Are Bans on "Gay Conversion Therapy" Based on Reason and Evidence?

A legislative panel held a hearing this morning to consider the issue of a ban on "gay conversion therapy." Here are a few questions lawmakers should ask before supporting a counseling censorship bill that would put legislators with no medical expertise in the position of judging appropriate medical treatments:

First, supporters of the counseling censorship ban cite several specific practices that are part of some kinds of "conversion therapy" ("a variety of shaming, emotionally traumatic or physically painful stimuli..." as one supporter of the ban has put it) that they consider to be harmful:

• Is it these particular practices that are the problem?
• What about conversion therapy that does not engage in these practices?
• Why not ban these particular practices? Why ban all conversion therapies?
• If these practices are what is the problem, then why not ban these particular practices in any kind of therapy?
• Why does this bill ban all conversion therapy, not just conversion therapy that engages in these particular practices?

Second, according to information from supporters, a lot of people have undergone conversion therapy. That would indicate that there must be a lot of psychologists who offer it:

• Are there really that many bad practitioners in the psychological profession. If so, is there some larger problem in the profession?
• Have these psychologists had a voice in the doings of the associations of which they are a part that now publicly oppose this kind of therapy?
• Are they members of these associations at all? How representative are the associations who oppose this kind of therapy of the larger body of psychologists?

Third, if conversion therapy is to be banned because of "health risks for LGBTQ young people such as depression, decreased self-esteem, substance abuse, homelessness, and even suicidal behavior," wouldn't that implicate some of the LGBTQ orientations this bill is intended to privilege? These very pathologies seem to be overrepresented in many LGBTQ populations--apart from any conversion therapy. One report, for example, asserts that as many as 40 percent of transgender adults report having attempted suicide. Doesn't the logic of this argument call non-traditional sexual orientations themselves into question?

Fourth, let's assume that harm to some individuals (not all, there are a number of people who have benefited from some form of conversion therapy) has in fact occurred.

• Is that sufficient reason for banning a practice?
• Are supporters of the counseling censorship bill in favor of banning any practices which sometimes result in harm to the patient?
• There are many medical procedures that are considered risky because of high rates of harm to the patient, and there are many types of patients who are particularly at risk for certain surgeries (such as the elderly). If resulting harm is the test, should all these procedures be banned?

Finally, if there were no demonstrated harm from conversion therapy, would supporters still oppose it?

The arguments for the counseling censorship bill is fraught with ubiquitous appeals to authority (a large array of professional associations oppose it), and the fact that public opinion polls are against it. Since when are appeals to opinion polls considered an appropriate way of determining the integrity of medical procedures? In fact, the very rhetoric of those who pretend to be acting on behalf of science--which includes not only ad populum appeals and appeals to authority, but also emotional appeals--belies a very unscientific attitude toward the issue.

One also wonders whether the people who now oppose gay conversion therapy would automatically change their minds if professional associations changed their opinions and supported it instead (as they once did before they were politically pressured to change their positions). In other words, if these associations changed their minds tomorrow, would these people drop their support for these counseling censorship bills? If we index the integrity of medical or psychological procedures to such things, then we would have to say that there was nothing wrong with conversion therapy when it had professional and public support.

It is tempting to conclude that the reason for censoring psychological counselors has little to do with these arguments and more to do with the ideologies the opponents seem to represent. But ideology should not be the determining factor for deciding the integrity of medical or psychological practices.

Is science the only way of knowing?

An economist friend of mine recently recommended Peter Boghassian's book Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism and Constructivism. I had heard of the book, but my friends very high recommendations of it prompted me to order it. 

My friend and I had been discussing the issue of "critical thinking skills" and how much of the movement that has developed around this concept has been co-opted by postmodernist thinkers.

Since I had to wait for snail mail, I looked the book up at Oxford University Press. Obviously I can't adequately assess the book until I get it, but I notice that the summary at Oxford indicates that that his main line of argument is that postmodernists that postmodernists assume science is not the only way of knowing the world.

This chapter introduces a thesis that is enormously influential in the contemporary academy – Equal Validity: there are many radically different, mutually incompatible, yet ‘equally valid’ ways of knowing the world, with science being just one of them. It explains in a general way how constructivist views of knowledge might be thought to underwrite this thesis.

Boghassian presumably argues against this thesis. Of course, on this particular thesis, I would find myself on the side of the postmodernists. There are clearly other ways of knowing than science. Science could never have been developed if there weren't. 

I have addressed this issue a number of times, including here, here, and here.

Now this doesn't necessarily affect the usefulness of Boghassian's arguments against the postmodernists. In fact, this is the interesting thing about arguments between modernists (of which Boghassian is one) and postmodernists: They're both right in many of their critiques of each other. Modernists limit their toolbox to only one tool, and postmodernists seem to reject limits altogether. 

The holes in modernism's epistemological net exclude things that should not be excluded and the holes in postmodernism's net are so big they let too many things through.

It seems to me many scholars like Boghassian use the word "science" in the same way that they charge postmodernists use "knowledge" or even "thinking skills," that is to say, without clear definition.

If you define science narrowly--as that method by which the hard sciences come to their conclusions, then you exclude universally acknowledged forms of reasoning (such as those practiced by philosophers like Boghassian) that, of necessity, he must himself practice in his critique of postmodernism. And if you define it so broadly as to encompass rational inquiry in general, then to call it "scientific reasoning" is misleading, since it implies only that form of reasoning used in the hard sciences is valid.

In fact, asserting that "scientific reasoning is the only valid form of reasoning" is itself vulnerable to the argument against postmodernism Boghassian apparently uses in one of his chapters; namely, that the assertion is a performative contradiction: If the assertion "scientific reasoning is the only valid form of reasoning" is true, then scientific reason cannot be the only valid form of reasoning since there is no way to arrive at that conclusion using scientific reasoning (unless, again, your definition of scientific reasoning includes all forms of rational inquiry, which, again, is misleading).

In any case, I await the book.

Scientific Hubris: Why #Science Can't Answer All the Big Questions

Big Think has printed another of a class of essays, written by scientists, common these days, announcing in triumphant tones all the things that science can do outside its particular and limited domain. It was a reprint from an earlier post at Aeon. Almost without exception, these essays, which implicitly aspire to philosophical eloquence, fly too close to the sun. The only difference being that, while Icarus was able to gain a little altitude before the wax started melting, these writers never gain much altitude at all before flaming out.

