Natural selection and moral decay

(I will be traveling for a few weeks and rather than put this blog on hiatus, thought that I would continue with my weekday posting schedule by reposting some of the very early items, for those who might have missed them the first time around.)

In a previous posting, I discussed why some religious people found evolutionary theory so upsetting. It was because natural selection implies that human beings were not destined or chosen to be what they are.

While I can understand why this is upsetting to religious fundamentalists who believe they were created specially in God’s image and are thus part of a grand cosmic plan, there is still a remaining puzzle and that is why they are so militant in trying to have evolution not taught in schools or its teaching to be undermined by inserting fake cautions about its credibility. After all, if a person dislikes evolutionary theory for whatever reason, all they have to do is not believe it. [Read more…]

Burden of proof-2: What constitutes evidence for god?

If a religious person is asked for evidence of god’s existence, the type of evidence presented usually consist of religious texts, events that are inexplicable according to scientific laws (i.e., miracles), or personal testimonies of direct experience of god. Actually, this can be reduced to just two categories (miracles and personal testimonies) since religious texts can be considered either as miraculously created (in the case of the Koran or those who believe in Biblical inerrancy) or as the testimonies of the writers of the texts, who in turn recorded their own or the testimonies of other people or report on miraculous events. If one wants to be a thoroughgoing reductionist, one might even reduce it to one category by arguing that reports of miracles are also essentially testimonies.

Just being a testimony does not mean that the evidence is invalid. ‘Anecdotal evidence’ often takes the form of testimony and can be the precursor to investigations that produce other kinds of evidence. Even in the hard sciences, personal testimony does play a role. After all, when a scientist discovers something and publishes a paper, that is kind of like a personal testimony since the very definition of a research publication is that it incorporates results nobody else has yet published. But in science those ‘testimonies’ are just the starting point for further investigation by others who try to recreate the conditions and see if the results are replicated. In some cases (neutrinos), they are and in others (N-rays) they are not. So in science, testimonies cease to be considered as such once independent researchers start reproducing results under fairly well controlled conditions.

But with religious testimonies, there is no such promise of such replicability. I recently had a discussion with a woman who described to me her experiences of god and described something she experienced while on a hilltop in California. I have no reason to doubt her story but even she would have thought I was strange if I asked her exactly where the hilltop was and what she did there so that I could try and replicate her experience. Religious testimonies are believed to be intensely personal and unique and idiosyncratic, while in science, personal testimony is the precursor to shared, similar, consistently reproducible experiences, under similar conditions, by an ever-increasing number of people.

The other kind of experience (miracles) again typically consists of unique events that cannot be recreated at will. All attempts at finding either a consistent pattern of god’s intervention in the world (such as the recent prayer study) or unambiguous violations of natural laws have singularly failed. All we really have are the stories in religious texts purporting to report on miraculous events long ago or the personal testimonies of people asserting a miraculous event in their lives.

How one defines a miracle is also difficult. It has to be more than just a highly improbable event. Suppose someone is seriously ill with cancer and the physicians have given up hope. Suppose that person’s family and friends pray to god and the patient suffers a remarkable remission in the disease. Is that a miracle? Believers would say yes, but unbelievers would say not necessarily, asserting that the body has all kinds of mechanisms for fighting disease that we do not know of. So what would constitute an event that everyone would consider a miracle?

Again, it seems to me that it would have to have the quality of replicability to satisfy everyone. If for a certain kind of terminal disease, a certain kind of prayer done under certain conditions invariably produced a cure where medicine could not, then that would constitute a good case for a miracle, because that would be hard to debunk, at least initially. As philosopher David Hume said: “No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle unless the testimony be of such a kind that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish…” (On Miracles)

But even this is problematical, especially for believers who usually do not believe in a god who acts so mechanically and can be summoned at will. Such predictable behavior is more symptomatic of the workings of as-yet-unknown natural laws than of god. The whole allure of belief in god is that god can act in unpredictable ways, to cause the dead to come back to life and the Earth to stop spinning.

So both kinds of evidence (miracles and testimonies) used to support belief in a god are inadequate for what science requires as evidentiary support.

The divide between atheists and religious believers ultimately comes down to whether an individual feels that all beliefs should meet the same standards that we accept for good science or whether we have one set of standards for science or law, and another for religious beliefs. There is nothing that compels anyone to choose either way.

