One day, perhaps in a century or two, the word “Scientist” will be a term of derogation used to describe the cultists of the 20th century. Many things that the “Scientists” believed will be causes for ridicule. Their work has brought unimaginable benefits, but, like the alchemists, when they promised gold their grand claims were eventually exposed as fraudulent.

In the Huffington Post, under the title Why Bad Science is Like Bad Religion, Dr Rupert Sheldrake observes that modern science, constrained by materialistic assumptions, is facing a “credibility crunch.”

In both religion and science, some people are dishonest, exploitative, incompetent and exhibit other human failings. My concern here is with the bigger picture.

I have been a scientist for more than 40 years, having studied at Cambridge and Harvard. I researched and taught at Cambridge University, was a research fellow of the Royal Society, and have more than 80 publications in peer-reviewed journals. I am strongly pro-science. But I am more and more convinced that that the spirit of free inquiry is being repressed within the scientific community by fear-based conformity. Institutional science is being crippled by dogmas and taboos. Increasingly expensive research is yielding diminishing returns.

Bad religion is arrogant, self-righteous, dogmatic and intolerant. And so is bad science. But unlike religious fundamentalists, scientific fundamentalists do not realize that their opinions are based on faith. They think they know the truth. They believe that science has already solved the fundamental questions. The details still need working out, but in principle the answers are known.

Science at its best is an open-minded method of inquiry, not a belief system. But the “scientific worldview,” based on the materialist philosophy, is enormously prestigious because science has been so successful. Its achievements touch all our lives through technologies like computers, jet planes, cell phones, the Internet and modern medicine. Our intellectual world has been transformed through an immense expansion of scientific knowledge, down into the most microscopic particles of matter and out into the vastness of space, with hundreds of billions of galaxies in an ever-expanding universe.

Science has been successful because it has been open to new discoveries. By contrast, committed materialists have made science into a kind of religion. They believe that there is no reality but material or physical reality. Consciousness is a by-product of the physical activity of the brain. Matter is unconscious. Nature is mechanical. Evolution is purposeless. God exists only as an idea in human minds, and hence in human heads.

These materialist beliefs are often taken for granted by scientists, not because they have thought about them critically, but because they haven’t. To deviate from them is heresy, and heresy harms careers.

Since the 19th century, materialists have promised that science will eventually explain everything in terms of physics and chemistry. Science will prove that living organisms are complex machines, nature is purposeless, and minds are nothing but brain activity. Believers are sustained by the implicit faith that scientific discoveries will justify their beliefs. The philosopher of science Karl Popper called this stance “promissory materialism” because it depends on issuing promissory notes for discoveries not yet made. Many promises have been issued, but few redeemed. Materialism is now facing a credibility crunch unimaginable in the 20th century.

As I show in my new book, “Science Set Free,” unexpected problems are disrupting the sciences from within. Many scientists prefer to think that these problems will eventually be solved by more research along established lines, but some, including myself, think that they are symptoms of a deeper malaise. Science is being held back by centuries-old assumptions that have hardened into dogmas.

Despite the confident claim in the late 20th century that genes and molecular biology would soon explain the nature of life, the problems of biological development remain unsolved. No one knows how plants and animals develop from fertilized eggs. Many details have been discovered, hundreds of genomes have been sequenced, but there is still no proof that life and minds can be explained by physics and chemistry alone.

Read the full article at the link above.
HT: Angus Olsen

Sheldrake’s website is here.

A rejection of Biblical history and its chronology of the planet might be the cause for one of science’s greatest mistakes.

My friend Tas Walker writes:

I just listened to a podcast by climate scientist Murry Salby to the Sydney Institute entitled “Global Emission of Carbon Dioxide: The Contribution from Natural Sources.”

During question time toward the end of the recording (55min 15sec) he says:

Just a historical note, the guy who started this was a Swedish chemist whose lab I used to work at Stockholm by the name of Arrhenius. He won the Nobel Prize for chemistry and for his understanding of the temperature dependence of chemical reactions he got the Nobel Prize. He got into this and he started the whole global warming thing because he was actually trying to explain ice ages and he saw CO2 varied and temperature varied and he figured maybe CO2 caused the Ice Age. Now I don’t think anyone believes that anymore …

In other words, the whole idea that global warming is caused by CO2 came out of the need to explain what caused the Ice Age—a mystery that still eludes modern scientists.

