SecretMethod70

io9 - Texas Officially Makes The Universe Ageless - Texas
New Scientist - Texas vote leaves loopholes for teaching creationism



After the narrow victory (if it can even be called that) over evolution skeptics, it's hardly surprising that the school board is finding other ways to dismantle science in the Texas classroom. The statement from Don McLeroy is the most surreal part of this: "someone has got to stand up to experts." Are you kidding me? The person in charge of the board of education in one of the largest states is talking about standing up to experts? I wonder if he's consistent about that, or if he only stands up to experts who challenge his worldview. Perhaps when someone he cares about is in need of surgery, he'll stand up to experts and perform it himself. Astrophysicists don't tell this guy how to pull teeth (he's a dentist), and he should not be telling them what they are and are not correct about. Unless maybe he'd like to take over operations at Johnson Space Center in Houston...I'm sure that would go over real well.

Anyway, I know that we do have a few differing views here, so I'd like to hear your thoughts. Is there a way to please both sides on this issue and others like it? Maybe you don't think it's such a travesty for children not to learn the age of the universe. Personally, I think it makes a difference in terms of one's perspective and how one thinks about the very nature of existence, but maybe you disagree. Let's hear what you think.

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BadNick

It seems to me that when people throw their trust into a matter of faith, then no amount of proof or argument will change their minds.

But unless we're already convinced that the Universe is "open" and will continue to expand forever, a plausible alternative is that the "present" Universe could be the result of the latest "big bang expansion" but there could have been many more previous expansion/collapse/expansion/etc cycles in the "past", and who's to say that hasn't been going on for... fill in your time belief ...ever or a long time.

Could a sceanrio like this bridge the beliefs of the "forever" vs "15(?) billion years" groups?

murp0434

I don't understand why we have to teach creationism in schools. If you want your children to learn about religion, send them to bible school. Can't afford it? Sounds like a personal problem to me.


edit:

I agree with Nick - In my experience, particularly here in the bible belt, people will denounce any scientific fact that they perceive to be contrary to their religious beliefs, even if (a) it is so obviously true as to be indisputable and/or (b) it isn't actually counter to their beliefs at all. Establishing an age to the universe doesn't actually prove or disprove creationism, if you stop and think about it. "God" could have created the universe whenever he damn well pleased but if there is no age, then it's been here forever, so how could he have created it? The belief is that HE created it, right? So it would have to have an age...? If anything, I would think creationists would argue that the universe DOES have a specific age, like back in the good old days when they used to argue that the earth was only 4000 years old.

Somebody feel free to correct me if I am misunderstanding the term "creationism." But to me these two beliefs are not mutually exclusive.

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dippin

I think it is actually a good sign that creationists have been reduced to discussing this sort of minutiae.

Irishsean

Texas really is crazy. It seems like every few years they try something like this, which is why the wife and I are homeschooling our kids. I love public schools, went to them myself as did my wife, but here in Texas their are a lot of teachers who don't accept science or anything other than conservative Christianity.

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roachboy

well, the obvious conflict is over who gets to control the criteria that shape judgments about scientific models--large-scale cosmology is a huge modelling. the creationists/fundamentalist protestant types who keep working on this question know full well that what you can demonstrate using a particular set of rules says nothing about the status of the rules themselves, that questions of which rules are more and less legitimate is a political question--at least in spaces like education which are not themselves scientific operations but rather spaces that talk about scientific operations. from that viewpoint, all this is rearguard action--these folk know they're fucked, but are trying however they can to use political power to impose their frameworks. and they're loosing for the most part because once they manage to persuade people in particular areas that this is a political conflict, it seems that the "what the fuck are you doing?" question emerges right away and kills them. and that's the trick: for their arguments to work, the field has to be understood as political, so subject to change from interest groups (say), but when they win that fight, they loose the war because from a political viewpoint what they're trying to do is impose a religious problematique on a secular school system.

