The religion post

I was sent an article the other day and I felt it was laughably bad enough to share.

http://whatiamtobe.blogspot.com/2009/02/god-vs-science.html

""Let me explain the problem science has with religion." The atheist professor of philosophy pauses before his class and then asks one of his new students to stand."

OK, So an atheist professor of philosophy... moving on, science doesn't have a problem with religion any more than it has a problem with pseudoscience.  Science is not an entity that has problems or real contradictions, it is a set of tools that we use to measure and understand our world and our body of knowledge about it.  It's other things that have issues with the findings of science.

"He doesn't, does he? My brother was a Christian who died of cancer, even though he prayed to Jesus to heal him. How is this Jesus good? Hmmm? Can you answer that one?"

Yeah, faith healing does not work.  Study after study finds that prayer does not heal people.  It is no wonder though that you will keep hearing stories about people who prayed and were 'miraculously' cured.  There are nearly 7 billion people in the world and the vast majority of them have some kind of religion.  Since many diseases (such as cancer) can spontaneously go into remission a certain percentage of people who pray will be cured, completely independent of the prayer.  I truly wish that praying were all it would take to cure disease but that is unfortunately not the case.  Does this research invalidate religions?  only if your religion hinges on the idea that god answers every prayer.  That can be disproved by praying for anything tangible, like asking to have a moment like any of these..

"Yes, faith," the professor repeats. "And that is the problem science has with God. There is no evidence, only faith."

The student stands quietly for a moment, before asking a question of his own. "Professor, is there such thing as heat?"

"Yes."

"And is there such a thing as cold?"

"Yes, son, there's cold too."

"No sir, there isn't."

Heat is a measure of energy.  Energy, or the absence of, creates a specific measurable effect on the world around it.  We don't need to have faith that energy has an effect on the world, we can observe it.  The same thing goes for the argument with light and darkness, darkness is simply the absence of light in the visible spectrum.  There is always some kind of electro-magnetic wave.  Microwave radiation permeates the entire universe so really there is no absence of light anywhere.

"You are working on the premise of duality," the student explains. "You argue that there is life and then there's death; a good God and a bad God. You are viewing the concept of God as something finite, something we can measure. Sir, science can't even explain a thought. It uses electricity and magnetism, but has never seen, much less fully understood either one. To view death as the opposite of life is t o be ignorant of the fact that death cannot exist as a substantive thing. Death is not the opposite of life, just the absence of it.

"Now tell me, professor. Do you teach your students that they evolved from a monkey?"

"If you are referring to the natural evolutionary process, young man, yes, of course I do."

"Have you ever observed evolution with your own eyes, sir?"

Researchers have made some very good ground on understanding human though.  Even if it couldn't explain it we can still measure it’s effects directly using things such as FMRI machines.  This goes for every other thing that science can't explain currently.  We can find a lot of very clever ways to measure, directly or indirectly, just about anything.  Many people thought we would not be able to measure the chemical composition of stars, some making grand declarations of it.  Then spectroscopy came along and now we can accurately tell what a star is made of.  Making a loud declaration of what science cannot ever do is something that is sure to get you in a science textbook as an example of irony.

Saying that something cannot be measured is another way of telling me that it does not exist.  If it exists and has some influence on the world then it can be measured in some way.  Because otherwise if it has no influence on the world then it does not matter if it exists.  The methods to detect that influence may not be known at the time but you cannot categorically say that we will forever be in the dark on that subject.

A quick aside on the Subject of evolution… I plan on having a lot of posts about because as mentioned it is one of my favorite concepts.  The idea that we MUST directly observe something in order for it to be real  is ridiculous, see my post about Australia.  We can measure the effects of those forces and concepts indirectly.  We do this with many parts of science and many technologies rely specifically on that science being right.  Although, evolution is one of those things that can be directly observed.

So yes, we have directly seen evolution, we have used it to make predictions, and we continue to build up evidence for it.  When people attack evolution because it conflicts with their religion it reminds me of a phrase I once heard whose source unfortunately escapes me at the moment.  "If a religion taught that the sky was green, and this was widely held to be true, when the students came into their science classroom the professor would not expound on how wrong their religion was, or the inadequacies of their faith.  The professor would merely ask them to look up and judge for themselves."  That is the essence of science, using what can be measured to build an understanding of the world.  Checking those measurements against earlier measurements and when they don't agree figure out why. 

