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Category: science (page 5 of 8)

Kids who are beaten are more aggressive

22 April 2010 / / 6 Comments

Surprise, surprise: Kids beaten by their parents show more aggressive behaviour.

Now researchers at Tulane University provide the strongest evidence yet against the use of spanking: of the nearly 2,500 youngsters in the study, those who were spanked more frequently at age 3 were more likely to be aggressive by age 5. The research supports earlier work on the pitfalls of corporal punishment, including a study by Duke University researchers that revealed that infants who were spanked at 12 months scored lower on cognitive tests at age 3.

“I’m excited by the idea that there is now some nice hard data that can back up clinicians when they share their caution with parents against using corporal punishment,” says Dr. Jayne Singer, clinical director of the child and parent program at Children’s Hospital Boston, who was not involved in the study.

I’m secretly excited too.

“The odds of a child being more aggressive at age 5 if he had been spanked more than twice in the month before the study began increased by 50%,” says Taylor. And because her group also accounted for varying levels of natural aggression in children, the researchers are confident that “it’s not just that children who are more aggressive are more likely to be spanked.”

I’ve got a couple of great boys who I really respect as people, and who themselves are respectful. They’re not great at all of life’s tasks yet, but I’m not either. I’m not exactly sure how they turned out the way they have, but I do know that I’ve never hit them.

We all want our kids to know that there are consequences for their actions, but hitting them is a lousy consequence. It harms the relationship between parent and child, and a strong relationship is a major way to have input and influence on the child’s life.

There are better consequences than hitting. Good consequences are related to the behaviour. If toys aren’t put away, then the toys go away for a while, after a warning. And we need to let kids enjoy the good consequences of their actions: if they get ready for bed quickly, it’s more story-time.

It’s also good to play “What Happens Next”. “What might happen if we don’t lock the car?” “What do you think would happen if we left the milk out of the refrigerator?” This gets them thinking about the natural consequences of actions, instead of the artificial consequences that come from beatings.

I’ve heard parents respond to this in various ways:

“If they do something dangerous, like run into the road, they need a smack to tell them it’s not okay.

If the child is doing something dangerous, then we as parents need to control the environment so they can’t hurt themselves. We’re the big people; we can make the choices about the environment. We can make sure that doors are locked, that enticing delicate objects are out of reach. It’s hard to do, but good parenting is effortful.

“But children can’t reason at that age, and a smack is a direct way to communicate to the child.”

I suppose it’s true that children aren’t good at reasoning. This is why we teach them. We slowly and laboriously teach them all the things they need to do in their lives, including tying shoes, long division, toilet training, and riding a bike. Why do parents take an easy way out instead of teaching reasoning and logic, which is a skill more important than all those others? Perhaps because it’s the parenting we got, or perhaps because it’s considered acceptable by some.

But hopefully, as we get more knowledge about how violence against children affects their lives and their behaviour, it will become less and less acceptable.

Evolution: A great book, with only one misstep

14 April 2010 / / 2 Comments

I’m reading through this book with Youngest Boy. It’s “Evolution: How We and All Living Things Came to Be” by Daniel Loxton. It’s really good. It has a good overview of evolutionary theory, with the evidence.

But there is one misstep, and it’s toward the end of the book.

If you can’t read that scan, here’s the text.

This is a question people often ask when wondering about evolution. They want to connect the discoveries of science to their religious understanding.

Unfortunately, this isn’t something science can help with. Individual scientists may have personal opinions about religious matters, but science as a whole has nothing to say about religion.

Science is our most reliable method for sorting out how the natural world functions, but it can’t tell what those discoveries mean in a spiritual sense. Your family, friends and community leaders are the best people to ask about religious questions.

I think this answer was trying to do two things: tell why science is good, and allow for the validity of religion. Those are probably good goals for a book like this, since they’re aiming for a broad audience, and the book wasn’t intended to be an atheist polemic. I can even see the benefit in not antagonising religious readers.

But I also think it’s important for scientists to tell the truth, and this answer sidesteps that responsibility. Here’s what’s wrong.

  • It says that science can’t deal with supernatural claims, only natural ones. This is untrue. While the scientific method, with its emphasis on real-world evidence, can’t categorically disprove supernatural claims, it does tell us what to do when such a claim comes along: remain skeptical of it until its proponents provide real-world evidence in favour of the claim.
  • It says that religious claims about creation are essentially supernatural. But creationist claims really involve the natural world, and can therefore be evaluated by science just like any other claim.
  • It handballs the responsibility for answering questions over to family, friends, and community leaders — people who may be no better than anyone else at evaluating truth claims, or who may have an interest in promoting an unscientific view. Religious leaders are the ones who ought to be promoting religion, of course — that’s their job — but is that where we want to send young people for information about how evolution and religion interact?

