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I'm guest blogging over at By Common Consent for a little bit. Below are links (updated as needed) to my posts there.
1. Faithful Science
2.Elder McConkie’s Other List of Heresies
3. Inspired Errors
4. I got up and bore testimony
5. The Alu in You
Edited transcripts for the interviews with President Boyd K. Packer and Elder Dallin H. Oaks for the PBS documentary The Mormons have been posted by the Church.
Elder Oaks made several comments that touched on science. Although most of them appear to have been made in the context of the Book of Mormon, they have broader applicability and are reproduced below. I may discuss some of these points further in later posts, but I thought I would post them all together first. Except for the footnote and separating dashes, all indications of editing (brackets, etc.) are in the original.HW: What would you say to faithful, liberal (in the absence of a better word) Mormons who are searching for “the middle way” to look at the Book of Mormon as an inspired text with profound spiritual meaning?
DHO: To people who have a hard time with the literal claims of scripture, I would say: “Keep your life in balance between reliance on history, so-called, or geology or science, so-called, and reliance on spiritual witnesses and the testimony of the Holy Ghost. There are two ways to truth: science and revelation. If you find things that trouble you, don’t dismiss the spiritual explanation and hold with the scientific one. Keep your life in balance by continuing to do the things necessary to keep open the channels of communication to heaven as well as to scholarly journals.”
HW: Describe what that middle way or middle ground is.
DHO: It’s hard for me to define a middle ground because I don’t believe in a middle ground when it comes to morality. I don’t believe in situational ethics. I believe that truth is a knowledge of things as they are. I think we’re dealing with religious truth, and I don’t think that religious truth can be understood by scientific methods.
Whenever science dilutes a religious truth or the revelation of God, it demeans it. While I understand the sincerity of those who are looking for a middle way, I think that God has the final answer on the purpose of life. He has the final answer on what is right and wrong. I don’t think there’s a middle way. I think that science and scholarship can lead us toward truth, but I think that people in the end must be willing to surrender their best judgment to revelation from God.
----------------------------HW: Possibly the “problem” the Book of Mormon has to a modern person is that there are no precedents [to the plates].
DHO: A book that has no origin, of course that’s a problem! Of course a book, translated from plates that you can’t examine to authenticate it is a terrible problem to anyone who approaches this in a scientific way. There have been other visionaries, but I don’t know of any who have written a book. So Joseph is unique in saying, “I had a vision, and it led to this book, and here’s the book! Read it, put it to the spiritual test.” Well, it can be put to the spiritual test. Millions have done that and have joined the Church. But it can’t be put to scientific test — that really bothers a scientific age! If I wanted science to draw on, it would bother me too.
I suppose that we’re in a scientific age, but surely in human history there have been times when people would have said, “Visions in the age in iron? Visions in the age of sailboats?” [Slight laughter.] Any age could take its own marvels and use them to reject the simpler revelatory experiences of an earlier time.
----------------------------Now intellectualism is also perceived as a danger. I suppose it has been for at least a century. I read some history of some of the early confrontations with science — creation of the earth and so forth. In fact at Brigham Young University in some of its earliest years, [there] was [such a] manifestation [1]. There’ll be other manifestations at different times. The life of the mind, which is a great, defining object of universities in our day, of which I’ve been the beneficiary in my own life, can be seen or practiced to be in flat-out opposition to the spiritual characteristics of one’s faith. Revelation stands in opposition to science in some aspects according to some understandings. So I think in any day the watchmen on the tower are going to say intellectualism is a danger to the Church. And it is at extreme points, and if people leave their faith behind and follow strictly where science leads them, that can be a pretty crooked path. ([The] science of today is different than the science of yesterday.) We encourage the life of the mind. We establish and support universities that encourage education. But we say to our young people: “Keep your faith. Do the things necessary to hear the promptings of the Spirit. If you’re getting too far off the line in the latest scientific theory or whatever, you will get a spiritual warning.” And I believe that.
