A Paranormal Plug in the Deseret News

Oh, for heaven's sake. Daniel Peterson's latest column in the Deseret News, Defending the Faith: Rethinking materialism in science, advertises a new home for cranks and loons. As a casual observer (and an overall fan) of Peterson, this isn't terribly surprising. He has expressed affinity for Intelligent Design on several occasions, and he seems to relish taking on 'the establishment' as he perceives it. Simply by the title of the column you know it's going to take an aggrieved stance toward mainstream science, but he does one better by telling everyone about a group of open-minded scientists who are calling for revolution, and spreading their questionable (at best) assertions.

When I looked around the Open Sciences site, it didn't take long to find that it's a collection of people pushing all kinds of fringe ideas (parapsychology and psychic phenomena, mysteries of water, etc.) At least a few of them have a long history of, shall we say, original thinking. After this group of revolutionaries met a year ago, they issued a manifesto which serves as the foundation of Peterson's column. It's written in the classic style of minority scientists who think they don't get enough respect [1]. It notes that they are "internationally known [2]," vents their grievance at all the dogmatism, and collects names of people with PhD's in order to appear important.

Before presenting their unorthodox ideas, the manifesto prepares the way with this statement.

Science is first and foremost a non-dogmatic, open-minded method of acquiring knowledge about nature through the observation, experimental investigation, and theoretical explanation of phenomena. Its methodology is not synonymous with materialism and should not be committed to any particular beliefs, dogmas, or ideologies.

Ah, classic. We all know that scientists should follow the evidence wherever it leads, and that dogmatism runs against the spirit of science. This kind of statement serves two purposes. First, to disarm critical scientists by appealing to their scientific values, and second, to help cultivate the appearance of unfair treatment by critics in the eyes of the public. It's not that the statement is wrong, per se, it's just incomplete. It's missing notions of skepticism, reproducibility, criticism, and so on.

Moving on, there are a variety of claims: we've got quantum mechanics (QM) and consciousness, near-death experiences, mediums who contact the dead, telekinesis, etc. Let me pause here to give you my rule of thumb on QM: you can dismiss out of hand anyone that uses QM to support new-age-type claims. I know that sounds dogmatic, but QM is strange stuff and is difficult to understand because it is heavily mathematical and contradicts our intuitions. Given the fact that new-age claims are not part of standard physics courses, it is much more likely that someone connecting QM to consciousness either doesn't understand QM, or has hijacked it in a way that is difficult to discern for non-physicists (of which I am one).

The manifesto continues:

Moreover, materialist theories fail to elucidate how brain could generate the mind, and they are unable to account for the empirical evidence alluded to in this manifesto. This failure tells us that it is now time to free ourselves from the shackles and blinders of the old materialist ideology, to enlarge our concept of the natural world, and to embrace a post-materialist paradigm.

Now it is certainly the case that we don't fully understand how consciousness works under currently understood physical principles (which is different than to say it CANNOT be understood eventually), but here is what our revolutionaries assert as a better view:

15. According to the post-materialist paradigm:

a) Mind represents an aspect of reality as primordial as the physical world. Mind is fundamental in the universe, i.e. it cannot be derived from matter and reduced to anything more basic.

b) There is a deep interconnectedness between mind and the physical world.

c) Mind (will/intention) can influence the state of the physical world, and operate in a nonlocal (or extended) fashion, i.e. it is not confined to specific points in space, such as brains and bodies, nor to specific points in time, such as the present. Since the mind may nonlocally influence the physical world, the intentions, emotions, and desires of an experimenter may not be completely isolated from experimental outcomes, even in controlled and blinded experimental designs.

d) Minds are apparently unbounded, and may unite in ways suggesting a unitary, One Mind that includes all individual, single minds.

There you go, folks! Materialism has failed to give a good explanation, so we can now say that mind is basically magic unmoored from the known laws of the universe.

I know there are still a lot of questions remaining within science, but I fail to see how positing that "mind is fundamental to the universe"--whatever that means--helps anything. I know that some of these statements bear a superficial resemblance to certain scriptures, but that doesn't guarantee that they really correspond to one another. And I know that to be a Mormon entails a certain amount of belief in things not borne out by science (yet?), but that doesn't mean we should run into the arms of the scientific fringe.


Notes:
1. Compare the manifesto with Dissent from Darwinism and the Global Warming Petition Project.
2. So am I, and I'm a nobody.

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BYU Fact-Checks Joseph Smith on Zacharias: How an Apocryphal Story Became Revealed Knowledge

As we are studying the New Testament in Sunday School this year, I was interested to see that Lesson 4 contains the following tidbit about John the Baptist and Herod's 'slaughter of the innocents'. After describing Joseph and Mary's flight to Egypt, as recorded in Matthew, the manual quotes Joseph Smith:

To protect John, “Zacharias caused [Elisabeth] to take him into the mountains, where he was raised on locusts and wild honey” (Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, sel. Joseph Fielding Smith [1976], 261).

