Arrogance and Vanity in the Human Scientist

There's plenty of arrogance and vanity in the ordinary human being, but scientists often seem worse. This is probably due to that fact that they're generally well educated, are actually pretty smart and have lots of training--things which often tend to make people assume they're qualified to make bold declarations the rest of us should listen to and obey or adopt.

Examples of these sorts of public assertions are quite numerous. Don't eat eggs: they cause high cholesterol. A few years later: eggs are good. Or don't eat butter; it's bad for your heart, eat margarine instead. A few years later: margarine is bad, very bad, so bad we must ban it from restaurants in New York! Butter is good. Eat butter.

Recently the entire paradigm of the dinosaur world had to be reworked because someone realized that fossils previously thought to be separate species are actually babies or juveniles. You'd think that would be pretty obvious. Duh, not every fossil is a grown-up, how can it be?

Or how about the old assertion that RNA was junk genetic material that didn't really do much which lately has been found bogus. Actually, RNA does a heck of a lot and is vital.

One of my all time favorite expert opinions: humans only use 10% of their brains. That one was recently overturned when it was realized that most of the brain is busy, very busy, doing stuff the consciousness is unaware of. Ok, I don't know about you, but you'd think that should be pretty obvious too.

Isn't there a paradigm, easily proven, about how the body is very efficient and doesn't keep any useless things around--like muscle? If you're a couch potato, you lose muscle or if you're an astronaut, you lose bone. It's been proven. You can prove it. Just lie around on the couch for a few weeks. So, that leads me to ask, why would we have so much junk genetic material and so many brain cells if they're all doing nothing? Funny, scientists weren't asking that question, but instead thought themselves quite smart and mouthed off their ideas in an arrogant, know-it-all, vain sort of way. Only to be later proved wrong. Thankfully, eventually discovering something once thought correct is actually wrong is the beauty of the "scientific method" which early scientists, most of whom were Christians, invented.

John W. Moffat in his book Reinventing Gravity (how human beings can "reinvent" gravity, I haven't discovered yet) asserts:

The Greek mind was abstract, fond of ideals and patterns, and slipped easily into Christianity's Earth- and human-centered theology. It took many centuries for thinkers such as Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton to break with the enmeshed Platonic and Christian views of the universe, to turn astronomy and physics into sciences, and to develop the idea of gravity.

The implication here, though not explicitly stated, is that these guys he listed were somehow superior to Christians--that they weren't really Christians. Maybe he thinks they only pretended to be so they could get along in society. Actually, they were all Christians. They didn't break from their Christianity, they broke from the Greek model of thought. And, it was their Christianity that encouraged them and enabled their liberation.

Galileo wrote:

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.

Christianity is not the stumbling block many present day scientists think it is. A person who truly follows Christ will receive revelation, as Kepler, Copernicus and Galileo did, because to follow Christ is to hunger for truth and God doesn't withhold truth from the honest seeker.

Just because a person doesn't fit in with the dogma of his day doesn't make him a sure-enough heretic or unscientific.

How one interprets what the Bible says can be a stumbling block, as Galileo discovered, and Copernicus knew--which is why Copernicus didn't allow any of his stuff to be published until he'd died. Certainly there are Christians who, like the church fathers of Copernicus' and Galileo's day, are stuck in an erroneous paradigm. Unbelieving scientists aren't immune, as much as they'd like to think they are.

It behooves each mortal to listen to and weigh what the opposition has to say and then check one's tendencies toward arrogant vanity. It's all too easy to be exposed as a fool in the end.

Marilyn

Lava fields in Northern New Mexico from Capulin Mountain

Noam Chomsky is onto something

The November 2011 issue of Discover magazine features an interview with libertarian socialist, anarcho-syndicalist and radical linguist, Noam Chomsky.

On page 71 the interviewer says that parents marvel at how their children develop language. "It seems incredible that we know so little about the process." In response, Chomsky talks about how the new born baby "has some information about its mother's language. It can distinguish its mother's language from some other language when both are spoken by a bilingual woman." He then mentions William James calling what an infant experiences as "blooming, buzzing confusion." He said, "Somehow the infant reflexively selects out of that complex environment the data that are language-related. No other organism can do this: a chimpanzee can't do that." He wonders, "How did these things evolve?"

If I didn't know any more about Chomsky than what I've read in this article, his question "How did these things evolve?" lets me in on his foundational paradigm: he believes in Darwinism or a modified version of Darwinism.

How did language evolve? Good question. Don't see a whole lot of value for literature when a person is trying to get away from a tiger or live through a drought. It just doesn't seem to me that nature really gives a fig about literature. And to think that infants already have this amazing ability to perceive language out of all the cacophony that surrounds them. Couldn't have anything to do with what the "fetus" heard in the womb of any sort of special relationship between the mother and the infant, at least from the infant's point of view, before birth, could it?

The God of the Bible is a God of words which He uses to create things, to speak into being the universe and all the laws that govern it. He also spoke animals into being and when He spoke them, included how their organic parts would fit together and work in concert. When He created human beings, He formed the man's body from dirt and then breathed into him the "breath of life," or to put it another way, He breathed into the man the very thing that made him different from all the other living creatures: language, art, music, self-consciousness, etc., all powered by an eternal spirit. He was created in the Image of God.

From this view, language is inherent in humans. It did not evolve, it was included in the package when humans were created. It's part of the Image of God.

The phrase, "...no other organism can do this..." is very telling. If evolution were true, then there would have to be some kind of evolutionary benefit to language. It would seem that lots of other creatures would have language or be developing it. Like chimpanzees for example, who have complex societies and carry on group behaviors. But, no, they're not evolving language. We can't even make them evolve language despite all the years people have spent trying to teach apes sign language.

Noam Chomsky is onto something and it's right in front of his face, but I don't think he's seeing it.

Marilyn