Before I started writing The Real Skeptic columns, I got two types of correspondence other than simple expressions of support or condemnation. The first type was from people who had read one or more of the books in The Copernican Series and were interested in serious discussion. Many of those discussions led to the subsequent books, especially Light, a subject I consistently attempted to avoid for many years. The second type involved committed empirical followers (indeed, it is hard to remove the word follower from empirical because entering the world of empirical science requires faith, and faith is reserved for those who follow the established Word) empiricists who had visited the Copernican website and were not sure they were reading a challenge to the established religion. This correspondence would take the form of an initial conciliatory expression and then a question about some aspect of the material. Subsequent correspondence would continue until the empiricist found something I said that directly contradicted established beliefs at which point I would get a final blast informing me of my ignorance of the textbook reality dictated by empirical science.
Since writing The Real Skeptic columns, the nature of the second type of correspondence has changed. No longer uncertain about my confrontation with established dogma, I am getting charged first with having no knowledge of 20th Century reality and, well, the second charge simply beggars the imagination, I am being charged with being a Newtonian, of all things. The very first column is titled, "On Bacon and Newton, Reality and Delusion." I make no bones about the fact that I oppose everything Newton represented, from unfounded assertions to the notion that those assertions can be proven to be facts. I make no bones in the subsequent columns about pointing out that accepting theory as fact results in more theories based on non-facts and ultimately the delusion that is the 20th Century picture of physical reality, a picture that is not only inconsistent, but contradictory, leaving gaps that are not even discussed, primarily the refusal to address the questions of the forces that produce the motion in our existence.
Which leads me to wonder just how dumb our empirical followers are? If the empirical response to a clever campaign by the intelligent design movement to have evolutionary textbooks labeled "Theory, Not Fact" is any indication, dumb in empirical circles means brilliant. I covered Darwinian theory in the 02/26/05 column entitled "Characteristic Comes Before Darwin, Design, Devolution and Divine." Because I didn't think that design, devolution or divine were really worth talking about, I described them in a footnote. My main disagreement with Darwin's evolution is its operation. Life evolves by evolving characteristics, not by morphing from species to species. It is understandable that Darwin, with the limited knowledge of his time, would chose the more improbable of the two, but there is no reason why, with our sophisticated knowledge of the way genetics operates to remain mired in the dogma of the past. When we deal with characteristic evolution, we are dealing with something for which we can craft mechanisms.
That aside, the practice of empirical science leaves a hole in its anti-intelligent design stance big enough to go unnoticed by even the most discerning. If the universe is operated by laws, and it is the job of empirical science to uncover what those laws are, and once a law is uncovered, by whatever means, it becomes an immutable law, then those laws had to come from somewhere. The very insistence on the part of empirical science that laws made up by dead men who knew nothing centuries before anyone was even close to a picture of the sun's position in the galaxy, dead men who felt the discovery of these laws was their key to heaven, who in fact believed the laws existed because God existed, that these laws control the universe puts empirical science into the category of world class denial. It claims to follow the laws created by God fearing men but refuses to believe in the God those men imagined created the laws.
My position, of course, that there are no laws, that if God enters the picture at all, it is only where science is no longer useful, areas such as the origin and size of the universe that have no bearing on the technology we develop to ensure our survival. The primary questions that science presents, science in the sense of uncovering the nature of reality, are the mechanical nature of the forces that produce the motions in our existence because it is only by understanding the mechanical nature of these forces that we will be able to produce accurate enough pictures of reality to engineer that reality for our further survival.
The response of empirical science to the intelligent design campaign to have textbooks expounding evolutionary theory labeled as theory rather than fact is to claim that theory has two different meanings. To you and me, non-empiricists, dumbnuts who are supposed to sit back and worship at the alter of empiricism, theory means an untested idea or opinion. We bobos sit around creating theories about why our mother-in-law hates us, or why the local team lost or why our spouse is out all night.
On the other hand, empirical scientists produce theories that are, according to an article in the local paper written by an evolutionary expert, a more or less verified or established explanation. The closest a dictionary gets to even this less than impressive statement is, a plausible or scientifically acceptable principle offered to explain phenomena. At no point does anyone claim that in scientific terms a theory is a fact.
Until, that is, empiricists begin to explain why their theories are fact.
So that I can be perfectly clear, let me explain what a fact is, empirical or not, and what a theory is, empirical or not. A fact is something we can go out and measure with a real, existing, solid ruler. A theory is everything else.
