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.
@KWK,
No, we have detected particles that are only influenced by gravity and the Weak Interaction. This is a trait of Dark Matter, not the definition of it. The term “Dark Matter” usually refers to WIMPs or some other particle that could provide the missing gravity, not to any particle that is only affected by gravity and the Weak Interaction.
My argument isn’t that we are less than 100% certain that Dark Matter exists, but that we have no evidence that it exists at all. We can’t be 100% certain that the four fundamental forces are the only fundamental forces, but we have direct evidence that each exists. With Dark Matter, there is no evidence at all.
All we have are observations that there seems to be a lot more gravity out there than there should be. No one knows what the cause is, and no one has a shred of evidence that Dark Matter even exists, let alone that it is the cause.
Sean,
Yeah, it sure looks like John Stewart missed the boat on this one with his “f*ing magnets, how do they work?”-type argument. We need more people like you pushing for scientists (and everyone, really) to better understand and more carefully express the nature of science and how people attain knowledge by means of it.
That said…for all the hand-wringing over Stewart’s view of science expressed here, the vast majority of the (non-theistic) chorus that has weighed in on your post seems to have an equally inadequate (and unquestioned) view of the nature of religious faith. “Something I want to cling to, evidence be damned” seems to be a common (and dare I say, utterly tendentious) working definition for your commentariat. As with scientists, religious believers must do a better job of explaining their method for evaluating evidence (logical, philosophical, experiential, documentary, circumstantial, and yes, observational) that provides the reasons for why they hold the views that they do. But despite religious believers’ failures in this regard, such fatuous definitions of “faith” as those expressed here are no less wrong for being so common.
To take just one example: many early Christians were willing to (and did) die for their confession that their Messiah returned from the dead. And in light of historically verifiable events like this, Evangelicals’ favorite saint, C.S. Lewis, was eventually dragged kicking and screaming into assenting to the basic truth-claims of Christianity. He didn’t “want” it to be true, but based on his evaluation of the evidence before him, he altered his previously-held stance. Religion does not employ the same process of “peer review” that occurs with science, obviously; nevertheless, responsible and thoughtful people among both the religious and the irreligious re-evaluate their mental and moral commitments regularly, notwithstanding the naive and unjustified beliefs about the rigidity of faith expressed here.
@QGS,
I have to say I don’t follow your (semantic?) argument. We haven’t detected WIMPS, say, but we have detected at least one class of (non-baryonic) particles that contributes to the observed mass of galaxies. Why do you not consider these as one of a class of Dark Matter particles?
In the absence of current observational evidence as to their specific properties, may have faith (i.e. very good mathematical, logical, and historical reasons to believe) that other such particles exist, but I fail to see why this is a problem. In much the same way that special relativity reduces to Newton’s laws in the limit of low velocities, “whatever is really out there” reduces to “something that behaves like Dark Matter” in the limit of our current observations. So we may eventually find that there is *more* than dark matter, but it seems to me to be implausible to think that there will be *less* than dark matter.
Jon was just being a nice and polite young man to this nice and well spoken middle aged lady who got to plug her book on his show…. Nothing to see here folks….. He was probably returning a favor to a friend by doing this interview…. Sometimes you just have to be nice and agreeable….. If it would have been me making those assertions, he would have probably bitten my mofo head off…. I go to Catholic service on Sunday for only one reason, to make my mother happy, she knows that I’m a “7” and I know that she loves me even more because I make the effort…. You can trust me when I tell you that it’s an “effort”…
@KWK,
You seem to be talking about a broad kind of matter (non-baryonic) and not what the author is referring to: the matter that many believe fills the universe (neutrinos and other observed non-baryonic matter are a tiny percent of the total mass in the universe). So lets talk about the same thing (the kind of Dark Matter the author refers to).
Your (logically fallacious) claim is this: non-baryonic matter exists, Dark Matter is theorized to be non-baryonic matter, therefore Dark matter exists. No one doubts that non-baryonic matter exists. “Dark Matter” doesn’t refer to non-baryonic matter but a type of (possibly non-baryonic) matter that gives the universe the extra gravity that seems to exist.
