I love Jon Stewart’s work on The Daily Show, which manages to be consistently fresh and intelligent. Their segment on the Large Hadron Collider was sheer brilliance, and I’ve often said that between Stewart and Stephen Colbert, Comedy Central is the best place to go to hear insights from real working scientists on TV these days.
Which is why it was so crushing to listen to this interview he did with Marilynne Robinson, a leader among the movement to reconcile science and religion. I didn’t agree with much of what Robinson said, but then again I didn’t really expect to. Nor did I expect Stewart to challenge her in any way; a “why just can’t we all get along” perspective is very consistent with his way of thinking. But I admit I was hoping he would not misrepresent modern science as thoroughly and lazily as he managed to do here. (It’s a 2010 interview, brought to my attention by Scott Derrickson’s Twitter feed; apologies if these complaints were hashed out elsewhere two years ago.)
| The Daily Show with Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Marilynne Robinson | ||||
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If you skip ahead to 2:50, here’s what Stewart has to say:
I’ve always been fascinated that, the more you delve into science, the more it appears to rely on faith. You know, when they start to speak about the universe they say, well, actually, most of the universe is antimatter. Oh, really, where’s that? Well, you can’t see it. [Robinson: “Yes, exactly.”] Well, where is it? It’s there. Can you measure it? We’re working on it. And it’s a very similar argument to someone who would say God created everything. Well where is he? He’s there. And I’m always struck by the similarity of the arguments at their core.
Obviously he means something like “dark matter,” not “antimatter,” but that’s a minor mixup of jargon. Much worse is that he clearly has absolutely no idea why we believe in dark matter — what the actual evidence for it is in real data. He betrays no understanding that we know how much dark matter there is, have ongoing strategies for detecting it, and spend a lot of time coming up with alternatives and testing them against the data. What kind of misguided “faith” would lead people to believe in dark matter, of all things? (The underlying problem with appeals to faith is that they cannot explain why we should have faith in one set of beliefs rather than some other set … but that’s an argument for a different day.)
In reality, the more you delve into science, the less it appears to rely on faith. When it comes to modern biology there are large parts I accept because of the testimony of experts; but when it comes to physics I actually understand the evidence behind it. There are certainly some good philosophical issues about what assumptions science must make to get off the ground: does it presume naturalism, can it address miracles, does it admit nomological facts, are there a priori truths about the physical world, can it deal with unobservable things? But Stewart isn’t engaging any of these issues; he’s just taking lazy swipes at parts of science he doesn’t understand, which he therefore feels justified in equating with faith. If believers in God spent a tiny fraction of the time that modern cosmologists spend trying to invent alternatives to their favorite ideas and testing them against evidence … well let’s just say the world would be a very different place.
For which I blame us, at least as much as I blame him. Stewart is obviously a smart guy who likes science and is interested in it, and frequently has scientists on his show. And yet, we have clearly completely failed to communicate the reasons why we scientists believe in apparently spooky-sounding things like dark matter.
“Science communication” is a many-faceted thing, and all of its facets are important. We need to do better getting K-12 students excited by science and grounded in the basics. We need to do better educating college students about how the world works, since they’re going to be running it soon. We need to do better in helping policymakers understand the science behind their decisions. We need to do better at encouraging and enabling a lifelong interest in science among the general public. And we clearly need to do a much better job at clearly conveying the foundations of our practice to interested non-specialists. There’s a strong temptation to emphasize the weird and bizarre things that we discover, because after all the natural world is full of surprises. But if we don’t at the same time do a good job at explaining why we believe the bizarre things, it will come back and bite us eventually.
Sounds like you should be invited on his show to talk about dark matter and how we understand science!
Great blog post, and I second the thoughts from Keith Lau and Ian, above.
Double edged sword… The same benefit by “popularizing” science to a tantalizing degree (i.e. “God Particle”) which interests many people, gets funding … is also a strong factor in misrepresenting science. (Live by, die by).
However, I appreciate Jon at least bringing up what MOST people actually believe so that scientists and researchers can properly set the record straight. This is clearly where any publicity is better than none at all.
That’s a common and somewhat forgivable position to have. What was her answer though? That seems to be a rather importnat aspect missing from this article.
Often interviewers will ask questions they know the answer to in order to give the guest an opportunity to speak on it. This could very well have been one of those times.
Just replace “antimatter” with “multiverse” and his argument is pretty solid.
actually I find Jon’s interview and his witty remarks as being correct and grounded. And probably his “antimatter” “mistake” was simply an irony. There were many science faiths in the past. In cosmology, for instance, luminiferous aether. The majority of scientists believed in that at those times. Current faith examples are Big Bang and Inflation. No one can explain casuality and developments of these events. Majority just have such a belief, so it is considered as solid science. Like inflation much faster than a speed of light. Well, many facts point into those directions. But science is not about the words “majority”, “voting”, and these postulations still are at best hypotheses and in some end may happen to be incorrect interpretations of the facts. Like it happened with Earth the center of the cosmos or a solar system.
I’m PRO-matter. It’s energy I hate.
