I find myself nodding in agreement with the wisdom of the Kansas Board of Education. Not very much agreement, to be sure; the recent move to introduce official skepticism about evolution into its new public school science standards is just bad. Bad, bad Kansas.
But, amidst the bemoaning of this setback for Enlightenment values, we all had a little fun with the school board’s attempt to change the definition of science, as Risa has already pointed out. (See also John Rennie at the new Scientific American blog.) Seems that they have decided to open the door to explanations other than the purely natural — obviously, so that they can include religious (“supernatural”) explanations within a science curriculum.
But only after reading Dennis Overbye’s story in yesterday’s New York Times did I really understand what they had done. Here’s the new definition of “science”:
The changes in the official state definition are subtle and lawyerly, and involve mainly the removal of two words: “natural explanations.” But they are a red flag to scientists, who say the changes obliterate the distinction between the natural and the supernatural that goes back to Galileo and the foundations of science.
The old definition reads in part, “Science is the human activity of seeking natural explanations for what we observe in the world around us.” The new one calls science “a systematic method of continuing investigation that uses observation, hypothesis testing, measurement, experimentation, logical argument and theory building to lead to more adequate explanations of natural phenomena.”
At the risk of alienating all my friends — the school board is right. Science isn’t about finding “natural” explanations vs. “supernatural” ones; it’s about finding correct explanations, without any presupposition about what form they may take. The distinguishing feature of science isn’t in the explanations themselves, it’s in the process by which we find them. Namely, we toss out hypotheses, compare them to data, and look for the hypotheses which account for the largest number of phenomena in the simplest possible way. Simplicity here is in the sense of “algorithmic compressibility” — the number of bits, if you like, required to specify the mechanism that purports to do all this explaining.
What the Kansas school board has tried to do is to open the door for unbiased consideration of natural and supernatural explanations by a common standard — that of scientific investigation. This is just what I’ve been arguing for all along. Scientists have to get off this kick that science and religion are completely distinct magisteria that have nothing to do with each other. Quite the contrary; religion (at least in its common Western forms) goes around making claims about how the world works, and it’s perfectly appropriate to judge such claims by the same standards that we judge any other suggested hypotheses about nature.
The thing is, if we judge popular religious vs. naturalist explanations for how the universe works by a common scientific standard, naturalism wins. Without breaking a sweat, frankly; by the beginning of the second half, we have to send in the scrubs from the bench, at the risk of being accused of running up the score. Intelligent Design, to take one obvious example, is laughably bad as a scientific hypothesis. It explains practically nothing (since it refuses to say anything about the nature of the designer, so we have no clue what such a designer would ever choose to design), while introducing a fantastic amount of new complexity in the form of an entirely distinct metaphysical category (the designer). I have no problem saying that ID is a “scientific hypothesis”; it’s just such a bad one that no sensible scientist would give it a moment’s thought if it weren’t for the massive public-relations campaign behind it.
Science doesn’t home in on naturalistic explanations by assumption; it chooses them because those are the best ones. That doesn’t mean that we have to “teach the controversy” in high schools; the number of grossly inadequate scientific theories is far larger than we could ever address in such a context. But it’s about time that we admitted that science is perfectly capable of judging supernatural claims — and finding them sadly wanting.
What’s interesting about this controversy is that we’ve been on this earth for what amounts to a fraction of a femtosecond in the history of the universe, and yet we feel to speak so authoritatively in these matters.
Now, there are reports that some among us are about to design living organisms. Might evidence of such efforts be referred to as “unintelligent design” down the road a few seconds from now?
Recently, a new way to test ID by analyzing the CMB was proposed by S. Hsu and A. Zee:
http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0510102
”We argue that the cosmic microwave background (CMB) provides a stupendous opportunity for the Creator of our universe (assuming one exists) to have sent a message to its occupants, using known physics. The medium for the message is unique. We elaborate on this observation, noting that it requires only careful adjustment of the fundamental Lagrangian, but no direct intervention in the subsequent evolution of the universe.”