that said, this texas decision is very very strange. what the fuck does it mean to say that the universe is ageless? well, at one level, is there time outside of human experience? there's motion, there's change: but is there time?
i don't think the answer is obvious at all.
we impose time through the act of observation because we deal with succession in those terms. so for us, movement/succession is temporal--but that's entirely for us.
but i don't think the arguments operate on this level of conceptual problems---i just think they're interesting.

what would it mean for a fundamentalist/creationist to argue that the universe is ageless?
the movement probably goes that by seeing the universe in that way, you make of it a kind of manifold in a platonic sense--so it already contains all possiblities---then the question of why these particular possibilities are manifest and not others turns up. since you've already framed the problem in platonic terms, the answer is the agency of some god. so to move from all possible outcomes to particular outcomes means that there has to be a designer or selector.

what a curious proposition to agree to.
sheesh.

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yournamehere

When the sun turns into a red giant 5 billion years from now and turns this rock into a cinder, what difference will it make?

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Hektore

The gist I got from the article is not that they have changed the way in which they describe the age of the universe, but they are ceasing to address age at all. Or, at least, they have eliminated the specific requirement of defining the universe as X number of years old, leaving the door open for teachers to teach/say any old nonsense that pleases them.

This is unfortuante because, if they were exploring the same angle you were, I could at least give them credit for novelty, but they don't even deserve that.

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Willravel

The Texas Board of Education is the very model of educational failure when it comes to science. In fact, it should not be within the purview of any board of education to rule on what does or does not constitute science, math, language, history, or any other subject covered by their schools. The board has administrative responsibilities and that's it. You can't vote something into fact. You cannot legislate science.

The universe, by our very best understanding, is about 13.5 billion years old. The earth is 4.5 billion years old. Life on earth either came from terrestrial abiogenesis or extraterrestrial abiogenesis. After life started or was deposited on our planet, a process known as evolution lead single-celled organisms to, over billions of years, become life as we know it today. Anything taught to the contrary is wrong, and those that teach it not teachers.

If this madness continues, expect me to become the first atheist, pro-science Sunday School teacher in Texas, and expect more to follow.

Vincentt

"Someone has got to stand up to experts."

This still gets to me.

It is kind of interesting to see that he, and the people who are behind him, really feel like science is a bully.

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MSD

There is no way to please both sides and there shouldn't be. Evolution and the age of the universe (within an accepted margin of error) are facts and there are no valid competing theories.

Hektore

'Science' is a bully. The scientific worldview is only one and it's one that squashes many others. The question is whether or not science is justified, or defensible in it's bullying. Teaching the earth as fourteen billion years old is bullying to a certain section of the religious population that believe the earth to be a mere 6000 years old. Whether you define the age of the universe as a religious belief or not, it does conflict with religious viewpoints, thus we have state entities teaching that certain religions are silly/wrong in the 'scientific' sense. That is bullying.

If we really believe in freedom of religion then shouldn't we stop teaching views in state institutions that directly conflict commonly held religious beliefs? Isn't that anti-religious indoctrination?

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KnifeMissile

Is this a poe?

If your religion believes in silly stuff then there's nothing that reality can do about that. If your religion believed that the Earth is flat, would you advocate not teaching that it's round because some religious group will be offended? Freedom of Religion means that you may practice any religion you want. It doesn't mean that you must be told what you want to hear...

Teaching a scientific viewpoint isn't "bullying," that's just a scientific education. In what manner does science "squash" other "worldviews?"

Finally, the age of the Earth is a little over four billion years old. It's the Universe that's more than sixteen billion years old...

MSD

If your religion differs from the scientific consensus on a well-researched and understood fact, your religion is wrong.

genuinegirly

Bullying. I haven't heard it expressed in this way, Hektor.

This intimidation/bullying attitude is not usually expressed by the scientists that I interact with regularly. Rather those who "believe in science" seem to perpetuate this bullying mentality. Those who "believe in science" see it as more of an absolute than the scientists who research and work daily with these theories. True scientists know that any theory could be disproved or modified at any time - that their entire life's research could be thrown out as useless drivel. The scientists that I know are generally humble people who are motivated to study a distinct system. They are not the ones who write policy. They are not interested in wasting their time with such things - they just want to explain what they see, to test their hypotheses and see if the trend they have observed is consistent. These scientists that I know seek to assign order to the world that many view as chaotic. They wish to understand things in measureable terms - to understand a system well enough to predict how that system might change in the future.