While the more I find out about the sources of Western knowledge of the past, the more suspect I become of those sources, I can go along with the proposition that Aristotle is responsible for feeding into the mind the notion that the heavier and object was, the faster it would fall, a belief that apparently went untested for two thousand years. As long as the assertion went untested, it was a theory. When Galileo came along and apparently demonstrated that objects of different weights fell at the same rate, Aristotle's theory vanished and the rate at which objects fall became a fact, an extremely important one I should add because it provides insight into the nature of the matter doing the falling as well as the force causing the object to fall.
Any insights into the nature of force or matter however, by simple definition, can never be facts because we can never pull apart an atom and actually hold a ruler to it and we can never put the mechanical source of the attractive force in a museum under a labeled glass.
There are some things we will never know for sure. All we can do is obtain as consistent a picture of their operation as possible so that we can test those pictures against reality. If we decide that the pictures are not pictures of operation, but are merely pictures of a name, then we have nothing to test. If we lock the pictures away from development by the discovery of subsequent facts, as we do when we label them names and embody them in meaningless laws, we have created a reality we use to test reality that doesn't exist in reality and our technology will be distorted by the inaccuracy of the picture we have created.
The evolution expert, after defining the term theory to mean something more or less verified, goes on in true empirical fashion to claim empirical theories have been verified to the point that they can never be questioned. Theories are the end product of science, he states, not a stage on the way to truth and as such are very unlikely to change. He claims that our unscientific theories are actually hypotheses and that in science hypotheses are hunches or conjectures. He then states that Copernicus' picture of the planets circling the sun was a hunch rather than a theory and only became a theory after centuries of observation and thinking determined it was compatible with everything we knew about the solar system.
In fact, the Copernican picture was a theory, and it didn't become fact until we started shooting rockets into space on the basis of the picture. The rockets missed more than hit their targets and when they hit their targets, they had a tendency to crash because we have an inaccurate picture of gravity, but they were the measuring rod that turned Copernican theory into fact.
Then he addresses the concept of fact, or should we say the empirical hypothesis of the nature of fact. The writer claims that fact is a word that makes scientists uncomfortable because it implies that accuracy can be tested.
Well, golly gee, isn't that something we all try to avoid. Testing reality for accuracy might show reality to be accurate and empirical facts to be the hokum they are.
He then goes on to state that the basic characteristic of a scientific statement is that its accuracy can be tested by comparing it to observation in the natural world, that it must be falsifiable. Under these conditions, measuring the fact that objects of different weights drop at the same rate is not a scientific statement because there are no conditions under which it can be falsified. Let me reserve comment on this idiocy, which has become evolutionary doctrine as a result of the rantings of that great evolutionary thinker, Jay Gould, for a moment.
Our empirical advocate then concludes his story with the statement that evolution is not a hypothesis, it is a rich theory that explains why the biological world is the way it is. He doesn't explain how it does this, he just claims it does, and he rests that claim on the same basis that empirical science rests all of its assertions, the evidence is so overwhelming that biologists have trouble understanding how someone could not accept it. To do so would be akin to studying whether the sun revolves around the Earth. (As an aside, this is quite refreshing. Usually evolutionists argue that to believe otherwise is to believe the Earth is flat, a notion that was never believed by anyone in the history of the world, but one that effectively silenced evolution's early opponents. For reference, the flat Earth notion came up by map drawers who wanted to keep potential sailors away from lucrative trade routes and thus populated the edges of maps with monsters and a line showing where the world ended.)
The same paper, during the prior week, had written a piece about the Discovery Institute in Seattle, apparently the driving force behind intelligent design. The article had drawn enough complaints to get the paper's Ombudsman involved. The complaining letters apparently focused on the fact that the article, while critical of intelligent design, did not explain evolutionary theory. According to the Ombudsman, many letters stated that by simply adding a paragraph or two, evolutionary theory could be explained and thus the reader would not have to be concerned about unscientific intrusions. The Ombudsman agreed, concluding that an extra few paragraphs explaining the scientific basis for evolution would have defused the entire ideological and scientific criticism.
I have several dozen books in my library on evolution starting with The Origin of Species, and I've yet to come across an entire book that explains the mechanism everyone keeps talking about as a given. Probably just an inability to read, though, if the Ombudsman states the whole thing can be cleared up in a couple of paragraphs.
As to falsification, the concept comes from Karl Popper, who attempted to distinguish the theories proposed by Freud from Einstein. He pointed out that Einstein's theories were either true or false and thus could be found to be one or the other. They were capable of falsification, and therefore scientific. This would put Aristotle's observation on falling objects into the category of scientific theory. Freud's theories, on the other hand, could be made to cover everything and thus could never be proven false, which is to say falsified, and thus were not scientific. He was saying that if a theory permits the introduction of other theories to explain why the theory doesn't explain reality, then it is not a scientific statement.