Douglas Scott and J.P. Zibin have distputed this, see here:
http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0511135
”A recent paper by Hsu & Zee (physics/0510102) suggests that if a Creator wanted to leave a message for us, and she wanted it to be decipherable to all sentient beings, then she would place it on the most cosmic of all billboards, the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) sky. Here we point out that the spherical harmonic coefficients of the observed CMB anisotropies (or their squared amplitudes at each multipole) depend on the location of the observer, in both space and time. The amount of observer-independent information available in the CMB is a small fraction of the total that any observer can measure. Hence a lengthy message on the CMB sky is fundamentally no less observer-specific than a communication hidden in this morning’s tea-leaves. Nevertheless, the CMB sky does encode a wealth of information about the structure of the cosmos and possibly about the nature of physics at the highest energy levels. The Universe has left us a message all on its own.”
🙂
Nope, I gotta disagree. Science is explicitly a search for naturalistic descriptions of the way the world works. If we succeed in finding a naturalistic explanation for something, then it is natural and not supernatural. Heck, you could relax that a bit to say that if we observe it, or if it’s consistent with what we observe, then it’s naturalistic. Without observation, or at least serious attempts to link an idea to observations, it. is. NOT. science.
Ignoring the line in the GEM song (“My model and you data disagree — your data must be wrong!”), we require repeatable, testable hypothesis for a reason. It has been, since well before Galileo. Saying anything else ignores our history and program. More to the point, tell it to the grant reviewers and see if they agree. We can say science is this, science is that, but that doesn’t make it true.
Just two quick points, as I have real work to be doing:
1. Of course, science does prefer completely naturalistic explanations. All else being equal, scientists will vote for theories featuring rigid patterns that are never violated, rather than allowing for occasional supernatural interventions. But perhaps not all else is equal. If there were a theory that did allow for supernatural events, and there wasn’t any more naturalistic theory that fit the data nearly as well, any scientist worth their salt would happily accept (at least provisionally) the supernatural theory. Like Steven Weinberg says, it wouldn’t be difficult to convince him that God exists; all God has to do is walk through the door and start demonstrating omnipotence right and left. Scientists would also have prefered not to give up on deterministic evolution, but confrontation with the data eventually convinced them to accept quantum mechanics.
2. Much of the discussion is about how we would ever know that something was “really” supernatural, and we simply hadn’t yet discerned the underlying patterns. Absolutely right. Since naturalistic explanations tend to be simpler, the urge to keep looking for them is a perfectly sensible one. But maybe, provisionally, we can’t think of any, and some good supernatural theory is placed before us. No problem with that; science doesn’t pretend to be in possession of the ultimate immutable truth, we just do the best with the information we have at the time.
The point, don’t forget, is that all these hypotheticals are completely contrary to fact. In the real world, theories that rely on the supernatural are incredibly weak by conventional scientific standards. I’d rather admit that truth instead of pretending we’re not allowed to pass a judgment.
Hume argued in his “Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion” that it was impossible to find God by deduction from the natural order. It seems to me, that it should also be thus impossible to say that science is always in fact capable of judging supernatural claims. The post seems to disagree:
Sean (or anyone else): Did I miss something here? Maybe I misunderstood Hume, but it seems to me that you can’t have your cake and eat it too. Of course, science is sometimes able to judge supernatural claims about nature, but science is not capable of judging all supernatural claims, and maybe this is what you meant.
Scientists have to get off this kick that science and religion are completely distinct magisteria that have nothing to do with each other.
Whoa! Kick? We are talking about two different approaches to seeing the world. One in which belief structures based in authority predominate, without any necessary recourse to experience whatever, and one in which *any* idea must survive in a crucible of observations available to everyone.
I’ve spent a lifetime studying both — the mathematical sciences and the major religions. There is no place in science, for example, for belief in angels … whether or not 75 percent of Americans believe in them. Recently, the Vatican *and* the Dalai Lama have spoken in favor of evolution, the latter saying that experience must count for more than the most venerated scripture.
A science classroom is for science. The great majority of scientists do not consider as science study of the supernatural. “Kansas science” is an embarrassing abberation fostered by times full of fear and confusion and more than a little ignorance of all that science, including medicine, have contributed to the modern lifestyle.
A, I don’t think Hume is always completely consistent. Even in On Miracles, which is directly about this topic, he sometimes appears to say that miracles are logically impossible, while at others seems to argue that they are simply inconsistent with a preponderance of the evidence.