These articles have a number of characteristic features. First, they are usually written by scientists almost completely unfamiliar with the philosophical issues they seem to feel qualified to address; second, they betray a marked ignorance of their own unquestioned metaphysical assumptions, assumptions outside the realm of science altogether, and which, moreover, are often question-begging; and third, their chief rhetorical mode of procedure is not reasoning, but a kind of naive optimistism that often descends into cheer-leading.

"Science," says author Peter Atkins, in his article "Why it’s only science that can answer all the big questions":

has proved itself to be a reliable way to approach all kinds of questions about the physical world. As a scientist, I am led to wonder whether its ability to provide understanding is unlimited. Can it in fact answer all the great questions, the ‘big questions of being’, that occur to us?

Well, first of all, why should we think it is unlimited? There are obvious limitations to science. Like all disciplines, it is limited by the unique tools at its disposal: in the case of science, it is the tools of mathematics and empirical observation. The tools of science are quantitative; they are therefore limited in the possible answers they might give to quantitative answers. 

When a scientist is faced with a non-scientific, qualitative question, he should realize that he is out of his water and would be better off treading lightly.

There are a few exceptions to this rule. History has produced a number of scientists who were also formidable philosophical minds. Alfred North Whitehead was one. Henri Poincare was another. A number of physicists (I'm thinking of Werner Heisenberg, Richard Feynman, and, more recently, Paul Davies) have been able to cross over and still make sense. Even popular science writers like Martin Gardner and Stephen Jay Gould were able to sound articulate even when they took off their scientific hats.

Unfortunately, Atkins is not among this august assembly.

First, he makes a distinction between two kinds of "big questions." The first, he says, 

include questions of purpose and worries about the annihilation of the self, such as Why are we here? and What are the attributes of the soul? They are not real questions, because they are not based on evidence. Thus, as there is no evidence for the Universe having a purpose, there is no point in trying to establish its purpose or to explore the consequences of that purported purpose. As there is no evidence for the existence of a soul (except in a metaphorical sense), there is no point in spending time wondering what the properties of that soul might be should the concept ever be substantiated. Most questions of this class are a waste of time; and because they are not open to rational discourse, at worst they are resolved only by resort to the sword, the bomb or the flame.

"They are not real questions, because they are not based on evidence." Hmmm. How do we know this? What evidence is there for the statement "The only real questions are questions based on evidence"? It is a metaphysical assumption that is simply unverifiable in itself and suffers from not being able to comply with its own criterion, since there is no evidence for it.

Then he takes a little, hidden leap: These kinds of questions "are not open to rational discourse." In other words, metaphysical questions are not rational because there is no evidence for them. But there are all kinds of mathematical questions that depend on no evidence at all. Geometry is full of them: They're called axioms and postulates. There is no evidence for them at all. We simply assume them.

The field of logic itself has all kinds of assumptions for which there is no evidence that even Atkins would be loathe to reject, among which is the Law of Non-Contradiction.

And then there is science itself. As the 18th century philosopher David Hume pointed out, the major premise in induction is that the future will always be like the past. There is no evidence for it. None. In fact, it is impossible for there to be evidence for it. Scientists postulate that there is such a thing as cause and effect. But these are metaphysical conceptions which, again, as Hume pointed out, are completely beyond the reach of evidence. Empirically speaking, there is only correlation. To posit cause and effect is to go entirely beyond the actual evidence.

And even supposedly empirical science goes beyond the evidence. Where, for example, is the empirical evidence for dark matter?

The second kind of "big question" is the kind of questions that 

include investigations into the origin of the Universe, and specifically how it is that there is something rather than nothing, the details of the structure of the Universe (particularly the relative strengths of the fundamental forces and the existence of the fundamental particles), and the nature of consciousness. These are all real big questions and, in my view, are open to scientific elucidation.

Well, okay. This is a mixed bag. The question of the "nature of consciousness" is something very different than the "relative strengths of the fundamental forces and the existence of the fundamental particles." How is the nature of consciousness even conceptually empirical? He gives no account.

And here is where Atkins employs a typical scientistic trope to make something sound scientific when it is not: "How is it that there is something rather than nothing?" is a disguised form of "Why is there something rather than nothing?" This is the trick that Laurence Krauss pulls in his book A Universe from Nothing (somewhat unfortunately subtitled Why There is Something Rather than Nothing), as I pointed out in my review of that book.

To get the general idea, compare Atkins reasoning here:

The first class of questions, the inventions, commonly but not invariably begin with Why. The second class properly begin with How but, to avoid a lot of clumsy language, are often packaged as Why questions for convenience of discourse. Thus, Why is there something rather than nothing? (which is coloured by hints of purpose) is actually a disguised form of How is it that something emerged from nothing? Such Why questions can always be deconstructed into concatenations of How questions, and are in principle worthy of consideration with an expectation of being answered.

With Krauss' here:

At the same time, in science we have to particularly cautious about "why" questions. When we ask, "Why?" we usually mean "How?"

... So I am going to assume that what this question really means to ask is, "How is there something rather than nothing?" "How" questions are really the only ones we can provide definitive answer to by studying nature, but because this sentence sounds much stranger to the ear, I hope you will forgive me if I something fall into the trap of appearing to discuss the more standard formulation when I am really trying to respond to the more specific "how" questions.

This is the practice Nobel Prize-winning physicist Frank Wilczek has likened to throwing a dart against a blank wall and then, only afterward, drawing a target around it. You take the why question, change it into a how question, and, presto, it becomes amenable to scientific resolution.

It's hard to believe that this move is not just intellectually dishonest. "Why" questions "are often packaged as Why questions for convenience of discourse"?!!! No, actually they're not. They're two entirely different kinds of questions, and Martin Heidegger, who famously asked the "Why" question about something and nothing, would have had a good laugh (which is a rare thing for a serious German philosopher) if he had heard this kind of nonsense.

Then, as if he had not already displayed enough hubris, Atkins says:

I see no reason why the scientific method cannot be used to answer, or at least illuminate, Socrates’ question ‘How should we live?’ by appealing to those currently semi-sciences (the social sciences) including anthropology, ethology, psychology and economics.

Wait a minute. I could have sworn that Atkins said that questions like this "are not real questions, because they are not based on evidence." And now questions of how we should live are open to scientific inquiry?

As Chesterton once said,

To mix science up with philosophy is only to produce a philosophy that has lost all its ideal value and a science that has lost all its practical value. I want my private physician to tell me whether this or that food will kill me. It is for my private philosopher to tell me whether I ought to be killed.

