The Science Series

I realized that since I haven't been writing hardly anything at all, I also haven't been writing about what I've been listening to and reading lately.

Probably the most exciting thing that I've been listening too is a series of lectures about science.  I have a very scientific way of picking which lectures I'm going to listen to.  I go on line and see which ones are on sale then I try and pick the ones that I seem most inspired to pick.  I like to think that the still small voice helps in this, and really in believe it does but sometimes I'm sure that I just pick the most interesting ones.  Here's what happened recently.

First I got a series about the history of science from 1600-1900 that was very interesting.  In it I learned about phlogiston which was at one time thought to be the substance that natural philosophers believed was given off during combustion.  So everyone for years and years the theory for the combustion mechanism went in exactly the opposite way to the way we believe it goes now.  It explained a lot of things.  First if you put a candle under a dome and lit it the candle gave off phlogiston until the air became saturated with phlogiston and could not take any more in and the candle stopped burning.  Do the same thing with a mouse.  Put a mouse under a dome and it combusted food for energy and the mouse exhaled phlogiston until the air became saturated and then the mouse died.  There were problems with the theory but it was very predictive.  When they alchemist who were becoming chemists discovered oxygen they at first considered it de-phogistated air.  Candles burned brighter and mouses seemed perkier because they were able to give off more phlogiston.  For 30 years alchemist/chemists fought the idea that combustion was adding oxygen instead of giving off phlogiston.  Niels Bohr one time said that the reason quantum mechanics became accepted was because all the old physicists, who didn't accept it, died off and made room for younger physicists who did accept it.  I'm pretty sure this is what happened with phlogiston although the series didn't say it.  Another interesting thing about about oxygen is that the name means "with acid" because the early discovers thought it always went with acid.  So hydrogen should really be called oxygen because it's actually hydrogen that is always "with acid"

That was very interesting but then I listened to a second series called the "Science Wars" where the lecturer talks about how scientists know what they know.  The professor takes a historical journey through science but he uses as an example the fact that philosophers have been disagreeing about what people can know since Plato.  In one of Plato's books he talks about the Gods who are for Truth, and the Earth Giants who say we can only have belief there is no Truth.  Basically Plato believed that men can have a knowledge of truth through deductive reasoning, while his enemies (the Sophists) said that knowledge was alway subjective and dependent on the dictates of society.  The rest of the lectures talk about how these two ideas have been in tension for 2400 years and still are today.  However the powerful thing for me came in the second lecture.  

The professor points out that all of science is based on a logical fallacy.  If I say "If I do X Y will turn blue" and I do X and Y turns blue then that is a true statement but saying that "Doing X turned Y blue" is not a true statement.  As soon as he said that I thought of phlogiston and how for years scientist said; "If I cause a candle to give off phlogiston under a dome the candle will go out." and that was believed.  Well our definition can be no better. I think it's better but it's really not.

I felt like I should share this with the Priests and did last Sunday, and I've never felt the spirit in a class more powerfully that when I shared this and then compared it to a testimony.  I hadn't really thought that I would compare it with a testimony but was inspired to do so and frankly I was shocked at how powerfully the spirit came into the room.

There was another thing that kind of shocked me about this series.  At the end the lecturer gave an example of pseudo science and used intelligent design as an example.  The thing that shocked me was that he said that creative design is really just a cover for creationism, which I still don't believe, but he went on to say that those who believe in it think that biology and related sciences should be done away with.  Wow.  Now I believe we were created intelligently and I don't think life arose from random processes, but to give up biology is ludicrous.  I've. Now started looking to see if ID people really think that and from what I've read so far some of the statement may be true.  One of the books that I read that really helped convince me of ID as a theory (although I've always believed in Devine creation, this helped me think I wasn't and idiot for believing so) was an agnostic and he said that he didn't accept creationism, because he was agnostic and so which creation account would he believe?  Christian?  Hindu?  Muslim?  So I know all IDers are not creationists.

After that series of lecture I listened to another about the philosophy of science and frankly it was hard and probably over my head.  Some of it I'd heard about already and some of it was covered in the first series. In fact I'm pretty sure that if I hadn't listened to the first series I wouldn't have had a chance with the second series.  I'm now listening to the both series again so that I can learn more from them.  However, one thing that I did learn from it at the end was about how unlikely entropy is at the beginning of the universe the way that it is described.  In a way I'd know about this because I've known for a while how unlikely it is that we would get a clumpy universe the way that we have one, but I'd not tied it to entropy.  The lecturer said that the unlikeliness of the level of entropy at the beginning of the universe would be similar to throwing styrofoam balls one centimeter in diameter into a tornado in Kansas and having the tornado cover Kanses with a layer of styrofoam balls one layer thick, all of Kansas that is.  All I can say is Wow and atheists think theists are gullible in their faith.