I personally could not justify to myself why I should use different standards. Doing so seemed to me to indicate that I was deciding to believe in god first and then deciding on how to rationalize my belief later. Once I decided to use the yardstick of science uniformly across all areas of knowledge and see where that leads, I found myself agreeing with Laplace that I do not need the god hypothesis.

In a future posting, I will look at the situation where we can infer something from negative evidence, i.e., when something does not happen.

POST SCRIPT: Faith healing

The TV show House had an interesting episode that deals with some of the issues this blog has discussed recently, like faith healing (part 1 and part 2) and what to make of people who say god talks to them.

Here is an extended clip from that episode that pretty much gives away the entire plot, so don’t watch it if you are planning to see it in reruns. But it gets to grips with many of the issues that are discussed in this blog.

House is not very sympathetic to the claims of the 15-year old faith healer that god talks to him. When his medical colleagues argue with House, saying that the boy is merely religious and does not have a psychosis, House replies “You talk to god, you’re religious. God talks to you, you’re psychotic.”

Dover’s dominoes-7: The Ohio domino falls

(This is the final installment of the series, which got pre-empted by more topical items. Sorry! See part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6.)

The domino effect of the Dover verdict was seen soon after in Ohio where on February 14, 2006 the Ohio State Board of Education reversed itself and threw out the benchmarks in the state’s science standards that called for the critical analysis of evolution and the lessons plans that had been based on them. This happened even though the Ohio policy did not explicitly mention intelligent design. However, the move was clearly influenced by the ripples from the Dover trial and it is instructive to see why.

What Ohio had done in 2002 was to include a benchmark in its 9th grade biology standards in the section that dealt with biological evolution that said “Describe how scientists continue to investigate and critically analyze aspects of evolutionary theory.” They added additional language that said (in parentheses) “The intent of this benchmark does not mandate the teaching or testing of intelligent design.”

The pro-IDC OBE members also inserted people into the lesson plan writing team who drafted a lesson plan called Critical Analysis of Evolution that essentially recycled IDC ideas, again without explicitly mentioning intelligent design.

But on February 14, 2006, the Ohio Board of Education voted 11-4 to reverse itself and eliminate both the benchmark and its associated lesson plan. Why did they do so since, as some pro-IDC people on the Board said, they should have nothing to fear from the Dover decision since they had carefully avoided requiring the teaching of IDC?

Again, Judge Jones’ ruling indicates why. In his ruling, he said that what determines whether a law passes constitutional muster is how an informed observer would interpret the law. He said (Kitzmiller, p. 15):

The test consists of the reviewing court determining what message a challenged governmental policy or enactment conveys to a reasonable, objective observer who knows the policy’s language, origins, and legislative history, as well as the history of the community and the broader social and historical context in which the policy arose.

In the case of challenges to evolutionary theory, he looked at precedent and especially (p. 48) at:

a factor that weighed heavily in the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down the balanced-treatment law in Edwards, specifically that “[o]ut of many possible science subjects taught in the public schools, the legislature chose to affect the teaching of the one scientific theory that historically has been opposed by certain religious sects.”

He went on (p. 57):

In singling out the one scientific theory that has historically been opposed by certain religious sects, the Board sent the message that it “believes there is some problem peculiar to evolution,” and “[i]n light of the historical opposition to evolution by Christian fundamentalists and creationists[,] . . . the informed, reasonable observer would infer the School Board’s problem with evolution to be that evolution does not acknowledge a creator.”

Notice that the standard used for judging is what an ‘informed, reasonable observer’ would infer from the action. IDC advocates tend to implement their strategy by carefully choosing words and sentences so that it meets the letter of the law and thus hope it will pass constitutional scrutiny. But what Judge Jones says is that it is not merely how the law is worded but also how a particular kind of observer, who is assumed to be much more knowledgeable about the issues than your average person in the street, would interpret the intent of the law:

The test consists of the reviewing court determining what message a challenged governmental policy or enactment conveys to a reasonable, objective observer who knows the policy’s language, origins, and legislative history, as well as the history of the community and the broader social and historical context in which the policy arose. (emphasis added)

And this is the most damaging part of the verdict to the ID case. Their strategy has always been to single out evolutionary theory in science for special scrutiny in order to undermine its credibility. They have never called for ‘teaching the controversy’ in all the other areas of science. Judge Jones said that since an ‘informed, reasonable observer’ would know that Christians have had long-standing objections to evolutionary theory on religious grounds, singling it out for special treatment is tantamount to endorsing a religious viewpoint.

