Fear and Facination

Take away the supernatural and what remains is the unnatural – G.K. Chesterton

 It has become widely accepted that supernatural beliefs and science are mutually exclusive. This is usually portrayed as a debate between religion and science, but I think the problem runs much deeper than that.  What we are really looking at is a debate between naturalism and supernaturalism.  This can be seen in the Intelligent Design debate.  Supporters of that theory will often leave religion out of the picture all together, and yet many scientists come down hard on this theory simply because it posits a supernatural explanation for the world around us.  Science seems to be scared of the supernatural.  Why is this?

Philosophical Reasons

Many scientist hold to a philosophy known as Naturalism.  Naturalism says that only 'natural' things, or things that are a part of nature, or real.  They say that  reality only consists of things that are controlled by and obey the laws of nature.  If there is anything outside of nature, they maintain that it cannot act on nature or interfere with the laws of nature.  They see the goal of science as being the discovery of these laws.  I am not going to enter into a critique of Naturalism here, except to point out that part of the reason many scientists cannot stomach the idea of the supernatural existing has nothing to do with what they have observed in their lab and much to do with what they believe.

When doing scientific study, it is essential to approach your data under the assumption that these laws of nature exist.  If they did not exist there would be not point in searching for them, but the assumption that they  exist does not lead to the conclusion that they cannot be broken.  In fact, supernaturalism also requires that these laws exist, since a law of nature cannot be 'broken' unless it is first understood to exist.

However, many scientists will not believe that it is possible for these laws to be affected by sources outside of nature (like God or angels) since they claim that we destroy the reason for science in the first place.  If we are looking for the laws that rule nature, we need to assume that they are there and we need to assume that they cannot be changed or broken on the whim of a supernatural being, otherwise what is the point of looking for them? Many scientists feel it is necessary to exclude the supernatural from the equation since they feel that including it would destroy the basis of science.

I would like to turn that thought on its head.  The reason a supernaturalist looks for laws of nature to exist is that he believes those laws were put in place and designed by a Lawgiver.  He assumes they exist and so goes looking for them.  The fact that they can occasionally be 'interfered' with does not matter, because the normal course of things is that the Lawgiver will work through his laws.  For the supernaturalist, there is no reason to look for laws (except for the pragmatic reason that 'they work')  unless there is a Lawgiver who put those laws in place.  Thus, I think that a supernaturalist has a much stronger motivation for seeking out the laws of nature since he assumes that a Lawgiver will make laws whereas there is no logical reason for assuming that 'nature' will create laws. Of course, the supernaturalist scientist has to guard against laziness (i.e. too quickly attributing something to the supernatural without seeking out natural causes), but then again a naturalist scientist has his own dangers to watch out for in the form of excluding possible explanations for a phenomenon, simply because they don't fit into his conception of natural events.

Historical Reasons

Historically the Catholic church in the middle ages (and even into the more modern era in places like Spain and Portugal)  had discouraged any deviation from official church teachings, which included matters of science.  This led to conflict between the church and some of the scientists of that age and this historical conflict is still alive in the memories of some scientists.  Since the church often used either its authority or else supernatural explanations as a way of dismissing what scientists were saying, many of those in science have a deep suspicion of the church and its teachings on supernaturalism.

Of course, this is to forget that the vast majority of the great scientists that laid the foundations of modern science and opened up these doors for us, were supernaturalists themselves.  Great men like Kepler, Newton, Pascal, and many others, firmly believed in the supernatural and were part of the church.  Obviously these two things can be used to hinder science, but just as obviously they do not necessarily need to do so.

Religious Reasons

We don't like to admit that there might be something beyond our understanding and compression out there, especially if this Being says that he is in control of us.  We like to be in control.  We like to think that we can figure everything out eventually.  We like to think that this world can be fit into our little minds.  The conception of a supernatural being grates on our pride and self-reliance and is a little bit scary.  People get angry if you suggest that there is a God out there that holds them accountable for their actions, because we want to be in control and we want to have the power and we to be able to 'do what we want'.  The fact that even our scientific endeavors might be subject to the will of a greater being is more than many scientists can stomach. 

