Thinking Christian

From Melanie Phillips today comes possibly the most intellectually aware statement I have seen from any journalist on the Intelligent Design controversy, including this:

While materialist fundamentalists can deal with religious believers by scoffing they are in a separate domain altogether from the real ie scientific world, the suggestion that science might itself arrive at the conclusion that there are limits to what it can understand is a heresy that directly threatens the materialist fundamentalist closed thought-system — and therefore must be stamped out.

… they cannot grasp that ID is a metaphysical idea that comes out of but stands separate from science, in that science leads here to an idea with which by definition it must abruptly part company. Instead they insist that the two must be fused – and when that proves impossible, they cry victory.

As Charles Johnson asks on LGF:

If ‘intelligent design’ is really based on science, why have their advocates failed to produce any scientific evidence for that claim, despite millions of dollars worth of funding and years in which to do it? Instead, ‘intelligent design’ proponents spend all their time on public relations. Where are the peer reviewed studies? Where are the experimental proofs that can be duplicated by other scientists? Answer: nonexistent.

Well of course they are non-existent — because ID is not in itself a scientific discovery. It is rather an inference from scientific discoveries. Looking at the complexity of the created world, it says the evidence points inescapably to a guiding intelligence as the cause of that complexity. It is an idea, a conclusion to a chain of observation and thought. When people demand proof of this idea, what they are actually demanding is proof that an ‘intelligent designer’ exists. The fact that there are no peer-reviewed studies (!) demonstrating the existence of such a cosmic ‘designer’ provokes this yah-boo response. But it is obviously no more possible to prove the existence of an ‘intelligent designer’ than it is to prove the existence of the Biblical God.

ID is thus a paradox. The whole point is that it states that the ‘intelligent designer’ it posits as the only logical inference from scientifically verifiable complexity cannot be known through scientific means. This is because the essence of the ID idea is that there is a limit to science beyond which it cannot go….

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Richard Dawkins wrote in The God Delusion that religion is a dangerous form of child abuse, a claim he reiterated in an online essay titled “Religion’s Real Child Abuse.” He explicitly says that while sexual abuse by priests may be bad, what’s worse is raising children to think of themselves as members of one religion or another, or saddling them with the fear of hell.

In response to that I wrote an article for our local newspaper, republished in BreakPoint Online in early 2007, showing that this is not just a religious/theoretical claim, but it has distinct scientific implications. Psychologists and sociologists have worked out a clear, empirically-based picture of how abuse affects children. If religion is a form of abuse, it should have some of the same identifiable negative effects on children that abuse has. Research shows, however, its effects are generally quite the opposite: as I wrote then, according to the National Study of Youth and Religion, American youth who are devoted to religion (predominantly Christians in this study) come out better than non-religious youth in every one of the 99 life-outcome dimensions that were measured.

Dawkins is a zoologist by professional training, but he has become much more than that. At the time he wrote these things he was the Charles Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University. By holding that position, and by his prominence in the media, he has been for many “the voice of science” in the English-speaking world. He has consistently staked out a position as one who speaks for reason, rationality, evidence, and empiricism. When Christian thinkers took him to task for writing on a topic, religion, on which he has done astonishingly little actual research, he responded, “Why bother? What need is there to dig into a topic that’s so obviously irrational?” While there are serious weaknesses with that answer, my attention here is on something even more fundamentally, obviously amiss: as a scientist, a spokesman for science, he persistently and publicly contradicts what science has to say about this topic.

This seems strange to me. Stranger still is that in over two years since then, to my knowledge no scientist and no other journalist has called him to account for it.

I suppose some would say that if Dawkins’s thesis had been presented in a journal rather than a popular publication, it would have been flagged down by peer-reviewers and never published. Or if somehow it had been published, it would have been quickly and decisively answered. The same should not be expected of a popular publication, some might say.

That would be a fair answer to give in many cases, but I think Dawkins’s case is different. In becoming the public face of science, he took on an especially high level of accountability for how he treats science. He ought not to be contradicting scientific findings so cavalierly as he has done with this topic. Those who care about the integrity of science ought not to be letting him get away with it—even in a popular publication; rather, especially in a popular publication, where many, many thousands are supposedly being shown what real science is.