In a further telling statement that has direct implications for the Discovery Institute’s ‘teach the controversy’ strategy, he said (p. 89):

ID’s backers have sought to avoid the scientific scrutiny which we have now determined that it cannot withstand by advocating that the controversy, but not ID itself, should be taught in science class. This tactic is at best disingenuous, and at worst a canard. The goal of the IDM [Intelligent Design Movement] is not to encourage critical thought, but to foment a revolution which would supplant evolutionary theory with ID.

There is no way to see the Dover ruling as anything but a devastating blow to the whole stealth strategy promoted by the Discovery Institute. After all, their strategy had precisely been to single out evolutionary theory for special treatment. They have resolutely opposed any attempt to call for ‘critical analysis’ and ‘teaching the controversy’ in all areas of science.

What will they do in response? It is hard to say. My guess is that they will put all their efforts into supporting the policy adopted by the Kansas school board, which was done according to their preferences, unlike the ham-handed efforts of the people of Dover, El Tejon, and Kirk Cameron’s friend and the banana. (I had not known who Kirk Cameron was before this. I have been informed that he used to be a TV sitcom actor before he saw the light.)

The next domino is the science standards adopted by Kansas’s Board of Education. I have not looked too closely at what the school board decided there, so will defer commenting on it until I do so. But it is likely to end up in the courts too.

POST SCRIPT: More on The Israel Lobby article

A few days ago, I wrote about the stir created by the Mearsheimer and Walt article on The Israel Lobby and the petition started by Juan Cole to defend them against charges of anti-Semitism.

In the May 15, 2006 issue of The Nation, Philip Weiss has a good analysis titled Ferment Over ‘The Israel Lobby’ on the personalities of the authors and the other people involved, what went on behind the scenes of the article prior to and after its publication, and why it had the effect it did.

Dover’s dominoes-6: Religion in schools

(See part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5.)

Contrary to what Bill O’Reilly and other hysterical people allege, there is no ‘war on Christianity’ or ‘war on Christians’ in the US. To say so is to just be silly and to disqualify yourself from being taken seriously. Nor is there is a blanket ban on teaching about god and religion in public schools. The latter assertion is based on a common misunderstanding about the US constitution and it is worth exploring. The relevant question is how you teach about god and religion and for what purposes. (Usual disclaimer whenever I am discussing the implications of rulings by the courts: I am not a lawyer but would love to play one on TV.)

The issue of whether religious beliefs can be taught in public schools is governed by the establishment clause of the First Amendment (which I have discussed before here) which states that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

A key interpretation of this clause was provided in 1947 by Justice Hugo Black in the case of Everson v. Board of Education (330 U.S. 1, 15-16 (1947) where he wrote: “The “establishment of religion” clause of the First Amendment means at least this: Neither a state nor the Federal Government can set up a church. Neither can pass laws which aid one religion, aid all religions, or prefer one religion over another.”

This was further clarified in Epperson vs. Arkansas 393 US 97 (1968) which said that the “First Amendment mandates government neutrality between religion and religion, and between religion and nonreligion.” (Kitzmiller, p. 91)

This was further clarified in 1971 in the case Lemon v. Kurtzman (403 U.S. 602, 612-613 (1971)) which said that to pass constitutional muster, a law must pass all three of the following tests:

First, the statute must have a secular legislative purpose;

Second, its principal or primary effect must be one that neither advances nor inhibits religion;

Finally, the statute must not foster “an excessive government entanglement with religion.”

In the Dover case, both sides agreed that only the first two prongs were relevant to that issue. The first prong of the Lemon test explains why IDC proponents are so anxious to have their beliefs accepted as part of science. If that can be achieved, then they can meet the first prong, since the teaching of science in a science class clearly has a secular purpose. Hence Judge Jones’ conclusion that IDC is not science must be seen as a serious blow to their ambitions.

Judge Jones also invoked another US Supreme Court precedent (County of Allegheny v. ACLU (1989)) which said that “School sponsorship of a religious message is impermissible because it sends the ancillary message to members of the audience who are nonadherents ‘that they are outsiders, not full members of the political community, and an accompanying message to adherents that they are insiders, favored members of the political community.'”

