:

• First, it captures the emissions of a power plant (and power plants produce 21% more carbon dioxide than all the cars in the world), and directs them into two 50-foot long trailers.
• It uses the heat from the emissions to power the process, so there is no additional energy draw to run their process.
• In the heat-conversion process, toxic chemicals like mercury, sulfur dioxide and hydrogen oxide separate from the rest of the emissions.  Skymine stores these chemicals for later safe disposal.  What’s left is primarily carbon dioxide.
• The carbon dioxide then enters a series of capture chambers into which sodium hydroxide (salt and water) is injected.  This results in a chemical reaction that leaves behind baking soda, hydrogen and chlorine.  The hydrogen and chlorine are separated and stored apart from the baking soda for later sale or disposal.

The process actually extracts between 85% and 97% of the harmful stuff from flue gasses, so it’s pretty effective.  Right now it is projected to cost about the same ($400 million) as the scrubbers that the power plants already have to remove mercury and smog chemicals from their exhaust streams, so it should be fairly economical, in the grand scheme of things.

The biggest problem may be that, if this goes into broad production, the resulting sodium bicarbonate may well outstrip the world’s demand for the stuff.  The upside could be cleaner, whiter teeth, fresh refrigerators, reduced carpet smells, and shiny silverware.

Oh, and no real-life rerun of Waterworld.  I hated that show the first time.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love $4.00 Gas June 11, 2008

…or more like $5.00 gas, in my neighborhood.

The methodology is simple: remind yourself that if gas falls back down to $1.50, we’ll never solve an incredibly pressing national security and environmental problem.

The limitations of fuel cell cars and my current new fav, the Air Car, don’t loom so large when I’m forking out $80 to fill my tank.  Market forces at work.

As an aside: I’m loving the innovation at car companies recently.  BMW is now testing a car that doesn’t have a metal “skin”; rather, it uses a neoprene fabric.  The idea is that the metal skin of a car actually does nothing to improve safety (that’s all in the frame), it’s heavy and therefore wastes fuel, and it gets dents and dings that roughen the appearance over time.

The fabric-framed car (dubbed the BMW Gina) employs a stretchy fabric over the frame.  It’s lightweight and fuel-efficient, and it you don’t like the look of your current skin, you buy a new one and stretch it over the frame in about two hours.

I actually don’t like the car very much, but I love the thought process behind it.

See it here:

(For the title of this post, a tip of the cap to Peter Sellers’ Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.)

Update on Fuel Crisis Post: The Air Car June 9, 2008

Just thought you all might enjoy this look at what’s possible.  Thanks to Dennis Phillips for pointing this out to me.

Inconvenient Science June 8, 2008

Both of our presidential candidates agree on global warming:  Senator Obama states that the notion that human use of fossil fuels is leading us toward catastrophe is “scientifically certain.”  Senator McCain is among the most environmentally aware of capitol Republicans, and he wonders whether our “government is equal to the challenge.”

This isn’t going to be a post that agrees with them.  It’s also not going to be a post that disagrees (except with Obama’s notion that it’s all so certain).  It’s going to be a post about the new religion of science, and how that religion deals with heretics.

Let me begin by stating my position on global warming: It seems patently obvious to me that pumping carbon emissions (or, really, almost anything else) into the atmosphere isn’t a good thing, just as filling landfills with plastics or styrofoam that won’t biodegrade is intuitively stupid.  The globe is warming, we may have something to do with it, and we might even be a proximate cause.  We should be taking serious steps toward reducing our footprint on the earth.  I am, fundamentally and at my core, an environmentalist.

But I also like people to tell the truth about things.  Some things that are at least as true as the warnings about carbon emissions:

1.  We cannot be certain what effect our carbon emissions are having.  We can’t possibly know: this is a science that is fundamentally about computer models, and our best models cannot even predict the path of a single relatively local event, a hurricane that is already in progress.  It’s quite a stretch to think that we can predict a more complicated worldwide result many years into the future with any degree of accuracy.  The doomsday predictions posit a massive chain of conditional probabilities that make them all but useless.

2.  We don’t know enough about our climate’s natural variability to be able to assert, as “scientifically certain,” that we are anything more than a minor cause of the current climate change.  For just one example: It was as hot or hotter in the Arctic in the 1940s.  For another: the much-discussed Greenland ice sheet is actually growing lately.  Glacier science overall, in fact, is so new that we don’t know as much about glaciers as you might think.  We’re just learning about them.

3.  While it’s true that Alpine glaciers have been retreating more rapidly in the past 20 years, those glaciers have been retreating since the 19th century, and they were advancing for centuries before that.

4.  We don’t really know about the effect of tons of things other than greenhouse gases on global warming: sunspots appear to have a huge effect, for example (and paradoxically, some researchers last week projected that we are entering an 11-year phase of very low sunspot activity that may cool the earth quite a bit).  Water is 90+% of greenhouse gas.