In the Wikipedia entry on Arrhenius it says:

He was the first person to predict that emissions of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels and other combustion processes would cause global warming. Arrhenius clearly believed that a warmer world would be a positive change. From that, the hot-house theory gained more attention. Nevertheless, until about 1960, most scientists dismissed the hot-house / greenhouse effect as implausible for the cause of ice ages as Milutin Milankovitch had presented a mechanism using orbital changes of the earth (Milankovitch cycles). Nowadays, the accepted explanation is that orbital forcing sets the timing for ice ages with CO2 acting as an essential amplifying feedback.

Note the term “amplifying feedback”. This means that Milankovitch cycles are not enough to explain the Ice Ages, which is understandable considering the relatively small variations in orbital parameters for the earth. So, they added a positive feedback mechanism from CO2. A positive feedback means the system is unstable, which explains why many scientists today are concerned about global warming and the earth reaching an unstable tipping point.

The problem is that these scientists have ignored the huge climate catastrophe of Noah’s Flood. By ignoring the Flood they cannot explain the post-Flood (Pleistocene) Ice Age. The Ice Age was the earth’s thermal response to the massive climate shock caused by the biblical Flood. It was largely the volcanic activity during that year-long event that produced the necessary conditions—warm oceans and volcanic dust high in the atmosphere. But the earth returned to equilibrium in about 700 years, demonstrating that it is a stable system. The biblical Flood provides the only explanation for the Ice Age.

See how a wrong understanding of the true history of the earth leads to a misunderstanding of what is happening in the present. And a wrong understanding will lead to wrong decisions about what we need to do.

In 1633, the Inquisition found Galileo guilty of “vehement suspicion of heresy” for his support of Copernicanism, the view that the earth moves around a stationary sun. The ill and elderly scientist was then forced to recant his view and spend the rest of his life under house arrest. He died in his country villa in 1642, entirely blind.

The “Galileo affair” is the most familiar piece of evidence for the idea that science and religion have been at war from the beginning. But before signing on to this ‘warfare’ view, you should know something about Galileo’s life. Facts are important.

Perhaps most importantly, Galileo was a devout Catholic. In fact, at the end of his life, he wrote to a friend that his troubles weren’t nearly as bad as everyone believed. After all, he explained, he had the comfort of knowing that—before God—no one had more zeal for the Church.

So the debate over Copernicanism—this is another thing you should know—was between Christians, not between science and religion. It was an intramural debate over the nature of scientific evidence.

And when it came to that evidence, both sides held the same high standard. It’s just that Galileo’s evidence for Copernicanism didn’t meet that standard. In fact, Galileo’s best argument for Copernicanism was entirely wrong. In rejecting Copernicanism, the Catholic Church stood on fairly solid scientific ground. Of course, it was also apparent that the Bible said some relevant things about the sun. And, thankfully, Galileo was keen on the Bible. He professed that “the Holy Scripture can never lie or err, and it’s declarations are absolutely and inviolably true.”

And despite the condemnation of Copernicanism, the pope gave Galileo permission to write about the controversial view. Nevertheless, even after receiving the church’s official approval of the finished work, Galileo was put on trial for writing it. In the end, the entire ordeal was the result of a web of tragic misunderstandings and the pope’s hurt feelings. (You should never hurt the pope’s feelings.)

Despite these and other details—and largely because of two nineteenth century revisionist histories written by unbelievers—many people think that the trouble was, at root, between science and religion. And so a Christian scientist, it is believed, is like a square circle—impossibly inconsistent.

Don’t tell Galileo that.

“When you read the Bible, be careful of adopting a bunch of mechanical rules to read by… You know, you can go to the Christian bookstore, or the seminary bookstore, and you can get books by popular writers and by professors of theology on how to read the Bible: ‘rules for reading.’ And there is much that is useful and good in some or all of those books. But we must ask ourselves, what other book have you ever read using rules? Do you have a book of rules to read the newspaper by? Or if you want to read a novel by Jane Austen, must you consult a book of interpretive laws? Or a textbook on American history? Or do you just read it? It’s kind of odd that we have covered the Bible up with ‘rules on how to read.’ We don’t read anything else by rules. So what’s going on here?

Part of the reason is that over the last several hundred years, western civilisation has been enraptured with what we call the ‘science ideal’: since scientific investigation of the things of the Creation has paid off, therefore we want to imitate the ways of science in our investigation of everything else…

Science investigates things. Things can be categorised. Things can be numbered. Things can be understood in a spatial way by putting them in order and comparing them. And this is right for this area of life. But the scientific method is nothing but idolatry when it’s turned against God and other human beings…”

Further to yesterday’s post, Gregg Strawbridge has very kindly allowed me to upload the second lecture from James Jordan’s series, How To Read The Bible. It is called “Beware of Rules” (Click here to listen). It’s not that there aren’t any hermeneutical rules when it comes to the Bible; it’s that the rules are not the ones made up by Myopic Minimalistic Modern Men. On the surface, this is a fairly lighthearted lecture, but don’t let that fool you. Jordan packs more useful stuff into this 45 minutes than you can use in a lifetime.