Contrary to what we would expect, empirical science does not like Mr. Popper. And its not for the obvious reason, that Newton's theory of gravitation was subject to the test of falsification, and in fact, when the volume of the planets did not predict their orbits, was actually proven false. It is because empirical science accepted the relationship as a law regardless that it had been proven false and then reversed it, applying the law to the orbits of the planets to measure the unmeasurable amount of matter in the planets to make Newton's Celestial Mechanics incapable of falsification and thus, in Popper's terms, a belief.
The writer of the article reverses Popper's use of the word falsification, as do evolutionists in general, to overcome this failing. To Popper, being able to alter theory to accommodate a fact the theory did not describe meant it was not falsifiable. Evolutionists mean that a theory that explains everything in the biological world is falsifiable, while religions, which are ruled by unchangeable dogma, are not. Popper would have said that religion was, like Freud, all encompassing, and for that reason not falsifiable. Here we have evolutionists saying their theory is all encompassing, therefore it is falsifiable.
Believe me, I have to scratch my head. In reality, if evolutionists would simply admit to reality, that evolution is a theory that doesn't explain reality and thus needs some work, would the world blow up? Jay Gould admitted as much when he altered evolutionary theory, in the process proving it is not falsifiable. When Gould framed his favorite question, If you are a real scientist, then what evidence would disprove your hypothesis? he was paraphrasing Popper's falsification test in terms of an empirical science whose basic process is to make theory infallible by falsifying existing scientific facts, hypotheses accepted as fact, by creating hypotheses on top of hypotheses on top of hypotheses. Empirical science calls the process "saving the theory." Gould proved that evolution was not falsifiable, at least in Popper's terms, by creating the concept of punctuated equilibrium.
Darwinian theory requires that species evolve gradually over long periods of time and that the fossil record would therefore show no record of an abrupt transition, the elimination of one species and the appearance of another. However, that is all the fossil record shows, so Gould, with his sidekick Eldredge, concocted the theory of punctuated equilibrium, that while most species evolve according to Darwinism, and thus the fossil record shows no evidence, abrupt changes are the result of a species developing out of the mainstream of evolution and then bursting forth on the evolutionary scene to leave its mark.
In other words, the basic theory of evolution is falsified so that it agrees with observation by creating an entirely new theory of evolution that does not involve evolution in the Darwinian sense, which means that evolution theory is not falsifiable.
No one can gainsay evolution theory, or any empirical conclusion for that matter, because they are questions of belief, have no basis in actual reality and can always be altered to fit prior hypotheses.
On the other hand, if we call a fact a fact and a theory a theory, we don't need sophisticated tomfoolery like Popper's falsification to justify us turning theory into fact.
ADDENDUM: An anonymous letter in Atlantis Rising #51 has an interesting take on exactly what Darwinism is. It takes the position that evolution was never a hypothesis, it is an observed fact and the theory of evolution explains how evolution occurs. While it doesn't address the problem of theories, nor does it explain how the theory of evolution fits the available data, the observation that evolution is an observed fact is interesting. The writer claims we can observe evolution and reproduce it, which is even more interesting. If the writer is talking about breeding, or about genetics, then he is not talking about Darwinism. Breeding and genetics produce character rather than species evolution, the evolution Darwinists cling to. On the other hand, I find it hard to disagree with evolution, at least evolution of the characteristic type, being an observed fact. I should also note that the astute editor, Doug Kenyon, points out at the end of the letter that it isn't the theory of evolution that's the problem, it's the doctrine of Darwinism, by which he means the survival of the fittest and natural selection, that have been conjured up from Darwinian theory and accepted as reality. These gimmicks are designed to obfuscate an evolutionary direction because, and these are now my observations, direction implies a supreme entity. In characteristic evolution, there is no supreme entity, but there is clear direction, the direction provided by a cooling planet, its accompanying lessening gravitational field, and the complexity that time produces with characteristic evolution.
Peter Bros is the author of the 9 volume Copernican Series and is President of The Far Museum of Dallas, an actual history museum, which will house its collection of 50,000 rare Eastern Mediterranean manuscripts and artifacts together with actual history displays and tours in a full-sized replica of the Egyptian Temple at Dendera to be built in the Dallas Ft. Worth area. Email:peterbros@therealskeptic.com