1. This is almost certainly a reference to the 1911 evolution controversy. To read more about it, as well as Elder Oaks's interaction with the sciences while president of BYU, see here.
The New York Times has an article about a new book--A Farewell to Alms--on the industrial revolution.
Gregory Clark, an economic historian at the University of California, Davis, believes that the Industrial Revolution — the surge in economic growth that occurred first in England around 1800 — occurred because of a change in the nature of the human population. The change was one in which people gradually developed the strange new behaviors required to make a modern economy work. The middle-class values of nonviolence, literacy, long working hours and a willingness to save emerged only recently in human history, Dr. Clark argues.
The tendency of population to grow faster than the food supply, keeping most people at the edge of starvation, was described by Thomas Malthus in a 1798 book, “An Essay on the Principle of Population.” This Malthusian trap, Dr. Clark’s data show, governed the English economy from 1200 until the Industrial Revolution and has in his view probably constrained humankind throughout its existence. The only respite was during disasters like the Black Death, when population plummeted, and for several generations the survivors had more to eat.
Malthus himself noted that many people misrepresented his theory and took pains to point out that he did not just predict future catastrophe. He argued "...this constantly subsisting cause of periodical misery has existed ever since we have had any histories of mankind, does exist at present, and will for ever continue to exist, unless some decided change takes place in the physical constitution of our nature."
Thus, Malthus regarded his Principle of Population as an explanation of the past and the present situation of humanity as well as a prediction of our future.
Newsweek has a lengthy article on the organized and well-funded anti-global warming campaign. Here is the jist:
Since the late 1980s, this well-coordinated, well-funded campaign by contrarian scientists, free-market think tanks and industry has created a paralyzing fog of doubt around climate change. Through advertisements, op-eds, lobbying and media attention, greenhouse doubters (they hate being called deniers) argued first that the world is not warming; measurements indicating otherwise are flawed, they said. Then they claimed that any warming is natural, not caused by human activities. Now they contend that the looming warming will be minuscule and harmless. "They patterned what they did after the tobacco industry," says former senator Tim Wirth, who spearheaded environmental issues as an under secretary of State in the Clinton administration. "Both figured, sow enough doubt, call the science uncertain and in dispute. That's had a huge impact on both the public and Congress."
Another installment of FARMS Review is available online. The one that caught my eye was Brant Gardner's review of Voices from the Dust: New Insights into Ancient America by David G. Calderwood. You may remember that I attended a presentation by Calderwood last fall and reported on it here. (I'd like to claim that I was prescient in my looking forward to the FARMS review, but alas, no genius was needed to call that one.)
Gardner has two chief methodological criticisms:
1. By including material from all over the Americas, Calderwood is implicitly endorsing a hemispheric model--something that is contradicted by what many would consider much stronger evidence (either from within or without the Book of Mormon). Conversely, rejecting a hemispheric model calls into question his methods.Either Calderwood defends the hemispheric geography of the Book of Mormon by default, or he forfeits the ability to pull information from texts so far distant as those from Peru and Central Mexico.
2. Calderwood accepts the Spanish accounts uncritically and dismisses the argument that the writers were projecting their own religious background onto the natives. You'll have to read Gardner's review for more on that.
As a side note, in response to a passage in the introduction, Gardner writes, "I confess that I am nervous when the introduction of any book on history blithely dismisses years of scholarship." There was a taste of that in the presentation I attended as well. From my report:Early in the talk he said that researchers are tied to "make-believe histories." The first is evolution and that there was no creation. The second is that Native Americans migrated from Asia 15,000 years ago and that there were no significant outside contacts until Columbus. (He did not specify whether he objected to the early migration, or just the isolation.)
Gardner concludes:Calderwood sees only the parallels. He neglects to consider any other reason for the apparent similarities in his sources. In the historical materials from Mesoamerica, with which I am most familiar, I find much stronger evidence that it really was the common perceptual layer imposed by the Spaniards that created the parallels in the chroniclers' accounts.
