Reasonable Dissent

Hijacking Science – Everybody does it

Today I’d like to try to instill a sense of skepticism about lay-people’s interpretation of scientific or mathematical results. I don’t think it’s any big secret that the popular media outlets tend to fail miserably at accurately reporting on the meaning of scientific discoveries, and instead focus on the hype factor. And it’s also not a big secret that the opinions that float around the internet (including mine) are just that: opinions.  I think researching and interpreting things for yourself is a wonderful thing – but it’s important to remember to take everything with a certain degree of skepticism.

I’m reminded of a recent exchange I had regarding the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin result in cosmological physics. In short, it states that inflationary physics models do not mathematically permit infinite-past universes. Now, this is a great example of a result that is very easily adapted to whatever conclusion you’ve got in mind. There are a couple of ways to interpret this result, like this one: “That’s EXACTLY what we’ve been saying! There had to be a definite beginning, so therefore God is real!” And then there’s another interpretation that would go something like this: “This poses a problem for inflationary physics. If it’s true that there was a definite beginning to time, what does that mean? We can’t very well ask what happened before it to cause that, because there was no ‘before’ to talk about…”. And then on the complete other side of the gamut we have this: “Inflationary physics must be wrong. All scientific theories need to be improved as we gain more information. Thus, we just don’t know enough yet, but I KNOW that the universe did not have a beginning.”

Personally, I’m somewhere between the second two. Frankly, I find both the idea of the infinite and the finite to be perplexing when we talk on a universal scale. It’s hard to imagine a universe that has absolutely no end… you can go farther and farther and never reach any boundary.  But then, it’s just as hard to think of a boundary. What’s on the other side? No, wait, that doesn’t mean anything. What if I push through it? I can’t? What if I push reeeeeally hard?

But this kind of result is always going to be twisted. William Lane Craig, whose website name has some unintentional resemblance to mine, is happy to discuss his feelings on the matter. I don’t think that he does a terrible job of researching and thinking about his answer to this question, which is a compliment to him. I don’t necessarily agree with him, but that’s another matter entirely. But what we need to be careful about is people finding this answer and calling it scientifically proven that God created the universe. (In his defense, his final point is that you are not outside of mainstream science to believe in a definite beginning to the universe.) Treat it with the same skepticism as anything else. If only my audience had more overlap with his, I would be reaching the people most likely to make this mistake.