But as far as I’ve been able to observe, no one has raised a word of scientific objection on this point. That raises questions in my mind, which I will leave for discussion here:

• Has there actually been some response that I’ve missed, some scientific or journalistic call to accountability?
• If not, what does this say about the consistent application of self-correction in science? Why is it not being applied in this case?
• What’s really going on? How do we explain Dawkins’s anti-scientific stance on this issue, and the lack of response from the scientific/journalistic world on it?

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This, from Discover Magazine, is just for fun:

You don’t have to look to hard to find bad science writing. Here at Discoblog, we do our best to chronicle, analyze, and explain the worst of it, from the playing hockey with facts to the over-reliance on questionable studies to the always-popular “slapping pseudo-science on a stereotype and declaring bulletproof validation.” But sometimes an article comes along that’s so egregious, so sloppy, so far from anything resembling actual fact, that even we are astonished.

Case in point: “Shopping is ‘throwback to days of cavewomen,’” a piece by Ben Leach at the U.K. Telegraph. It refers to a study (we use the term loosely) led by David Holmes of Manchester Metropolitan University, which “found” that “skills that were learnt as cavemen and women were now being used in shops.”

[Link: Worst Science Article Ever? Women “Evolved” to Love Shopping | Discoblog | Discover Magazine]

On the other hand, what if Holmes is right?

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I saw this headline in my newsreader, and of course I was intrigued.

Spirituality protects against depression better than church attendance

Questions were clicking in my mind immediately, even as I clicked the link. How did they define spirituality for purposes of their research (the operational definition)? What religious groups were included, and did they differentiate among them in the results?

Then I read the EurekAlert article, and a completely different question came to mind: Who writes these headlines?

According to the article, there were three independent variables in the research: religious service attendance, “religious well-being, which refers to the quality of a person’s relationship with a higher power,” and existential well-being.

The group with higher levels of religious well-being were 1.5 times more likely to have had depression than those with lower levels of religious well-being. Maselko theorizes this is because people with depression tend to use religion as a coping mechanism. As a result, they’re more closely relating to God and praying more. Researchers also found that those who attended religious services were 30 percent less likely to have had depression in their lifetime, and those who had high levels of existential well-being were 70 percent less likely to have had depression than those who had low levels of existential well-being.

“Spirituality” was not one of the research variables. I’m guessing the headline writer was connecting it with the second variable, “religious well-being,” but that’s just a guess. The article certainly didn’t use that term for any of the variables. That’s strike one against the headline.

None of the variables was said to “protect against depression.” It’s not there in the article. Nowhere. That’s strike two.

And the one variable that was most closely correlated with depression was “religious well-being” (which I’m surmising was the headline writer’s “spirituality”). That’s strike three. If you’re going to draw a conclusion from a correlation (rather a risky practice, mind you), at least don’t draw a conclusion completely opposite to what the correlations show!

EurekAlert, you’re out!

So now the question is, what do the data show about depression and its correlates? It took some searching but I found the original source. I didn’t pay the $25 to read it, but there is of course an abstract, which begins,

The complex relationships between religiosity, spirituality and the risk of DSM-IV depression are not well understood.

It ends,

Given the complex interactions between religiosity and spirituality dimensions in relation to risk of major depression, the reliance on a single domain measure of religiosity or spirituality (e.g. religious service attendance) in research or clinical settings is discouraged.

Now, that’s believable.

But does it have any connection whatsoever with “spirituality protects against depression better than church attendance?”

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This news just in from EurekAlert (quoting the actual headline):

New comet discovered in Canada

To be more specific:

[A] comet has been discovered at the University of Calgary’s Rothney Astrophysical Observatory, which is located about 35 kilometres southwest of Calgary.

To my friends in Canada: I hope you had a happy Thanksgiving Day yesterday. I wonder if your day off there might explain why news of the disaster has been so slow to reach the rest of the world. Be assured you are in our prayers.

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From the comic strip Partially Clips, via Language Log.

“[The scientist] knew that he could say yes or no, and the reporter would print whatever answer he gave. But he also should be grateful for any kind of media interest in his field, even if treating scientists like oracles of knowledge this way is probably why some people confuse science with religion.”

Compare: Servants of a Twisted God

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Ah, science journalism!

While this [New Scientist report] makes for an interesting, Alice – through – the – Looking – Glass foray into utter nonsense, the falsehoods and misinformation presented as historical fact need correcting.

[Link: Evolution News & Views: New Scientist Needs a Reality Check]

Do please look into the facts on this, and take note of the definite distortions in New Scientist’s version.

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