I think the book should have said something like this:

Some religious people claim that evolution didn’t happen, or that it’s impossible. But according to the evidence we have, evolution is real, and it’s happening all around us.

Many religious people do accept evolution. They don’t see a conflict between evolution and their religion, or they see evolution as part of creation.

Whether you believe in a religion or not, you can use science to figure out how our amazing world operates.

This answer re-asserts the reality of evolution and the primacy of science, but it takes it easy on the conflict between religion and science. It allows that people have their own opinions, and is written not to be offensive.

I still think the book is really good. It’s interesting, has beautiful illustrations, and lays out the basics of evolutionary theory in a way young people can grasp. Even the religion question can lead to an interesting discussion.

The author responds to the criticism here.

Not reading, citing.

26 March 2010 / / Comments Off on Not reading, citing.

Yikes. Simkin and Roychowdhury posit that only about 20% of authors actually read the articles they’re citing. The estimate is based on citations that appear identically in different scientific papers, but which are actually wrong.

They assume this means that the author hasn’t read the original source. I would dispute this. I have lots of articles that I’ve read, but which for one reason or another don’t have the citation data printed on them. I chase the citations up on these (when I cite them) because I’m paranoid about getting the citation data wrong, but boy, is it ever tempting to pull up someone else’s paper and find the citation already there for you. I think the authors are too quick to discount the possibility that this is what’s happening.

I haven’t read all of the article yet, but I probably will soon.

Teenagers getting by on 800 words a day?

24 January 2010 / / 3 Comments

I’m used to hearing people complain about the language of Them Dern Kids, but this rationale is a new one.

Here’s the claim:

800 words won’t get job done

LONDON: A generation of teenagers risks making itself unemployable because its members are using a vocabulary of only about 800 words a day, according to the British government’s first children’s communication tsar.

Communication tsar? Are they sure she’s not a czar?

I wonder what’s causing the supposed paucity of vocabulary? Could it be the Internet and mobile phones?

The teenagers are avoiding using a broad vocabulary and complex words in favour of the abbreviated “teenspeak” of text messages, social networking sites and internet chat rooms.

Thought so.

Jean Gross, the government’s adviser on childhood language development, is planning a national campaign to prevent children failing in the classroom and the workplace because they cannot express themselves.

“Teenagers are spending more time communicating through electronic media and text messaging, which is short and brief,” she said. “We need to help today’s teenagers understand the difference between their textspeak and the language they need to succeed — 800 words will not get you a job.“

Gee, 800 words doesn’t sound like a lot. Or is it? How many words do most people say? Let’s check.

First, keep in mind that the 800 words claim is about daily vocabulary, not total vocabulary. That is, young people are using the same 800 words over and over again in a typical day. I’m not sure if that’s true, but let’s accept it for now. The question is: how many different words do adults employ in a day?

We’re going to use a dialogue corpus to find out. I’m pulling words from Verbmobil-2, a corpus of appointment scheduling dialogues. But we don’t know many words to use until we know how many words someone speaks in a day. This is a scary prospect, laden with assumptions.

I had a read through the corpus and found that I can read about 250 words out loud in a minute. Of course, in a dialogue you’d only be speaking about half the time unless you’re rude, or a lecturer. (Or, like me, both.) So let’s say I’d rip through 7,500 words in an hour. Most of us spend some time alone or watching TV, so I doubt we’d spend the equivalent of 4 full hours of every day talking. But let’s say 30,000 words as an upper boundary. (I admit this is highly speculative. Stay with me.)

Here I’ve listed the number of word types (different words) for various numbers of word tokens (each separate word we say) in the Verbmobil-2 corpus. If you think you’re more laconic or loquacious, you can adjust your expectations accordingly.

Word tokens Word types
10,000 words 814 types
20,000 words 1,080 types
30,000 words 1,342 types
40,000 words 1,510 types

So if you’re an adult on the lower end of the talking scale, you’re going to use about 800 different words, over and over. And even if you quadruple the number of words you say, that still won’t quite double the daily vocabulary. Keep in mind that 40,000 words represents hours and hours of transcripts. The fact is, 800 words is quite a lot. Even if teens only use the same 800 words over and over, that’s certainly not a sign that their vocab is sub-standard. That’s just the way word frequencies fall.

