The Allure of Science

In the eyes of most people, science has a lofty allure. Even people who do not like the conclusions and beliefs of scientists feel this way. Why is this?

The ideal scientists zealously pursue the truth about the natural world, relentlessly cutting away the prejudices that they and others have, and demanding only the best evidence. No sloppy thinking allowed, no reliance on hearsay or single observations. To be a scientist is, in some ways, like being an athlete. Scientific thinking is a discipline. It is available to anyone, but it is usually only professional scientists and science educators who take on the discipline consistently. A scientist exploring the depths of nature, and an athlete running the course, have a kind of golden shimmer quite unlike the sloppy thinker or the armchair athlete.

This is why anti-scientists want to look like scientists. There are numerous anti-scientific think tanks that announce their seriously flawed beliefs in sciency-sounding jargon. And some religious groups have even started up their own pseudo-scientific journals. They imitate the very appearance and structure of scientific articles: an objective-sounding title; an abstract; a text that cites evidence and analyzes it with reason; a conclusion; and references to other articles previously published on the same topic. They want everyone to think that they are scientists, even as they discredit scientists.

One example is an article in “Answers Research,” the pseudo-journal started by Answers in Genesis, that purports to show that the speed of light has decreased over the last few thousand years. Therefore the red shift does not indicate the universe is billions of years old but that light used to travel a lot faster than it does now. From the link you can download the PDF. The PDF of the article looks exactly like a scientific article, down to the most minute detail of its appearance.

One hallmark of scientific papers is that they are “peer-reviewed,” which means that other competent scientists anonymously review the paper and pass judgment—sometimes fair, sometimes unfair—on whether the paper should be published. If religious pseudo-science articles have “peer review,” it only means that people who share the same delusion have read it prior to publication.

Remember that in such pseudo-journals, anyone can be a peer (in the sense of micturator).

Of course, it is not just creationists who produce fake scientific articles. There are numerous online journals that will print anything so long as it has a sciencey appearance and you pay them. There is no peer review. I discuss this in Chapter 14 of my book Scientifically Thinking. I end that chapter, “I’m thinking about starting a science journal. I only charge $10,000 per article. If you are interested in publishing there, let me know, and remember I’m a peer.”

I suppose I am flattered to be a legitimate member of the scientific community. But, with ever more fake scientific journals, I fear that the public will begin to disbelieve true scientists along with the fake ones. With this, society can no longer benefit from true scientific research.

This essay also appeared in my science blog.

Trust the Mother

One of the most divisive political issues is abortion rights. I am a scientist, and I can tell you that there is no single point in embryonic or fetal development in which the unborn child “becomes human.” It depends on the indicator that you use: heartbeat, brain activity, etc. all begin at different times. There are even three events that occur during “the moment of conception.” As a result, I have no scientific opinion about “when life begins.” Nor will I speculate about morality or politics. But I do have some scientific insights that you might find useful.

Love evolved. Love is, from the evolutionary point of view, the instinct for helping and protecting other animals in your species. Natural selection has favored animals that protect their offspring. In this way, they maximize their reproductive success. If you want to know more, search for information about inclusive fitness. The most famous examples are from insects such as bees, ants, and termites, and among mammals such as ourselves.

The strongest love in the natural world is the love between a mother and her offspring. It is a force of nature. If you get between a mother bear and her cubs, it might be the last thing you do. This is because the cubs are the mother bear’s entire genetic future. Human mothers are no less motivated to protect their young, including those not yet born, than any other species of mammal.

In the animal world, a mother’s love is, on the average, stronger than a father’s love. The reason for this is because the mother always knows which offspring are hers, but the father cannot be certain. Every ounce of effort that a mother puts into nurturing and defending her young is well spent, but for the father, there is the lingering subconscious question about whether the offspring are his. (“Mommy’s baby, Daddy’s maybe.”) Genetic tests, in humans and birds, show that some of the offspring in the nest or the home, which the father supposes to be his, are not. The offspring may not be the father’s entire genetic future. Most of us fathers love our children, but on the average, mothers love their children more.

And a mother loves her offspring, including those not yet born, more than politicians do.

Given that a mother’s love is the strongest love in the natural world, I believe we should trust the instincts of an individual mother. The idea that pregnant women are eager to kill their unborn children unless white men pass laws and tell them not to is ridiculous. Maybe we should trust the mother to make the right decision regarding her unborn offspring.

