PZ Myers recently posted some creationist drivel over at Pharyngula, which - unusually - focussed on physics rather than biology. This particular quote has been the subject of much scorn:

Unveils the fundamental truth, based on the scientific record of creation, that the earth accreted from a watery nebula; the great surging mass of water and chemicals had no particular shape and covered thousands of square miles of interstellar space.

Why is this so funny (apart from the idea that volume can be measured in square miles)? Well, personally I’m reminded by someone who, apparently at a loss for what else to say when Hemant at Friendly Atheist asked what we admire about christians, claimed that they “think big”. God is supposedly big. But apparently, the universe isn’t.

The author of the quote - one Parsons - is out by orders of magnitude when it comes to how much water you’d need to form the Earth. One commenter at Pharyngula claims that the earth has “approximately 196 MILLION square miles of surface area. It has, approximately, 26 BILLION cubic miles of material.” (I haven’t bothered to verify these claims, but I do know that they are closer to the truth than Parsons with his thousands of square miles.)

This isn’t the first time a creationist fails to comprehend large things. Recall for instance the Christian grad students who were supposed to teach middle schoolers that 10²⁶² is such a large number that if you attempted to write it down, you would “fill up the entire known universe with paper before you could write that number”. Now, this could mean that whomever wrote that lives in a very very small universe … or they simply had no idea what they were talking about.

Is this symptomatic of something? Does the muddled thinking of creationists ultimately come from an inability to understand, or come to terms with, just how big the world is? Perhaps if these people actually comprehended the true scale of the universe, they would realise the hubris of believing that it was created for the sole purpose of housing bipedal, hairless primates.

science, physics, creationism

The 2008 Annual Question of Edge.org:

When thinking changes your mind, that’s philosophy.
When God changes your mind, that’s faith.
When facts change your mind, that’s science.

WHAT HAVE YOU CHANGED YOUR MIND ABOUT? WHY?

Science is based on evidence. What happens when the data change? How have scientific findings or arguments changed your mind?

In a refreshing display of humility, over 160 thinkers (so far?) have admitted to not always being right. Unsurprisingly I especially like Richard Dawkins’ answer - not because of the exact topic over which he’s changed his mind (Zahavi’s handicap principle of sexual selection), but because of the points he makes about science and skepticism. His opening paragraph reads (my emphasis):

When a politician changes his mind, he is a ‘flip-flopper.’ Politicians will do almost anything to disown the virtue — as some of us might see it — of flexibility. Margaret Thatcher said, “The lady is not for turning.” Tony Blair said, “I don’t have a reverse gear.” Leading Democratic Presidential candidates, whose original decision to vote in favour of invading Iraq had been based on information believed in good faith but now known to be false, still stand by their earlier error for fear of the dread accusation: ‘flip-flopper’. How very different is the world of science. Scientists actually gain kudos through changing their minds. If a scientist cannot come up with an example where he has changed his mind during his career, he is hidebound, rigid, inflexible, dogmatic! It is not really all that paradoxical, when you think about it further, that prestige in politics and science should push in opposite directions.

Of course, this point seems to be entirely lost on many followers of religious dogma. Ted Haggard’s statements in “Root of All Evil?” are a perfect example of the distrust these people feel for the scientific community because of the changing nature of science. They seem to pursue stability in the form of ever-lasting Truth ™ … regardless of whether that truth is actually true or not. Unfortunately, I think convincing someone with this mindset of the superiority of the scientific method(s) is doomed to fail. Hopefully, the results of science will speak for themselves, in the long run. After all, they don’t have much by way of competition, as the Truth ™ of various holy books have yet to save people from smallpox or construct earthquake-safe buildings.

In closing his statement, Dawkins moves on to discuss the necessity for healthy skepticism:

Nevertheless, a word of caution. Grafen’s role in this story is of the utmost importance. Zahavi advanced a wildly paradoxical and implausible idea, which — as Grafen was able to show — eventually turned out to be right. But we must not fall into the trap of thinking that, therefore, the next time somebody comes up with a wildly paradoxical and implausible idea, that one too will turn out to be right. Most implausible ideas are implausible for a good reason. Although I was wrong in my scepticism, and I have now changed my mind, I was still right to have been sceptical in the first place! We need our sceptics, and we need our Grafens to go to the trouble of proving them wrong.

This ties in with a recent discussion on Aardvarchaeology, continued on Respectful Insolence. In short, to be a skeptic means agreeing with scientific consensus when it comes to areas in which you are not an expert. If you are an expert - as could be said for Dawkins in the case of Zahavi’s handicap theory - you should be following the evidence. Dawkins did not accept Zahavi’s theory until he had seen what for him constituted sufficient evidence, in the form of Grafen’s mathematical modelling.

science, dawkins, dogma, skepticism