Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

This started out as a comment in smallship1's journal, that I had to edit down a wee bit to fit the size limit for comments, then realized it would make a good entry on its own.

Reacting to the line "Bewildered and frustrated at the survival of creationism as pseudo-science?" in an entry by sdorn introducing a link to a page abut folks mocking the Creation Museum by advertising a Unicorn Museum, smallship1 opened with:

"Well, no. Hardly at all. Any more than I'm bewildered and frustrated at the survival of Hinduism, the folk beliefs of the Kazakhs, or the Australian aboriginal belief in the Dreamtime, none of which seem to get quite as much stick as this one belief system. Pseudo-science is just belief with diagrams."

While I'm not certain to what extent the Unicorn Museum is intended to mock specifically the presentation of creationism as an alleged science and how much it's meant to mock the religious beliefs behind the fake science, the response was enough to get me writing about why creationism bothers me but basic religious belief does not, and how to explain that to anyone who doesn't already consider it obvious. Basically it boils down to a disagreement with the statment that "Pseudo-science is just belief with diagrams." So here is my second draft...

The survival of belief in the Jewish creation story as mythology or mysticism bothers me not a bit. Personally, I believe in a non-literalist interpretation of that myth; for example, I believe in a weak form of 'directed evolution' -- as a religious belief. Just as I believe that the Creator cares about us so much that he gave His son as sacrifice to save us from the ultimate consequence of our sins. I used the word "myth" because that reflects the function of these memes in that interaction-of-memes that produce my worldview^[1]; that I believe these partcular things to be factually true does not change what kind of idea they are. Believing them affects who I am in ways similar to how things that others believe that I don't, affect who they are. I see no inherent problem with religious belief, and nothing bewildering about its continued existence.

My problem is with pseudo-science.

My problem is with pseudo-science in general, not just any one particular example of it.

Continuing to use myself as an example a little longer, my belief in directed evolution is definitely not a scientific belief. If I were to claim that it were, I would quite properly be criticised and mocked for it, and it would be appropriate for those who know better to attempt to educate me. My belief in "straight" evolution is a scientific belief -- I'll say "belief" because I'm putting my trust in others' work and judgement instead of doing all the steps myself^[2], and scientific because it's falsifiable, has predictive value, and was arrived at by way of the scientific method.

As long as I recognize that the one is science and the other religion, there is no conflict between the two. Directed evolution does not directly contradict anything in pure evolution, it merely adds another assumption. And pure evolution does not rule out directed evolution, it merely demonstrates that the extra assumption is not required to make sense of the data.

The problem comes when people try to dress up directed evolution, or any other magical, mystical, or religious belief, in an ill-fitting "Science" hallowe'en costume, with the cheesy plastic mask held on by elastic, and pass it off as something it's not. And that brings us back around from talking about me to talking about what's wrong with creationism.

The version of creationism that denies evolution entirely even as a mechanism by which God's will could be implemented -- and even more, the 'young Earth' flavour of it -- strikes me as being much more difficult to maintain a belief in when faced with the scientific evidence for evolution, but I won't get so upset at others for somehow holding onto that belief as long as they understand and acknowledge that it is a religious belief and not science. That trying to surround it with "scientific" incantations misapplied-jargon doesn't make it science, that it has no business being taught in science class. And that it's not the most useful set of assumptions to use when making predictions about the consequences of future actions.

(My belief in directed evolution doesn't belong in a science class either. Okay, maybe as a brief side-comment about how one can still believe in a creator-God while still understanding evolution, if some theist students ask first, but even that is a "maybe".)

Psychic phenomena, crystals, energy work, ghosts? All fine -- I even believe in a subset of that general category myself -- all fine until people start "explaining" them with patently bogus fake-science. "It's magic" - okay; "We don't know yet why/how it works" - okay (er, if in fact it does work); "It resets your body's natural magnetic fields" - nuh uh, and the more absurd details regarding stuff I can easily disprove with lab instruments, or that outright contradicts what we actually know about physics or biology, the worse it gets. (I'll accept using "energy" in a mystical sense to label something that behaves in some ways analogously to how physical energy works, because we need a useful word for it and that one is widely understood in context. But that doesn't mean that it is physics-energy.) You can even go ahead and start building a model to fit your observations, like a scientist, if you label the "I don't know yet" parts of that model^[3,4]. But if you start dressing something up as science when it's not, or worse yet, pretend that it's based on well-understood science, to bypass other folks' natural (and mostly healthy) skepticism about magical claims or non-rational^[5] beliefs, that's cheating. Lying.

I say: do away with pseudo-science. Stamp it out. Be tolerant and respectful of folks' religious beliefs, patiently accept that some of us are mystics, but let science be science, and do what we can to prevent people from muddying and confusing it by pretending these other things are science.

Pseudo-science is not just "belief with diagrams". It is either dishonest or mistaken.

[1] Well, my belief in a (metaphorical interpretation of) the Jewish creation story functions exactly as a myth for me, but my belief in the existence of God and the meaning of Salvation is a little different, because of the intimately personal aspects of my religious experience. Being just myth would be like somebody knowing "Zeus/Santa Claus/Odin exists", or "Washington confessed to chopping down the cherry tree"; my belief in God affects me more in the way that an ancient Greek meeting Zeus and getting drunk with him would. But that difference is a bit beyond the scope of this essay (I've been meaning to write separately about what I mean when I describe myself as a born-again Christian for a while). For my purposes here it's close enough to fitting in that category even if I did feel it needed this footnote.

[2] I'll gloss over, for now, discussion of the epistomological question of the difference between 'belief' and 'knowledge', the meaning of the verb 'to know' in this context, and whether it is possible to know anything beyond cogito, ergo sum.

[3] Depending on what you're doing and how rigorously you do it, you may wind up with science after all, or something that is a mix of science and mysticism. For example, it's not clear what Qi is in physical terms, and AFAIK meridians can't be seen on an X-ray or an MRI, but the model built on the concepts of Qi and meridians produces useful physical-world results via acupuncture. But the key here is that acupuncture is not credible simply because it has a plausible model and fancy diagrams; it's credible because it has a long, documented track record of physical-world results showing that the model is useful even if it's incomplete from a scientific viewpoint (because it doesn't connect to biology/physics in a way that testably explains why it works in terms of more fundamental science).

[4] You get a little slack if you're writing the mystical equivalent of technobabble for a science fiction movie (for some reason I think of this more as a movie thing than a written-word SF thing), but even there if you push it too far a big chunk of your audience is going to be yanked out of their suspension-of-disbelief.

[5] Obvious to some readers, probably footnote-worthy for others: note that I've carefully chosen the word "non-rational" here rather than "irrational". The distinction is important. (Though some magical claims, superstitions, and snake-oil pitches are both.)