Is Science "Getting Better"?

The title of this post is intended to carry a double meaning. The first meaning is the one which is immediately evident from a simple reading of the title: is science better today than it was at some point in the past, and will it be better in the future than it is right now. The second meaning I have could be better read as "Is Science All About 'The Process of Getting Better'?" I would like to begin with the second interpretation I provided, since an analysis of that question will provide a better foundation for answering the question posed by the first interpretation.

This blog has spent a lot of time up to this point talking about origins, which at some point will bring up the theory of evolution. Science as a whole may not be centered around the concept of things getting better--in fact, to my understanding, studies of thermodynamics and entropy state quite the opposite--however evolution is grounded in what I will summarize as "progress." Speaking in terms of evolution, progress requires that over large enough spans of time, later generations of species will be better than previous generations. A human is better than a monkey is better than a bird is better than a lizard is better than a fish is better than a protozoa. The justification given for how this happens is that there is a lot of little variations in all directions over generations, good and bad, but only the better ones survive and persist.

Regardless of what you think about macro-evolution, progress as a philosophy is not confined to the academics of biology. People say that civilization is progressing, which by that they mean a whole host of things. Our laws are more enlightened, more informed, and more just than they were before. Our social institutions and cultures are more reasonable and practical than they were before. Our technology is better and people have better standards of living than before. Even our academics, and especially our science, is better and more comprehensive than it was before.

Much of this is true, and I don't intend to dispute that progress can and does happen. My point is that progress is taken for granted. In fact, I have heard some suggest and I am inclined to believe (although I won't go into why) that this faith in progress inspired the theory of evolution, rather than the other way around. I am open to hearing otherwise, but as far as I know there is not much justification for why there should be progress in any human institution other than on the basis that we do see it. This is one illustration for when I say that everyone carries assumptions into everything. I imagine "unbiased" scientists still believe in progress.

Furthermore, I see that too much attention focused on progress has started to confuse its definition. Progress holds that, in the long term, things will be better in the future than they are at present, and they are better at present than they were in the past. It does not, however, mean that progress is monotonic--that is, that each day or each year or even each decade will be better than the one before it. People still make mistakes, and mistakes can be perpetuated, too. In fact, they can be perpetuated because of a blind adherence to progress. Once made and if not quickly caught, a mistake may be labelled as "progress," which means it is assumed to be better than anything that came before. Not only will it go unquestioned, but more things will be built off of this foundational mistake in order to continue with progress.

I concede that probabilistically, such a perpetuation becomes less likely the longer it is perpetuated. After all, if it really is a mistake at its foundation, then at some point something built off of that mistake simply won't add up. Here is a paradox: the more strongly you believe in progress, the better chance there is that this perpetuation will happen. You see, the longer a mistake lasts, the less likely it is to last; but a strict adherent to progress, knowing this, will say that since a mistake is not likely to last that long, will be more likely to claim that there was no mistake at all. By denying the mistake to be such, it is allowed to continue.

So, now, when you laugh at my suggestion that anything about the Middle Ages could be better than anything we have now, understand that you are assuming this philosophy of progress. On that note, though, I may revise my previous comment because I may have wrongly associated two eras of history. I had every intention of going into more detail about that claim, but my introduction to it has already become long enough.

Testing the Water

I imagine that my remarkable slowness in updating this blog may have caused some to lose interest in what I have been saying. Is there anyone who would like for me to continue, and would like for me to do so for any reason other than to ridicule me.

Standards for Revelation

There remains, then, only to discern what, if any, are the words of the designer to humanity. I do not pretend to have a sufficient list of criteria, but I hope to present here a preliminary list of necessary criteria for judging between what are the words of us and what could be the words of one above us. A true "scripture" must at least be...

1) ...completely true.

I argued for this point previously. If it is at some point false, then we--presumably--have no standard but ourselves to judge which parts are true and which are false. If we set ourselves up as a reliable standard, then there is no sense in going this route at all.

2) ...internally consistent.

This is demanded by the first requirement. If something is internally inconsistent, that is, it is self-contradictory, then it must necessarily be false at that point, because one of its two claims must be false.

3) ...externally consistent.

Our hope is that the scripture is written by one who is knowledgeable about the world we live in. He would then be qualified and capable of writing about this world without error. We therefore expect such a scripture to be consistent with what is true in our world. This standard is somewhat dangerous to apply, because we ourselves have judgments about this world which are not always completely correct. So if I disagree with a scripture, and I disagree because I am wrong about the world and it is right, can I really say that it is wrong about the world?