5.  Is is not even a certainty that global warming is a bad thing for species on the planet, nor is it necessarily bad for humans.  Plant and animal diversity thrives in warm climates; as the earth has warmed over the last several decades, so have harvest yields on the world’s farms.  You think global food supplies are a problem now?  They’d be at least 15% worse if the earth were not experiencing a warming trend.

This does not mean that we should not husband our natural resources very carefully.  It doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t enact policies to slow carbon emissions.  It definitely doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t reduce our dependence on a resource (oil) whose most abundant reserves exist in unstable nations who are not necessarily our friends.  (At minimum, our oil dependency is a dangerous addiction: we fund our worst enemies, we pollute the environment, and we allow ourselves to be held as economic hostages.)

No, what it means is: there’s a lot we don’t know, and it’s not helpful to pretend that we do.  It’s particularly not helpful to shout down opposing viewpoints in an argument that is fundamentally about the interpretation of data, and that is exactly what we are doing.

My issue here is represented by a recent Newsweek article that declares the global warming debate over.  It’s a widely-held opinion: Stanford climatologist Stephen Schneider says not only that there is really no legitimate opposing view to the notion that man-made carbon emissions drive global warming, but also that to suggest or support otherwise is “irresponsible.”  At the Chatauqua Institute last month, Al Gore reiterated the same point, several times stating that there is no science on the other side.  If you hear differently, according to Gore, you’re being duped.  The implication is that this is akin to tobacco pseudoscience: whoever suggests something other than the norm is in the pocket of the oil companies.

Only this is nonsense, and more pointedly, it doesn’t sound like science at all.  Where, in genuine science, do we attempt to squelch debate?  We don’t.  Science is about continuing to question, about always looking for more and better data, always seeking only what is true.  Special relativity can be questioned, Newton’s laws of motion can be improved.  But somehow an assertion about the cause of global warming can’t?

Schneider has a formidable opponent in MIT’s Alfred P. Sloan professor of meteorology Richard Lindzen, who called Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth “shrill alarmism,” while suggesting that we simply do not know the extent of humanity’s contribution to global warming.

Predictably, Lindzen has been vilified.  Amazingly, Laurie David, whose scientific credentials amount to being the wife of comedy writer Larry David, had the gall to brand Lindzen (I remind you: a professor at MIT) “a shill.”

Mrs. David can feel comfortable in that accusation because this has stopped being science — it’s a religion now, and human beings as a primary cause of global warming is an unassailable tenet of that religion.  One of the greatest scientists of our generation, theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson, bemoans this:

“There is a worldwide secular religion which we may call environmentalism, holding that we are stewards of the earth, that despoiling the planet with waste products of our luxurious living is a sin, and that the path of righteousness is to live as frugally as possible.

The ethics of environmentalism are being taught to children in kindergartens, schools, and colleges all over the world.

Environmentalism has replaced socialism as the leading secular religion. And the ethics of environmentalism are fundamentally sound. Scientists and economists can agree with Buddhist monks and Christian activists that ruthless destruction of natural habitats is evil and careful preservation of birds and butterflies is good.

The worldwide community of environmentalists — most of whom are not scientists — holds the moral high ground, and is guiding human societies toward a hopeful future. Environmentalism, as a religion of hope and respect for nature, is here to stay. This is a religion that we can all share, whether or not we believe that global warming is harmful.

Unfortunately, some members of the environmental movement have also adopted as an article of faith the belief that global warming is the greatest threat to the ecology of our planet. That is one reason why the arguments about global warming have become bitter and passionate.

Much of the public has come to believe that anyone who is skeptical about the dangers of global warming is an enemy of the environment. The skeptics now have the difficult task of convincing the public that the opposite is true.

Many of the skeptics are passionate environmentalists. They are horrified to see the obsession with global warming distracting public attention from what they see as more serious and more immediate dangers to the planet, including problems of nuclear weaponry, environmental degradation, and social injustice.

Whether they turn out to be right or wrong, their arguments on these issues deserve to be heard.”

So.  We can agree on a lot.  It is probably useless to debate the precise extent of global warming: how high the seas will rise, when catastrophe will occur.  The truth is, we are in a warming trend (whatever the reason), and it’s a big deal.

What’s the danger, then, in being shrill?  Well…

I’ve been asked, “What if all the scientists are right?”  It’s a good question.  But it is asked as though the opposing question (“What if they’re wrong?) has no value, and yet it does.  On the one hand, we could under-respond to a serious issue.  On the other, we could respond to the wrong stimuli, and fail to solve our most pressing problems while we’re throwing all of our energies at the wrong one.

The reason it’s important to keep this in the realm of science is that simple: It’s not important to be politically correct, it’s important to be right.  We need to decide what our most important issues are, and respond appropriately.  Maybe our contribution to global warming is the biggest issue of all.  Maybe it’s the rise of terrorist threats throughout the world.  Maybe it’s the lack of clean water.

We won’t know what it is as long as Gaian priests continue to stifle debate (and science!) on their pet issue.