Anyway, whatever Hume may have thought, I don’t think there is any conceivable way of being convinced that God exists except for looking at the natural order — other ways are just cop-outs. And I look at the natural order and don’t see any need to invoke the God hypothesis. Not sure what “always” or “all” really refer to; I just want to say that science can in principle entertain supernatural hypotheses, and finds that they fall short.
I’m surprised that no one has raised the simple point that ID is not science because it cannot be falsified by observations. It is a hypothesis, but not a scientific one. Mathguy (post 20) gets at this. So, unfortunately, the Kansas Board is still wrong, and Sean kinda is too.
ID/Creationism v. Evolution is a great way to explain in Science classes what makes a scientific theory, and explaining the philosophy of science. Arguing that evolution has gaps which therefore begs for a supernatural explanation is not science, and is a bad representation of the philosophy of science.
“The point, don’t forget, is that all these hypotheticals are completely contrary to fact. In the real world, theories that rely on the supernatural are incredibly weak by conventional scientific standards.”
In a sad way, i think that there is a relatively serious consideration that hasn’t been identified yet in the post and subsequent comments. A vast majority of US citizens have more “confidence” in their beliefs (no matter how “contrary to facts” they be) in the supernatural, than they do in their understanding of scientific processes and knowledge. Sean’s post seems too hopeful, in holding that these millions upon millions of people will come to their “senses” so to speak when confronted with a rigorous scientific inquiry of all we conceptualize as reality.
Jeff Olson writes: “We might win more hearts by giving ID and other such claims their rightful day in court.” I don’t think we have a chance of winning more hearts, or minds for that matter. The ID movement is merely a tactic in a strategic battle plan to force creationism (in this case a very restrictive sectarian version) into the standards, frameworks, and curricula of public schools in place of “conventional scientific standards.” The bulk of the people simply won’t care how much effort is undertaken to validate or falsify their “more adequate” explanations, regardless of what they are called.
Dallas-
Like I pointed out before, I think that ID (if we try to give it the benefit of the doubt as much as possible) is a framework rather than a hypothesis. I’m not exactly sure how the proponents want to do it. An IDer must eventually say things like: shells are really fancy- they were designed in 3000 BC. Horses were designed in 8000 BC. These are now hypotheses that can be falsified: find evidence that they existed before that, or give a plausible means by which they came into being and these weaken or destroy the hypothesis. So, no, the basic framework of ID is not falsifiable, but the specific statements are. And if IDers can’t find enough hypotheses that hold up to existing evidence and cover the same material that the hypotheses in the evolutionary framework cover, then its not a valuable science.
My (not original) view is that there is always this unfalsifiable element in a science. People say that Newtonian Mechanics was falsified by finding that the world is probabilistic. But really, when it comes down to it, we still see stuff moving around and can postulate corresponding forces. Yes, in cases like the double slit experiment the forces seem to have some weird behavior, but I don’t believe it truly falsifies the theory- just makes it extremely unwieldy and quantum mechanics is a much more elegant concise explanation.
Anyway, maybe this is a fringe view of science, but this is where I currently sit with it.
As i understand it the school boards intent is suspect as they want to challange evolution etc. (i confess i do not have detailed knowlege about the specifics of what the kansas board is doing)…
but are these actual definitions a problem?
was the old definition so great? what exactly are “natural explanations” – somewhat ambiguous. some certainly percieve creationism as being very “natural”
and is the new definition really sinister? other than being not well written (e.g. are not measurements a type of observation; what does “adequate explanations” mean?; etc), it seems like a something that i (and i strongly believe in evolution) might come up with if i was asked to define science by my 8 year old daughter…
Tony, I don’t see why Sean’s comments are upsetting to you and others here. He seems to merely be saying that any claim or hypothesis can have its scientific worth discerned. Hence a claim can be probable or improbable due to the evidence or scientifically worthless/ful based on its predictiveness and simplicity. Hence I would really like Kansas’s knew definition assuming they then go on to define “more adequate” to mean, more probable(based on observation and experiment) and more powerful(both predictive and simple).
mbecker,
It’s not a problem unless one also considers that the goal of the redefining of the nature of science is to enable creationists in local schools (and there are a substantial number of creationist science teachers) to teach spurious and often false criticisms of evolutionary theory, to present ID as though it is on a par (explanatorily and substantively) with modern evolutionary theory, and to introduce unjustified doubts about all science, including (for the benefit of locals here) physics. Recall that many creationist “criticisms” of evolutionary theory require rejecting most of particle physics and astrophysics. Biology is not the only discipline at risk.