4) ...authoritative.

We seek words from one who designed our world, from one who knows it intimately. His knowledge of the world is not dependent upon that of others; it is self-sufficient. When these words claim, "This is so," then we should not be surprised when we do not see, "This is so because this great thinker has said that," or, "This is so because we see that and that are so," but simply, "This is so," because he has no need to appeal to any other standard but himself.

The Desirability of Revelation

Before my extended absence and my couple digressions onto other loosely related topics, I was examining what conclusions can be drawn after having admitted that all of the world before us exhibits form which seems to require its design by some intelligence. Supposing this, there is actually very little that can be concluded with any confidence. I suggested the possibility of direct revelation from the intelligence.

I can imagine many would shirk at such a suggestion, preferring pure reason and universal experience to the words offered of one or more people. We recognize that in our world, the words of people are unreliable. There is a thing called lying, and because such a thing is possible we cannot always trust everything that everyone says. The mere fact that two people may say two different things which are exclusive of one another is sufficient proof of this. There are a lot of "scriptures" out there, and they can't all be right, and there's no way of knowing whether the authors are lying or not, so there's no good reason to trust them. However, it should also be noted that pure reason and experience are deceptive as well. Over the ages, philosophies inspired by reason have been just as multitudinous as religions inspired by the words of others. We recognize that appearances can be deceiving because appearances, too, can lead us to contradictions. There is nothing more or less perfect about reason--on this criteria alone--than about revelation, yet philosophy has for a long time hoped and assumed that it is.

Consider, however, the words of the intelligence, if there are any available. For convenience, I will refer to the intelligence in the singular masculine. When talking about an intelligent designer, we have implicitly assumed that this intelligence is qualitatively similar to that shared by human beings if not quantitatively. One peculiar feature of this intelligence is the ability of communication, that the ideas of one intelligent being can be shared with another such being. I may at times use the concept of "words" interchangeably with "ideas" as used in the preceding sentence; do not be surprised by this. Therefore, communication between an intelligent designer and humanity is at least not inherently impossible.

Now, the words of the designer are either fully true, at some point false, or have no truth value at all--that is, it is a collection of words either with no meaning or it is purely subjective. I am hesitant to say this last option is a real option to be considered, but for the benefit of the doubt I'll let it stand. Whatever the case, in all but the first option, these words would be inadequate for our purposes. We desire truth. If the intelligence's words are at some point false, then to find truth we would need a measure by which to judge his words; the best candidate, it seems, is the reason and experience of man, and if we go with that, we may as well have trusted that from the beginning. If the intelligence's words have no truth value at all, then of course they will be worthless for finding truth. Supposing his words are false or foolishness (or even true), this still provides us with some small glimpse into the nature of the intelligence that we are dealing with. Namely, we know that he is unreliable. If he is unreliable, is there any reason to suppose that that which he shaped will be more reliable and more knowable than he? Yet it was the reliable nature of the patterns of the world that led toward an intelligent designer in the first place. The argument is loose, I concede, but on the surface our limited assumption of an intelligent designer seems more consistent with his being reliable.

If he is reliable, then his words are to be trusted above all else. Having been the designer of this world, his knowledge of the world would be extensive and complete; he could not be deceived in this regard. I suspect that no one is really afraid that, if an intelligent designer chose to speak with humanity, that he would somehow get his words all wrong. The real fear is that humanity, upon reception, has changed these words around, or that humanity calls revelation that which is not at all. This is the root of the distrust of "scriptures." If we could be confident in finding some imparting of words from the designer to the designed, then in those claims, at least, we may be assured of having found answers to these uncertainties. Our hope is that, if the designer has chosen to give any words at all, its words are sufficient for living in this world, since he would, after all, know the world well enough to know what was sufficient for life in it.

What I Believe About Origins

Since there has been some request for this, I will lay forth the extent of my convictions regarding the origin of our world. I feel, though, that in part doing so now is putting the cart before the horse, so to speak, and therefore I share my views only after this exhortation. Origins is a hotly contested topic, and it is often a make-or-break view to hold. As such, I sense the temptation arising to first hear the particulars of my view, compare it against the particulars of your own views, evaluate how closely the two are in agreement, and afterwards attribute me credence in proportion to my agreement with you on this one issue. Put simply, if I make a claim about how we came to be, and you think it's preposterous to even think that way, you will call me crazy and assume everything else I say is crazy, too. This is common practice, and often the principle holds true, but I claim it is not always that simple, and I request that you hear me out even so.

