Creationism in Ireland and "Alternative Facts"

I am not sure how this term “alternative facts” managed to become common parlance. The Irish news is reporting on a traveling roadshow that is trying to educate young kids that dinosaurs and humans coexisted (as Barry Lynn notes: "only on the Flintstones").  Paul Ainsworth writes:

AN organisation is to tour Ireland with an event teaching children that dinosaurs and humans existed on Earth at the same time.

The ‘Prehistoric Preachers Dinosaur Roadshow’ is hosted by Creation Ministries, which promotes the belief that the world is only around 6,000 years old.

The fundamentalist Christian organisation says the roadshow - to visit four venues across the north during May before moving to five locations in the Republic – will teach the “true history of the world to young and old alike”.

Children are offered the chance to sit on life-size replicas of dinosaurs and take home an “educational free gift”.

However, it has been warned that the message that dinosaurs did not die out 65 million years ago flies in the face of conventional understanding of natural history, with one critic dubbing the claims put forward by organisers as “dangerous alternative facts”.

There are no such things as “alternative” facts.  There are scientific observations about observable phenomena that generate hypotheses.  If several thousand of these hypotheses support a particular model, then a theory explaining the phenomenon is generated.  That is how we have gravitational theory, cell theory, plate tectonic theory and, yes, evolutionary theory.

Facts are instances in which so many concurrent observations have been made that support a particular understanding of some natural phenomenon that it is regarded as a near certainty.  Everyone on the planet agrees that marble is a rock.  No one has ever observed marble behaving in such a way that makes one suspect that it is not.  Therefore, it is a FACT that marble is a rock.

Theoretical constructs, on the other hand, are open to examination and change.  Young earth creationism is a theory that the earth was created six thousand years ago and that modern science supports this.  That can be critically examined.  When it is, however, it is found that no hypotheses that are constructed to test this theory have been found that DO support it.  Put simply, the theory has no empirical justification.  Further, it is found that the primary advocates of this theory put it forth from a religious and not a scientific perspective.

But you knew this.

The problem is in calling these“alternative facts.” They are not. They are scientifically unsupportable statements made about observable phenomena and that is what they need to be called.

Nearly Half of Americans Accept Astrology As Science

How bad is the science education in this country?  UPI is running a story about the acceptance of astrology in the United States.  It is depressing:

According to a new survey by the National Science Foundation, nearly half of all Americans say astrology, the study of celestial bodies' purported influence on human behavior and worldly events, is either "very scientific" or "sort of scientific."

By contrast, 92 percent of the Chinese public think horoscopes are a bunch of baloney.

What's more alarming, researchers show in the 2014 Science and Engineering Indicators study, is that American attitudes about science are moving in the wrong direction. Skepticism of astrology hit an all-time high in 2004, when 66 percent of Americans said astrology was total nonsense. But each year, fewer and fewer respondents have dismissed the connections between star alignment and personality as bunk.

This, once again, calls into sharp focus why we have to have good, grounded science education. While it is quite true that many people will accept something because they simply want to, despite the evidence, a good many people simply don't know better. They also don't have a good grasp on what science is and how it operates. One of the principle sections of my Anthropology 110 class opening lecture is how science is practiced and how to distinguish between hypothesis and theory. I am continually amazed at how many people get those questions wrong.

On the other hand, as far as the Discovery Institute is concerned, astrology really is science.

Christine O'Donnell: Trouble For Science Education In Delaware?

New York News and Features has an article on Christine O'Donnell, the woman who surprisingly upset GOP favorite Mike Castle to win the primary in Delaware. In what has become tiringly predictable, the author writes:

In a discussion moderated by anchor Miles O'Brien, O'Donnell squared off against Michael McKinney, a University of Tennessee professor of evolutionary biology. Not only was O'Donnell in favor of teaching creationism alongside evolution, but she wasn't even sure evolution was real. According to a transcript, via Nexis:

CHRISTINE O'DONNELL, Concerned Women for America: Well, as the senator from Tennessee mentioned, evolution is a theory and it's exactly that. There is not enough evidence, consistent evidence to make it as fact, and I say that because for theory to become a fact, it needs to consistently have the same results after it goes through a series of tests. The tests that they put — that they use to support evolution do not have consistent results. Now too many people are blindly accepting evolution as fact. But when you get down to the hard evidence, it's merely a theory. But creation —

Great Googlymoogly! Yet another person in elected office for whom science education has completely failed. Where do people learn this nonsense? O'Donnell, all at once, doesn't seem to know the difference between theory and hypothesis or between conclusion and fact. Theories don't ever become facts in this sense. They become very high probabilities. It isn't a fact that when I drop something it will land on the floor but the probability of it doing so is so great that we consider it a certainty. Where does she get the idea that these "tests" of evolution don't have consistent results? Not from any science textbook, that's for sure. To get an idea of where it does come from, we get to this:

CHRISTINE O'DONNELL: Well, creationism, in essence, is believing that the world began as the Bible in Genesis says, that God created the Earth in six days, six 24-hour periods. And there is just as much, if not more, evidence supporting that.

This is a woman who's only exposure to biological and geological sciences has been the ICR and AIG. No wonder she doesn't know the difference between theory and hypothesis. She also states that scientists use carbon dating to prove something was "millions of years old." Uh, no. They don't. Radiocarbon dating can stretch back 60-70 thousand years at the outside.