Family and Friends in Times of Disaster

These last couple of weeks, we have experienced natural disasters in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Tornadoes have raked through parts of the city. Heavy rain has swollen the Keystone reservoir. The Arkansas River is within inches of being higher than it has ever been. Though relatively few people have actually been harmed by these disasters, all Tulsans have had to be ready to evacuate from either or both of these kinds of catastrophes. Just today, Tulsa was on the national news again, this time because the flood waters are receding as fast as they rose.

And that is where being a member of a family or a network of friends is very important. My wife and I have a sturdy home not far from the river; though not on low land, flooding is possible. My daughter and son-in-law have a flimsy apartment on high land. And I have a second home, the one where I reside when I teach at the university in Durant, 160 miles away, out of the current danger zone.

In the event of flood, we will go to my daughter’s apartment; in the event of tornado, they will come to our house; in event of both, we all go to Durant. We have a plan. Those who do not have family or friends have only one place to go: an evacuation shelter.

My family is really fortunate to have the flexibility of three residences. A network of family and friends is, and has been throughout history, the most important way that humans have survived, and recovered from, disasters.

Natural disasters will become larger and more unpredictable in the future because of global warming. This is Tulsa’s third “five-hundred-year flood” since 1984. The only way the world can survive climate change disaster will be international cooperation. Many nations are cooperating in global warming prevention and adaptation.

The United States used to be one of those nations. But, as part of his interminable anger, Donald Trump pulled us out of international agreements on global warming. And, in several other ways, he has done his best to piss off even our closest allies.

It’s not just tension with China. Trump refused to endorse the joint statement from the 2018 G7 meeting. Our allies in the G7 group of nations seem to have decided that they must cooperate among themselves, leaving America in its self-imposed tantrum. Below is a BBC news photo that shows a typical moment in what is supposed to be constructive cooperation between America and its allies:

Leaders in this photo, besides Trump and Bolton, include Japan's Shinzo Abe (4), Germany's Angela Merkel (6), France's Emmanuel Macron (7), and Britain's Theresa May (8).

As a result, the United States cannot expect any international assistance in the event that we should suffer a natural disaster, or, for that matter, any other kind of disaster. Trump says that he wants a policy of America First, but what he is actually doing is creating a policy of America Only. In so doing, we are rejecting any help that anyone else might ever be willing to give us. We are like the man who tells his family and friends that under no circumstances will he take shelter in their houses if floods or tornadoes come.

As we have known since the days of Petr Kropotkin, mutual aid (cooperation), a form of evolutionary altruism, is our most important human adaptation. Trump is rejecting nature’s most important evolutionary accomplishment.

This essay also appeared in my science blog.

A Creed to Live By: Insights from Earl Nightingale

When I was in high school, I made it a point to never miss the five-minute radio program in which the deep-voiced Earl Nightingale explained surprising and uplifting things about the world. I had to miss a few, but only a few, from 1972 to 1975. Radio stations (worldwide) that carried his program offered to send free copies of his scripts in a self-addressed stamped envelope. Of course, today, the programs would all have been on a website, which Nightingale, who died in 1989, did not live to see. I sent for all of his scripts. The secretary at the radio station wrote to me, wanting to know more about this unusual, perhaps unique, little boy who listened to every show.

Nightingale talked about anything he wanted to. A common structure of his programs was, I’ve been reading a book by x entitled y. I think you would enjoy hearing about it. And he was usually right. He seemed to like Eric Hoffer and Abraham Maslow a lot. He usually talked about successful business and personal life, and how to have a healthy mind—for example, how to not be a mumpsimus. But he sometimes threw in things that were a bit puzzling, such as how there might be UFOs, about the Bermuda Triangle, or about an article called “Secret Thoughts of a Happy Husband.” Not sure where that came from. But we all listened to whatever he said, and most of the time were enriched by it. One of his broadcasts was about the dangers of smoking. In the photo above, notice the absence of an ashtray—a noticeable absence in the mid-twentieth century.

Nightingale knew by experience what he was talking about. When he was twelve, in the middle of the Depression, his father abandoned the family, and he lived in a tent city with his mother outside of Los Angeles. But it was not long before he worked his way into successful military and business careers.