There isn't much to be said on this point aside from pointing out the obvious contradiction between the representation of science as a system based only on cold hard facts, and the fact that there is so often such a powerful emotional and antagonistic response by scientists to the idea of a power greater than themselves. In the end we have to make a choice.  Do we choose to only believe what we can observe with our senses and deny the possibility of anything greater than nature existing, or are we willing to explore the idea even if it means putting ourselves in position of humility and being under the control of God?

Global Warming Part I: The Science?

This has been rattling around in my head for some time now, but as I was writing this up I found I had far too much to say for one post and so I've broken this down into a multi-part series. Part I is about the science behind the whole Global Warming fad.

Global warming has become the hot topic of the day. It seems hardly a day goes by that we don't hear something about it in the news and politicians are going on and on about it and what we should do about it. Usually this takes the form of regulating carbon emissions and many countries and states have already put in place restrictions on these emissions. A lot of people are very worried about global warming and what it will do to us all, so much so that a group of politicians got together and decided to enact something call the Kyoto Protocol which requires assenting nations to greatly reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. But what exactly is all the hype about? Should we really be getting all worked up about global warming and be spending trillions of dollars in an attempt to curb it? I think not. Let me explain why.

First of all it's poor science. Well actually to be more precise, it is not science at all. You see, science involves using the scientific method to arrive at a conclusion. This means it needs two key things: observable and measurable evidence, and repeatability. Thus for example something like the law of gravity is scientific. We can observe what happens when we drop something and we can measure the acceleration change and we can do this over and over and over again making us extremely certain that this law holds true.

Global warming on the other hand does not involve repeatability of any kind since it is merely conjecture about the the future. Also, It only involves evidence insofar as it extrapolates far beyond what is mathematically and scientifically acceptable, and it ignores true evidence in that most of the parameters in models have to be guessed at or estimated since we cannot now everything about our climate. It is far to complicated for even the most powerful computers to come even close to calculating the effect of every parameter, without even considering the fact that we are far from know what exactly all these effects are. Let me briefly illustrate this fact. There is something that is known as the butterfly effect I know that link is quite technical but the point of what I'm trying to show you is that potentially every flutter of a butterfly's wings can have a huge effect on the weather and thus unless our models account for every flutter of every butterfly's wing, ever bird that flies, every man and animal and plant and fish that moves on this earth, unless it accounts for every fluctuation in the sun's energy output, unless it accounts for all the forest fires and volcanoes, unless it accounts for so many parameters that we can never know, it will not be truly accurate. The question is how accurate do we have to be to have a reasonable model? How much stuff can we ignore and how much do we need to include? We don't know. We are missing the repeatability factor and so much of what is done is just educated guesswork. The parameters used and the weight they are given in the models is guesswork. The model designers use the parameters they think matter the most and then assign them the values they think they will have.

Now of course we don't need to know any of these things to be able to say that global warming will happen. If, for example, we were to look at global temperatures and say that for the last 500 year the temperature has always gone up be 0.01 degrees per year we would be able to say with a large degree of certainty that it will continue to do so. However to look at the approximately 30 years of data that we have indicating a global warming trend and extrapolate that into the next 100+ years is HORRIBLE science. I would receive an instant F if I tried to do anything of that sort on a lab or assignment. With only 30 years of data you cannot extrapolate more than 5 years into the future and still have any degree of certainty. For example if we were to look at the 30 year warming trend that occurred from ~1915-1945 we would predict that average world temps would be about 1 degree F higher than they are right now. We can't use the data that we have to extrapolate into the future until we have much more of it.

Therefore, we see that since the whole global warming theory relies on simplified parameter inputs (and therefore is highly susceptible to the preconceptions and assumptions of the person creating the model and entering the parameters) and also has no repeatability and cannot be verified or tested it is not true science.

Coming next: The consensus?

Chemistry

Seeing that this blog is supposed to be about a Crazy Chemie I though I would share with you some facinating chemical news. They have discovered (or more precicely, made) the 118th element. See, I knew y'all would find that most exiting.

Dave Westy