You can purchase the series here, or for an even better deal, you can purchase the latest edition of the complete JBJ audio library here.

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In fact, if you are one of the first three readers who can prove to me that you purchased the complete set online today, I’ll send you a free signed copy of Bible Matrix. Sadly, it will only be signed by me, not Dr Leithart.

[ email print @ bullartistry [dot] com [dot] au ]

Include your postal address.

or Postmillennial Rubbish

Does thinking about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch give you the eco-jitters? Do you shudder at the thought of the world running out of space for landfill? Worry no more. We finally have the answer.

My Christian friend Dave Lankshear and I don’t agree on Genesis or Revelation. He’s as passionate as I am about things, and can get worked up in a debate. But he’s also just as ready to admit when he’s wrong and to be passionate about what’s been corrected.

After doom-and-glooming us all for a couple of years concerning Peak Oil, and begging us to consider renewable energy, he recently shocked me with the following encouraging news. I must admit, as an optimistic postmillennialist, that I half expected this development anyway. God is good.

From Dave (edited by me):

I’m now fairly critical of attempts to make a renewable grid … basically I’ve had long, cranky debates with climatologist Dr Barry Brook … and he convinced me. I’m now a pro-nuclear activist!

They’ve built the technology years ago, but there were problems making it commercially viable. They now want to make these things so small (300 Megawatts) that they can mass-produce them, DELIVER THEM OFF THE BACK OF A TRUCK direct to site and plug them in. Mass-production will also dramatically reduce the cost. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-PRISM

Imagine energy barons ordering them:  ”I’ll have four, and fries with that, as I close down my coal mine!”The power of the atom is SO great that one can take any patch of unremarkable dirt, like your backyard, and mine it! Even at low parts-per-million, there’s enough uranium on our continents to run the world till the Lord returns, even if that’s 200 million years away. Their cycles CANNOT produce nuclear bomb material, but they CAN EAT bombs!:

From 1995 through late 2009, 375 metric tons of highly-enriched uranium from Russian nuclear warheads have been recycled into low-enriched-uranium fuel for U.S. nuclear power plants. This program has eliminated the equivalent of 15,000 nuclear warheads. The Megatons to Megawatts government-to-government program goal of elimination 500 metric tons of warhead material is scheduled to be completed in 2013. [1]

Currently, ten percent of U.S. electricity is produced using this fuel.

I doubt we’d need these reactors in 500 years… by then we’ll have super-cheap batteries that make renewables viable.

But right now, renewables are almost the ENEMY of a real climate and peak oil solution! Can you believe I just said that?

Basically, even if the Gen4 S-PRISM has some kinks to work out, I’m all for building Gen3 reactors because it will give us some clean energy independence and help us prepare for massive electricity demands from electric cars (and electric fast rail to replace planes).

Integral Fast Reactors eat nuclear waste and weapons, burn 90% of the waste, and the 10% that is left over is safe in just 300 years. Today’s nuclear waste could run the world for 500 years without opening a single new uranium mine.

The Trash Vaporizer

James Hansen and Barry Brook are both excited about the following amazing technology as well—plasma recycling. This thing can take council waste, lawn clippings, asbestos, old nappies … and turn the waste into anything from jet-fuel, to toothbrushes, diesel, ELECTRICITY back into the grid, gravel for building roads, and ‘rock-wool’ for making insulation or even replacing fibreglass, but without the toxicity of asbestos!

It’s not ‘burning it’ so much as ripping the waste back into its constituent atoms for reprocessing into almost anything we want to.

So, you could turn dirty nappies into cars, plastic bottles into more plastic bottles, glass into synthetic rock-bricks for building…. it just goes on and on… it can even extract the steel from old car tyres….

Wait, there’s more… it could EVEN FIX DANGEROUS LEAKING radioactive LANDFILLS WITHOUT DIGGING THEM UP by fusing the contaminated soil into sealed slag that’s waterproof. Read Chapter 7 of Blees book here.

Here’s a link to Dave’s blog, EclipseNow. I should stress that Dave is not a postmillennialist.