To this the student replied, "Evil does not exist sir, or at least it does not exist unto itself. Evil is simply the absence of God. It is just like darkness and cold, a word that man has created to describe the absence of God. God did not create evil. Evil is the result of what happens when man does not have God's love present in his heart. It's like the cold that comes when there is no heat or the darkness that comes when there is no light."

Evil is a concept that people came up with, it is actually less a concept than cold or darkness, because light or heat can be directly measured.  Good cannot be measured,  it is a sliding scale that exists only in our minds.  So this is a false analogy (Some may argue that because the effects of good can be measured, i.e. in the prosperity of a community, it is not a false analogy.  I dislike this argument mostly due to the concept of good being a subjective term and would point out that many societies have prospered that have been seen as incredibly evil by other societies).  The professor in this piece is a straw man, pure and simple.  An atheist professor of philosophy would most certainly have already heard these tired arguments before and have simply refuted them as easily as I have.  As for the student.

The student was Albert Einstein. Albert Einstein did write a book titled God vs. Science in 1921.

Albert Einstein was an atheist (the quote from Einstein "I do not believe in any personal god" comes to mind), he was born Jewish (so I truly have no idea where the idea that he believed in Jesus came from),  and he never published a book call 'God vs. Science'.  Even if it was an actual story about Einstein it would only prove that Einstein could be wrong.  Although Einstein is almost the icon of science to some people he was still human and had his flaws like everyone else.  Arguing otherwise is just an argument from authority.  Before Einstein's theories Newton was seen as an unimpeachable authority, Einstein proved him wrong and that is why we hold Einstein in high regard.  The person who proves Einstein wrong will be seen in much the same light.  (Though modern physics has already got to the point of needing entire teams of people working on problems to solve them).

This article is not about attacking religion, the trouble is that religious people will sometimes tell stories like this or insist that their beliefs be taught in public schools.  When the tools of science are applied to their religion, the cracks begin to appear.  The religious claims that are sometimes made can be tested by science,  and are proven false.  When people argue that the ten commandments should be in the courthouse or creationism should be taught in schools they make a claim that they have to prove.  When they speak of these things in their church they are not called on them to prove them, and they expect the same ‘courtesy’ extended to them in the realm of politics.

Things like the earth only being 10,000 years old can be so completely disproven by any number of methods.  But creationists still teach this to their children as inerrant truth.  When people point out the inconsistencies in it or the evidence against it we are told that we cannot criticize their religion (The idea that religion holds a place that is beyond criticism is without merit, read the god delusion for more on that.).  We aren't criticizing the ideals of that religion, merely the claims that do not hold up with reality.  Teaching that the world is only 10,000 years old is the same as teaching that the sky is green, although it just takes different ways of looking to prove it wrong.

One criticism that I keep hearing is that carbon dating is inaccurate.  We don't use Carbon dating to get an accurate date on anything older than 60,000 years.  The reason for this is that different elements decay at different rates and so the further back we go we have to switch elements to get a more accurate date.

When we date something that is 400 million years old, our dating comes up as being anywhere from 390 million to 410 million years old.  People will point out that a 20 million year window is not very accurate, but accuracy also has to do with the scale we are using.  A 20 million year window on a scale of 400 million years is only a 5 percent window.  5 percent is terrific accuracy at a scale of, compare that to the 'estimates' that people make for the worlds age based on the bible.  6,000 to 10,000 years, that is a 50 percent window there.  But the same people who pan different dating techniques are fine with those numbers because even though the percentage is high the numbers are small.

Why does the religious community attack things like evolution and modern geology?  One of my friends went to church with his in laws one day, he was sitting through a lecture about how Darwin had come up with his theory of evolution specifically to overshadow the creation of their denomination (7th day adventists) and lead people away from the revelation of the true sabbath.  I doubt that Charles Darwin had even heard of that denomination in the first place, let alone would release his theory of natural selection merely to distract people.  You might as well say that the Large Hadron Collider is to distract people from the Pope.  Attacking science and it's methods will not help them in the long run.  Think back into history about when religion denied the findings of science, Galileo and his treatment by the church is a obvious mistake now.  How big a mistake will it show to be in the future looking back at the religious  arguments against scientific ideas like evolution.  Science is not infallible, not many people claim that science is perfect, but when our understanding of the world has been shown to be wrong it was the tools and methods of science that did the overturning