Finally, possibly because he is clearly having problems operating an argument, Atkins just settles for an altar call and asks everyone to come forward:

The lubricant of the scientific method is optimism, optimism that given patience and effort, often collaborative effort, comprehension will come. It has in the past, and there is no reason to suppose that such optimism is misplaced now. Of course, foothills have given way to mountains, and rapid progress cannot be expected in the final push. 

Amen, Halleluiah. 

In the rest of the paragraph whence those sentence came I counted four maybe's and one perhaps. Would if the enthusiasm were supported by actual, shall we say, evidence.

#Science 's Useful Fallacy

My article in the most recent Classical Teacher magazine:

The expression “the science is settled” has been invoked as a way to end numerous discussions of scientific importance. On issues involving evolution, dietary science, or exercise physiology, it is not uncommon for one side to claim that the research has settled the issue. But, however much evidence there may be for any particular scientific theory, is the science of it ever really “settled”? 

Although many scientists don’t like to hear it, the nature of scientific reasoning itself prevents any scientific theory from ever being settled. The problem of the level of certainty in scientific judgments goes much deeper than any specific issue. It has to do with the very kind of logic science must employ in order to come to its conclusions. To put it bluntly, scientific reasoning is based on a logical fallacy, and because of this fact, science is never settled. 

...The fact that the chief mode of scientific reasoning is a fallacy is not an excuse for dismissing science. Far from it. But it should be a lesson to us that, though certain theories may be said to be well-established, the findings of science are always to some extent tentative.

Read the rest here.

Why are humans different from animals?

Should human beings be treated differently than other animals?

For most of history, it’s been a widely-held belief that human beings are worthy of special treatment. This belief provides the foundation for the idea of morality, and is the underlying principle behind human rights.

As British philosopher Roger Scruton pointed out earlier this week in the New York Times, "Almost all people believe that it is a crime to kill an innocent human, but not to kill an innocent tapeworm."

Sometimes, Scruton explains, this belief is based on religion: "If, as many people believe, there is a God, and that God made us in His own image, then of course we are distinct from nature, just as He is" ...

Read the rest here at Intellectual Takeout.

What the Humanities Can Tell Us about T. Rex that Science Can't

The Gender Deniers: Gender ideology and its quarrels with science

If you've ever wondered just how messed up this society is, just take a look at a video that has gone viral in which college students are asked if they think there is any difference between males and females. What the viewer is treated to is a collection of people who are incomprehensively confused about basic reality.

These are people who are in deep denial about some pretty self-evident things. In fact, I wish the interviewer had thought to ask these sadly misguided individuals if they were aware that (spoiler alert) women can give birth and men can't. Or that genitalia differs between men and women, or that women grow breasts and men don't. And then there is the basic fact, scandalous to the Gender Deniers, that men and women actually have different physical capabilities and even different emotional characteristics.

I learned about gender when I asked my mother when I was young how to tell the difference between a male hamster and a female one and she said, with wisdom born of woman, "You look between their legs." How could she have known this, my mother who only had a 10th grade education?

It seems to me a self-evident fact that if you don't know the difference between males and females, you simply don't belong in college. You need to go back to, oh, I don't know, 2nd grade and take that health unit again. In fact, a little more time in high biology wouldn't hurt.

Remember biology? I hear there are some people still practice it. Probably in secret. They taught it when I was in school. They told us (I am not making this up) that women were born with two X chromosomes and men with an X and a Y chromosomes. They said nothing about how anyone felt about the chromosomes they had. It didn't matter. And if you had maintained that it did, you be laughed out of class, and you would have deserved it.

But now, at a time when people claim to hold science in high esteem, they completely ignore it when it comes to gender. All the while, the self-styled skeptics, eager to jump on the least little deviation from scientific fact by religious people, stand on the sidelines and either say nothing or, in an amazing number of cases, cheer the nonsense on.

Is science based on faith?

Once again a scientist has wandered into the Land of Philosophy, thinking he knows his way around, and has instead become disoriented and confused. And not only that, but the person doing this is a repeat offender.

In a recent post, Jerry Coyne criticized Matt Emerson, whose essay "At it's heart, science is faith-based too," was recently published in the Wall Street Journal. 

Coyne is best know for his book Why Evolution is True. But he also frequently makes forays outside his field of expertise, some of which have proved embarrassing. His new book is Faith vs. Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible. There have been several great take-downs of this book by people who actually know what they are talking about, one of which is Ed Feser's review of the book in the most recent issue of First Things magazine.

In his criticism of Emerson, Coyne employs the same fallacious reasoning that characterizes his books and that has become a fixture of his blog.

To Emerson's assertion that scientists have "faith in reason," Coyne responds by quoting his piece in Slate magazine:

Scientists don’t have “faith in reason.” As I noted in Slate:

What about faith in reason? Wrong again. Reason—the habit of being critical, logical, and of learning from experience—is not an a priori assumption but a tool that’s been shown to work. It’s what produced antibiotics, computers, and our ability to sequence DNA. We don’t have faith in reason; we use reason because, unlike revelation, it produces results and understanding.

Sorry, but this is just nonsense.

It's not completely clear what Coyne even means by the term "reason," but I'm going to take leap in the dark and assume he means something like logic in particular and rational thought in general. To say that reason in this sense is not a priori and that we only accept it because it "works" is just ignorant.

All reason in this sense is based on two axioms: the Law of Identity and the Law of Non-contradiction. To say that a belief is a priori (meaning, literally, "from the prior") means that you accept it without any prior reasoning or evidence. Maybe Coyne would like to explain what evidence or prior reasoning supports the Law of Identity and the Law of Non-Contradiction. 

In fact, there is no evidence for them. That's why they are axioms. We accept them purely on the basis of intuition: They make sense that's all. That's the problem with any system of thinking: it is based on beliefs which cannot themselves be proven. All we can conclude about a scientist who says he accepts reason because it "works" is that the scientist saying that doesn't know what he is talking about.

Science too is based on reasoning that is based on a priori assumptions. If it is based on deductive reasoning, then you have the two assumptions (and a few others) above. If it is based on inductive reasoning, there is another a priori assumption. As the philosopher David Hume pointed out, all inductive reasoning involves the premise that the future must be similar to the past. If copper repeatedly and uniformly conducts electricity in repeated experiments, then we conclude--on the basis of the assumption that the future will always be like the past--that it will always do this. But although we believe that the future will be like the past, we have no rational basis for believing it. Again, it's intuitive: It just makes sense.

In other words, at bottom, science too, insofar as it makes logical inferences, is a priori, since its fundamental tools of inference are based on a priori assumptions. 

