Newsflash: Climate Scientists Knew What They Were Doing

The 'climategate' pseudo-scandal two years ago shook a lot of people's confidence in climate science--to the point that some skeptics questioned whether the instrumental record actually showed a warming trend. Occasionally someone would claim that the record had been fabricated, but more often suspicions were expressed that the data were manipulated to give a false warming trend.

Then there was Anthony Watts, who enlisted volunteers to find land temperature stations and made a big deal about how many of them were near asphalt, air conditioners, BBQ grills, and other warm objects. According to Watts, the warming trend is actually temperature contamination.

Enter physicist Richard Muller and the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature team, whose aim was to re-analyze the temperature records to find the true story. Today they announced their results.

On the basis of its analysis, according to Berkely Earth's founder and scientific director, Professor Richard A. Muller, the group concluded that earlier studies based on more limited data by teams in the United States and Britain had accurately estimated the extent of land surface warming.

"Our biggest surprise was that the new results agreed so closely with the warming values published previously by other teams in the U.S. and the U.K.," Muller said. "This confirms that these studies were done carefully and that potential biases identified by climate change skeptics did not seriously affect their conclusions."

Previous studies, cared out by NOAA, NASA, and the Hadley Center, also found that land warming was approximately 1°C since the mid-1950s, and that the urban heat island effect and poor station quality did not bias the results. But their findings were criticized by skeptics who worried that they relied on ad-hoc techniques that meant that the findings could not be duplicated. Robert Rohde, lead scientist for Berkeley Earth, noted that "the Berkeley Earth analysis is the first study to address the issue of data selection bias, by using nearly all of the available data, which includes about 5 times as many station locations as were reviewed by prior groups."

Well, OK then.

(See also The Economist: The heat is on.)

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Mormon Matters Evolution Podcast

I almost forgot to mention this: In August the Mormon Matters podcast had an episode devoted to Mormonism and evolution with participants including James McLachlan (professor of philosophy and religion Western Carolina University), Steven Peck (SteveP; professor of biology at BYU), and Duane Jeffery (emeritus professor of zoology at BYU). The discussion runs through a basic history of the interaction of evolution with the Church and BYU, and then turns to a collection of auxiliary issues. It's a nice discussion and I encourage you to listen to the whole thing.

I've never met or corresponded with Duane Jeffery, but I always enjoy listening to what he has to say and am a fan of his efforts. (Got that? Good.) So let me shift and say that I think he made three questionable claims that need better substantiation.

They are:

1. That the Improvement Era 1910 Priesthood Quorums Table came from the First Presidency (@ 30:00). The basis for this claim seems to come from the fact that Joseph F. Smith was one of the editors of the magazine. However, although we often disagree, I agree with R. Gary that the evidence that the statement represents the position of the First Presidency, or even just Joseph F. Smith, is weak. I do think its publication was significant--Joseph F. Smith could have stopped it or later published a repudiation of it. So my interpretation is that Joseph F. Smith and the First Presidency did not find it objectionable, but that it did not have their imprimatur.

2. That the 1925 First Presidency statement, "Mormon View of Evolution," is the official church position: (@ 32:00) "If there is an official church position, this has got to be it." The basis for this claim seems to be that because the statement is more recent than the 1909 statement, it has priority. The 1925 statement consists entirely of quotes from the 1909 statement, but never mentions it. So it makes sense to think of the 1925 statement as representing the most current (!) position, and I think Jeffery's statement would have been uncontroversial in, say, 1928.

However, as a practical matter I think it is a difficult position to defend because i) the Feb 2002 issue of the Ensign published the 1909 statement as the Church's official position, ii) the 1909 statement has at times been distributed to people inquiring of the Church's position, and iii) the 1925 statement is pretty much ignored as a reference in Church manuals, in contrast to the 1909 statement.

I imagine Jeffery might defend his statement as follows: In a presentation given in 2004, he said that the publication of the 1909 statement in the Ensign was somewhat controversial behind the scenes, and that BYU was assured by the First Presidency that it's publication did not supersede the BYU evolution packet. And as published in his book, Mormonism and Evolution, inquiries to the Church are not always answered with the 1909 statement. So I can see where he might be coming from.

My opinion--and I speculate that Jeffery would agree with me--is that the question of the Church's position on evolution is not resolvable to a single sentence or to one statement. It is better represented by the BYU packet, which consists of several statements made or authorized by the First Presidency, preferably informed by a sense of the history.

3. That the traditional Mormon view of natural law has largely been abandoned since the mid-1950's (@ 1:25:00), partially because of Joseph Fielding Smith and Bruce R. McConkie. I would be interested in a fuller justification for this statement. As I recently pointed out, Joseph Fielding Smith and James E. Talmage wrote almost identical passages regarding miracles and natural law. I'm open to Jeffery's statement--anecdotally it seems true, and perhaps it boils down to a matter of interpretation--but I would like to see more evidence that such is the case.

Again, I'm a fan of Duane Jeffery, but these are things that I would not be comfortable repeating to others without better evidence.