This is another reason why a secular public sphere is to be preferred. (See here for an earlier discussion of this issue.) If you have a public sphere (in schools or elsewhere) in which one particular religious view is favored or endorsed, then it sends a message that others who are not of this particular religious persuasion are not full members. The Allegheny case resulted in the following ‘endorsement test’ that could be applied to any laws. It says that there is a “prohibition against government endorsement of religion” and that it “preclude[s] government from conveying or attempting to convey a message that religion or a particular religious belief is favored or preferred.” (Kitzmiller, p. 15)

As Judge Jones pointed out (p. 46) all these precedents imply that “[T]he Establishment Clause forbids not just the explicit teaching of religion, but any governmental action that endorses or has the primary purpose or effect of advancing religion.”

There would be no problem under these guidelines (as I read the law) about a philosophy course that examined, in a neutral way, the religious beliefs of people. There would be no problem in discussing in a history or social studies course the role that Christianity played in the American political process or the role that Islam played in the development of the middle east. In fact, it would be hard to keep religion out and teach those topics in a meaningful way.

A problem only arises if you use a course to promote religion in general or a specific religious point of view. Now we see more clearly why the El Tejon policies were problematic. It is not how a course is labeled (whether science or philosophy) that is at issue, it is how the course is taught. The El Tejon course was explicitly advocating a particular religious point of view, that of young Earth creationism. And the people at the Discovery Institute (rightly I think) saw that this would be easily ruled unconstitutional. And since the course dragged in IDC ideas as well, a negative ruling on this case would be interpreted as meaning that IDC ideas should not be allowed even in philosophy classes, which would be a huge public relations setback for them.

This is why they must have breathed a huge sigh of relief when the El Tejon school board decided to cancel the course.

Next in this series: Another domino falls in Ohio

POST SCRIPT: First amendment freedoms and the Simpsons

A survey of 1,000 Americans has found that just one in 1,000 people could name all five freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment (religion, speech, press, assembly, petition the Government for redress of grievances.) while 22% of Americans could name all five Simpson characters.

I am shocked by this result. The Simpsons have been on TV for 17 years. Surely more than 22% should be able to name all five characters?

Dover’s dominoes-5: A Dover domino falls in California

(See part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4.)

The first domino to fall as a result of the Dover verdict was in California where a teacher had decided to create a new optional philosophy class that would promote IDC ideas. This decision was interesting because the people behind it had seemed to draw the lesson from the Dover ruling that while it was problematic to teach IDC ideas in science classes, that it was acceptable to teach it in philosophy courses. As the LA Times reports (link to original article no longer working):

At a special meeting of the El Tejon Unified School District on Jan. 1 [2006], at which the board approved the new course, “Philosophy of Design,” school Supt. John W. Wight said that he had consulted the school district’s attorneys and that they “had told him that as long as the course was called ‘philosophy,’ ” it could pass legal muster, according to the lawsuit.

[Read more…]

Dover’s dominos-4: How IDC lost in the Dover case

(See part 1, part 2, part 3.)

The stage was thus set in Dover, PA for what turned out to be an unequal contest in the courtroom of US District Judge John E. Jones III. Matthew Chapman, a great-great-grandson of Charles Darwin, attended the trial and provides an amusing description of its proceedings, the personalities involved, and of the events in the town of Dover leading up to the trial. In his account God or Gorilla: A Darwin descendant at the Dover monkey trial in the February 2006 issue of Harper’s Magazine, he describes how the plaintiffs team of lawyers, headed by the ACLU seemed to have the resources and materials at their fingertips while the Thomas More lawyers looked inadequately prepared and with few resources, even having to borrow the expert audio-visual services available to the plaintiffs.
[Read more…]

Dover’s dominos-3: The Dover school board battles the Discovery Institute

(See part 1, part 2 here.)

The Dover school board members were encouraged to adopt their policy by the offer, when they encountered the inevitable legal challenge, of legal representation by the Thomas More Law Center, based in Michigan, and which was “created in 1999 by Thomas Monaghan, founder of Dominos Pizza and a philanthropist for conservative Catholic causes.” The center supports all kinds of religion-based social policies, and was eager to take on the teaching of evolution theory in schools. To give you some idea of how extreme this group’s views are, the president and chief counsel of the center Richard Thompson believes that:

Christianity is under siege from all quarters, but especially from the federal courts, the American Civil Liberties Union, and what Thompson calls the “homosexual lobby.”