This lack of basic knowledge is truly troubling for someone who, as an elected official will have an influence on the education policies for the state of Delaware. Now this interview was conducted in 1996 and it is possible these views have changed since then. I applaud her conservatism as it applies to fiscal responsibility but it is hard to support this kind of ignorant Christian folk science.

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Redstate the Latest One to Get It Wrong

Charles Taylor points us in the direction of a Redstate column, which is really a reply to another column at Salon.com which, derisively, has a section devoted to conservatives called "Ask a Wingnut," as if all conservatives tilt at windmills. The writer at Redstate, who identifies himself as "Realityunwound," decries the usual liberal penchant for casting all conservatives as anti-science and then proceeds to support their point. After some cursory comments about how conservatives are not anti-science, he brings up ID as a good example of science that should be taught. He makes the following points about ID:

• I believe the world was created by an Intelligent Being, and I don’t believe Darwin (or any other amalgum of scientific theorists) offer as reasonable and scientifically proveable explanation of how the world is.
• I accept that there is a theory of evolution, and that smart, intelligent, educated, honest scientists in the world ascribe to this theory.
• I will also concede that Intelligent Design is a theory in the same way that gravity is a theory (an assumption based on limited information or knowledge; a conjecture). It has not been observed as a complete process (i.e. we weren’t there at creation) so it can not be verified as an observed fact.

Lets take point one. You say you don't "believe" that Darwin or any other theorists offer an alternative of how the world is. It is perfectly all right to state that you believe that the world was created by God. No problem there because it is "belief." What education has led you to "believe" that Darwin or other "amalgum of scientific theorists" can't explain the world as it is? Do you not accept gravitational theory, which explains not just why things fall out of the sky but the existence of black holes? Do you not accept germ theory, which has led to the deriving of antibiotics to combat nasty bugs? Your use of the word "proveable" indicates that you don't understand how science works. Science never "proves" anything. It simply shows relationships between phenomena and tests hypotheses. Note: these hypotheses can be experimental or predictive.

Point Two: You mention that there is a theory of evolution and that "smart, intelligent, educated, honest scientists" subscribe to it. Do you think they subscribe to this theory in a vacuum and are just deluding themselves after decades of honest work in the fields of biology, palaeontology and geology? Do you have enough expertise in these fields to be able to tell them that they are wrong?

Point Three: You also "concede" that Intelligent Design is a theory much in the same way that gravity is a theory. How is this even remotely so? Gravity is an incredibly robust theory (which is not the same as an hypothesis, by the way) that can be and has been tested repeatedly through actual observation and prediction. Intelligent Design is NOT SCIENCE. It offers no testable or predictable hypotheses. Its very essence is an appeal to a supernatural explanation because it is perceived that no naturalistic one is in the offing. This perspective is called argumentum ad ignorantiam or "argument from ignorance." One has exhausted all of the known explanations to a problem so it explained in a supernatural way. Here's the problem: say we have competing hypotheses for why some phenomena is the way it is. Then let's say that I conclusively demonstrate that your hypothesis is wrong. That doesn't make my hypothesis right. All we know for sure is that yours is wrong.

The other aspect of Point Three about theoretical bases not being "observed fact" is every bit as troubling as that already mentioned. It is a variant of the Ken Ham "Were you there?" quote. The idea is that since we weren't around to witness an event, we don't know for sure that it happened. If a tree falls in the forest...and so on. In a strict sense, you are correct. But do you really believe we can gain no inference from past events? Court rooms are filled every day with trials in which a prosecuting attorney is trying to make a case that a defendant committed the crime of x. He or she does this by reconstructing the events leading up to and following the crime. It is necessarily predictive and is accepted as common practice of law because of its robusticity. The so-called historical sciences, geology, palaeontology and, to the extent that it takes light a long time to get to us, astronomy all use prediction to flesh out theory. If we hypothesize that the transition to the first land animals occurred in shallow Devonian seas, we can hypothesize that a transitional critter should be found in those deposits. If we find a critter in those deposits that has characteristics of land animals and late fish, it means that the data support the hypothesis. It is called Reconstructing the Past and it is basic to science.

A free exchange of ideas is fine as far as it goes, but if I want to teach modern geography and you want to teach that the world is flat, the two theories don't hold the same amount of scientific merit. It is easy to show that the world is not flat, just as it is easy to show that despite protestations to the contrary, there are thousands of transitional fossils. ID, on the other hand, can't construct even a basic hypothesis that is testable. As Paul Nelson, a fellow at the DI's Center For Science and Culture said in 2004:

Easily the biggest challenge facing the ID community is to develop a full-fledged theory of biological design. We don’t have such a theory now, and that’s a real problem. Without a theory, it’s very hard to know where to direct your research focus. Right now, we’ve got a bag of powerful intuitions, and a handful of notions such as “irreducible complexity” and “specified complexity” –- but, as yet, no general theory of biological design.¹

To my knowledge, no other ID supporter has come out to deny that stance. Simply put, ID cannot be science if it has no testable hypotheses or theoretical basis. As such, it doesn't belong in the science classroom.

¹Nelson, P. (2004) The Measure of Design," Touchstone, pp. 64-65