What do I believe? I believe the Bible is inerrant as originally written, and I furthermore believe that the Bible as we have it is close enough to its original writing to be relied upon. Inerrancy means that it is true and free from error in its primary purposes--to demonstrate the character of God and His relationship to His world--and in its secondary purposes, including describing historical events. Therefore, anything which God's Word says is true must be, and any claim which contradicts His Words must be false.

We begin with Genesis 1, which says that God created the heavens and the earth. Right away we see that the world is a creation of God's, and is therefore subject to Him. It came into being, it is temporal, it is finite, it is not eternal, it is not co-existent with God, and furthermore it is not the same as God. The account goes on to describe how features of the world were created, and five evenings and mornings occurred between them, and after the sixth evening and morning we are told God rested from His work. Many claim that the use of days is figurative in this passage, and could actually refer to eons; the use of the word, not to mention the emphasis placed on evenings and mornings, seems to rule out this possibility from critical analysis. Many claim that the whole passage is figurative, such as the poetry found elsewhere in the Bible. There is poetry in the Bible which should be read as poetry; if you compare this passage with other poetry, you see that they are not at all the same in style. The Genesis account is written much like the history accounts. So yes, I hold to six-day creationism.

I am a little less concerned about the particular age of the world, that is, the amount of time spanning between the beginning of history and now. Whether God created the world or the world created itself has incredible theological and philosophical consequences which cannot be taken lightly. A couple thousand years, on the other hand, don't add up to that much. From what I understand, the estimate of 6,000 years was derived from genuine Biblical scholarship, and for that I tend to prefer that estimate.

As was hinted, I hold that God is eternal, and by eternal I mean not only that which is without beginning nor end, but that which is atemporal: God does not flow with time, as we do, but transcends time itself. In the act of creation, God created time itself with a definite, historical beginning. The created world is finite, and God alone is infinite. The finite is separate from the infinite--not to say that they have no communion between them, but they are not the same essence.

When humankind was created, we were created in the image of God, possessing many His qualities in a finite instantiation. We were without sin but not incapable of sin, with the freedom to choose either dependence upon our Creator or rebellion against Him. Having chosen to assert our own authority over our lives, we became enslaved to this decision, and thus humanity is fully separated from God.

While this is probably not the "scientific" beliefs you were expecting to hear, I nevertheless consider these truths to be of the utmost importance in understanding ourselves and the world around us.

Returning to "scientific" beliefs, some time following all of this, God caused a great flood to cover the earth. Now, there has been not a little speculation about the nature of the earth prior to man's fall, between the fall and this flood, and following the flood. I suspend judgment on much of these details. However, I will say that this flood was a catastrophe the likes of which was never seen before or since, and would naturally cause great changes to the earth. Regarding the ark which Noah was commanded to build and fill with the creatures of the earth, it seems reasonable to suspect that Noah brought on board a pair from every high-level classification of animals, and from these the mechanisms of speciation have produced the diversity we find today. As for the dinosaurs, a lot could be explained by simply claiming, "They were not permitted on the ark and so became extinct in the floodwaters." There is no indication of this at all, so we are led to believe that the extinction must have happened either prior to the flood or after it, but not as a result of it.

I am sure you will not be satisfied with the account I have laid forth. However, as I said at first, I did not want to lay all of this out all at once at this time.

Assumptions in Science

It has been a very, very long time since I last set out to write about this topic of intelligent design. The reasons for this long hiatus are many and complex, and would be of no benefit to recount here. At this time, I feel that it is important to resume this discourse and let it continue to a more natural end.

Before beginning again, I would like to take a moment to share some evidences which were recently shared with me. In this tension between the view of a created origin of the world and an evolving origin of the world, the primary attack leveled against those who hold to a view of creation is that they must "bite a bullet" in order to maintain that position. That is, they must believe steadfastly in certain facts or ideas which are not impossible, but nevertheless difficult to keep consistent with the rest of the body of knowledge. Specifically, creationists have to believe that a large percentage of scientific facts and interpretations, corroborated by a large percentage of the scientific community, are either false, misguided, or misrepresented. It would seem that--at least probabilistically speaking--the odds are in favor of agreeing with the scientific community, and to do otherwise is nothing but foolishness and stubborn.