A more full quotation is as follows:

When Herod’s edict went forth to destroy the young children, John was about six months older than Jesus, and came under this hellish edict, and Zacharias caused his mother to take him into the mountains, where he was raised on locusts and wild honey. When his father refused to disclose his hiding place, and being the officiating high priest at the Temple that year, was slain by Herod’s order, between the porch and the altar, as Jesus said.

In 2013 the Religious Studies Center at BYU published an interesting article, "The Confusing Case of Zacharias," by Lynne Hilton Wilson, which shows this story to be a spurious tradition from the second century A.D. You should read the whole thing, but the story can be told in a few steps.

1. Zechariah, son of Jehoiada, was a high priest serving in Solomon's temple and was stoned to death (2 Chronicles 24:21).

2. Zechariah, the son of Berechiah, was the minor prophet after whom the Old Testament book is named.

3. In Matthew 23:35, Jesus told the Pharisees that they were guilty of killing the prophets, including "Zacharias son of Barachias, whom ye slew between the temple and the altar." Luke 11:51 records the same condemnation, but simply referred to "Zacharias, which perished between the altar and the temple."

4. Matthew seems to have mixed up which Zacharias was referenced.

5. The early-Christian document, "Protevangelium of James" embellished on the nativity narratives and connected the Zacharias referred to by Jesus with the father of John the Baptist by having him killed by the altar [1]. (In the process, the document transformed the father of John into the high priest. Also his blood turned to stone.)

6. In spite of its dubious origins, the story continued to circulate down through the centuries and was published multiple times in a variety of venues in the nineteenth century, including the Times and Seasons in Nauvoo. It was then incorporated into Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith by Joseph Fielding Smith.

7. Here we have a twist in the plot. It turns out that there is no evidence that Joseph actually wrote the statement quoted above. After laying out the evidence, Wilson writes:

Although we know of no evidence that Joseph Smith wrote, delegated, or approved the publication of this article referencing Zacharias, it still found its way into Joseph Fielding Smith’s compilation, Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, in 1938. The pertinent problem lies in the fact that these teachings became interpreted by many as instructions to the Church from the Prophet. As a result, several Latter-day Saint books have spread the story as if it were a restored truth—including Sunday School and institute manuals.

Indeed, her footnote #2 lists its use by a number of LDS authors--some of whom are big names (e.g. McConkie, Millet, Matthews, Skousen), and it does appear in several Church publications. In the January 1995 Ensign, for example, it was listed as one of the insights about the Bible given to us as revealed knowledge through Joseph Smith.

This all makes my title tongue-in-cheek, since it turns out that Joseph Smith probably had nothing to do with the teaching. How ironic, though, that a centuries-old apocryphal story became 'revealed' knowledge. Given its widespread and authoritative distribution, it probably has a lot of years to live still.

Notes:
1. Translations available here. The murder of Zacharias happens toward the end.

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NASA: 2014 Hottest Year on Record

NASA and NOAA have officially declared 2014 as the warmest year on record. This in spite of parts of the United States being colder than usual, and the lack of El Niño. Here is the NASA temperature record with El Niño-La Niña cycles shown:

And here is the difference from average for 2014. Did you know that part of the U.S. can be cool while most of the rest of the planet is warmer than usual? I know it sounds crazy, but it's true!

Think about this for a second and let it sink in. That blue spot over the eastern U.S. is what makes people say, "What ever happened to global warming?" It's like residents of Detroit wondering what happened to global population growth.

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BYU Studies: Science as Storytelling, and the Atomization of Knowledge

While looking for something to read during my Christmas vacation, I discovered that the last 2014 issue of BYU Studies contains an article by Barry Bickmore and David Grandy titled, "Science as Storytelling." The article is nicely summarized as follows:

Much [o]f our modern world revolves around something called "science." But what is science? Interestingly, this turns out to be a very difficult question to answer because every definition seems to include something we don't consider science or seems to exclude something we do consider science. In this essay, the authors present their own definition: Science is the modern art of creating stories that explain observations of the natural world and that could be useful for predicting, and possibly even controlling, nature. They then refine this definition by offering seven rules that scientific storytelling must follow to distinguish it from other genres. These rules fall under the following general topics: reproducibility, predictive power, prospects for improvement, naturalism, uniformitarianism, simplicity, and harmony.