I quote from the Wedge document that lays out the current ID strategy:
“Governing Goals
* To defeat scientific materialism and its destructive moral, cultural and political legacies.
* To replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and hurnan beings are created by God.”
(http://tinyurl.com/8lzy9)
If that doesn’t bother you, then yes, the redefinition is innocuous.
RBH
also note that predictive, in my last post, means that it generates testable predictions, as obviously a theory could generate an infininate number of untestable predictions but no testable ones and hence be unpredictive.
oh and specificness of predictions also adds to a claims predictiveness.
/sorry about the spread but I decided that since we are talking about definitions I should be precise in mine.
RBH (and, to a lesser extent, spyder)– I understand that there is a political/social context as well as an epistemological one. That doesn’t mean that I have to comment on the former every time I comment on the latter. The correct order should be (1) figure out what is right, (2) try to convince people of it. We shouldn’t be taking intellectual stances for political reasons.
Just wait until I find time to write the post explaining why “falsifiability” is not the right criterion for deciding whether an hypothesis is scientific or not. That’ll really rattle people’s cages.
As I once heard long ago, the philosophy of science is the field where you kick up a lot of dust and then complain that you can’t see.
It’s really quite a disappointment that all the blue things didn’t turn green six years ago. Would’ve been quite cool.
Well, one conceivable way is to ask why there is something rather than nothing. Atheists take this as brute fact, but a religious person could legitimately attribute it to God. In both cases, it is a matter of pure contemplation. And there are plenty of other metaphysical questions.
There are oodles of unexplained phenomena in this universe for which someone could invoke God. True, they are vulnerable to the usual God-of-the-gaps trap, but until the gaps are filled, people can plausibly see a “need”.
Good point. The question is not correctness of the theory but its usefulness. A creationist theory is correct by fiat but offers no guidance; no supernatural theory could. This is why I object to Kansas’s redefinition of science.
To the extent that scientists comment on creationism as bad science, it is not because of the supernatural agent per se, but because of the lack of a boundary theory — a criterion to tell which processes are or are not explicable by Darwinism. For instance, there is no quantitative theory of “irreducible complexity”.
George
There have been some attempts on this thread to produce a demarcation between science and nonscience (metaphysics or the supernatural). One approach is to take the subject matter (Nature) as key, another to prefer the disciplinary activity. The philosopher R.G.Collingwood would certainly have counted himself in the latter camp. In fact he wrote a book ‘The Idea of Nature’ describing how our idea of Nature had developed over the centuries, through the overcoming of internal tensions. Taking what you see as our currently best conception of Nature as timelessly correct will in all likelihood be a mistake.
You can see in the following quotation the accent on science as historical process:
“If a scientist, told by a philosophical inquisitor that his methods are faulty and that the science they yield can never give him genuine knowledge, thought it worth while to give any answer at all, the right answer for him to give would be: ‘Eppur si muove. My science is a going concern. I ask myself questions. I invent ways of answering them. I find the answers convincing. As I go on working, I find my old problems dissolving, and new ones taking their place. I claim no infallibility; as my work goes forward, I find myself constantly correcting my own past mistakes; and if it is allowed to go on in the future I shall discover and correct others that I am making now. And I am no individualist; I welcome criticism; but only if it is well-informed criticism, that is, criticism by men who understand what I am trying to do and can give me grounds for thinking that they can show me how to do it better.” (The principles of history: 41-42)
Collingwood would interpret what those of you who cannot see ID as science as saying is that you can conceive of no history of our understanding of life, written at any time in the future, which would have a place for ID as a part of the continuation of the going concern which is currently called evolutionary biology. And by ‘history’ he would mean a history of reasoned argument about subject matter, principles, means of assessing evidence, and so on. In other words if the textbooks of 2200 invoke the principles of ID, something necessarily will have gone wrong for you. Irrationality will have occurred.