However, this need not be the end of the story, even though most would like it to be. If it can be shown that, contrary to the assumption that the conclusions of every researcher are formed independently of every other researcher, there is in fact some influence from one researcher on the next, the possibility of error is no longer infeasible. Instead of measuring the probability that each researcher might introduce the same error again and again, we really are looking for the probability that the following researcher will not question an error carried along by the previous one. We know that researchers do not work independently of one another and realistically, not much progress could be made if they did not. It is not an inherently bad or dangerous thing that this collusion occurs, but neither are these people necessarily above reproach.

Still, the question remains as to whether or not the scientific community would and does allow grievous misconceptions to be perpetuated. One such example was recently shared with me of how this has happened in recent history. I will let you read the story for yourself, and in case you are doubtful I made every effort to find an "unbiased" source. For background, begin with an article on Catastrophism and then read about J. Harlen Bretz. As you will see, Uniformitarianism was preferred to Catastrophism in the 18th and 19th century not so much because of any new-found evidence, but because Uniformitarianism offered an escape from the religious baggage implicitly associated with Catastrophism. From the way the story was first told to me, Bretz's findings were initially discounted not on the basis of any particular flaws in his research, but simply because his conclusions did not conform to the accepted standard of the day. They would be on the level of silliness and pseudo-science. It wasn't until the rest of the scientific community actually went out and looked at his findings themselves that they were willing to concede that perhaps there were some flaws in their assumptions. Despite a general agreement, popular opinion turned out to be not quite correct, and it had been carried along through time without much trouble.

Hopefully this illustration will soften any hardened resolutions you may have regarding the preferability of mainstream thought over any other position, or at least that regarding the essentially infallibile nature of mainstream thought. It is often claimed that the opposition has no evidence at all for its claims, and it was my intention to show that this is not so. Furthermore, I would like to point out the role that presuppositions played in this instance. In hindsight, we see that geologists were mistaken for some time because they held onto certain presupposed views through which they interpreted what they found, but these views were not wholly consistent with a true picture of what was going on. We are told that science seeks to lay aside these biases and presuppositions and only look at matters objectively. Aside from the fact that this is very, very hard--because they are hard to find and harder to part with--I would suggest that it is actually impossible. Consider carefully by what means we judge that "objectivity" is a reliable standard, and you may see that this, too, is a presupposition, after a fashion. The goal, then, is not to be as neutral as possible in one's reasoning, as this seems a futile task, but to seek out a right foundation for all other reasoning, and it is in this direction I wish to go.

Omonia to Return

Omonia should be returning relatively soon.

What About the Aliens?

In the preceding comments, this question effectively arose: “What about the aliens?”

Well, my answer (for which I was hoping to have provided context before now) is to weigh the issue against Biblical scripture. What we find is that Scripture doesn’t say anything about aliens at all; it’s not even alluded to. This doesn’t discount their existence, but we can conclude the following: It is possible that they do not exist. If they do exist, it has no importance on how we relate to God (since this is what the Bible is about, if it were relevant, it would need to be mentioned). Or, any importance there might be is a natural extension of that which is taught in Scripture. Nam made the excellent point of whether to consider aliens as equally created in the image of God, or if they are lesser beings. The answer can have serious ramifications, but Scripture doesn’t adequately equip us to make that judgment. So aliens are not important in this regard.

Taking a more high-level approach, consider the role of humanity in the world. The Bible declares that we are created in the image of God, and note further that creation culminates with the creation of humanity. The rest of the Bible frames all of history, all of the world, and all of understanding in the context of man and God. Humans have a special importance in the world. For there to be aliens who are equal with us (or greater) would be inconsistent with the way God has revealed our relationship to Him as something special. For there to be aliens that are like plants and animals, they should have some significance to humans. Since in the present state of affairs it is doubtful this could happen, I find it highly doubtful that there is alien life.

I’ve commonly heard the argument that space is too big for there not to be aliens. Genesis 1:14-15 gives us an explanation. “And God said, ‘Let there be lights in the expanse of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark seasons and days and years, 15 and let them be lights in the expanse of the sky to give light on the earth.’ And it was so.” We see that even though the universe is much bigger than the people inhabiting it, God explains that it is not wasted after all. It has a purpose, and that purpose is for the benefit of us humans. Again, all of creation and history centers around us.