Bickmore and Grandy explain that their article originated as part of an introductory science course in order to address simplistic views of science and the corresponding tendency to reject scientific findings that clash with personal, religious, or political views. Theirs is a time-honored attempt to define what makes science unique from other human endeavors.

Their use of storytelling as the central concept of science made me nervous at first because it is easy to dismiss scientists as making up stories. They address this concern and explain their reason of word choice.

[W]e chose the word “stories” to emphasize the idea that the explanations scientists come up with are not themselves facts. Scientific explanations are always subject to change, since any new observations we make might contradict previously established explanations. The universe is a very complicated place, and it is likely that any explanation that humans come up with will be, at best, an approximation of the truth.

I think use the word "story" is fine as long as it is used loosely. For example, if you were to ask how water gets to the faucets in my house, I would tell you a story beginning with the entrance of the main water pipe into my basement, and how the water is distributed to various places by various pipes. Plumbers count on building codes to help ensure that the story is consistent from house to house. However, occasionally they will find deviations or expansions on the basic story. As they attempt to understand these variations, they are basically refining the story of that building's flow of water and acting accordingly in order to control the flow. When pipes are hidden by walls, floors, or ceilings, there will always be a little uncertainty in the story. But with enough probing of the system, the remaining uncertainties become negligible or practically irrelevant.

Unfortunately, the attempt to separate facts from stories (or hypotheses, theories, etc) can also be a source of mischief. It can lead to what I call the atomization of knowledge, where knowledge is broken down into the smallest possible pieces and loses its force because the formation of context and relationships between facts is prevented. Take, for example, the following quote of Hugh Nibley provided by R. Gary in the comments to my last post.

The fossil or potsherd or photograph that I hold in my hand may be called a fact—it is direct evidence, an immediate experience; but my interpretation of it is not a fact, it is entirely a picture of my own construction. I cannot experience ten thousand or forty million years—I can only imagine, and the fact that my picture is based on facts does not make it a fact, even when I think the evidence is so clear and unequivocal as to allow no other interpretation. (The Collected Works of Hugh Nibley, vol. 1, ch. 2, 25-27.)

That's all well and good, but a dedicated skeptic might question whether a fossil is actually a fact, and assert that only pixels are fact--pictures are interpretation. Actually, Bickmore and Grandy hint as much when they write:

Consider fossils. They look like the remains of living things. Is it not reasonable to suppose that they were once living things that were covered and preserved in sediment, just as dead organisms can be covered and preserved in sediment nowadays?

That's quite an underselling of fossils; the evidence is better than that. I'm not criticizing the authors--they were just making a point about the consistency of cause and effect--but it helps to illustrate the problem. It took me about 10 seconds to Google up some creationists arguing that when it comes to fossils, the only facts are their physical properties (dimensions, weight, etc). Scientific troublemakers excel at this kind of game--keeping attention on the most basic indisputable facts so that higher-ordered interpretations appear to be mere guesses.

This all goes to my view that, just as it is impossible to entirely separate science from non-science, it is impossible to entirely separate fact from interpretation, and the judgment of fact vs interpretation will differ based on knowledge-base. That carbon has 6 protons is a statement of fact to chemists because it is so well tested. A non-chemist might consider it merely an interpretation. Maybe I could formalize this as a rule of thumb: if someone seems keen to separate fact from interpretation, there is a good chance that they are selling scientific garbage. This is because specialists will tend to have an appreciation of where accepted facts end and interpretations begin in their field, so they don't need to bang on about it. Further, they will tend to dispute interpretations with additional observations or facts, rather than by getting pedantic about the demarcation between the two.

From the discussion thus far you would be forgiven for wondering how scientists make any progress at all. The rules outlined by Bickmore and Grandy are key here. I list them as they appear in the article.

Rule 1: Scientific stories are crafted to explain observations, but the observations that are used as a basis for these stories must be reproducible.

Rule 2: Scientists prefer stories that can predict things that were not included in the observations used to create those explanations in the first place.

Rule 3: Scientific stories should be subject to an infinitely repeating process of evaluation meant to generate more and more useful stories.

Rule 4: Scientific explanations do not appeal to the supernatural. Only naturalistic explanations are allowed.

Rule 5: Any scientific explanation involving events in the past must square with the principle of “uniformitarianism”—the assumption that past events can be explained in terms of the “natural laws” that apply today.

Rule 6: Scientists assume that nature is simple enough for human minds to understand.

Rule 7: Scientific explanations should not contradict other established scientific explanations, unless absolutely necessary.

Although they are all important, I think rules 1, 2, 3, and 7 are particularly important. I would argue that the remaining rules are simply extensions of those four rules working together.

Well, I've gone on long enough and I don't have a good way to wrap up. So I'll just say go read the article and see what you think.

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