The ACLU and the courts are “basically cleansing America of religion and particularly Christianity,” Thompson said. “It’s almost like a genocide. It’s a sophisticated genocide.”

So it is clear that Thompson is a charter member (along with Bill O’Reilly) of the crazy cult that believes that it is Christians who are persecuted in the US. Anyone who uses the word “genocide” to describe the situation of Christians in the US clearly needs to lie down and take a nap until the fever passes.

The Thomas More center and the Dover school board were itching for a fight with those they saw as secular Darwinists. “Bring it on!” seemed to be their cry. Needless to say, the somewhat more sophisticated strategists at the Seattle-based Discovery Institute were not happy with their erstwhile allies in Dover shouting loudly about their blatantly religious motives. They could see their cautious, delicately-balanced, and expensive long-range plan, which depended upon carefully avoiding any mention of religion, falling apart because of the clumsy blundering of the Dover board, aided and even egged on by the Thomas More lawyers.

But once that die was cast and the Dover policy adopted, the Discovery Institute was placed in a quandary. The Thomas More center did not have the legal resources to mount the kind of sophisticated arguments necessary in such a case. Should the Discovery Institute completely disassociate themselves from the Dover school board actions and distance themselves from the case as it went down to likely defeat? Or should they throw themselves also into the fray, provide their own expert witnesses, pour all their considerable financial and legal resources into the case, and hope to secure victory from the jaws of an otherwise almost certain defeat?

In the end they waffled, initially agreeing to be part of the case, and then backing out when the Thomas More Law Center did not want the Discovery Institute’s own lawyers representing their clients. This caused bad feelings on both sides which spilled out into the open, as The Toledo Blade reported on March 30, 2006:

In fact, when Mr. Thompson decided to defend the Dover intelligent design policy, he angered the group most associated with intelligent design: the Discovery Institute, a conservative think-tank based in Seattle.

“We were incredibly frustrated by arrogance and bad legal judgment of goading the [Dover] school district to keep a policy that the main organization supporting intelligent design was opposed to,” says John West, the associate director of the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture.

The Thomas More Center acted “in the face of opposition from the group that actually represents most of the scientists who work on intelligent design.’’
. . .
In fact, these two prominent supporters of intelligent design couldn’t be much more at odds.

Mr. Thompson says the Discovery Institute bailed out on the Dover Board of Education when three of its experts refused to testify at the last minute, after the deadline for recruiting witnesses had passed.

But Mr. West says the whole thing was the More Center’s fault. Mr. Thompson wouldn’t let Discovery Institute fellows have separate legal representation.

The Discovery Institute has never advocated the teaching of intelligent design, and told the Dover board to drop its policy, Mr. West says. It participated in the trial only reluctantly.

“We were in a bind,” Mr. West says. “Our ideals were on trial even though it was a policy we didn’t support.”

Richard Thompson countercharges that the Discovery Institute people are essentially wimps, people who just talk a tough game but don’t put their beliefs on the line when it counts:

Mr. Thompson says the Discovery Institute’s strategy is to dodge a fight as soon as one appears imminent.

“The moment there’s a conflict they will back away . . .they come up with some sort of compromise.” But in Dover “they got some school board members that didn’t want compromise.”

This intramural battle between two groups supposedly on the same pro-IDC side did not augur well for the trial that was scheduled when some Dover parents led by Tammy Kitzmiller challenged the constitutionality of the school board’s decision.

The stage was now set for the courtroom confrontation.

Next in this series: Why the Dover school board lost the case.

Dover’s dominos-2: The Dover school board undermines the Wedge strategy

(See part 1 here.)

The reason that Judge Jones’ verdict in the Dover trial is likely to be so influential is because of the exhaustive nature of the testimony that he heard and the depth and comprehensiveness and scope of his ruling. In essence, the trial provided a place for IDC ideas to get a close examination under controlled conditions.

