Think More, Believe Less

Many Conservatives Wage All-Out Battle Against Science

Sunday, June 8, 2014

Most of my professional life has been devoted to scientific literacy: educating the general public about science. Industrialized democracies cannot survive unless the general public understands the general principles of the science that drives our economy and shapes our culture.

Although my own field is physics, the topic I consider most important is not Newton's laws, the big bang, or even quantum mechanics. It is the scientific process itself. We will not make it through the challenges of the 21st century without a better understanding of scientific reasoning, and the willingness to fearlessly engage in it.

"Fearlessly?" Yes, absolutely. Science obeys a simple but demanding code: Follow the evidence and your own powers of reason, and modify your conclusions in the light of new evidence. In other words: Trust the universe. This is scary, because it demands that you drop your pre-conceptions.

In this science-dominated era, hucksters for all sorts of products and causes dress their arguments in scientific garb. But most of this is not science. It is usually mere apologetics (arguing for your own pre-conceptions) or pseudoscience (using scientific-sounding but fallacious arguments).

For a classic example of both, consider creationism. A founder of this religious movement is Henry Morris, who established the Institute for Creation Research in 1972 and authored Scientific Creationism (Creation-Life Publishers, 1974). Morris states "It is precisely because Biblical revelation is absolutely authoritative and perspicuous that the scientific facts, rightly interpreted, will give the same testimony as that of Scripture. There is not the slightest possibility ... that a truly scientific comparison of any aspect of the two models of origins can ever yield a verdict in favor of evolution." So this book is religious apologetics, not science. The book's title is an oxymoron.

Based on his assumption that religious scripture is absolutely true, Morris concludes that "the date of creation ... was about 2024 years prior to Abraham's journey from Haran to Canaan, or around 4000 B.C." This utterly contradicts scientific conclusions based on evidence from physics, astronomy, geology, biology, chemistry, paleontology, anthropology, and history. To cite just one piece of this web of consistent evidence, consider the ice cores that geologists extract from Antarctica, showing obvious annual layers that are fairly easy to count. Some of these cores are dated at 800,000 years. So Earth must be older than this.

Morris presents the standard creationist argument that evolution must be wrong because the principles of thermodynamics predict that systems become increasingly disorganized while evolution predicts that life on Earth becomes increasingly organized. This is a foolish misuse of some wonderful physics. The second law of thermodynamics asserts that any isolated system must become more disorganized. Living systems, however, are never isolated. They in fact receive both energy and organization from the sun. Morris acknowledges this, but still manages to conclude that "the whole evolutionary idea is negated by the Second Law."

This conclusion is nonsense. The easiest way to see this is by noting that the simple growth of any plant is evidence against his conclusion. A leaf grows by using 2 percent of the energy of the sunlight that hits it to photosynthesize atmospheric oxygen and carbon dioxide molecules into high-energy, highly organized hydrocarbon molecules such as sugars. Does this violate the second law? Obviously not: The increased organization comes from the sun. Incoming sunlight has the "radiation temperature" of the sun's surface, several thousand degrees. The large temperature difference between this and Earth's atmosphere is then exploited to drive the formation of hydrocarbon molecules, resulting in a huge overall disorganization as the solar energy comes into equilibrium with Earth. This huge increase in disorganization drives the much smaller increase in organization brought about by photosynthesis, in keeping with the second law. So living systems can increase their organization, and Morris's argument is pure pseudoscience.

Many politically conservative people today, religious fundamentalists in particular, are at war with science. In the United States, this war against reason extends to evolution, climate science, and much of social science, economics, medical science, and science education. Around the planet, true believers everywhere spread murder and mayhem in order to promote their ideology. Civilization and reason cannot afford to lose this struggle.

We must think more and believe less. A fine organization called Fayetteville Freethinkers (it's on the net) is devoted to this.

Albert Einstein said "The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe." Indeed, our modes of thinking will determine the fate of the planet.

ART HOBSON IS A PROFESSOR EMERITUS OF PHYSICS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF ARKANSAS.

Commentary on 06/08/2014