———————-
UPDATE: I’ve just discovered this article in USA Today about a study that saw people wearing tape recorders all day long.

Both sexes say about 16,000 words a day, a study in Science magazine says.
…
He and colleagues analyzed conversations recorded from 1998 to 2004 of 396 students in the USA and Mexico, 210 women and 186 men, ages 18-29. The study examined word count, not vocabulary or word use. Pennebaker says two-thirds of participants spoke 11,000 to 25,000 words a day; the average for both sexes was about 16,000.

So there it is. Sixteen thousand words of dialogue would probably be comprised of under 1,000 word types a day, not too far from 800.
———————-

Let’s take a look at another claim in the article.

Ms Gross said her concerns were supported by research by Tony McEnery, a professor of linguistics at Lancaster University, who found in a study that the top 20 words used by teenagers, including “yeah”, “no” and “but”, account for about one-third of the words used.

Twenty words is not a lot. Is it possible that it could account for a third of the total?

Fortunately, we have frequency statistics for many corpora. If we take a look at the top 1000 words from COLT, the Bergen Corpus of London Teenage Language, we can see that the top 20 words account for 35.6 percent, or about a third. (Some words are excluded from this count, but that just means that the real proportion will be a good deal smaller, which makes the teens seem even more erudite.)

Now we head over to this data from the BNC, or the British National Corpus, a large and wide-ranging collection of spoken and written language. Here, the top 20 words account for around 32 percent of the total, or… about a third.

I decided to run a counter over some works of literature. I tried George Orwell’s 1984. Nobody’s going to accuse Orwell of having a tiny vocabulary. But here the top 20 words account for only 33.7 percent of the total. And for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, the top 20 words make up, again, 33.1 percent of the total. Somebody better tell Pseudonym Boys that they’ll never get jobs with that kind of vocabulary.

Gross’s claims sound impressive until you break them down. Most people don’t do this because it’s easier to just accept claims that you already believe. But it’s just another way to complain about young people in a way that’s socially acceptable. It’s a shame people try to enlist linguistic data to confirm their prejudices.
———————-
If you want to hear me say about the same thing on the radio, you can listen to last week’s RTRFM interview. For some reason, I was talking pretty fast. I bet I could have clocked 60,000 words per day at that rate.

I’m on about 5/6ths of the way through the stream. Watch out; it starts playing as soon as the page loads.

Please don’t let them quote me.

13 January 2010 / / 1 Comment

Let’s say I gave a very sensible talk about linguistics. And in this very sensible talk, I said that there was a possibility that the spelling of some English words might change as a result of the Internet. And just for fun, let’s say I’m David Crystal. (Oh, come on. Flatter me.)

Anyhow, here’s how the article would pan out once it hit the Sydney Morning Herald.

Internet spells death of English

Traditional spellings could be killed off by the internet within a few decades, a language expert has claimed.

Aaaaugh! Not the spellings!

The advent of blogs and chatrooms meant that for the first time in centuries printed words were widely distributed without having been edited or proofread, said David Crystal, of the University of Wales in Bangor.

As a result, writers could spell words differently and their versions could enter common usage and become accepted by children.

Aaaaugh! Not the children! Won’t someone please, et cetera!

But notice that writers put the most calamitous material at the top of the article. And then by the end of the article, they’ve backed off of all the scary claims, and the whole thing becomes almost sensible.

Professor Crystal told the conference of the International English Language Testing System the internet would not lead to a complete breakdown in spelling rules.

”All that will happen is that one set of conventions will replace another set of conventions,” he said.

But by then, it’s too late because everyone has already fled the house screaming, or are writing angry letters to editors about Kids These Days.

If this article had been about continental drift, the headline would have been ‘Doomed Continents to Collide’.

My advice: When it comes to news articles about language, don’t read headlines if you can help it. They’re written by amphetmine-addled caffeine junkies. Instead, start reading about halfway down.

Best of Music 2009

28 December 2009 / / 5 Comments

Everyone puts out their end-of-the-year lists in November. Have they no patience? What if something really good comes out in the last week?

Anyway, here are my picks for the best of 2009 in music.

Best Children’s Album
They Might Be Giants
Here Comes Science

This album works on a lot of levels. First, it has great songs that kids and grown-ups will enjoy — but this is TMBG’s fourth kids’ album, so they’re good at this by now. Then, the science content covers a lot of ground: biology, physics, astronomy, engineering. I think I can now name five different jobs that the bloodstream does!