It is a shame that science is placed in such a negative light by religion.
It is a shame that religion feels so threatened by science.
Especially since many of us scientists find a place for religion in our lives.

As a scientist who is constantly being told by her religious peers that she should disagree with things that she sees as fundamental realities - I contest that the anti-evolution religious are the true bullies.

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Hektore

Wow, my sincerest apologies for that, there must have been a serious disconnect between my head and fingers.

I'm going to try to this again, but more thoroughly. There are two related challenges to the teach of 'old earth' and 'old universe' in schools. For the sake of brevity, I tried to express them simultaneously and garbled it all up. So, I'll try again from the top in a more lengthy, (hopefully) clear attempt.

Firstly, if we look at the teaching of ID theory in public schools in the US, it has been disallowed, correctly, on the basis that it imposes religion through the 'designer' component of the theory. When we talk about freedom of religion, and separation of church/state, the gist from where I sit is: we can't state religious views as facts in state institutions (schools). By extension, because several sects preach a literal interpretation of the book of genesis and that the earth is only 6000 years old, any statement about the age of the earth that conflicts with religious views is also disallowed.

When you state that the earth is 4.5 billion years old, you directly dispute a religious claim in schools, violating separation. The street runs both ways, so to speak.

Now, I know already what the entirely logical response to this is.

'...But then anyone can say any old thing conflicts with their religion and pretty soon we'll have to stop teaching anything at all because it conflicts with their religion.'

And you'd be right on target, At this point there are two options, one is to reject the statement and assert only 'scientific truth', or accept a 'subjectivist truth' where all ways of knowing are acceptable and none is more valuable or 'truthful' than any other. A great many people do not have any problem with asserting 'scientific truth', but that great many aren't politicians. As a politician if you reject all 'subjectivist truth' in favor of 'scientific truth' that means rejecting 'religious truth' also, and thus you commit political suicide.

This development in Texas highlights how this movement is becoming successful, school boards and state standards setting committees, which have to answer to a voting, overtly religious public (particularly in Texas), would rather sidestep the issue, by say...omitting any mention of it, than taking a stand and promptly losing their jobs in the next election.

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dippin

That is not a violation of separation of church and state.

First of all, the separation, as it is understood by most modern constitutions, refers only to state promotion of religion. It says nothing about the state maintaining an environment where no religious doctrines are ever contradicted.

Second of all, even in the last sense it can only be seen as a breach of the separation if you consider science to be structurally the same as religion, so that a "science" religion is being promoted. But to accept that world view would entangle accepting a sort of radical relativism that would simply freeze any and all inquiries.

Modern scientific theories operate the same way regardless if its an atheist or a religious person doing it. As long as the same rules of inquiry are followed, people will reach the same conclusion regardless of who or what they see as being ultimately responsible for creating laws of nature.

Willravel

I don't know if I'd put it exactly like that. How about this?

If you use your religion as a flimsy excuse to defy established scientific facts due to cognitive dissonance rooted in your own ignorance, you're intellectually dishonest and will be challenged at every turn by intellectual honesty. Moreover, you're not doing your belief god any favors by pitting it against something that can be proven.

Hektore

This was the point of the first part of my second post, when a school says exactly what I've quoted here, a very strong case can - and likely will (if it has not already) - be made that it is a violation of separation or, if not separation, at the very least 'freedom of religion'.

Right, but people proposing this don't care if it stops all inquiry, it prevents science from discrediting religious truth in schools, which, means be damned, is their goal. The argument works because you force politicians between a rock an a hard place. As a state elected official you cannot say that relativism is bunk, and science is the only road to truth or you will find yourself on the fast track to unemployment because you just lost the religious vote. You can't go the other route either and put yourself totally in the lot who are for 'subjective truth' because you'll be perceived as loony. So you have to ignore the issue altogether and simply omit anything controversial. Thus the state standard for describing the age of the universe disappears.