Keith R. Lau: “politics is his strong point”
… despite that he suffers from chronic Friedman Syndrome. His schtick depends mostly on locating the absolute center of wherever that social conservatives have managed to drag the Overton Window, then leading his audience to mock anyone outside it’s edges.
This, by the way, from a fan. At his best, he can grab hold of someone with a seriously loony worldview, e.g. Jim DeMint, & display an impressive capacity for surgical evisceration. But when he slips into generalization, where the value of whatever he’s saying requires not just his having reviewed the evidence but also having applied some depth in thinking it thru beforehand. he emerges as a standard establishment clown, e.g. everything George Carlin worked hard to avoid.
Religion and Science are all stories; on different topics. What do we really know about anything? We have approximate knowledge in many subjects, however underlying everything is ignorance. An honest scientist will admit doubt, however if you read popular media, everything is fact, when it in reality is is only true for a given value of true.
I think what Stewart was getting at is exactly what the author admitted when he said, “When it comes to modern biology there are large parts I accept because of the testimony of experts.”
Often there are experimental findings that lie so deep within a scientific specialty that only those with doctorate level education and years of technical experience within that specialty can truly evaluate the validity of any conclusion drawn from those findings.
Any non-experts must have faith in the expert interpretations of scientific experimentation and faith in the process of peer-reviewed publication of those expert interpretations.
We scientists need to come down off our horses. We’re all humans and any human activity is inherently fallible. Non-scientists are right to recognize that there is a significant element of faith behind their belief in our discoveries and to question that faith. These are the origins of skepticism, a highly-valued practice in science.
I always find it troubling that this is always such a heated discussion. Why are theists demonized for belief in a higher power? There are certain questions in science that I believe mankind can never answer. Why does an electron have a certain weight? What is the nature of the universe at Planck energies? How in the heck did an extremely rare set of coincidences culminate in what we call intelligent life on Earth? I’m not sure these questions can be satisfied by any theory or experiment man can provide. The odds of an amoeba forming in a universe comprised of 3 elements + whatever dark matter and whatever else seems almost infinitely small. Some form of the anthropic principle must come into play. Cosmologists always make some kind of leap of “faith” though they may call it something else. Ask what happened before the big bang. They respond with “that’s like asking what’s north of the north pole”. Sounds like faith to me.
Sean Carroll is right to contrast the reasons for believing in antimatter with reasons for believing in God. They are very different kinds of reasons. But the “beliefs” in question are also very different kinds of things, and Carroll (like Stewart and many others, atheist and fundamentalist alike) is oblivious to this fact. Religious “beliefs” are ultimately expressive of values and feelings. They aren’t meant to be confirmed or disconfirmed, except insofar as one is able to persist in the values or states of mind that they connote.
Stewart’s point is misguided, but I’d like to point out that scientists tend to misunderstand the actual uses of words like “faith”. If you define “faith” simply as “belief without evidence”, then everything is very simple. But if you look at real situations like “I have faith in my child’s ability to…”, you will quickly get answers to questions like “why should we have faith in one thing rather than another?” I need to have faith in my child rather than faith in something else, because the amount of support I show and confidence I can instill in him will have a material effect on his outcomes (whereas other objects of faith involve no such practical utility). Yes, I need to also have a realistic view of his chances; but within the range of probabilities I can realistically determine, there are good reasons for thinking and acting as if the things I hope for are actually going to occur.
I do think we have faith in science, not as per Stewart’s example, but in the general sense that we believe in the eventual convergence of different theories, and in the ability of a critical mass of humanity to continue acting in good faith on the communal enterprise of science. (It’s easy to imagine, for example, that corporations end up strangling unbiased investigations and manage to pollute the educational sphere to a massive extent.)
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And just like any believer, you are sure that your belief is correct and based on solid foundations.
Stewart is right about Dark Matter: all that is known is that the universe seems to behave as though there is more gravity than their should be. No one knows any more than this, and certainly know one knows that this thing called ‘dark matter’ is the cause.
I am sure you know a lot about the technical issues in science, but you need to learn more about the philosophy of science. All science can do is produce a mental model of reality, not tell us how reality actually works. Your mistaking of these two is positivism.
I disagree that scientists are to blame. There are plenty of fine books and TV shows that explain modern science. And the amount of informative stuff on the internet is mind-boggling. People have no excuse for not understanding the basics apart from laziness or lack of interest. Scientists do more than enough “public outreach” these days, but if the public don’t want to learn, it’s not the fault of scientists. Well, after all, science is a small blip in human history, and does not come naturally to us.
I’ll throw in the huge imprecision in language as an issue.
What the religious call their faith, is in truth quite different from the things scientists call their (non-religious) faith. The word faith does not have the same meaning to those respective groups.
To clarify, a scientist has faith in peer review. A scientist has faith in the scientific method. And scientists generally believe (have faith) that all knowledge is connected even if we do not currently understand the connection.
What the public calls theory is what a scientist calls a hypothesis. However hypothesis has never quite made it into popular culture, and the average person believes that theory and hypothesis are synonyms.
While the malleability of language is a gift and playground for poets, it can undermine non-artists attempting to reach out to very different sorts of people.