But the most encouraging thing is that the songs have an appropriately skeptical bent, even referencing religious dogma as being inferior to the scientific method. Lyrics from the title track:

I like those stories about angels, unicorns and elves
Now I like those stories as much as anybody else
But when I’m seeking knowledge either simple or abstract
The facts are with science

This is a great TMBG album, maybe their best.

Best Classical Album
Catrin Finch
Goldberg Variations

Mastering Bach’s Goldberg Variations on piano made Glenn Gould famous in the 50s. Now Welsh harp virtuoso Catrin Finch has scored and performed her version. This alone should be enough to merit her place in the classical pantheon. (Not to mention, I love the rock chick look. Brings in the young folks.)

Finch performed the work live several times over the last year, which to my thinking constitutes some kind of marathon of skill and concentration.

Best Album I Missed Last Year
The Daysleepers
Drowned in a Sea of Sound

Saying that this album is Lush meets Cocteau Twins doesn’t cover it, even though it’s true. The surprise here is how good this shoegaze revival sounds. Smooth yet engaging.

Song of the Year
Lusine
‘Two Dots’
A Certain Distance

Compulsively listenable. It’s a little unusual to hear vocals on an ambient electronic track, but here it contributes to make ‘Two Dots’ part IDM, part chill, and very sophisticated.

Album of the Year
The Leisure Society
The Sleeper

I found out about this amazing band via fans of the Lilac Time, and it’s not hard to see the connection. Both bands feature beautiful bucolic (and unmistakably British) folk-tinged music. Both use a diverse range of instruments. And the Leisure Society, like the Lilac Time, makes music that is unfailingly pleasant, and melodic to a degree I haven’t heard in quite some time — every song has its own hummable melody that seems not so much written, as having always existed.

Take the title track. Structurally, it begins and ends with a quiet meditation of mortality and the transience of human achievement.

Someday we all shall cease to exist. 
Someday our towers will fall. 
Roots will reclaim the bricks that we lay. 
Worms will reclaim the soil.

But the middle opens up with a beautiful revelation: ‘Sometimes you need someone.’

At the time I discovered the Leisure Society, I was conducting my own meditations on mortality, and this album provided a soulful but joyous soundscape, perfect for walking, meandering, or dancing down a quiet Perth street. Any life would be enriched by this magical music.

People think god agrees with them

3 December 2009 / / 3 Comments

It’s not a new idea that people construct their god based on whoever they are. Nice people, nice god. Horrible people, horrible god. Homophobic people, homophobic god. The god of the Hebrews was obsessed with details about animal sacrifice. The Christian god is obsessed with the sexual behaviour of other people. What else do you need to be convinced that gods are a creation of their people?

But even if you’d already cottoned on to this idea, it’s still exciting to see it verified experimentally.

For many religious people, the popular question “What would Jesus do?” is essentially the same as “What would I do?” That’s the message from an intriguing and controversial new study by Nicholas Epley from the University of Chicago. Through a combination of surveys, psychological manipulation and brain-scanning, he has found that when religious Americans try to infer the will of God, they mainly draw on their own personal beliefs.
…
Religion provides a moral compass for many people around the world, colouring their views on everything from martyrdom to abortion to homosexuality. But Epley’s research calls the worth of this counsel into question, for it suggests that inferring the will of God sets the moral compass to whatever direction we ourselves are facing. He says, “Intuiting God’s beliefs on important issues may not produce an independent guide, but may instead serve as an echo chamber to validate and justify one’s own beliefs.”

When people changed their opinions, they thought god changed his opinions, too.

In another study, Epley got people to manipulate themselves. He asked 59 people to write and perform a speech about the death penalty, which either matched their own beliefs or argued against them. The task shifted people’s attitudes towards the position in their speech, either strengthening or moderating their original views. And as in the other experiments, their shifting attitudes coincided with altered estimates of God’s attitudes (but not those of other people).

And finally, they used fMRI to detect any differences in brain activity when considering their opinion and god’s opinion. The difference being ‘none’.

The takeaway: people get themselves and their god mixed up. You’d think it would be a warning sign when your god agrees with you all the time. Maybe they just think they’re really ‘in tune’.

How to persuade? And who?

16 August 2009 / / 1 Comment

I ran across two similar articles the other day. One’s about religion, one’s about politics, and both are taking me to task.

