The phrase that means “God faked the age of the Earth”

I've run into more than a few fundamentalist Christians who have insisted that the Earth is only 6,000 years old. "Then please explain the results of radiometric dating," I typically ask, adding that even carbon dating can accurately date materials up to 60,000 years old, far older than 6,000 years. Most modern savvy Young-Earthers won't fight me on the general usefulness or accuracy of carbon dating. Instead, they will insist that A) God has created an Earth that only looks like it is billions of years old, and B) I need to have faith. That is how they would explain everything older than 6,000 years old, including the Old Tjikko tree in Sweden, which certainly appears to be 9,550 years old. God must have transplanted it from another universe when he made this universe. The Young-Earthers thus offer an provocative argument. I don't believe it, but there's would be no way for me to disprove it.

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What did Jesus look like?

I'm not yet far into Bart Ehrman's newest book, Did Jesus Exist?: The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth. Ehrman's answer, however (and he warns that his conclusion will annoy many non-Christians--of which he is one--and please Christians) is that a man named Jesus most definitely did exist. I'll be posting on Ehrman's book once I finish it. I should also mention that Frontline has produced a show on the search for the historical Jesus [Here is the video of the entire show]. Assuming that a man named Jesus once walked on the planet, what did he look like? At Popular Mechanics, Mike Fillon discusses what Jesus must have really looked like. Hmmm. He's not the tall blonde haired blue-eyed British-accented guy I've seen in more than a couple movies. Nor could he have been like any of the seven art images of "Jesus" created through the centuries. And what Jesus looked like is no academic exercise. There are real and serious real-world ramifications. For instance, Rudy Giuliani once became perturbed at an exhibit depicting Jesus as a black man. People tend to concoct the Jesus they worship in their own image and likeness. What is the method by which one might recreate an image of Jesus using other Galilean Semites of his era? It's the field of forensic anthropology, and the assumption guiding this enterprise is that Jesus would, indeed, look somewhat like most other men who lived in that area of the world.

With three well-preserved specimens from the time of Jesus in hand, [medical artist Richard Neave] used computerized tomography to create X-ray "slices" of the skulls, thus revealing minute details about each one's structure. Special computer programs then evaluated reams of information about known measurements of the thickness of soft tissue at key areas on human faces. This made it possible to re-create the muscles and skin overlying a representative Semite skull.
What Neave has offered, then, is not actually the face of Jesus, but how Jesus likely would have looked. Here is a video showing Neave at work. Based on this reaction, we have some confidence to say the following to European, African and Asian Christian congregations, each of which tend to display a version of Jesus that looks like themselves. "So sorry, but Jesus didn't look like any of you. Will you still worship him?" I'd love to run the following experiment. Let's put a big reproduction of the photo offered by Neave at the front of Christian churches all across America, right next to the altar. Then I'd like to observe church attendance over the next few months to see how dramatically it suffers. My prediction is that church attendance would fall by 50% within a year. For more on this topic see this article by BBC News. [Above Image by BBC].

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Who do you call to investigate charlatans and tricksters?

When someone makes a supernatural claim, James Randi would not recruit only scientists to investigate. He writes that you should consider hiring a trickster to investigate a trickster. More particularly, you should bring in a magician:

I particularly like the way our associate, magician and skeptic Jamy Ian Swiss, has expressed this point: Any magician worth his salt will tell you that the smarter an audience, the more easily fooled they are. That’s a very counterintuitive idea. But it’s why scientists, for example, get in trouble with psychics and such types. Scientists aren’t trained to study something that’s deceptive. Did you ever hear of a sneaky amoeba? I don’t think so. You know, they don’t get together on the slide and go, “Hey, let’s fool the big guy.” . . . Harry Houdini stood on the floor of the U.S. Congress and stridently denounced a variety of hoaxers, flaunting his cash prize for an example of a supernatural feat that would prove him wrong. Magicians like Penn & Teller and others have stepped forward to express their expert opinions concerning expensive and wasteful pursuits of chimeras. What we need now is to formalize this. We magicians have to make it clear that the insights we need to be magicians can be leveraged in the scientific method, and that we are on call.

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How to tell the difference between Science and Pseudoscience: A presentation by Massimo Pigluicci

Today I attended a lecture by Massimo Pigliucci at Washington University in St. Louis. The title of the talk was "A Fresh Look at the Demarcation Problem and Why it Matters." Pigliucci’s aim was to help us distinguish between real science and pseudoscience. He offered some a few examples up front to set the stage. It is fairly well accepted these days that Freudian psychoanalysis is pseudoscience whereas Einstein's theory of relativity is a prototypical example of legitimate science. Most science falls in between these endpoints. One example of a suspect science is string theory, which Pigliucci characterized as a favorite modern day "whipping boy." Karl Popper had the same objective back in the 1930s, offering his falsifiability approach: a theory should be considered scientific if, and only if, it is falsifiable. Not only did Popper believe that he had provided a method for determining what is truly scientific; he also believed that he had solved David Hume's “problem of induction.” Induction is the process of generalizing from a smaller set to a larger as-yet-unobserved set; the induction problem, according to Hume, was that we cannot rationally justify induction, because this conclusion depends upon the assumption that nature will continue to be uniform. Pigliucci argued that Popper's falsification approach is not sufficient for it distinguishing between pseudoscience and science, because it is “vulnerable to the Duhem-Quine theses.” The problem, according to Pigliucci, is that one can often save a falsifiable hypothesis by tweaking it (as nineteenth century astronomers did when they worked to save Newtonian physics in light of the perturbations of Mercury by positing that there was an as-yet-unseen planet closer to the sun, a planet they named "Vulcan." It would also seem that there is another problem with falsifiability; some nascent fields don't yet have a thick collection of observations with which to work. Imagine that Aristotle announced the theory of general relativity, far before Einstein. It might have been impossible for him to offer a way to falsify his theory back then, but not because there was any problem with the theory itself; it would thus be declared to be not-science. Pigliucci addresses this situation (see below). Throughout his lecture, Pigliucci referred to Larry Laudan's approach to the demarcation problem. Laudan has argued that the demarcation problem is "uninteresting and intractable," urging that we should completely stop using terms like "pseudoscience" and "unscientific." Laudan argues that philosophers have failed to point out necessary and sufficient criteria for distinguishing between pseudoscience and science. He therefore considers the demarcation project doomed. Pigliucci disagrees, pointing out that it is not necessary to find necessary and sufficient criteria for distinguishing between science and pseudoscience. Pigluicci draws upon Wittgenstein's work on family resemblances. Wittgenstein had challenged people to define the word "game" in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. It seems like an easy task, but it is not. Pigliucci refers to this exercise as "humbling." Just because we can't set out the necessary and sufficient conditions doesn't mean we don't know what a "game" is. With regard to many concepts, including "species," and, yes, "science," no boundaries have been drawn, yet we have workable ideas for what these concepts are. Wittgenstein’s observations have been recognized and expanded by modern linguists, including George Lakoff, who has labeled such concepts as “radial categories,” indicating that prototypes serve as the most typical instances of such categories. [More . . . ]

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