The only question left is whether this is equivalent to faith. Coyne himself seems to think it is, since he responds to Emerson's claim that scientists have "faith in reason" by claiming (erroneously) that science is not a priori, a claim made more ironic when consider the additional assumptions science makes, in addition to its purely rational assumptions, about the reliability of our own senses.

In fact, Coyne is just proving, once again, that he needs full time philosophical care.

Is the magic in fairy tales and fantasy books a problem for Christians?

Someone wrote me recently about being admonished by a friend for recommending that her friend’s daughter read the fantasy books of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. The books contained magic and witchcraft and her friend felt that this would only encourage an interest in such things.

I told her about a man who came up to me at our exhibit booth at a conference and asked me if I knew of any good educational computer programs that taught certain subjects. He clearly thought that education technology was a good thing. Near the end of our discussion, he looked down and saw that we carried The Hobbit. “Oh,” he said, “I would never use that book with Christian students.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“Because it has magic in it,” he said.

“But you approve of technology?”

“Of course.”

“Well, books like The Hobbit have what I call ‘fairy tale magic’ in them, which is just using some process, the exact nature of which is a mystery to you, to manipulate nature. What’s the difference between magic in this sense and technology?”

Fairy tale magic is the fanciful kind of thing that happens in many fairy tales. When the pumpkin and the rats in Cinderella are turned into a coach and horse, and six lizards into footmen; when the prince kisses Sleeping Beauty and she awakens from her deathly sleep; when Jack plants his magic beans and they grow into a giant bean plant that reaches the clouds; when Rumpelstiltskin spins straw into gold.

It is this kind of “magic” that Chesterton declares—in his great essay, “The Ethics of Elfland”—if imbibed as a child, helps to inoculate us against the scientific materialism of our age because it helps us to see that what lies behind the world is not a “law” (as the scientific materialist would say), but a Will.

Arthur C. Clarke once famously said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” What he meant was that advanced technology does the very same thing that fairy tale magic does: manipulate nature using a process which you do not understand.

The man I was talking to said something about the fact that even though technology may be a mystery to us, it is not a mystery to scientists who have a natural explanation for it. I responded that that does not change the fact for those of us who are not scientists who use technology: It’s still magic to us.

And besides, even scientific explanations are not explanations, but descriptions―descriptions which themselves appeal to an order which even to scientists is still a mystery. Using an incantation to open a door in a fairy tale is no more magical than using copper to conduct electricity in the real world. And to say that copper conducts electricity because its outer electrons are not localized just begs more questions, since we have only explained one mysterious procedure in terms of another (Why do materials whose electrons are not localized conduct electricity?)

In other words, not only is any advanced technological process magic for us, but ultimately it is magic even to the people to whom we appeal to explain their magic. In the final analysis, it’s even magic to them.

So one way of responding to this objection to fantasy literature is to ask the person if they have a microwave oven in their home or a cell phone in their pocket. If there is a problem with fairy tale magic, then there is a problem with technology. But there is no problem with technology, therefore there is no problem with fairy tale magic (the logical rule of Modus Tollens).

In addition, the kind of “magic” you find in fairy tales―and in fantasy literature like that of Lewis and Tolkien―is not the kind of magic that is prohibited in Scripture. What is prohibited in Scripture is necromancy in particular and fortune-telling in general. It is the consort with specifically demonic forces that is prohibited, as when, at the behest of King Saul, the Witch of Endor calls forth the spirit of Samuel from the dead in the First Book of Samuel.

Again, if you interpret demonic forces too broadly (the occultic), you indict technology. Any definitional net with holes small enough to capture fortune-telling and demonology and large enough to let technology through will also be large enough to allow fairy tale magic through.

Tolkien’s wizard Gandalf does not have dealings with evil spirits, nor does Lewis’ Aslan.

The holes in the net are going to have to be so small as to capture fortune-telling and necromancy, but large enough to let through Joseph’s interpretation of dreams and Daniel’s prophecies. All of which is to say that the problem is not the manipulation of natural things, but the demonic itself. And there is nothing demonic about fairy tale magic of the kind that you find in Lewis and Tolkien. They are simply not calling upon evil spirits to do what they are doing.

And, in fact, it is clear that necromancy is portrayed as evil in The Lord of the Rings, as evidenced by the references to the evil character Sauron as “The Necromancer.” Tolkien certainly seems to recognize this distinction.

The problem is that the people who make this kind of argument want to go way beyond what the Scriptures prohibit. There is a distinction between the use of the word “magic” (in any sense) that is broad enough to encompass fairy tales and fantasy on the one hand, and witchcraft proper on the other.

People who protest Lewis and Tolkien need to have these distinctions pointed out to them.

Dr. John Lennox explains why science & faith are not in conflict

Dr. John Lennox, Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford and Emeritus Fellow in Mathematics and the Philosophy of Science at Green Templeton College, explains why science and faith are not in conflict:

God no more conflicts with science as an explanation for the universe than Henry Ford conflicts with the laws of the internal combustion engine as an explanation for the motorcar. The existence of mechanisms and laws is not an argument for the absence of an agent who set those laws and mechanisms in place. On the contrary, their very sophistication, down to the fine tuning of the universe, is evidence for the Creator’s genius.

His article is the feature article in Knowing and Doing, a publication of the C. S. Lewis Institute. Read the rest here.

Things for which you don't need scientific evidence in order to believe

I was reading the first volume of Pope Benedict's Jesus of Nazareth today, and he quotes the second century Church father Theophilus of Antioch, in his book Ad Autolycum ("To Autolycus") , "But if you say, 'Show me your God,' I would reply, 'Show me yourself, and I will show you my God.'"

 

Benedict was highlighting Theophilus' argument that just as there were physical eyes, there are eyes of the soul, and just as physical eyes can be blinded, so can the eyes of the soul, making it difficult or impossible to see God. But it also made me think of the challenge I hear from the scientoids about what they argue is the lack of hard and fast evidence for God. "Show me your God," is the general point, and you are expected to produce scientific evidence for the belief in God.

The next time you are asked to do this by your atheist friend, ask him "Show me your self," or "Show me your mind," or "Show me your consciousness."  Atheists use these terms all the time and no one is expected to give scientific evidence for the things they signify--largely because there isn't any. 

The point being that there are things for which you don't need scientific evidence to believe.

Jürgen Habermas on scientism and analytic philosophy

I don't agree with Jürgen Habermas, one of our great cultural critics, on everything but he, along with a number of those associated with the "Frankfurt School" have a legitimate and useful critique of modern rationalistic scientism and instrumental rationality. In fact, is he the last surviving member of that crew?

