Senate Committee Makes State Look Bad

More than two decades ago when Louisiana passed legislation that would allow schools there to teach Creationism, I thought how foolish and uneducated those people are. When Kansas’ state board of education mandated equal treatment for Intelligent Design, I thought how sad it is that the people in that state who decide how their citizens are educated are so dim-witted. When Dover, Penn. Schools decided to sneak Intelligent Design into their science curriculum I thought it was underhanded and uninformed. I sat here as a science teacher in Indiana and bragged about how good our state science standards are, with their heavy emphasis on evolution theory.

Now, however, I don’t feel so confident in our state. This week, the Senate Education Committee, despite lots of expert testimony in opposition, passed a bill (SB 89) that would allow public schools in this state to teach Creationism in science classes. They didn’t even try to mask it as Intelligent Design. They want the biblical version of Creationism taught in science. And that passed out of committee, the education committee, by an 8 to 2 vote.

Now I feel ashamed that my state has taken a big giant leap backward in its science education policy. Although the bill has not passed into law yet, and hopefully never will, the passage out of the education committee highlights the increasing danger to science education in Indiana since Republicans took over the General Assembly. I’m embarrassed by the action of these legislators. Eight out of the 10 members of the state’s education committee apparently do not have enough education of their own.

It doesn’t matter what these people believe. That should be irrelevant. What matters is that they are trying to dictate that students be taught religion, their own personal religion, in science class. Why not just go ahead and teach Flat Earth hypothesis in geography class? It’s also supposedly based on biblical teachings. Why not also teach that insects have four legs, like the bible says, instead of the six that they actually have? They are free to believe whatever fairy tales they want, but to try to force those beliefs on the students of Indiana under the guise of science is inexcusable.

It sickens and saddens me that the people with power in this state are such dullards, and so incompetent and ignorant that they have used the state’s time to pass such idiotic legislation while being paid taxpayer money for it.

On behalf of the more rational people of the State of Indiana, I apologize for the idiots on our education committee for making us all look like uneducated yokels.

Science vs. God

People believe in God or they don't. Some say they don't know, but if they don't know or are not sure that God exists, then they don't really believe, do they? But if a person does have belief in God, it is not based on any kind of empirical evidence. It might be based on personal evidence, which is not allowed when doing science. It might be based on a trust in others who have told them that God exists. It is certainly, at the root, based on some authority (like the bible). But any belief in God can never, ever, be based on reason or data, because no empirical data exists in support of the God hypothesis.

Using the methods of science, there is no way to prove that God does or does not exist. The scientific method uses inductive reasoning, which means that even though most theories can never be proven 100 percent, one can collect so much evidence in support of a theory that it is treated, for all practical purposes, as a fact. In other words, it becomes useful at predicting things in the real world. When one hypothesizes the existence of God, and especially a specific god with certain personality traits, then the empirical evidence in support of this hypothesis is so scarce, even non-existent, that it can be completely ignored as a possibility.

So to compare, science does not always get the right answer, or what is closer to the truth, the complete answer. But, unlike religion, science corrects itself. That is the method of science. Science is unbiased, non-judgmental, data-driven, and most importantly, skeptical. A good scientist doubts everything until the evidence is so compelling that it can join the ranks of the most highly-respected theories, such as atomic theory, quantum theory, or the theory of evolution. On the other hand, religion, including Christianity, is based on authority texts (the bible, the Koran). They are driven by feelings and emotions. They are most certainly biased and agenda-based, and highly judgmental. More importantly, a religion cannot be skeptical of itself.

Now, in every aspect of daily life or business life, most people embrace the more rational, data-driven path to problem solving. Only in their religious life do they embrace faith - the blind, authority-driven, emotionally-charged path that defines their religion. Those who claim they are certain that God exists, especially the personal God of the bible, are certain only because they have decided to be. They have nothing external on which to base that certitude. On the other hand, science would never claim 100-percent certainty that God does not exist. It would claim only that the evidence in support of God's existence is so minuscule and rarefied that it need not be considered for practical purposes. The evidence in support of God's existence is exactly the same as the evidence in support of leprechauns and unicorns. Those creatures might exist, but nobody takes that possibility very seriously. Thus, although God has not been disproved, he is relegated to the extremely-unlikely-to-exist pile and forgotten about, that is until some fundamentalist waves him in your face again.

A Scientific Study Said WHAT?

I was listening to an NPR program a couple of days ago about how 2011 has been a year for scientific take-backs. Some of the supposed discoveries of recent times, such as zeroing in on a cause for aging, have gotten second looks by the scientific community. Some of the conclusions of these studies were rethought in 2011. Unfortunately, such news adds fuel to the anti-science flames that burn in the hearts and minds of some fundamentalist Christians. They want desperately for science to fail so that they can claim a victory for their dysfunctional religious theories like creationism. But these latest headlines do not cast doubt on the scientific process. There is no cause for scientists to hang their heads in shame. Quite the contrary: The news story on NPR shows how science works, and works very well. That is what science does; it corrects itself and moves on.

In today's world of blogs and up-to-the-second headline updates the pressure on the news media to report the latest scientific discoveries is tremendous. And the pressure on researchers to produce is equally intense. If you are a government-funded scientist working to discover something new or prove a favorite hypothesis, it is very tempting to report the positive results of a study you have conducted. And it is equally tempting for media to publish the results of scientific studies prematurely. That's because the consumers of information, the American public, are eager to find the answers to those vexing problems of life: How to slow the aging process, the best new drug therapy to treat X disease, the next new technological gizmo coming over the horizon. But what the media, and the public, seldom realize is that most of the scientific studies that are published in the mainstream media have not been published in peer-reviewed science journals yet. Some never get published in peer-reviewed science journals. Yet they are eaten up as a smorgasbord of facts by the general public. Then, after further scrutiny reveals flaws in the data or errors in procedure, the public gets irritated by the whole process and eventually becomes jaded and detached.

The researchers doing the studies may not have done anything wrong from a scientific standpoint. But the premature release of information, especially when accompanied by unverified conclusions, eventually can lead to distrust of the scientific process by the public. The scientific method is the best way of finding answers to nature's puzzles. But when researchers start forming their conclusions too early and leaking them to the public, they only do science a disservice. The proper manner by which the public should be informed of scientific research is to wait until after a study or an experiment has been published in a peer-reviewed journal. Even then the caveat is to assume that any findings are tentative until they have been verified by independent researchers. Even after repeated verification, conclusions in science cannot typically be assigned a certainty of 100 percent. Science works by the process of inductive reasoning, which almost never yields 100-percent certitude. But that's fine; if a theory is useful in predicting outcomes it is a perfectly satisfactory theory. Its value is in its usefulness.

So when you read about the latest scientific discovery or about the results of a new study, drill down into the details of the story to find out if it is a single study that has not been published in a peer-reviewed journal, or is it the end result of multiple research projects that is embraced by the scientific community as a whole? Be wary of the former, and understand that at some point, the rosy picture often painted by single studies often fades quickly.