Must science declare a holy war on religion?

The so-called New Atheists are attacking the mantra of science and faith being compatible. Others in the science community question the value of confrontation.

Ooo, confrontation. Sounds confronting. It seems that atheist scientists are being mean, publishing books, and loudly declaring that God probably doesn’t exist. Doing science, in other words.

And then there’s this article:

Are liberals seceding from sanity?

The left is crazy to insult white Southerners as a group

which takes liberals to task for South-bashing, and the only example offered is Kevin Drum. But never mind. The article warns us:

They are erring neighbors to be won over, not cretins to be mocked.

At which point I ask: Is it too much to ask for both?

Let’s examine the question that ties these two articles together: how do we act toward people who disagree with us? And there are at least two possible answers:

  1. Be nice, keep quiet, persuade them with reason, and sooner or later they’ll come around if we don’t hurt their feelings and (all together now) alienate them.
  2. Be loud and proud, combat the ridiculous with ridicule, the error with truth, and don’t worry overmuch about stepping on toes.

Now let’s see: where have I heard this conflict before? Ah, yes. It was Amy Sullivan, who warned us that Democrats needed people of faith to win elections. She couldn’t have known how badly that would work for Republicans, who herded the faithful into their tent, only to find that they couldn’t get rid of them. Now the delusional folk are wanting to run the whole show, with predictably disastrous consequences.

So let’s address the religion article first. And just for perspective: these articles ran on the same day as these news stories:

Dozens of rabbis fly over Israel praying to defeat swine flu

The aim of the flight was to stop the pandemic so people will stop dying from it,” Rabbi Yitzhak Batzri was quoted as saying in the mass-circulation daily Yedioth Ahronoth.

“We are certain that, thanks to the prayer, the danger is already behind us,” added Batzri.

Mayoral Candidate Mary Falling Wants Creationism Exhibit

TULSA, OK — A mayoral candidate has resurrected a controversy over Creationism at the Tulsa Zoo.

A push to exhibit the Christian story of creation at the Tulsa Zoo failed four years ago. Republican candidate for Tulsa mayor, Anna Falling, is bringing the issue front and center.

It’s the same exhibit and the same arguments, but now it is given from the bully pulpit of a candidate running for mayor.

“Some may ask why this issue during a Mayoral campaign? And I say why not?” said candidate Anna Falling.

For Anna Falling, the road to city hall runs through the Tulsa Zoo. She’s made her Christianity central to her platform and now the exhibit depicting the Christian story of Creationism is her first campaign promise.

“Today we are announcing that God will be glorified in this city. He shall not be shunned. Upon our election, we hereby commit to honoring Him in all ways that He has been dishonored,” said Anna Falling.

These people live in the same century as we do. They have access to all the same knowledge that we do. The Enlightenment was 400 years ago. Sweet reason has had all that time to do its work. The non-confrontational approach has failed. They’re still here, dumber than ever, and trying to take over the world that science has created. By not confronting them, by not speaking out, we will let them win.

On the other hand, by speaking out, by coming out and being heard, by being loud and obnoxious and, yes, confrontational, we have seen our numbers grow. More people now identify as non-religious than at any time in recent history.

If my reading is representative, most of these gains are coming from people who haven’t been religious for a long time, but were reluctant to call themselves atheists or agnostics. For these people, all the noise about religion has forced the issue, and pushed them to re-examine their beliefs. It may have pushed some other people the other way, this is true, but those people probably weren’t convincible anyway. The only people I see complaining about noisy atheists are Fundamentalist Christians — and why wouldn’t they.

See, when you’re in a religion, it’s like you’re in a bubble. A big cushy bubble where it’s nice and soft, and everyone reaffirms your beliefs. And it feels goood. Now someone comes and gives your bubble a push. You have two choices. If you’re a confirmed believer, you retreat further into the bubble. That makes the noise stop. Drat those noisy people! Why must they challenge you? It certainly didn’t make you change, but then what were the odds of that happening? On the other hand, if you’re someone who makes reality your guide, that noise (plus the cognitive dissonance you already have floating around in there) may be just the thing that forces you to see how the facts conflict with what’s going on in your bubble. And when that gets loud enough, you might decide to burst your bubble and change your thinking.

But that only works when it’s obvious that there’s a disconnect between your bubble and the real world. So I’d say that when you have the facts on your side, your cause can only benefit from pushing the facts.