The Frankfurt School was a group of influential early-twentieth century thinkers (my favorite of whom is Max Horkheimer--his Eclipse of Reason is a masterpiece) who were themselves influenced by Marx. And although Marx's prescription is fatally flawed, much of his diagnosis of modern commercial culture is right on the mark.

Here's Habermas critiquing the science-envy of the analytic philosophers in Eurozine:

The hard, scientistic core of the analytical philosophy was always alien to me. Today, it comprises colleagues who take up the reductionist Programme of the Unified Sciences from the first half of the twentieth century under somewhat different assumptions and more or less regard philosophy as a supplier for the cognitive sciences. The advocates of what we might call "scientism" ultimately view only statements of physics as capable of being either true or false and insist on the paradoxical demand of perceiving ourselves exclusively in descriptions of the natural sciences. But describing and recognizing oneself are not the same thing: decentring an illusionary self-understanding requires recognition on the basis of a different, improved description. Scientism renounces the self-reference required to be present in every case of re-cognition. At the same time, scientism itself utilizes this self-reference performatively – I mean the reference to us as socialized subjects capable of speech and action, and who always find themselves in the context of their lifeworlds. Scientism buys the supposed scientification of philosophy by renouncing the task of self-understanding, which philosophy has inherited from the great world religions, though with the intention of the enlightenment. By contrast, the intention of understanding ourselves exclusively from what we have learnt about the objective world leads to a reifying description of something in the world that denies the self-referential application for the purpose of improving our "self"-understanding.

HT: 3 Quarks Daily

Scientists claiming to be able to predict male homosexuality get roughed up by ... other scientists

What has come over the scientific community? Do they not understand that, when it comes to homosexuality, they are supposed to look the other way when questionable scientific claims are made that favor the exotic conclusions of modern gender theory? Isn't there some protocol somewhere that dictates this?

For years now, we have been told, for one thing, that psychologically speaking, homosexuality is perfectly normal. As proof we are given evidence such as that the American Psychological Association no longer considers homosexuality a pathology because science had shown that it isn't. Never mind that the APA changed its position purely on the basis of political activism within and outside the organization. This was admitted both by liberal members of these organizations who protested the change at the time and the radicals who pressured the APA, through political pressure, including the disruption of APA meetings.

Whether it is a pathology or not, it's hard to justify the process by which the question was answered, which was almost exclusively political.

Just imagine the response if social conservatives ever interfered in the workings of a supposedly scientific organization the way gays have.

But we all must look the other way, think scientific thoughts, and pretend it had something to do with, I don't know, like, evidence or something. Bad science is no problem with research that supports pro-gay orthodoxies, unlike research that questions the Approved Opinions, like that of Mark Regnerus, which are held to the highest scientific standards.

If your conclusions follow the party line, you're celebrated no matter what. But violate the current orthodoxies, and a witch hunt ensues, as it did with Regnerus.

One of the most important claims of gay orthodoxy is that "sexual orientation" is immutable. This is politically important on gay issues because, in order to be considered a "suspect class"—one that cannot be discriminated against--one of the four criteria (all of which need to be met) is that the class of person be defined according to immutable characteristics.

Not only do gay rights groups make this claim—and cite studies that purportedly demonstrate it, but courts now regularly accept these claims with almost no critical inquiry into whether they are, in fact, true. When these claims are questioned in judicial proceedings, the defense you get is not exactly compelling. This was the case in the Prop 8 case when, Gregory Herek, a social psychologist at UC Davis, testified that "eighty-seven per cent of the gay men and seventy per cent of the lesbians he questioned said they felt they had little or no choice in their sexual orientation."

That's right: A survey of gays themselves was supposed to settle the question of whether homosexuality was immutable. This methodology would laughed out of court, literally and figuratively, on any other issue, but when it comes to gay issues, no scientific method is so bad that it can't do in a pinch. But it should be noted that Herek had to backtrack with opposing attorneys presented a whole binder full of evidence (the actual, scientific kind) to the contrary.

In reality, no study has proven that homosexuality is immutable. It is not a scientific belief: It a creedal belief in the religion of Political Correctness that is automatically accepted in order to further what is now a popular political agenda. In fact, gays themselves deny it when they talk about "gender fluidity," which they do about as much as they talk about it not being a matter of choice.

So it wasn't a surprise when, at the end of last week, headlines blared that a team from UCLA announced at a meeting of the annual meeting of the American Society of Human Genetics announce that they had creation "An algorithm using epigenetic information from just nine regions of the human genome can predict the sexual orientation of males with up to 70 percent accuracy."

Just as we have come to expect, the uncritical headlines followed:

"Homosexuality can be predicted by a gene scan with 70 percent accuracy, study reveals," Latinos Health
"Study: DNA test can reveal male sexual orientation," San Diego Union Tribune
"Epigenetic algorithm accurately predicts male sexual orientation," Medical Press
"Real-Life ‘Gaydar’: Gene Scan Predicts Who’s Gay with 70 Percent Accuracy," Healthline News
"Epigentic ‘gaydar’ proven to be 70 percent accurate," Examiner.com

And on and on. You get the idea.

Now first of all, you wonder what all the fuss is about concerning a study finding something we already know. If we all know now that homosexuality is immutable, then why would the results of this study be hailed so widely?

Scientific American summarized the study soon after the announcement:

It followed 37 pairs of identical male twins in which one was homosexual and one heterosexual, and 10 sets of twins in which both males were homosexual. The study found that the presence of specific epigenetic marks in nine areas of the human genome could predict homosexual preference with up to 70% accuracy.

But something went wrong. Someone didn't get the memo that bad science is perfectly permissible when it comes to gay issues. All of a sudden, out of nowhere, comes this chorus of scientific voices casting doubt on this study's results. Scientific American was one of the first:

... genetics experts warned that the research has important limitations and will not provide definitive answers to a potential biological basis for sexual preference.

Two days later, there came a fairly devastating article in the Atlantic, where, after reiterating the excited headlines, author Ed Yong said:

Meanwhile, the mood at the conference has been decidedly less complimentary, with several geneticists criticizing the methods presented in the talk, the validity of the results, and the coverage in the press.

It went on to explain how the study was done, and then this:

...The problems begin with the size of the study, which is tiny. The field of epigenetics is littered with the corpses of statistically underpowered studies like these, which simply lack the numbers to produce reliable, reproducible results. 