Prior to the trial, the case for and against IDC had been waged in the media, in legislative hearings, and in debates. As someone who has participated in many such things, I know that such forums can be a place where key ideas get examined and focused. But this happens only if the participants want them to. Otherwise skilled practitioners in those forums can evade tricky questions by diverting attention elsewhere and turn them into public relations exercises and question-begging.
[Read more…]

Dover’s dominos-1: Why Intelligent Design Creationism will lose

The Scottish poet Robert Burns in his poem To a Mouse cautioned those who place too much faith in detailed plans for the future. He said:

The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men, 

Gang aft agley.

When historians of the future write about the demise of Intelligent Design Creationism (IDC), they will likely point to the Dover, PA court decision as when the carefully thought-out plans and strategy of the IDC movement ganged agley in a big way.

If you recall, US District Judge John E. Jones III ruled on December 20, 2005 (Kitzmiller v. Dover) that the then Dover school board had acted unconstitutionally in its attempts to undermine the credibility of evolutionary theory in its biology class and in its attempt to promote IDC as a viable alternative. (See here for a previous posting giving the background to this topic.)

That case raised many fascinating issues and the final ruling clarified and put in perspective many of the issues clouding the role of intelligent design, science, religion, schools, and the US constitution. This series of posts that begins today will analyze that decision and the ripples it has caused throughout the country. I had been meaning to analyze the decision and its broader implications in depth for some time but kept getting deferred by other issues.
[Read more…]

Precision in language

Some time ago, a commenter to this blog sent me a private email expressing this view:

Have you ever noticed people say “Do you believe in evolution?” just as you would ask “Do you believe in God?” as if both schools of thought have equal footing? I respect others’ religious beliefs as I realize I cannot disprove God just as anyone cannot prove His existence, but given the amount of evidence for evolution, shouldn’t we insist on asking “Do you accept evolution?”

It may just be semantics, but I feel that the latter wording carries an implied affirmation just as “Do you accept that 2+2=4?” carries a different meaning than “Do you believe 2+2=4?”

I guess the point I’m trying to make is that by stating something as a belief, it opens the debate to the possibility that something is untrue. While this may fine for discussions of religion, shouldn’t the scientific community be more insistent that a theory well supported by physical evidence, such as evolution, is not up for debate?

It’s a good point. To be fair, scientists themselves are partly responsible for this confusion because we also say that we “believe” in this or that scientific theory, and one cannot blame the general public from picking up on that terminology. What is important to realize, though, is that the word ‘believe’ is being used by scientists in a different sense from the way it is used in religion.

The late and deeply lamented Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, who called himself a “radical atheist” puts it nicely (thanks to onegoodmove):

First of all I do not believe-that-there-is-not-a-god. I don’t see what belief has got to do with it. I believe or don’t believe my four-year old daughter when she tells me that she didn’t make that mess on the floor. I believe in justice and fair play (though I don’t know exactly how we achieve them, other than by continually trying against all possible odds of success). I also believe that England should enter the European Monetary Union. I am not remotely enough of an economist to argue the issue vigorously with someone who is, but what little I do know, reinforced with a hefty dollop of gut feeling, strongly suggests to me that it’s the right course. I could very easily turn out to be wrong, and I know that. These seem to me to be legitimate uses for the word believe. As a carapace for the protection of irrational notions from legitimate questions, however, I think that the word has a lot of mischief to answer for. So, I do not believe-that-there-is-no-god. I am, however, convinced that there is no god, which is a totally different stance. . .

There is such a thing as the burden of proof, and in the case of god, as in the case of the composition of the moon, this has shifted radically. God used to be the best explanation we’d got, and we’ve now got vastly better ones. God is no longer an explanation of anything, but has instead become something that would itself need an insurmountable amount of explaining…

Well, in history, even though the understanding of events, of cause and effect, is a matter of interpretation, and even though interpretation is in many ways a matter of opinion, nevertheless those opinions and interpretations are honed to within an inch of their lives in the withering crossfire of argument and counterargument, and those that are still standing are then subjected to a whole new round of challenges of fact and logic from the next generation of historians – and so on. All opinions are not equal. Some are a very great more robust, sophisticated and well supported in logic and argument than others.

When someone says that they believe in god, they mean that they believe something in the absence of, or even counter to, the evidence, and even to reason and logic. When scientists say they believe a particular theory, they mean that they believe that theory because of the evidence and reason and logic, and the more evidence there is, and the better the reasoning behind it, the more strongly they believe it. Scientists use the word ‘belief’ the way Adams says, as a kind of synonym for ‘convinced,’ because we know that no scientific theory can be proven with 100% certainty and so we have to accept things even in the face of this remaining doubt. But the word ‘believe’ definitely does not carry the same meaning in the two contexts.

