Popular Science's latest issue features an article titled "Bill Nye Fights Back" about how Bill Nye (the Science Guy) has recently thrown his hat into the ring on the Creation-Evolution debate and plans to use his reach and understanding of science to topple the rise of Young-Earth Creationism in America. I saw it on my desk this afternoon and set aside some time to read it tonight, expecting to engage seriously with some of Bill's scientific arguments, or maybe just a sample or snippet of one argument, whatever the writer chose to include. After all, this is Bill Nye the Science Guy, the one who used all those cool hands-on experiments in videos to teach us Newton's Third Law in grade school. I expected something great.
I was disappointed. To be fair, it is not a reflection on Nye, since he did not write the article, but it does raise some sobering questions about the direction of popular thought on science in America today—though I doubt very much it raises the questions the author intended it to raise. The issue is that the article does not present any scientific arguments at all. It is entirely rhetorical. The whole piece is a sketch aimed at presenting Nye as an all-around American good-guy with a passion for science, humanity, the environment, progress, and critical thought and contrasting him with Ken Ham (his debate partner) who is smeared as a snake-oil salesman rooted in an environmentally-toxic and patriarchal past based solely on blind faith in a book Nye could pull apart as a fraud in five minutes.
There are a couple things that really bug me here, laying aside for a minute whether or not either caricature is even a remote resemblance of the truth. First of all, for a magazine with "science" in the title and an article supposedly about a man fighting for scientific and critical thinking, the article is an absolute vacuum of both. Evaluating any two competing sets of ideas (or theories, if you will) based solely on caricatures of their proponents is about as far from science and reason as you can get—but it is exactly what the article asks us to do. It is not even logical. It's a prime example of one of the fundamental logical fallacies: argumentum ad hominem: trying to disprove the truth of an argument or idea not by countering it but by assassinating the character of the person who made the argument in the first place. By putting all these rhetorical insinuations (2.5+ pages worth of them) before even the first allusion to a scientific argument, the author is guilty of "poisoning the well", presenting adverse information about an arguer in advance of their argument so as to cast everything they say in a negative light. This is terrible logic, utter illogic, and if that is the standard of popular scientific thought in America today, then we are in very big trouble.
The second thing that bothers me is the hubris of the position it presents. There is no debate presented between Creation-science and Naturalistic (macro-evolutionary) science. The debate is cast frimly as a battle of enlightened science vs blind gibbering-idiot-level faith. There is no acknowledgment that even psuedo-reasonable arguments for the other view might exist. There is such self-assured pride in the naturalistic cosmology that the author feels no need to justify any of its claims, or explain to us why anyone who does not immediately embrace them is a Neanderthal trying to shove us back into a new Dark Age. The Earth is 4.5 billion years old. The dinosaur fossils go back to 65 million years old. All the matter that makes us up comes from stars. All species evolved from a common ancestor over the course of millions and millions of years of gradual changes. Anyone who needs to ask, How do you know? is given no answer. Obviously such a person is a Neanderthal trying to shove us back into a new Dark Age and is a danger to humanity as a whole!
The problem with this attitude is that it goes beyond being simply illogical and unscientific. It does not simply fail to pass the test of critical thought or rightly apply critical thought. It actively suppresses critical thought (do not criticize these scientific ideas: they are simply right). It actively discourages logic (do not apply logic to this: just listen to the bandwagon of scientists who believe this is true and know that it is—and certainly do not look up the bandwagon fallacy on Wikipedia!). In the end, it is not just bad science, it is anti-science. If science is the pursuit of knowledge, of asking questions and answering them with evidence, this line of thought tells us to stop questioning, stop pursuing, stop looking at the evidence, and simply go along with whatever we are told. We are not to continue the quest for knowledge, but instead to stop at explanations as in-depth and satisfying as children's stories.
This is how science stagnates, turns in on itself, and ultimately dies. While modern rhetoric has tried to paint faith vs reason as the backdrop of Galileo Galilei's trial and the public condemnation of heliocentric astronomy, this is a historical fallacy. As we see from Galileo's sudden turn from astronomy to physics (specifically, the physics of falling bodies, which was said to prove that the Earth was stationary), the real backdrop was a debate between an established science (Aristotlean physics) vs an emerging one (astronomy). It is less a story about how religion stifled science than a story about how dogmatic insistence that one scientific school of thought be accepted without criticism held back the pursuit of truth and knowledge throughout the 17th century.
We are in danger of the same thing happening today, in the 21st. The naturalistic cosmology will broke no competition, no criticism, no questioning of its inherent truthfulness, and anyone who dares examine it's claims is automatically branded a heretic and excommunicated from the ivy halls. This is what is holding us back. This is what poses a threat to us as a civilization founded on scientific progress and the pursuit of truth. The solution that will save us is not children's TV stars spouting empty rhetoric, and it is certainly not making caricatures of our favorite "heroes and villains" in this debate, as the article does. The solution instead is a commitment to examine the truth, logic, and evidence of all things and follow it wherever it may lead us...even if it leads away from the politically correct bandwagon.