This relies on several dubious assumptions, the first being that General Relativity is the final and complete theory of gravity. If it is, then we should be able to predict how cosmic bodies are behaving under the influence of gravity, and yet what we predict is not what we observe. Rather than questioning whether our assumption is wrong, we assume it isn’t and that something else must cause this discrepancy. Even if General Relativity were the final and complete theory of gravity (it certainly isn’t, due to the issues of reconciling it with QM), then Dark Matter would be the simplest explanation. But even then, that it is the simplest explanation is not proof that it actually exists.
** YAWN **
Yet another “Scientific Method & Religious Faith are Mutually Exclusive” false-dichotomy rant on CV …
The usual cast of Non-Theist suspects lecturing, declaring, with varying degrees of profound, sonorous, self-congratulatory stridency, that all who ‘by faith’ believe in something not empirically observable are undeniably uneducated, deluded ignoramuses who fail to understand SCIENCE!
Apparently, the utter irony escapes them that such a dogmatic, non-repeatable hypothesis, reliant as it is upon non-universally-observational-fact/opinion, represents just as much an obstinate, arrogant statement of Faith as that of any offered by the most pig-headed Young-Earther Creationist.
The Truth is that we don’t even know what we don’t know, either way.
@TychaBrahe:
Well said, can I steal it? To respond to Alien Life Form, I do think that some of the better popular science books do a good job of taking you through enough steps to be able to understand the evidence behind many scientific assertions (the set of assertions covered in a book on cosmology will be different from those covered in a book on oceanography). As a scientist and a former high school teacher, I think we need to spend more time exposing students to the scientific method. Let them see how evidence helps create theories which result in new experiments which end up verifying or falsifying the theories leading to new and/or better theories etc.. A successful example of this is the Modeling curriculum for physics from ASU (http://modeling.asu.edu/).
@82. Goldy
The latest cosmological developments (post microwave background, say), do not really appear to offer much in the way of showing “how evidence helps create theories which result in new experiments…”. As I understands it even a result considered standard as black hole entropy is beyond experimental verification. But national television teems with “elegant universes” that even large numbers of practitioners find hard to swallow and which have been investigated without a shred of experimental evidence for what? 40 years now?
This does not even begin to address the damage that positivistic stances do (IMHO) to science’s reputation. And thank (someone) that platonic beliefs (seemingly widely held, among scientist) are not more widely aired, or understood. “We do not believe in Thee, but we do believe in Three” would be embarassing to defend in a theological discussion.
Cheers.
@ Aeronin @ Neil5150
Amen…it’s frustrating that time is being wasted on an insignificant open ended question, especially when the value of the answer is so vague. I would rather have scientist work on tangible questions rather that be involved in philosophical dilemmas with dubious outcomes.
And indeed, if someone is dedicating so much time to something with such low utility, the overall pay-off of that person would be low. This has been demonstrated.
That Sean knows something about science can be deduced from where he is working. Folks at that place don’t keep dummies in their hallways. But that Sean has been stuck banging his head against the wall for too long, this is unquestionable. Even kids know when a tantrum has gone too far and is time to move on to something more productive. That’s all, move on, folks from CV.
This kind of conversation only resolves one problem: someone needs to meet God before we exclude anyone here. *starts laughing hysterically*
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Well it looks like Dark Matter really doesn’t exist after all
http://www.nature.com/news/survey-finds-no-hint-of-dark-matter-near-solar-system-1.10494
Though I am sure the true believers will stick with their dogma.
We have several examples of galaxy cluster collisions which have different distributions of gravity than of visible mass. If you simulate a collision of galaxy clusters which contain a lot of WIMP dark matter, the result looks just like observation. http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2009/09/dark_matter_part_35_when_clust.php
I am more surprised by the peevish response of Shaun to Ms. Robinson…..Jon Stewart has been making fun of religion forever… why can’t he make fun of science (is science the new religion perhaps?)