Now what about the South-bashing? This is trickier because while the US South has a definite inclination toward the most dangerous kind of lunacy, I’ve read comments from loads of people in the South who are progressive, and who feel annoyed and embarrassed by the attitudes of their neighbours. So I don’t engage in South-bashing. I’m not a big fan of stereotyping. Not very accurate. But I’ll gladly take on the lunacy. People who are convincible aren’t too crazy about the crazy anyway.

And this is what I think both authors miss: people are different. That is, some people are crazy, and some people are convincible, and they are not the same people.

You can take on the crazy with mockery and ridicule. They won’t like it. But the convincible will notice that you’re making sense. They’ll thank you for it. And all you have to do is tell the truth and tell it loud.

Popes don’t do science

30 June 2009 / / 1 Comment

Zeus, this is dumb.

Pope Benedict XVI said scientific tests confirmed shards found in the underground chamber at the church of St Paul’s-Outside-the-Walls in Rome were from the apostle.
…
Pope Benedict XVI announced the findings during a service at the basilica, as Rome prepared to celebrate the Feasts of Saint Peter and Saint Paul.

“This seems to confirm the unanimous and undisputed tradition that these are the mortal remains of the Apostle Paul,” he said.

And what scientific tests did they do, you ask? Oh, well, obviously they compared the DNA from the shards to another DNA sample that was known to have come from Paul… oh wait. There’s your problem right there. There aren’t any.

I wish the Pope would quit molesting science like it was some kind of child or something. I wish he’d just said he’d prayed about it and got the answer that way. It would still fool the believers, and it would be just as immune to critical scrutiny.

Believing and evolution

14 February 2009 / / Comments Off on Believing and evolution

Hope you had a good Darwin day. The thing I keep coming back to about Darwin is this. The guy was training to be a clergyman, but dumped it when it became clear that the facts ran counter to his beliefs. I gotta respect that. That’s tough to do.

But if you think that’s tough, here’s an act for you. This Mormon biologist can give a talk about evolution while making a sculpture of Charles Darwin. And all without his head asploding from cognitive dissonance. Let’s have a listen as he talks about his mentor, Clayton White.

“He became an important example to me of a first-rate scientist and a faithful member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.”

Now Fairbanks believes with most biologists that evolution is the unifying theory in the field. And he is the same kind of mentor as White was to new generations of Mormon would-be scientists, helping them understand the importance of evolution without losing their faith.

Okay, full marks for accepting evolution. He’s not a dishonest idiot. But let me ask: what’s wrong with losing your faith? It hurts for a bit, sure, but then you’re free to accept reality without having to twist your brain into knots trying to make the facts fit your religious preconceptions. What’s so great about being able to do that? Shouldn’t a scientist be able to take the hit and accept reality directly? Particularly when his Mormon religion is strewn with beliefs that are explicitly refuted by evidence. (E.g. Book of Abraham, Book of Mormon, Old Testament creationism, and on and on.)

I hold to the view that science and religion conflict, and can’t be reconciled. Other people disagree, but it doesn’t help their case that some scientists go to church. That just means that people can wall off part of their brain from scientific examination. Like Jerry Coyne says in his wonderful article for the Edge:

True, there are religious scientists and Darwinian churchgoers. But this does not mean that faith and science are compatible, except in the trivial sense that both attitudes can be simultaneously embraced by a single human mind. (It is like saying that marriage and adultery are compatible because some married people are adulterers.)

I’m not even saying that Dr Fairbanks can’t do good work in biology and still hold religious beliefs. You just can’t do both at the same time. Even he admits this.

“We are obligated to examine experimental data and interpret it in an objective way, without allowing nonscientific beliefs to influence our interpretations,” Fairbanks says.

Great advice — but why shouldn’t religious beliefs therefore be discarded? They’re non-scientific. Why should he get to have it both ways when it comes to religion?

He continues:

But that is no reason to reject God or Mormon scriptures, which, he says, explain why God created the world, not how.

An old canard. Science explains how, religion explains why. Except that religion doesn’t explain why. It just gives you fluffy stories that you have to maintain faith in without being able to verify them.

I used to really look up to liberal Mormon thinkers who struggled to merge facts with fables, grappled with the difficulty of such an endeavour, and copped nothing but abuse from ignorant iron-rod believers. Now I think it’s the saddest thing I can think of, like someone who’s so close to understanding, but stopping themselves from taking the final liberating step. I actually think I’d rather talk to someone who argues that science is wrong and religion is right. At least then I’d be talking to someone for whom the truth matters.

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