I was disappointed. To be fair, it is not a reflection on Nye, since he did not write the article, but it does raise some sobering questions about the direction of popular thought on science in America today—though I doubt very much it raises the questions the author intended it to raise. The issue is that the article does not present any scientific arguments at all. It is entirely rhetorical. The whole piece is a sketch aimed at presenting Nye as an all-around American good-guy with a passion for science, humanity, the environment, progress, and critical thought and contrasting him with Ken Ham (his debate partner) who is smeared as a snake-oil salesman rooted in an environmentally-toxic and patriarchal past based solely on blind faith in a book Nye could pull apart as a fraud in five minutes.
There are a couple things that really bug me here, laying aside for a minute whether or not either caricature is even a remote resemblance of the truth. First of all, for a magazine with "science" in the title and an article supposedly about a man fighting for scientific and critical thinking, the article is an absolute vacuum of both. Evaluating any two competing sets of ideas (or theories, if you will) based solely on caricatures of their proponents is about as far from science and reason as you can get—but it is exactly what the article asks us to do. It is not even logical. It's a prime example of one of the fundamental logical fallacies: argumentum ad hominem: trying to disprove the truth of an argument or idea not by countering it but by assassinating the character of the person who made the argument in the first place. By putting all these rhetorical insinuations (2.5+ pages worth of them) before even the first allusion to a scientific argument, the author is guilty of "poisoning the well", presenting adverse information about an arguer in advance of their argument so as to cast everything they say in a negative light. This is terrible logic, utter illogic, and if that is the standard of popular scientific thought in America today, then we are in very big trouble.
The second thing that bothers me is the hubris of the position it presents. There is no debate presented between Creation-science and Naturalistic (macro-evolutionary) science. The debate is cast frimly as a battle of enlightened science vs blind gibbering-idiot-level faith. There is no acknowledgment that even psuedo-reasonable arguments for the other view might exist. There is such self-assured pride in the naturalistic cosmology that the author feels no need to justify any of its claims, or explain to us why anyone who does not immediately embrace them is a Neanderthal trying to shove us back into a new Dark Age. The Earth is 4.5 billion years old. The dinosaur fossils go back to 65 million years old. All the matter that makes us up comes from stars. All species evolved from a common ancestor over the course of millions and millions of years of gradual changes. Anyone who needs to ask, How do you know? is given no answer. Obviously such a person is a Neanderthal trying to shove us back into a new Dark Age and is a danger to humanity as a whole!
The problem with this attitude is that it goes beyond being simply illogical and unscientific. It does not simply fail to pass the test of critical thought or rightly apply critical thought. It actively suppresses critical thought (do not criticize these scientific ideas: they are simply right). It actively discourages logic (do not apply logic to this: just listen to the bandwagon of scientists who believe this is true and know that it is—and certainly do not look up the bandwagon fallacy on Wikipedia!). In the end, it is not just bad science, it is anti-science. If science is the pursuit of knowledge, of asking questions and answering them with evidence, this line of thought tells us to stop questioning, stop pursuing, stop looking at the evidence, and simply go along with whatever we are told. We are not to continue the quest for knowledge, but instead to stop at explanations as in-depth and satisfying as children's stories.
This is how science stagnates, turns in on itself, and ultimately dies. While modern rhetoric has tried to paint faith vs reason as the backdrop of Galileo Galilei's trial and the public condemnation of heliocentric astronomy, this is a historical fallacy. As we see from Galileo's sudden turn from astronomy to physics (specifically, the physics of falling bodies, which was said to prove that the Earth was stationary), the real backdrop was a debate between an established science (Aristotlean physics) vs an emerging one (astronomy). It is less a story about how religion stifled science than a story about how dogmatic insistence that one scientific school of thought be accepted without criticism held back the pursuit of truth and knowledge throughout the 17th century.
We are in danger of the same thing happening today, in the 21st. The naturalistic cosmology will broke no competition, no criticism, no questioning of its inherent truthfulness, and anyone who dares examine it's claims is automatically branded a heretic and excommunicated from the ivy halls. This is what is holding us back. This is what poses a threat to us as a civilization founded on scientific progress and the pursuit of truth. The solution that will save us is not children's TV stars spouting empty rhetoric, and it is certainly not making caricatures of our favorite "heroes and villains" in this debate, as the article does. The solution instead is a commitment to examine the truth, logic, and evidence of all things and follow it wherever it may lead us...even if it leads away from the politically correct bandwagon.