Nightingale’s messages were simple, often obvious—at least, obvious after someone says it. They were based upon the secrets of his vast success in business. He would give examples of how you have to treat your customers with respect, give them what they want, convince them that you care about them, and then really do it. As he was the first to admit, his ideas were not new; they sound strangely like the Golden Rule. But at the time, like today, many people in business thought that the path to success was to beat down your competitors and to get every nickel out of your customers that you can. Nightingale explained that this was a sure path to failure.

As it turns out, in the decades after Nightingale’s death, exactly the kind of oppressive corporate atmosphere that Nightingale hated, one that leaves us customers feeling like the scum of the earth, has become the dominant experience in the marketplace. He would not have liked to see what has happened to our economy in the twenty-first century. When Nightingale was recording his programs, he said that executives really deserved getting paid more than the average worker. But at the time, executives got paid only ten times more; today, it is more like two hundred times. I doubt that executives are twenty times as valuable to their companies today as they were in the 1970s. The modern American economy, dominated by TBTF corporations, would have outraged him.

Nightingale was definitely a conservative, as the concept was understood at the time. He was always defending free enterprise, and was puzzled at the counter-culture people who thought that working for monetary reward was bad. He even said that socialist countries like Sweden were an economic disaster and suffered massive crime waves. Maybe they did at the time, but socialist democracies have since that time flourished. He had the typical mid-century male view of women, they should be secretaries etc., but he was also open to them progressing to an equal status with men, someday. He championed female college education. But he never mixed religion with his conservatism, and he never said one word about the Vietnam War or Richard Nixon, as I recall. He was the kind of conservative we wish we still had.

This is one of several websites with Nightingale quotes.

In my science blog, I have explored one of his themes. In this blog, I explore a different one. In one of his programs, Nightingale quoted extensively from a man who wrote beautifully about how to live a good life. “My creed: To love justice, to long for the right, to love mercy, to pity the suffering, to assist the weak ... to wage relentless war against slavery in all its forms, to love wife and child and friend ... to make others happy ... to receive new truths with gladness, to cultivate hope, to see the calm beyond the storm, the dawn beyond the night ... This is the religion of reason, the creed of science.” This man was a military and political leader. Nightingale then tersely observed, “He also became one of the world’s most hated men, and a living symbol of the devil in hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of homes. To mention his name was to blaspheme in many circles.” The man? Robert Ingersoll, the agnostic. Nightingale was a conservative, but unlike modern conservatives did not brandish the Christian religion as a weapon to use against any and all who disagree with him.

In some ways, Earl Nightingale was the world’s first blogger. He posted short essays on whatever topic he wanted. Anybody can do a blog now, for free, but back then, Nightingale had to convince sponsors to pay for his show. Maybe my blog posts are my way of doing what the great Earl Nightingale did.

Jesus for Agnostics

Religious people, especially fundamentalist Christians, believe that, in order to know God, you have to know all about him. You have to have your doctrines all figured out. To them, it is utterly impossible to know God if you do not even know whether there is a God. Furthermore, they insist that, in order to love other people, you have to have your doctrines all figured out. One can, therefore, summarize conservative Christian belief as “He who knows about God is born of God and loves.”

But the Gospel of John says exactly the opposite. It says, “He who loves is born of God and knows God.” Fundamentalist Christians have it exactly backwards, even according to their own Bible.

I love, therefore I know God (not necessarily about God). When I say I love, I mean that I care about other people, as individuals and as a world. I love God’s creation, even though I believe it was not supernaturally created; I love it because it keeps us all alive, and I love it for its own sake. Of course, I do other things besides loving. Sometimes I hate. Sometimes I lust. Sometimes I feel infatuated, although as I get older this is rare and mild. I am sometimes greedy. But these things do not negate the fact that I love. How about the rest of you? You probably do also.

One way of showing love is to encourage others. I spend a lot of time encouraging my students. I help them achieve their goals, and I also help to open their eyes to the wonders of the world and of creativity. I encourage my colleagues (usually). And I appreciate the encouragement of others.

Back in 1992, I was getting fired from a faculty position, by a process that I believed was unfair and inaccurate. It was a major disruption in my life at the time, although I am glad that I am no longer at that college. (It was a Christian college that considered Republican faith to be Christian faith.) I sought out a professor at a nearby major university. I am not sure how I chose him, but he was active in the American Association of University Professors, the professorial union. (Christian colleges generally do not have, or even allow, professors to band together for mutual benefit.) He was a busy man, in a field quite unrelated to mine. But he took the time to write a thoughtful, information-filled letter to the president of the college I was leaving, explaining that he had no personal connection to me but that he believed the process of my termination was unfair. (The college administration ignored him.)