David
Medieval theologians tended to view the world as representational of scripture, and so when asked why a rose is red, a well-schooled monk might have answered, “A rose is red for the blood of Christ.” It is a prefectly respectable hypothesis, but it is not science. ID is simply the 20th century analog of this. A number things that make ID, and similar representational views of the universe, into non-science have been raised here, but I would like to expand the list.
In science we always ask the follow-up question, but in religion one has to stop at some point and it comes down to faith. If the ID crowd are serious about becoming a science then they have to ask the follow-up questions: What are the properties of this “designer?” Are these properties quantifiable and reproducible, or are they capricious and arbritrary? If they are the former then maybe there is some science to be done here, but if they are the latter then Occam’s razor needs to be invoked. There is, of course, a third option: a proponent of ID might argue that such follow-up questions are inappropriate and the designer works in mysterious ways. If that is so, then it is a form of religion.
Until proponents of ID start a serious discussion of the properties and characteristics of the designer and how they will do experiments to choose between competing theories then they are not doing science and have no business inflicting this nonsense on our school kids.
Nick: ”…they are not doing science and have no business inflicting this nonsense on our school kids.”
I agree, but I think that instead of focussing on ID one should improve science education for children. We don’t tell children about many important facts about how the world works. You can’t teach quantum mechanics to children in primary school, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t tell them that everything consists of atoms, that the human body is ultimately an extremely complicated machine.
Children are told about God but almost nothing about science. This leads to a distorted view about the physical world which is difficult to correct in secondary education.
“Until proponents of ID start a serious discussion of the properties and characteristics of the designer and how they will do experiments to choose between competing theories then they are not doing science”
I agree; and this is presumably what the Dover process will find.
Boaz, the claim that “survival of the fittest” is tautological is creationist claim CA500. See http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CA/CA500.html for responses and references.
I used to respond that it is really a culling, ie some expected to be “fittest” will die. A better response may be that it is not about survival but about reproductive success, which is quantifiable.
Sean wrote “RBH (and, to a lesser extent, spyder)— I understand that there is a political/social context as well as an epistemological one. That doesn’t mean that I have to comment on the former every time I comment on the latter.”
My remarks were stimulated by the title of the original entry, which put Sean’s piece squarely in the socio-political context, invoking all the connotations associated with it. I was tempted to write a Panda’s Thumb entry titled “With Friends Like This …”.
With respect to naive falsificationism (and the “ism” is purposeful), I’ll say only that Popper is abused almost as badly as Kuhn, and was a much more subtle thinker than rote invocations of “falsifiability” as a demarcation criterion imply.
I can’t wait for Sean’s piece on “falsibility” mostly because in principle i agree with his premise. Also my comment was not intended to hierarchically order or to ask for all inclusive statements/posts. I was reflecting on the public perception of the work of scientists in these matters. It seems the public, and public officials, have some very misguided (okay, seriously flawed and wrong) understandings of how science works, and/or how the universe works. As an example i read the following story today.
The strange case of supernatural water
Florida tested ‘Celestial Drops’ to see if they warded off citrus canker
By David Park Musella
Skeptical Inquirer
Updated: 3:08 p.m. ET Nov. 15, 2005
Florida’s citrus crop contributes billions of dollars to the state’s economy, so when that industry is threatened, anything that might help is considered. Back in 2001, when citrus canker was blighting the crop and threatening to reduce that vital source of revenue, an interesting — if not quite scientific — alternative was considered.
Katherine Harris, then Florida’s secretary of state — and now a member of the U.S. House of Representatives — ordered a study in which, according to an article by Jim Stratton in the Orlando Sentinel, “researchers worked with a rabbi and a cardiologist to test ‘Celestial Drops,’ promoted as a canker inhibitor because of its ‘improved fractal design,’ ‘infinite levels of order,’ and ‘high energy and low entropy.'”
The study determined that the product tested was, basically, water that had apparently been blessed according to the principles of Kabbalic mysticism, “chang[ing] its molecular structure and imbu[ing] it with supernatural healing powers.”
again i am not entirely familar with the precise school board debate, but how does the new definition further the cause of ID? maybe that is their intended goal but how does this further the goal?