From AP via MSNBC.com:
Remember the spectacular South Korean stem cell fraud of a few years ago? A new analysis says the disgraced scientist actually did reach a long-sought scientific goal. It’s just not the one he claimed.
The new study suggests Hwang Woo-suk and his team produced stem cells — not through cloning as they contended — but through a different process called parthenogenesis.
That, too, is an achievement scientists have long been pursuing.
The first scientific paper to report stable populations of human stem cells obtained through parthenogenesis appeared only about a month ago.
In a paper published online Thursday in the journal Cell Stem Cell, an international team of scientists says Hwang and his colleagues actually accomplished the feat in the research behind their discredited 2004 paper.
So what happened? Were they fooled? Or were they lying?
Vrana said he doesn’t know. It’s possible, he said, that the Korean researchers didn’t realize what they’d done because they handled a lot of eggs in a technically tricky experiment.
Daley, who visited Hwang’s university lab before the scandal broke, said: “We just don’t know, and this is one of the curious and provocative questions that may go unanswered in the history of this debacle.”
The last couple of months have been a whirlwind for me. I have a new job, which required moving to a different state. We're in our new house now (although still settling in) and have established our utilities (ie. internet), so I hope to be more active here.
I do have two limitations: (1) I am not comfortable blogging at work, and before long I won't have time to anyway. This means that all blog reading and writing must wait until the evenings/weekends. (2) My wife tends to have plans for my evenings and weekends; I'm sure you understand.
Nevertheless, I'll do my best to keep the show going. Stay tuned.
[David Bailey has a professional background in computer science and experimental mathematics. He has published a number of articles discussing science and religion in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought and elsewhere (see sidebar link). He offered the following review for posting.]
I just finished reading physicist Paul Davies’ new book “Cosmic Jackpot: Why Our Universe Is Just Right for Life” (Orion Publications, 2007).
In this book Davies joins physicists Leonard Susskind (“The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design”) and Alex Vilenkin (“Many Worlds in One: The Search for Other Universes”) in laying bare an incredible paradox of modern physics and cosmology. One way out of this paradox (advocated by Susskind and Vilenkin) is to posit a vast multitude of actually existing universes along side ours, and further to posit that the remarkable life-friendliness of our universe is due only to an observer selection effect (the “anthropic principle”) -- we exist in a life-friendly universe, because if it were not, we would not be here discussing the issue.
The paradox mentioned above derives from the fact that when one calculates, based on known principles of quantum mechanics, the “zero-point mass density” (or, equivalently, the “dark energy mass density”) of the universe, focusing for the time being on the electromagnetic force, one obtains the incredible result that empty space “weighs” 1093 grams per cubic centimeter (the actual average mass density of the universe is 10-28 grams per cc). Stephen Hawking quipped that this is the most spectacular failure of a physical theory in history. Closely related to the zero-point mass density of the universe is the “cosmological constant,” which until recently was thought to be precisely zero. Physicists have noted that calculations such as the above only involve the electromagnetic force, and so perhaps when the contributions (positive and negative) of the other known forces are included, all terms will cancel out to exactly zero, as a consequence of some unknown physical principle.
These hopes were shattered with the recent discovery that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, which implies that the cosmological constant must be slightly nonzero. In other words, physicists are left with the startling conclusion that the positive and negative contributions to the cosmological constant exactly cancel to 120-digit accuracy, yet fail to cancel beginning at the 121-th digit.
This stupendous coincidence joins a growing list of remarkable facts (such as the observed flatness and longevity of the universe, and the nuclear resonance that makes carbon atoms and all heavier elements possible) that suggest our universe possesses exceedingly rare characteristics that make atoms, stars and life possible.
At the same time, string theorists, who for 20 years have been earnestly seeking a complete and unique “theory of everything” that encompasses all known physical interactions, have instead deduced the existence of an enormous ensemble of possible universal laws, numbering (by one reckoning) more than 10500. The vast majority of these universes are utterly hostile to any conceivable form of long-lived information-rich structure, much less life, and thus must be completely devoid of observers. But with so many universes to choose from, so these physicists theorize, inevitably one (ours) beats the one-in-10120 odds and is life-friendly. Needless to say, such reasoning requires a dramatic departure in philosophy from the traditional program of physics, and many physicists and other scientists are dead-set against it.