Unfortunately, the problems don’t end there. The team split their group into two: a “training set” whose data they used to build their algorithm, and a “testing set”, whose data they used to verify it. That’s standard and good practice—exactly what they should have done. But splitting the sample means that the study goes from underpowered to really underpowered. 

There’s also another, larger issue. As far as could be judged from the unpublished results presented in the talk, the team used their training set to build several models for classifying their twins, and eventually chose the one with the greatest accuracy when applied to the testing set. That’s a problem because in research like this, there has to be a strict firewall between the training and testing sets; the team broke that firewall by essentially using the testing set to optimise their algorithms. 

If you use this strategy, chances are you will find a positive result through random chance alone. Chances are some combination of methylation marks out of the original 6,000 will be significantly linked to sexual orientation, whether they genuinely affect sexual orientation or not. This is a well-known statistical problem that can be at least partly countered by running what’s called a correction for multiple testing. The team didn’t do that. (In an email to The Atlantic, Ngun denies that such a correction was necessary.)

He goes went on to point out problems with potential confusions between cause and effect. Yong concludes by calling the study an "underpowered fishing expedition."

What happened to all the credulity?! Where did all of this actual critical analysis come from? And what are we going to do now that countless courts have treated the immutability of sexual orientation as a settled issue, partly depending on it to justify their conclusions about gay marriage?

Just move along folks.

Ted Cruz dismantles Sierra Club president on Global Warming

Ted Cruz dismantles Sierra Club President Aaron Mair in a congressional meeting on the issue of Global Warming alarmism yesterday. Whether you believe the earth is warming or not. I believe that that probably is the long-term trend, although what is causing it seems less clear. But you've got to find the anti-scientific mentality of the people demanding that everyone else accept it or else to be manifestly disturbing.

Listen to Mair's blatant appeal to authority when confronted with what the actual objective satellite data say about the pause in global warming over the past 18 years. In fact, he doesn't even seem to know what the "pause" is or that it is actually a term used by Warming proponents.

Can you be blamed for not trusting the authorities cited by these people (which de facto places them in the position of authorities for your own opinions)? Are you really supposed to believe so-called experts (who have been well-plied with grant money for taking the positions they take) in the face of evidence?

And do the 97 percent of climate scientists cited by Mair deny the pause? This seemed to be his assumption, but, as far as I know, these scientists were never asked that question.

I sat next to a recently retired climate scientist earlier this year. He was a political conservative, but believed that the evidence was definitive that the globe was warming over the long term. He said that he strongly disagreed with many conservatives who just denied that the earth was warming, but equally disturbed by how his liberal friends tried to sell the idea.

No wonder.

Oh, and here is one Warmer blog that calls Cruz's attempt to confront Mair with actual evidence, "bullying." This is priceless.

If someone argues this badly for a position, it makes you want to reject it even if you are inclined to believe it. In this sense, the Warmers have only themselves to blame if they can't convince people of their position.

Hah! Evidence that 15 homo naledis were part of cave cramming fad

Okay. Now this is serendipitous. My thesis that the 15 small-brained hominids found in a South African cave and now being called homo naledi (and by the way, the Latin plural of that is homines naledorum) were part of a prehistoric cave cramming fad is gaining credibility by the moment.

Which country holds the record for the number of people that can be stuffed into a phone booth?

Ready? SOUTH AFRICA! From Mortal Journey: "The South African record of twenty five people stuffed into a booth has never been broken.

You heard it here first.

Is the discovery of skeletons in an African cave really as significant as scientists are saying?

Scientists who have found fifteen skeletons in a cave in South Africa claim they have discovered a new species of hominid and are now waxing eloquent about the significance of the discovery to science. They have even given these creatures a fancy name: homo naledi.

But based on the fact that they were of small stature and possessed small brains, it is fairly clear that what we have here is an attempt by a group of prehistoric teenagers who, not having a small car or a phone booth at their disposal, were trying to see how many people could fit into a cave.

Ten bucks says that if they can determine the stomach contents of these creatures, they will find tiny fish skeletons—remnants of goldfish swallowing contests—and that if they look at the walls carefully they will find primitive instructions on how to dance the cha-cha.

What Two Scholars Found When They Looked at the Quality of Education Research (And It Isn't Pretty)

How many times have you been told that some trendy new education practice is "research-based"? The implication, of course, is that the mere application of this scientific-sounding label to the practice should cause the hearer to lay aside any further critical inquiry on the matter.

When it comes to education (and many other things for that matter) the expression "research-based" is the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. The expression is the equivalent of the philosopher's "QED" (Quod Est Demonstrandum: "It is demonstrated"). It is a discussion-ender. The only response considered appropriate is to nod in obedient acceptance.

But what exactly does this expression mean?

What it means is that there has been some study (perhaps more than one), conducted by someone, somewhere, that seems to indicate that the practice may be effective. Or, more likely, that someone has heard someone else say that such a study exists. It almost never indicates that the person making the reference has actually read the study (or studies) to which he refers, or could necessarily cite it.But there is something even more worrisome and it comes in the form of a study—one that you can actually read yourself.

In a study released last year by the Educational Researcher, Matthew C. Makel of Duke University and Jonathan A. Plucker of the University of Connecticut, Storrs, conducted a wide-ranging meta-study of educational research, to determine how many of the education studies published in the 100 most prominent education journals met one of the most basic research criteria. The question they asked was: What were the replication rates of education studies?

Replications, say the authors (quoting another researcher) serve five functions:

• Controlling for sampling error
• Controlling for artifacts
• Controling for fraud
• Generalizing different /larger populations
• Assessing the study's general hypothesis

H. M. Collins calls replication "the Supreme Court of science."

Replication is a common procedure in both the hard sciences (biology, medicine, genomics, computer science), as well as the soft ones (economics, political science, and sociology).

And when you consider the low rate of successful replication in the hard sciences, say the authors, the need for replication in the social sciences (such as education) "becomes even more acute." One review found that only 44 percent of studies in health care research are successfully replicated; another that only 11 percent success rate of highly cited cancer trial studies; another that research findings analyzed by the Bayer drug company were able to be successfully replicated.

The rate of successful replication in psychology is peculiarly high—91.5 percent, "making psychologists nearly 5 times better at predicting results than actual rocket scientists. It is an outcome the authors attribute to "collecting the data until the desired result is found, not reporting unsuccessful trials, and eliminating observations and variables post hoc that do not support the targeted hypotheses." And then there is the fact that only 1.07 percent of studies in 100 prominent psychology journals are replications.

