Statistical Significance
When speaking with my fundamentalist Christian friends they have said, “You can use statistics to prove anything.” and “Researchers can prove anything they want to prove.”
This appears to be their way of discrediting the science that discredits their fundamentalist beliefs. I must agree with them that there is bad research all around, however, bad science proves nothing for anybody. The importance of the good and valid research in our world far outweighs the irritations created by the bad.
Good science is responsible for our long list of unbelievable modern achievements. We have medicines that cure and comfort. We have air and space travel that is the safest transportation available. We have radio, telephone, TV, and computer sciences all blending together to make worldwide communications and business both possible and affordable.
When the same objective scientific method is used to study the Bible, whole new levels of religious understanding appear. Of course, you must be willing to look at the findings to understand them.
The problem is most folks haven’t had a chance to understand research methods well enough to tell the difference between good and bad scientific reasoning. One of the things I found interesting when learning about statistics, for example, is that statistics, themselves, prove nothing at all. They never have and never will.
Statistical procedures are ways to get sample scores that indicate what the real score probably is, without having to test everything. Using statistical procedures, for example, you can figure out the average height of 10-year-old girls in the U.S. without having to measure all of them. You can sample some of them, in a random manner, and still come up with a measure that will be so close to the real average height, that the difference can be considered insignificant.
Ah, yes, but there is the question. Who is responsible for deciding whether or not statistical differences are significant or insignificant? Well, the scientists have that responsibility, not the statistical measure they use. Scientists make those decisions based on how their individual results compare to previous and current research results reported within their scientific community.
Only when the vast majority of scientists, in a research community, keep getting the same statistical results when using the same procedures, is it gradually agreed that the theory represents something real; something factual.
Theories that are consistently verified and accepted in this manner are used in future problem solving as facts. It is not a quick process and certainly requires more than one study or one run of statistical tests. Still, the ultimate decision of truth comes from the human mind, not the statistical tools.
When scientists applied Einstein’s theories to space flight it helped them determine how to send space ships to the moon, to other planets, and out into the cosmos. However, even Einstein’s math has to be adjusted to make things work out as planned.
This means his theories explain a lot, but not everything. That’s the way science is, though. We try carefully to explain as much as we can by using the most efficient theories, even when those theories can’t explain everything.
Creationism and Intelligent Design
The entire evolution versus creationism (or intelligent design) debate is an example of comparing good science with non-science. Creationism has to be considered non-science, because it starts with an absolute assertion that the Biblical account of creation is literally true.
That is simply an idea, not a fact. I can have an idea that college students who drink beer have green ears, but that doesn’t make it real or true. Ideas that are going to be held as eternal truths deserve validation. To do anything else is to use verbal trickery in the name of truth.
Every intelligent design proponent looks at the evidence of evolution saddled with a conclusion they must reach, no matter what. That renders them incapable of accepting valid scientific evidence. The scientific method requires that conclusions be based on observations, not beliefs. That is why it works and answers our questions.
Also, when reading critiques that intelligent design proponents make of evolution, two major arguments consistently emerge: 1) Evolutionary theory does not explain everything. 2) The structures of life are so complex they could not possibly have happened by chance and must have been formed by an intelligent creator.
These arguments are so weak they are meaningless. Of course evolutionary theory doesn’t explain everything. Most accepted theories have some areas where they are weak. That in no way voids the parts of the theory that have be validated. Theories are always in the process of being proposed, modified, and improved. Accepted theories are just the best explanations we have until better explanations can be confirmed.
Concluding that the structures of life are too complex to be explained by evolutionary theory is nothing more than a cop-out. It means that, that critic has simply decided things are too complex for him/her to want to think about it any further.
It is as if they assume they should be able to understanding everything. So, if they don’t understand something, their only explanation is, God did it. It is an attempt to tie up those nasty loose ends at the edge of human knowledge. I understand the desire, but that’s a meaningless way to handle it.
We all know there was a time in history that the leading scientists on earth could not even conceive of the notion that earth was a sphere traveling through space around the sun. However, when they started running into evidence that could only be explained if the world were a sphere, they didn’t throw up their hands and say things are just too complicated to think about it any more.