Sean,
those who take it seriously, deserve it; don’t blow an o-ring :3
@87 Check also the invisible substance is just an illusion
This is a new observation that confirming all the direct and indirect tests (the famous Bullet cluster proof was posteriorly disproved when details were taken into account) disproving the existence of the hypothetical dark matter: Dark matter is the Vulcan planet of the 21st century
You say “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.”
That’s quite a swipe at all believers in God and the miriad of religious traditions and their acts of charity. Yes the world would be a different place, but you don’t say whether it would be better.
It also implies all or some of those traditions do not have any evidence for God (uncaused cause, unconditional reality, absolute simple reality, unique unrestricted reality, a priori and a posteri cosmological, etc). Perhaps you have evidence for the absence of God?
Also, it ignores the contributions of proto-scientific thinking centred in theology from the medieval universities (and other places) to cosmology. But heh, perehaps you don’t get the history or philosophy of science
I strongly agree with Quarkgluonsoup, and the arguments against him and against Stewart are inadvertently strengthening Stewart’s arguments.
Personally, I hate the not-uncommon narrative in science that so-and-so revolutionized our understanding of such-and-such. The only way this can happen is if our understanding was wrong in the first place. The way that a wrong idea can become entrenched is if scientists argue for it with insufficient evidence. Sometimes I think that arguments meant for the popular press end up influencing graduate students in slightly different fields, who then end up with a belief system without the true qualifications. The comments on dark matter here are a good example.
Back in my botany classes we got to play with a very cool piece of equipment that measured the amount of C02 being absorbed and also measured the relative output of oxygen, when pressed against a leaf. The $10,000 gadget did so on live plants without destroying the leaf, and allowed us to quantitatively measure the difference between P680 and P700 photosynthesis. The data matched the theory which matched the math.
The biggest difference between theory and faith is that the theory will either hold up to testing or not. Faith cannot be tested, nor should it be.
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to 94: there are many things in science that just now we can test and many we can’t test yet (haven’t figured out how to) – what makes you think that faith cannot be tested at some point?
“Much worse is that he clearly has absolutely no idea why we believe in dark matter… In reality, the more you delve into science, the less it appears to rely on faith.”
True, but if you believe in something unverified and unproven, your belief is, in some significant sense, still a matter of faith. Reasonable faith is faith nonetheless.
“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.”
And yet, there is also scientific evidence that challenges belief in dark matter:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2012/04/21/151114725/dark-matter-study-a-disturbance-in-the-force?device=iphone
I agree that Stewart mischaracterizes scientific belief in dark matter theory, reducing it to what sounds like faith w/o reason, or baseless faith. It seems to me that the great failure of science for laymen like myself and Jon Stewart, is first the failure to make clear exactly what the difference is between science fact/data and theory, and secondly (and more significantly) the failure to make clear the reasonability or probability of accuracy between various theories – those that are highly probable (relativity), those that are perhaps less probable (dark matter), and those that have no hard evidence supporting them (multiverse).
Dang it, sorry for the double post – didn’t mean to do that. Second post is edited.
It is all about math. Without math, we still think the sun circling around the earth.
No, I think Robinson is not right, even though she says so. Science, the scientific knowledge should be based on facts. Scientific knowledge is produced by approaching those facts as much as possible. We call these approaches as theories. Theories are models. Models should be verifiable and falsifiable. We test models by empirical studies. Good models survive bad models die. What important is the way we produce scientific knowledge, not whether science refutes or vice versa or whatever the combination is. We need to prove things. Things that are not proven are a priori, dogmatic, and they are nothing with to create scientific knowledge. Religion is a priori, religion has nothing with to do science. Last thing that I wanna say. Scientific knowledge should be objective knowledge. Religion may or may not be in human-mind. Religion may or may not be mind-dependent or dependent. We should focus on how to improve our scientific knowledge, or explore the ways leading a scientific progress. Nothing else.