RE: Creationist nonsense

Hm. Let’s clarify terminology a bit. The word you mean is “hypothesis”, not “theory”. In science, a “hypothesis” is a testable conjecture. A theory is a tested and accepted body of knowledge.

Gravitation, evolution, and quantum mechanics are theories — which is to say that they’re well tested, thorough explanations of a set of phenomena.

The National Academy of Sciences puts it this way:

Some scientific explanations are so well established that no new evidence is likely to alter them. The explanation becomes a scientific theory. In everyday language a theory means a hunch or speculation. Not so in science. In science, the word theory refers to a comprehensive explanation of an important feature of nature supported by facts gathered over time.

The basic epistemology of science is such that supporting evidence improves confidence in an explanation, but it can never eliminate the possibility of an alternative. When scientists start talking about a “theory”, they generally intend to mean that it’s an explanation that’s so well established that the possibility of an alternative is too remote to take seriously.

This is incorrect. We’ve already mentioned the vacuum fluctuations — they’re not a “hypothetical” scenario, they’re a demonstrated fact. The vacuum is unstable.

That doesn’t mean we don’t have very strong evidence to believe it possible.

No laboratory has ever produced the element Ununseptium, which is the name for a theoretical atom with an atomic number of 117, and it’s not known to occur naturally. But, atomic theory gives us very strong evidence that it’s possible.

We have created atoms with atomic numbers of 116 (Ununhexium) and 118 (Ununoctium) in the lab. They’re very unstable. Uuh has a half-life of 63ms, and only three atoms of Uuo have been detected, but they fit into the periodic table (a theory of how certain elemental properties interrelate). The same theory predicts the existence of Uus.

Similarly, vacuum fluctuations are a fundamental part of the theory of quantum mechanics. They’re necessary to explain lots of laboratory phenomena — including three of the four most fundamental forces in the universe (electromagnetism, and the strong and weak forces within the atom), and most physicists (except the ones working on very far-from-the-mainstream hypotheses) expect that thee fourth force, gravitation, will also eventually be explained in these terms.

We don’t have to create the Big Bang in the laboratory to know that it happened — observations of the universe all support the theory. The Nobel Prize in Physics for 2006 was awarded for the COBE experiments, for example. The Big Bang theory predicts the existence of a very small amount of background radiation spread throughout the universe. The difference between the measured radiation and the predictions of the theory are so small that you can’t even show them on a reasonably sized graph.

Scientific models aren’t just a collection of semi-related ideas. They connect together quite strongly to form a single, unified picture of the universe — from the scale of the bosons and fermions that make up matter and energy up to intergalactic superclusters. Along the way, quantum theory is connected to thermodynamics and chemistry, which are connected to biology and geology, and biology connects to all of the social sciences.

When you look at the areas where the sciences overlap, they don’t contradict, they support. One “end” of the spectrum that chemistry studies are bio-organic compounds, which are so intimately bound up with the biological discipline biochemistry that it’s hard to say to which science it “really” belongs. On the other “end” of the chemistry spectrum, you have structural theories that are so closely connected to atomic physics that you can’t tell the chemists from the physicists.

That’s an enormous body of evidence supporting the theory, so we have very good reason to think it true.

The “creator option” is a lousy explanation, simply because it doesn’t actually “explain” anything. Or, looked at it another way, it explains entirely too much.

For example, it explains why people weigh about 2% less when they’re on consecrated ground. It explains why you can take two sheets of paper from the same ream, write a bible verse on one and a quote from Shakespeare on the other, throw them both in a furnace, and the one with the bible verse will remain whole and unburned. It explains why, when an airplane crashes, the Christians all survive.

That is, it would explain those things, if any of them were true.

The “creator option” isn’t an explanation at all, it’s nothing more than a demand to stop looking for explanations. If people did weigh less on consecrated ground, “the gods made it so” appears to be an explanation — but the next question any scientist asks is, “How?” Is it a reduction in mass or is the pull of gravity less there? Where does the extra mass go? How does it come back when they leave? But all of these questions will end up answered — there’s no experimenting on the creator.

But, I’ll go one further. You say you “check whatever is verifiable” — I have to say I doubt it. Surely your religious beliefs have some testable, real-world consequences — things that, if true, would indicate that at least some of your beliefs were false. That means those beliefs are verifiable, so have you checked them?

That’s ultimately the structure of rational inquiry. We build models of the world in our minds. The scientific model includes bosons and fermions and their interactions, which we’ve very effectively used to describe physical phenomena. But there’s a constant interaction between reality and the model — the model makes predictions, experiments test them in reality.

If we’re serious about truth, we want to come up with these sorts of tests. The COBE program started with a prediction made from the Big Bang model that the cosmic background radiation would be very uniform — it would be the same in all directions. If the test had shown that the background was anisotropic (that is, that there were different levels of radiation in different directions of space), it would have seriously undermined the Big Bang theory.

But that’s what made it a good test — it could show us where the theory was wrong, so we could make a better theory. The reason that the Big Bang theory is so strong is because it’s survived tests like these. The same is true of gravitation and of evolution.

If we’re serious about truth, we test our beliefs. In practice, that means we try as hard as we can to prove that they’re wrong. If we can show a credible effort at doing so, and our beliefs keep passing the tests, then we have some real justification for holding them.

The history of the last few centuries, though, can be seen as a series of exactly those sorts of tests of religious beliefs. Isaac Newton was a deeply religious man, Copernicus was a priest. That fact that science today has so little interest in the divine is because it tested those theories and they failed.