I had forgotten all about this letter until, in the process of clearing out old boxes, I found it. This encouragement was powerfully important to me at that time. Although I had forgotten about it, it must have been one of the influences that turned me from a young professor who worried mostly about his own advancement into a mature professor who, as this man did, encourages and defends others.

By encouraging others, you can turn them into encouragers. He who loves knows God, if there is one.

An Unbeliever's Prayer, by John Gunther, Jr.

John Gunther was a famous American journalist. His works are mostly now outdated, such as Inside Russia Today. But his most lasting work is probably Death Be Not Proud, which documents the story of his son dying of brain cancer (Pyramid, 1963). It was made into a TV movie in the 1970s.

His son, John Gunther, Jr., wrote an “unbeliever’s prayer” while he was dying in July 1946.

Almighty God

forgive me for my agnosticism

For I shall try to keep it gentle, not cynical,

nor a bad influence.

And O!

if Thou art truly in the heavens,

accept my gratitude

for all Thy gifts

and I shall try

to fight the good fight. Amen.

The Tragedy of The Questing Spirit

In 1947, in the wake of World War II, Coward McCann Publishers released a 700-page book called The Questing Spirit: Religion in the Literature of Our Time. All during the war, editors Halford E. Luccock and Frances Brentano gathered their examples of stories, plays, essays, and poems in the hope, which must often have seemed dim to them, that the War would end. This book is now virtually extinct. For the first few hundred pages, which I read to induce sleep, a little bit each night, I thought its extinction deserved. I was going to give it to the library, which might then recycle it, since it is falling apart. Indeed, many of the entries are merely devotional, even pieces by such recognized writers as E. M. Forster and Saki. I kept hoping for something that was actually a quest for understanding.

But a few passages stuck out. Lloyd Douglas (author of The Robe) referred to the world as “not fit to live in, much less die for.” L. P. Jacks wrote that humans were “ill adapted for living an easy life, but well adapted for living a difficult one.” And there was another story about shepherds that ran off to greet the birth of the Messiah, except one, who would not leave his sheep. He explained that he was a savior to those hundred sheep he stayed to protect. One particularly thought-provoking story was Peter’s Difficulty, by Frank Harris. Peter, guarding the gates of heaven, was worried that someone was helping deformed people sneak into heaven. Upon investigating, Peter found that it was the Virgin Mary who was doing it.

Some authors lived through the same spiritual angst that I had experienced. The loss of fundamentalist religious doctrine left me angry because God ought to exist. I wanted, and want, God to exist. But fundamentalism demanded that I believe all good people are going to hell if they did not accept the narrow Christian doctrines that I held. Even in the midst of fundamentalism, I never believed this. One author who shared my anger was the famous historian Will Durant. He wrote a letter (presumably to God, though he left it blank). He wrote, “Every invention strengthens the strong and weakens the weak; every new mechanism displaces men, and multiplies the horrors of war.” Human life, he said, was a “fitful pullulation.” Perhaps foreseeing Deep Ecology, Durant wrote that humans were “a planetary eczema.”

Some particularly striking entries were:

• The Dawn of Peace, a poem by Alfred Noyes about how peace was coming like the dawn; what was once a vain dream is now an unstoppable reality: “Dreams are they? But ye cannot stay them, or thrust the dawn back for one hour.” I think that before he died, Noyes was sorely disappointed.
• Vachel Lindsay exactly reflected what I believe today in his poem The Unpardonable Sin. “This is the sin against the Holy Ghost: This is the sin no purging can atone: To send forth rapine in the name of Christ, To set the face, and make the heart a stone.” This is what I would like to say to the warlike Trump-worshipers 72 years later!
• John Galsworthy wrote a poem, Wonder, that made a similar point. “If God is thrilled by a battle cry...If God laughs when the guns thunder...Then, bewildered, I but wonder God of Love can love such things!” He ended the poem, “Merciless God, goodbye!”
• Perhaps most striking was a poem by Sara Henderson Hay, The Shape God Wears, in which different animals described what God is like, in their images, and then the human tells them they are all wrong: God is actually in man’s image. A forgotten masterpiece.

The editors must have hoped that their quest would have some effect on the world. It did not. But even if the rest of the world has forgotten this book, I will remember it, even if for just the dozen or so pages that stood out.