@36 (“Ask what happened before the big bang. They respond with “that’s like asking what’s north of the north pole”. Sounds like faith to me.”)
My layman’s answer would be, “There is no way to get any observational data from prior to the Big Bang. Try not to let it keep you awake nights.”
Both answers are stating that the question can’t be answered, at least currently. How is that in any way similar to faith, which claims to provide answers in the absence of evidence? We must use different dictionaries.
Isn’t dark matter another hypothesis like, say, the proton? It isn’t observed directly – if anything is – but is responsible for observed effects. In the case of the proton, the hypothetical particle ties a lot of things together so we would treat this as pretty solid science. Dark matter is hard to detect locally but it’s impact at astronomical scales is clear: galaxies don’t spin apart. We don’t know what dark matter “IS” but either it’s there or a lot of fundamental physics goes out the window.
As of now, there is no theory of everything that pops out the proton or the dark matter particle or the topology of space-time so we rely on working theories that fit the observed facts.
Sean, you’re right. Stewart blew it, big time. Let’s face it, there are people who understand science (few) and those that don’t (many). Stewart doesn’t. He’s a comedian.
“we have clearly completely failed to communicate the reasons why we scientists believe in apparently spooky-sounding things like dark matter.”
That’s my main gripe with popular science, they spend all their time telling people about all the things we know, how fascinating it all is, the people behind the discoveries, how it changed the world, why we should fund it and so on, yet for some reason it is very rarely explained *how* we know these things and *why* it’s true. There’s just so much fluff around science talk in the popular literature yet so little actual science!
Blogs are slightly better in that respect than pop sci magazines, like starts with a bang or of particular significance which seem to be especially focused around explaining things. But still most bloggers seem to take their accumulated knowledge for granted and prefer to post about the things surrounding science than science itself, like how successful science is or how difficult it is to get tenure or whether coffee should come before or after a talk..
I’m not criticising CV for not catering to my particular taste, everyone is free to blog about what they want and it’s generally great to follow, but i think this does reflect in general a missing part of the popular science dialogue where an interested layperson can miss the point of science completely because we’re always talking *about* science rather than communicating the science itself.
e.g. How often do you see “light is an electromagnetic wave” in a popular account, with no more explanation than that maxwell said so? How is the person supposed to differentiate that from “god created the earth in 7 days”? They’re both just handed down explanations, is it any surprise the layperson thinks it’s a matter of faith when that’s how it’s always presented to him? Would it be so difficult to explain faraday’s experiments and how the relationship between electric and magnetic field qualitatively leads to light being identified as an electromagnetic wave? Some do, yet most popular articles and books would just gloss over such things and say “it’s a solution of the maxwell equations” which might as well be “god did it”. If some make the effort to explain some concepts, like relativity, they just go on to things like “there are quarks inside a proton”. Why? Because. They could be “flargs” inside a proton for all it matters to the reader. It just feels all so arbitrary! Even to an undergraduate learning physics this can be the case when things aren’t properly introduced and learnt in the right way.
So again, i’m not surprised a lot of people mistakenly consider physics and science to be a matter of faith.
A distinction needs to be made. It is the human scientists that are operating on some level of faith, not science itself. And this is probably inevitable, as faith is a big part of the human psychology.
Most human scientists probably do need at least some faith to motivate them in their work. They have the believe that their hypotheses are true before they have evidence in order motivate themselves to make the effort of finding that evidence, or at least believe that the process of the search is worthwhile.
But one of the main points of the whole scientific method, with all its self-correction mechanisms, is to prevent human scientists from leading themselves astray as a result of their individual faith.
These theories you mention are proposed by human scientists as part of the scientific method, but they are not accepted by science, and will not be until evidence becomes available. This is where theoretical testability comes in. If something is theoretically testable, it means that finding evidence for it is possible, and hence it is a hypothesis worth thinking about. If it is not even theoretically testable, then that means evidence cannot ever be found for it, and pursuing it is a waste of limited time and resources.
A lot of the debates on the edges of science are about theoretical testability. Indeed, a lot of the debates are about practical testability. Early pioneers may propose an idea, but generally, the majority of the scientific community will not come on board until practical testability becomes feasible.
Just disappointing.
Poor Jon – unprepared at the least, tho probably dumber than s___ when it comes to science.
Excellent post Sean. I read the first part of it earlier today and saw that Phil Plait also had a strong reaction. But I hadn’t watched the video clip and read the rest of the post until a few minutes ago. So, it was a bit like reading a critical review of a movie before you’ve actually seen the movie. It’s natural to think “it can’t be as bad as they said”. Well, in this case it was. And, I say that as a big fan of the show.
In a way we do take science on faith. Faith that the universe isn’t screwing with us. Faith that there isn’t some higher being manipulating the data and laughing at what he could make these puny humans believe. Scientists are a bit like Pavlov dogs, we hear the bell and start salivating because we know the food is coming. We are basing our conclusions on evidence and reproducibility. As long as the food keeps coming, our view of the universe is secure. Now if some higher being decides to ring the bell and not bring the food, our entire view of the nature of the universe would be in chaos.