They sought more evidence and new information to try to figure out the truth. Observations and reasoning were those scientist’s most valuable assets. The same is true for us, today.
Unfortunately, church leaders did not respond to those early scientific discoveries with the same attitude of open inquiry. They used excommunication, exile, and death as techniques to discredit or silence scientists. To avoid punishment, scientists had to recant their scientific findings.
It is clear now who was right and who was wrong. Yet, we still hear the same kind of debate on evolution versus intelligent design. Creationism and intelligent design arguments are but fading echoes of the same irrational religious thinking that has been wrong every time before.
Berating evolutionary theory because it considers “chance” occurrences shows extraordinary naiveté. The only reason it is called “chance” is that we don’t know why it happens….yet. In the future, the mechanisms of DNA mutation will probably be understood well enough that they won’t be called “chance” mutations any more. When you only see what you have decided ahead of time that you must see, that is not science. Let’s quit pretending that it is.
The real beauty of evolutionary theory is not that the chance events are so important, but rather its explanation of how organisms in a particular environment respond to mutations that do occur.
If the resulting change to the organism improves its ability to survive in its environment, then it flourishes and creates more of its kind. If not, it dies out. Extinction is commonplace in evolution. (Note: This certainly does not mean that humans have the right to plunder the environment to the detriment of surviving species. If we are smart enough to destroy nature, we need also be wise enough to preserve it.)
Evolutionary theory is as elegant as it is brutal, but it helps us understand the ebb and flow of life that has occurred as earth’s environment suffered drastic changes. Who is to say that the small role that “chance” has in this process is not part of a highly organized natural mechanism for the preservation of life? Let’s consider human beings, for example.
The Single Race of Mankind
Mitochondrial DNA studies have shown that all humans on earth are related to a single ancient black woman in northeast Africa and up to seven of her daughters. Whatever mutations resulted in her unique genetic design, now account for all humans alive today. No other women alive at the time of our common prehistoric mother had what it took to create offspring that could survive until today.
Whatever unique features she had meant survival for the human race as we are now. It’s not the fact that the mutation was chance that is so important, but, rather, what our ancestral mother’s environment was like at the time this particular mutation occurred. Her adaptation potential helped all of her offspring survive in that and succeeding environments. They flourished and reproduced more humans with her traits.
The offspring of all other human mothers who gave birth at that time, for whatever reason, eventually died out. We surviving humans have done quite well with those critical traits our ancient mother passed on to us.
DNA evidence alone shatters any notion that creationism or intelligent design are credible. You cannot form a biological theory if your only data are statements of faith or opinions that things are just too complex to explain.
There are no sets of scientific measurements of the earth that suggest the earth and all life forms were created in six days. Everything points to some type of evolutionary process (for both plants and animals) over billions of years. Evolutionary theory may rule out theism, but it does not rule out God. On the contrary, I believe it places us directly in the middle of God’s workshop.
With no objective evidence to support them, creationism and intelligent design concepts cannot be presented as alternates to evolution in the schools. Such a notion is blatantly absurd. They are NON-SCIENCE, and nonsense despite the fact many, otherwise intelligent people, want us all to believe these ideas as truth.
The Miracle Of Reality
How substantial can a faith be if it cannot stand on its own, scientifically, outside the existence of a Godhead who must perform magic? Actually, I think the science of life itself is miraculous. Why is there such a desire to ignore the laws of chemistry and physics as part of a truly magical expression of God’s presence on earth?
We struggle to understand the simplest elements of our world. We use electricity all the time, but have no idea how and why electrons do what they do. What on earth is a magnetic field? No one really knows. What is gravity? We are still trying to figure that out.
We are awash with miracles throughout our daily lives, so why do we feel the need for a God that breaks the few laws of the universe that we do understand? I think the total of all scientific knowledge is a very small part of God’s immutable Truth. For example, there are many facts about human spiritual healing we have yet to learn and understand. We need to make it okay not to know everything, now, and enjoy the thrill of discovery that God offers us one day at a time.
“Human science, and rational thought are part of God’s fundamental expression of truth.”
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