This can lead to the generation of confusion as warned by the commenter but what can we do about it? One option is, as was suggested, to use different words, with scientists avoiding use of the word ‘believe.’ I would have agreed with this some years ago but I am becoming increasingly doubtful that we can control the way that words are used.

For example, there was a time when I used to be on a crusade against the erroneous use of the word ‘unique’. The Oxford English Dictionary is pretty clear about what this word means:

  • Of which there is only one; one and no other; single, sole, solitary.
  • That is or forms the only one of its kind; having no like or equal; standing alone in comparison with others, freq. by reason of superior excellence; unequalled, unparalleled, unrivalled.
  • Formed or consisting of one or a single thing
  • A thing of which there is only one example, copy, or specimen; esp., in early use, a coin or medal of this class.
  • A thing, fact, or circumstance which by reason of exceptional or special qualities stands alone and is without equal or parallel in its kind.

It means, in short, one of a kind, so something is either unique or it is not. There are no in-betweens. And yet, you often find people saying things like “quite unique” or “very unique” or “almost unique.” I used to try and correct this but have given up. Clearly, people in general think that unique means something like “rare” and I don’t know that we can ever change this even if we all become annoying pedants, correcting people all the time, avoided at parties because of our pursuit of linguistic purity.

Some battles, such as with the word unique are, I believe, lost for good and I expect the OED to add the new meaning of ‘rare’ some time in the near future. It is a pity because then we would then be left with no word with the unique meaning of ‘unique’, but there we are. We would have to say something like ‘absolutely unique’ to convey the meaning once reserved for just ‘unique.’

In science too we often use words with precise operational meanings while the same words are used in everyday language with much looser meanings. For example, in physics the word ‘velocity’ is defined operationally by the situation when you have an object moving along a ruler and, at two points along its motion, you take ruler readings and clock readings, where the clocks are located at the points where the ruler readings are taken, and have been previously synchronized. Then the velocity of the moving object is the number you get when you take the difference between the two ruler readings and divide by the difference between the two clock readings.

Most people (especially sports commentators) have no idea of this precise meaning when they use the word velocity in everyday language, and often use the word synonymously with speed or, even worse, acceleration, although those concepts have different operational meanings. Even students who have taken physics courses find it hard to use the word in its strict operational sense.

Take, for another example, the word ‘theory’. By now, as a result of the intelligent design creationism (IDC) controversy, everyone should be aware that the way this word is used by scientists is quite different from its everyday use. In science, a theory is a powerful explanatory construct. Science depends crucially on its theories because they are the things that give it is predictive power. “There is nothing so practical as a good theory” as Kurt Lewin famously said. But in everyday language, the word theory is used as meaning ‘not factual,’ something that can be false or ignored.

I don’t think that we can solve this problem by putting constraints on how words can be used. English is a wonderful language precisely because it grows and evolves and trying to fix the meanings of words too rigidly would perhaps be stultifying. I now think that we need to change our tactics.

I think that once the meanings of words enter mainstream consciousness we will not be successful in trying to restrict their meanings beyond their generally accepted usage. What we can do is to make people aware that all words have varying meanings depending on the context, and that scientific and other academic contexts tend to require very precise meanings in order to minimize ambiguity.

Heidi Cool has a nice entry where she talks about the importance of being aware of when you are using specialized vocabulary, and the need to know your audience when speaking or writing, so that some of the pitfalls arising from the imprecise use of words can be avoided.

We have to realize though that despite our best efforts, we can never be sure that the meaning that we intend to convey by our words is the same as the meaning constructed in the minds of the reader or listener. Words always contain an inherent ambiguity that allows the ideas expressed by them to be interpreted differently.

I used to be surprised when people read the stuff I wrote and got a different meaning than I had intended. No longer. I now realize that there is always some residual ambiguity in words that cannot be overcome. While we can and should strive for maximum precision, we can never be totally unambiguous.

I agree with philosopher Karl Popper when he said, “It is impossible to speak in such a way that you cannot be misunderstood.” The best we can hope for is to have some sort or negotiated consensus on the meanings of ideas.