So, when the authors looked at all the studies ever published in the top education journals, what did they find?

• Of the 164,589 studies published in these education journals, only 221 of them were replications—an overall replication rate of .13 percent.
• Of the studies that were replicated, only 67.4 percent  were successful.
• Also, 48.2 percent—nearly half—the replications were conducted by the same people who did the original study.

Now let's do a little math here: If you multiply .13 percent by .674, you get .08762 percent. What does it say about education research that only roughly .09 percent of it has been successfully replicated—and almost half of these replications performed by people who had a stake in seeing it successfully replicated?

That's 100 times .0008762. And half of those questionable.  This is a colossal indictment of the legitimacy of education research.

So the next time you hear a professional educator touting some exotic new education idea as "research-based,"  ask him this question: "Has the research been successfully replicated?" Chances are he won't know. When he confesses his ignorance, tell him that there is a higher than 99.9 percent chance that it hasn't.

Changing Nature to Suit Our Preferences (in which I self-identify as a human being)

Man's chief problem is pride. And one of the ways this manifests itself is in the human desire to gain control over nature itself. This has been the chief impulse in both science and art for a century or more.

In art, what philosopher Karsten Harries calls the "aesthetics of subjectivity" makes the artist himself the chief and sometimes only factor in the creation of art, a tendency that leads him away from representing the world as it is (the traditional role of art) toward portraying it as he would like it to be. The artist, impatient with having to settle for being a subcreator (Tolkien's term), tries to take on the role of the Creator Himself. But since he cannot actually create a new world, he is stuck with distorting the one we actually have. He can't make a human being so, he reconstructs real ones, resulting in faces with a mouth on the top, the eyes at the bottom, and the nose to the side--in word, deformity and ugliness.

Science approaches the world very differently, but the same nihilistic impulse is on display: The humble objective of gaining knowledge of a world that has a permanent and unchangeable order takes a back seat to various attempts at trying to subdue it to his own preferences. The Aristotelian objective of determining the causes of things is replaced with the instrumental aim of bending it to our will. Since the one thing that sets man apart from the rest of nature is that we can defy nature, we end up trying to change what we set out to understand. We start by distorting the environment and end up distorting human nature.

Part of the problem is that we take our ability to defy nature as license to redefine it. So now we no longer take our cues of what natural things are for from nature. A heart is for pumping blood; lungs are for putting oxygen in it; kidneys are for filtering it. But reproductive organs are ... not for reproduction. That an increasing number of people have come to think that the functions of reproductive organs can be seamlessly interchanged with those of digestive organs is a measure of just how alienated from nature we have become.

The most fundamental theme of modern thought is the denial of nature. Nature is irrelevant to the natural function of sex. We can now "self-identify" as male or female regardless of whether or not we are.

I just happened to be thinking about all this when I ran across this comment in a somewhat related and excellent post at the Federalist on ways in which nature matters even though we try to pretend it doesn't:

Even more so than the misogynistic Christian church or the anti-gay GOP, the chief enemy of egalitarianism is nature. Historic Christianity only makes it hard for women to be pastors, but nature makes it hard for women to be soldiers, firefighters, lumberjacks, and anything else that requires masculine levels of upper body strength. Republicans may pass laws letting bakers deny service for gay weddings, but nature imposes laws denying two pairs of ovaries the power to procreate. But the greatest way that nature breeds inequality is by filling us with the desire to love the children that have resulted from our breeding.

Read more here.

Does science explain anything?

What we now call 'science' was once called 'natural philosophy.' But although in one sense these two terms mean the same thing, there is a sense in which they are still very different. Modern science came out of natural philosophy, but has changed into something else.

In the old natural philosophy, the purpose of inquiry into nature was to better know what creation is. It taught nomenclature (the names of things), taxonomy (how the thing fits in with other things), morphology (how things are internally structured), and scientific method (how to investigate natural things). It was focused on the wonder and mystery of creation itself. It was focused on apprehending the natures of natural things and thereby appreciating them. It was a philosophy of wonder.

Much of modern science, however, has a different agenda. Francis Bacon (and, in a different way, René Descartes) began to change the very purpose of investigation into nature. For the first time, the belief arose that nature was not there primarily to be known, but to be used or controlled. Bacon said he wanted to put nature on the rack to give up its secrets—not primarily so that we could understand or behold it, but so that we could use it for our own betterment or advantage.

"Knowledge," Bacon said, "is power."

Bacon and Descartes seem to have meant well: They wanted to use science to improve the human condition. But once science came to be seen as an instrument to control nature for an extrinsic purpose—which it has done rather convincingly—the other purposes, such as that of understanding and wonder, tend to get shunted to the side.

Its success in accomplishing its new purpose has also caused science to develop a rather big head. Many modern scientists have become so enamored of the power of science that they now think that scientific inquiry can answer all of our questions. This belief—that science is the chief or even the only way to determine truth—is called "scientism": the religion of science.

Whereas in the old natural science there was no competition between belief in God and the study of nature, the scientism that began to gather strength in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries eventually resulted in the view that science and theology were competing modes of belief and that as science gained explanatory power, it would eventually push out religion.

It is said that Pierre-Simon Laplace, the famous French scientist, once gained an interview with Napoleon in order to present him with a copy of one of his books. "They tell me," said the Emperor, "that you have written this large book on the system of the universe, and have never even mentioned its Creator."

"Sire," Laplace famously responded, "I have no need of that hypothesis."

The "God of the gaps"
In fact, one of the arguments offered by non-believing scientists against religious belief is called the "God of the gaps" argument. If you look at the history of science, they say, what you see is that, at first, there were many questions which science could not answer. These questions were simply dismissed as unanswerable and attributed to God.

In other words, if there was some question science couldn't answer, we would simply say, "God did it," and that was considered the final word.

But, say these scientists, as science has grown in power and subtlety, there are fewer and fewer questions science is unable to answer. There are fewer and fewer mysteries about which we have to resort to the "God did it" solution. Furthermore, if we follow this trajectory into the future, we can see that, as science continues to grow in its explanatory effectiveness, it will one day be able to answer all the questions about nature that we have formerly had to invoke God in order to explain.
In short, soon science will have explained everything and God will be made irrelevant.

We will have "no need for that hypothesis."

But is this true? Are these scientists right to say that the fund of unanswered questions about nature is being slowly diminished by science, and that it will one day have answered all of these questions?

The answer is "No."