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BadNick

Right now there is an exhibition running in Philadelphia's Franklin Institute called Galileo, the Medici and the Age of Astronomy and one of its highlights are the experiences of Galileo and how he was supressed and oppressed by the Catholic Church establishment back in his day for suggesting that the earth was not the center of the universe (among his other heresies). But I see a lot of similarities between that saga and this one in the Texas "education system". Contrary to what the Pope (and via Scripture "God"?) said back then, we are now aware of a more realistic structure of our solar system and universe.

roachboy

well now wait a minute.

there is a clever bit in this argument from the id/creationist set: the relativizing move.
that they don't seem to be terribly adept at using it is a good thing, in my view, but that is a separate question.



"scientific fact" is being thrown around here alot and in many of the situations it's being used to refer to, you aren't talking about a "fact" so much as your talking about the result of modelling that is based on procedures that are agreed upon by one of another sub-community within the sciences...most cosmological statements lean on such models. so for that matter to most statements concerning paleontology. so do most statements concerning the theory of evolution. it doesn't mean that they're wrong, but it also means that unless you qualify the notion of "fact" you aren't saying anything.

for example...one of the arguments that's been coming out of complex dynamical systems work has to do with the limitations of darwinian notions of evolution, which are rooted in a notion of species as a natural kind, so a type of object--an assumption which doesn't really obtain for living systems in a coherent way---c-d-s theorists have been working out (fragmentary) models that cause a quite basic reconsideration of what a living system is and along with that a quite different picture of evolution has started to take shape, one that does not require the vast durations that darwin attributed to the process simply as a function of the metaphysics (the conception of species as a natural kind) that shaped how he understood change to happen. c-d-s type modelling presents an image of living systems which are far more mutable, far more adaptive, than does the darwinian model. one implication of this is that evolution is in a sense normal and that the transition from one kind to another perhaps not as big a Transition as darwin might have suspected...another way of making the same point; it is simply not the case that a "fact"--including a scientific fact--is free-standing, not theory-contingent, not a model. this characterization of a "fact" as free-standing might hold for trivial matters--but most of science is a combination of data gathering, analysis and patterns of inference--and in the context of patterns of inference, it is naive to assume that somehow or another when one puts on a lab coat that one leaves one's cultural baggage behind. the obtains for very basic things---for example the effects of naming, the effects of using nouns, which impose separation between phenomena (particularly in english) which in turn impact on what is observed and how it is observed, complicating questions of interaction or interrrelatedness by imposing (arbitrary? other than arbitrary?) separations. this at the level of category usage, quite apart from observation--category usage conditions what is observed.

so the fact is that there is a cultural consensus around scientific investigation that leads folk outside the various modes of operation that are lumped together under the name "science" (which is another category effect) to impute types of validity to statements that may or may not have it, and to put aside the procedures that shape the construction of such statements, and to grant all types of scientific results, from the most theoretical to the most basic results of work in mechanics (say) with the same type of validity. most of what is happening in this thread is a demonstration of the reach of that cultural consensus. you see it in the unreflexive repetition of these validity claims, sanctified (and i use this word deliberately) by the ritual invocation of the legitimating word "science"...

so in these respects there are problems...

this doesn't at all mean that i think therefore that the way the id/creationist crowd uses relativization arguments is interesting, nor do i think that their crackpot theories are worth much. but this because i find the arguments incoherent.

the paradoxical effect of these id/creationist campaigns has been to push the status of the sciences back into some imaginary realm of the uncontestably objective, which is an indefensible position.

no reason to fall into that trap. particularly if there's no reason i can think of to take id/creationism either seriously in itself, or a necessary result of a certain degree of curiousity driven skepticism about what the sciences are, what they do, how they do it, and the types of claims about the world that they generate.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

MSD

That's a lot more diplomatic, but consider that just about everything I write regarding religion is very restrained and toned-down. My personal beliefs are very contrary and hostile to religion, but I don't say anything unless I can back it up with evidence.