All that aside, give the podcast a listen. I think you'll enjoy the conversation.

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Getting Gods Out of Genesis

Over at Times and Seasons, Ben S. has a post up about how translation of the Old Testament into English doesn't necessarily convey the original meaning because of the differing cultural contexts. You should read the whole thing, but I especially liked this part and want to post it here as part of my own collection.

Several times in Genesis 1, curious circumlocutions appear. There’s no mention of the sun or moon, but “greater light” and “lesser light.”... And lastly, though we have the world bifurcated into water and dry land, the seas are mysteriously plural. All of these are explainable via polemical context. First, both the sun (shemesh) and moon (yareach) were also the names of those deities outside Israel, just as Ra designated both sun and sun-god in Egypt. We can see echoes of shemeshas the name of a (solar) deity in Israelite place names like bet-shemesh (Joshua 15:10), ir-shemesh (Joshua 19:41), and en-shemesh (Joshua 18:17), as well as in Sampson (shimshon). Genesis polemicizes against these deities; Not only are they creations, as opposed to co-creators as in some accounts, but their names are not even mentioned to avoid any hint of polytheism.

Similarly, the name for the sea (”yam”) was also the name of a prominent deity. Hebrew, as far as we can tell, did not have a full range of words for different-sized bodies as ocean, sea, lake, pond, puddle, etc. (think: Sea of Galillee), so it couldn’t simply substitute another term, but instead pluralizes to seas, yammim.

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John Welch's Reading List

As described in my last post, John Welch recently gave a talk at BYU about science and religion, at which he distributed a list of suggested reading. Thank you to "mapman" for sending me a copy, which I have made available here.

Looking over the list, I see a number of interesting books and articles that I look forward to checking out. Of course no list can be comprehensive, but I was a little surprised and disappointed to see some works left off of the list, such as articles by Duane Jeffery, David Bailey, or Steven Peck. (I note that Welch, the editor of BYU Studies, included only a single article from Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought. And an ad for a free trial-subscription of BYU Studies [1].) It's also curious that among the entries from the Encyclopedia of Mormonism, "Organic Evolution" and "Origin of Man" are not included.

Actually, after looking through the list some more, I can't help but wonder if Welch farmed the compilation out to an assistant, or if he's actually read all of the articles. First I noticed that the section, "Selected Physical Science and Mathematical Articles in BYU Studies," also contains biological articles. "Big deal," you say, "you're just being pedantic." OK, fine; maybe so. But beyond that, can somebody explain to me why the "Beta-Lysin" article by Donaldson was included on the list (or why it was published in BYU Studies in the first place)? I have a hard time believing that Welch read that article and decided that it made a worthy contribution to relating science and religion.

Several of the works have been highlighted in posts on this blog. They are listed below with links to my posts.

• Boyce, Duane. "Of Science, Scripture, and Surprise." FARMS Review 20:2 (2008).
• Eyring, Henry J. Mormon Scientist: The Life and Faith of Henry Eyring. Salt Lake City: Deseret, 2007
• Grandy, David. "Ideology in the Guise of Science."FARMS Review 19:2 (2007).
• Sherlock, Richard. "Mormonism and Intelligent Design." FARMS Review 18:2 (2006).
• Welch, John W. "The Power of Evidence in the Nurturing of Faith," in Echoes and Evidences of the Book of Mormon.
• Widtsoe, John A. Joseph Smith as Scientist (1920). (Also here.)
• Bushman, Jess R., "Hutton's Uniformitarianism," BYU Studies 23:1 (1983).
• Walker, Steven C., "Selling the Soul of Science for a Pot of Message: Evangelizing Atheism in The God Delusion," BYU Studies 47:1 (2008)

Enjoy!


Notes:

1. BYU Studies articles older than two years are available for free.

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John Welch on Science and Religion

A little over a week ago, John W. Welch gave a talk at BYU titled, "Forging a Friendly Alliance between Mormonism and Science." Welch is arguably the most influential LDS scholar (for lack of a better term) around. His résumé includes discovering chiasmus in the Book of Mormon, founding FARMS, editing BYU Studies, and sitting on the editorial board of the Encyclopedia of Mormonism. Summaries of his talk are available here and here, with the first link also containing a short audio interview. My favorite quote from the Daily Universe article is the following:

“Our ongoing task is to be building bridges,” he said, “even if it means laying ourselves down as a bridge over troubled waters, taking fire from both sides.”

To do so, Welch said Mormons must stop “shooting [them]selves in the foot with bad arguments,” and read current publications on the connection between LDS beliefs and modern science.

I like to think that I've been a board in that bridge.

The article goes on to say that Welch gave out a reading list that he compiled, but I can't find any details. Does anybody know what was on the list?

In related news, one of the stories highlighted on the main webpage of the Deseret News today (earlier, it was one of the rotating stories) is "Science and faith discussion evolving to a place of harmony." There are a couple of quotes from Welch in there as well.

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