Why the "God of the gaps" argument does not work
There is an assumption underlying the "God of the gaps" argument that is ridiculous on the face of it. In fact, it is a great example of the static analysis fallacy—the fallacy of assuming that what you are examining is somehow fixed and not in the process of changing.

The assumption of the "God of the gaps" argument against religious belief is that there is a fixed number of questions about the natural world, some of which have been answered and some of which have not, so that every question that is answered reduces the number of unanswered questions by one.
Now this is obviously absurd, since science does not operate in a world in which there is a fixed and unchangeable number of questions. In fact, as science proceeds in its path of discovery, it not only discovers answers to unanswered questions, it discovers new questions which it never would have thought to ask. New discoveries not only answer old questions, they produce new questions.

This problem becomes even more pronounced after a scientific paradigm shift. When Einstein's theory of relativity displaced Newtonian mechanics, it offered an improved system of explanation. But it also redefined mass, energy, time, and space, creating a whole new set of problems needing a solution. Quantum mechanics too introduced a whole new set of questions which no one would ever have thought to ask until Neils Bohr, Wolfgang Pauley, and Werner Heisenberg thought to ask them.
Some would argue that the number of unanswered scientific questions is not diminishing at all—that, in fact, because of the rate of the appearance of new questions compared to the number of questions having already obtained answers, the number of unanswered questions is actually increasing all the time. Natural mysteries for which science has no answer, far from being eliminated, are actually multiplying.

Think of it this way: If you take a flashlight and point it straight down, close to the ground, you will see a small circle of light. And if you raise the flashlight higher from the ground you will see a much larger circle of light. Our scientific flashlight today illuminates much more than the small circle of knowledge we had in the past. But notice this: The small circle of light borders only a small portion of darkness, but the larger circle of light reveals a much larger circumference of darkness. So, too, does the circumference of our ignorance increase as the area of our scientific knowledge becomes greater.

The more we know, the more we realize how much we do not know. Science is a light in the darkness of physical reality, but as its light increases, so does its estimate of the amount of darkness that is in need of light.

Many scientists postulate that they are in the process of closing in on some ultimate terminus in which our understanding of nature—and our ability to control it—are perfect: a sort of scientific utopia. But the idea of arriving at some position of full knowledge of nature becomes increasingly implausible as we see such a terminus move further away from us the closer we think we're getting.

This problem—of never being able to make headway toward a comprehensive explanation of nature—has been underscored by the investigations of quantum physics. According to many of its chief architects and many of its most devoted adherents, quantum mechanics has not only failed to make the nature of reality clearer, but has fundamentally undermined confidence in science as a mode of explanation at all.

Can science explain anything?
One of the themes of modern science has been that a knowledge of the parts of things reveals more clearly the nature of the things themselves. This is why much of modern scientific investigation involves analyzing the most elemental parts of something. This is just what quantum mechanics has done. The problem is that when they finally found the tools to investigate the behavior of the subatomic world, scientists did not find what they thought they would find. What they found, far from making nature more understandable, has made it even more paradoxical.

Light, which logically cannot be both a wave and a particle, is both (a photon). Certain particles disappear and then reappear somewhere else instantaneously (a quantum leap). Subatomic particles do not exist anywhere until we observe them (said Neils Bohr). Measurement defines what is being measured (said Heisenburg). "The more successes the quantum theory enjoys," said Einstein, "the more stupid it looks." But even Einstein could not stop it. Though he rejected it until the day he died, he could not refute it.

As with relativity, quantum physics redefined basic scientific concepts—'particle,' 'wave,' 'position,' 'momentum,' 'trajectory'—all had to be given new meanings. As it turned out, many of the old questions that had been "answered" were not the right questions to ask in the first place.
Not only did quantum physics show that many of the assumptions of classical Newtonian physics were incomplete (and in some cases simply wrong), but it brought the whole purpose of science as an explanatory construct into question. Events at the quantum level, it found, are governed by the rules of probability. At the level of the smallest and most elemental things—where we finally get to the bottom of things—it turns out that nature does not follow the scientific script.

So confounding have been the findings of quantum physics that its original and chief exponent, Niels Bohr, finally gave up on science as an explanatory discipline altogether. He talked of a new "epistemological situation" brought about by particle physics in which we can no longer apply the concepts of causality at all. And with causality goes logic itself. "Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory," said Bohr, "has not understood it."

Traditional Christian theism does not believe in a "God of the gaps" whose relevance can be eliminated by the progress of science. God is not there to answer our "how" questions in the first place. Many of these can be explained by studying the world He created, complete with the inherent mechanisms implanted in it that make it go. God is there to answer our "why" questions—the questions science can't even begin to answer.

Science, in Bohr's view, is no longer in the explanation business. "It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out [what] nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature." All it can do is describe and predict. It can only say "how," it can never say "why."

Modern science began with mysteries it could not explain; it has brought itself full circle. When science launched off on its own and shed the label 'natural philosophy,' it set off on a journey to explain everything. But here we are at the beginning of the twenty-first century and we are still being told by Bohr's scientific descendants that not only can science not explain the why of everything, it can't explain anything, a position that radically undermines the rationalistic pretensions of many modern scientists.

Maybe the goal of science should not be to resolve mysteries. The classical view of nature—as something to wonder at instead of to take apart—has virtues that we would do well to remember.
Under the classical view, the role of science is not to solve every question presented by nature, but rather to bring us face to face with things themselves—things which are essentially mysterious. Science tells us how the mystery operates; philosophy, why it is here at all; and theology, Who it is Who is behind it all.

More scientific studies that tell you what you already know

The bad thing about worshiping at the altar of science is that you find things out weeks, months, sometimes years after everybody else.

There are countless examples of this, but the most recent is a story today in Forbes Magazine reporting on a new study that has found that spoiling children is bad for their character:

"A new study from The Ohio State University suggests that constant – and perhaps undue – praise for our kids’ tiniest accomplishments, or non-accomplishments, may have the unintended side-effect of creating an over-inflated ego."

The revelation is doubtless being received among the knowledge class that knows more than the rest of us like a bombshell.

But I have a revelation to make: I knew that helicopter parenting was detrimental to children before this study ever came out! I swear it. In fact, I have published my own findings on this very blog repeatedly. The only thing my studies lacked is footnotes, data sets, and pretentious scientific jargon.

Also the grant money is nearly as good.

It's all rather informal, you see. Based on something that the scientific community doesn't value too highly anymore: a lifetime of experience.

It doesn't count for much anymore, but it's cheaper, less pedantic, and you don't have to wait years to find out what everyone else already knows.

You can read the rest Forbes magazine article.