Davies discusses all of this in detail, and then lists six possible solutions:
A. The absurd universe. There is no God, no designer, no teleological principle, and no destiny. Life in general, and human beings in particular, are an “irrelevant embellishment” in a vast and meaningless cosmos, the existence of which is an “unfathomable mystery.” The main difficulty of this view is that if there is no coherent scheme of things, then the success of the scientific enterprise to date (which shows no sign of abating) is completely enigmatic.
B. The unique universe. There is some compelling and logically consistent mathematical theory (say string theory) that permits one to unambiguously derive all the laws and constants of physics. One obvious difficulty of this view is that the recent developments of string theory, for instance, point in the opposite direction, to an enormous variety of possible physical laws, and no particular reason for preferring any one of them. The other difficulty with this view is that even if such a theory is ultimately produced, it would still leave open the question of “why that theory.” In any event, the observed bio-friendliness of the universe would remain unexplained.
C. The multiverse. As mentioned above, some scientists argue that we inhabit one of an infinite multitude of pocket universes, each with different physical laws and constants, and that the life-friendliness of our universe is simply an “observer effect” -- i.e. the anthropic principle. The main difficulty here is that this theory invokes an extravagant “overabundance of entities” (in the sense of Occam’s razor) -- an infinite collection of universes that can never be observed (although some scientists argue that we may be able to test this hypothesis indirectly). This strikes many scientists as an exceedingly profligate way to explain bio-friendliness. It has also been criticized as a “science stopper,” because it suggests there is no need to seek any further explanation for either our physical laws or the life-friendliness of the universe.
D. Intelligent design. Many theologians and some scientists argue that the universe is created by God (or some Intelligent Designer) and is specifically designed to be a habitat for us. One disadvantage with this philosophy is that it is a “science stopper” -- the declaration “God did it” provides no real explanation for anything, not even how or why God did what he did. It also begs the question of who designed the Designer. In any event, this version of the Designer appears to bear little relation to the traditional God of Christian religions, who interacts with the world and influences the lives of mortals.
E. The “life principle.” Here, the bio-friendliness of the universe arises from an overarching law that constrains the universe to evolve toward life and mind. The disadvantage is that the “teleology” involved here represents a sharp break with traditional scientific thinking, epitomized by the writings of Stephen Jay Gould, which has eschewed, with quasi-religious fervor, any notion of goal-oriented or directional evolution (cosmic or earth-bound), even the notion that evolution leads to ever-growing complexity and intelligence. This theory also suffers from the difficulty of singling out life and/or mind as the goal of cosmic evolution, without explaining why.
F. The “self-explaining” universe. Some scientists have hypothesized a “causal loop,” in which the ultimate life- and intelligence-friendly destiny of an intelligent universe has a backwards-in-time or equivalent effect on its creation. The disadvantage here, aside from the fact that we know of no means how this might be accomplished, is that we are still left not knowing why this universe exists, or why it contains sentient observers who not only observe the universe but who, in large measure, understand its operation.
G. The fake universe. Some sober-minded scientists have hypothesized that we are all living in a Matrix-style simulation, run on a super-duper-computer in some advanced civilization. In fact, at least one scientist has argued that if the multiverse theory (option C above) is real, then fake universes should outnumber real ones. Curiously, this theory has religious overtones -- the Great Simulator is also a transcendent designer, creator, sustainer, and, possibly on occasion, miracle worker. Critics have derided this theory as tantamount to solipsism (the notion that the universe is completely contained in someone’s mind), or as Intelligent Design upgraded for the information age. More importantly, scientists note that this theory utterly undermines the scientific quest -- if the universe is a sham, why bother to figure out how it works?
H. None of the above?
Davies expresses his personal preference for E and F, although he fully recognizes their speculative nature, not to mention that they too leave numerous questions unanswered.
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