How Science Made Sense

I’m told that it’s unusual for a person to give up religious faith without any study of science. I gave up religion just by reading the Bible. When I gave up my faith, I knew nothing at all about science (still don’t know much, but anyway . . .), philosophy, ethics, etc. Literally, all I knew was that I was supposedly reading the greatest and most brilliant book ever written, directly inspired by the creator of the universe – and that the book was really, really stupid. Just plain dumb, and completely morally disgusting.

It was years, though, before I knew anything about science, until a scientist/atheist explained it to me in a way that it finally clicked. Some people have asked me how this happened – how I finally figured out/how it was explained to me that science is a very useful tool, that evolution is phenomenally well-supported, etc. My own experience might offer a clue how to explain these things to others, seeing as how difficult it can be to break through that intellectual wall in people’s minds when it comes to certain beliefs.

Years ago, around 2001-02ish, I was in a Christian chatroom discussing biblical morality. At the time, I called myself an agnostic, though in reality I was basically an atheist. Only two or three Christians could stomach talking to me for any significant amount of time. They put up a heroic effort to change the subject, insisting that “without God, the only thing to base your morality on is evolution, which is really stupid!” Like I said, at this point, I didn’t know anything about evolution except what I’d been told by Christian fundamentalism. I’m ashamed to say that I rattled off several of the worst creationist strawman ignorances about evolution theory. At this point, another atheist popped in to explain it to me. This is what he said.

The basics of the scientific method are this: That scientific theories (or any other claim, for that matter) are never 100% “proven,” only very well supported, or potentially disproven. There must be a plausible mechanism, that the mechanism must be specific enough to generate predictions, and that a hypothosis and/or theory is supported or falsified based on those predictions. He asked me why I didn’t accept the validity of evolution theory.

Now, I did have some brains. I never insisted that evolution was evil, immoral, and created Nazi Germany, too. I still remember my first thought when I heard this (actually, I read it in a Jack Chick gospel tract); that evolution has no moral system to it at all. If a person driving a car hits a person and kills them, we can describe the speed and direction they were going, and that doesn’t mean that the physics involved are immoral. Likewise, I never really insisted that there weren’t any transitional fossils. I just looked up transitional fossils one day, and saw instantly that there are literally thousands upon thousands of them, from all kinds of different fields. It still boggles my mind that people make this claim.

My objection was that there were still so many gaps, despite the many transitional fossils that we’ve discovered, and so I doubted that biology was really on the up-and-up with so many “missing links.” My big hang-up with evolution, obviously, was a fundamental ignorance of the scientific method, and this is exactly how it was explained to me: Remember the mechanism and predictions? The critical point is that the scientific method does not test histories, it tests mechanisms. He used an analogy that I have since shamelessly thieved: Imagine a man, Bob the Guy, is seen in Ohio on Friday, and seen later in Missouri, Saturday night. Say that we develop a “theory” that Bob drove his car from one state to the other. So far, that’s all we know; he was seen in these two states at these different times. Does our theory tell us which route he took? Exactly which turn he took at this street, or that road? No; we have “missing links” all over the place! Do these missing links prove that Bob didn’t drive his car? Of course not!

What we can do, based on the mechanism of Bob having driven his car, is make predictions based on that model. For example, we might predict that Bob’s car is with him, in Missouri. We search, and it is. This supports the theory (not proves it, because scientific theories are not “proven,” only supported or falsified). Our mechanism also predicts that the drive would take him somewhere around 9-10 hours. Now, we test this mechanism and find that he was in Missouri within 2 minutes of being in Ohio. If this was verifiable, the theory is false, and must be discarded.

Obviously, this is a very strange observation; you would need massive amounts of evidence to show that this did, in fact, occur. Huge portions of how we assume reality functions would have to be rewritten. At this point, an observation this bizarre and powerful is what you’d need to falsify the theory of evolution. This is exactly because of the massive amount of support we have for the mechanism (not the history) of evolution. That’s exactly why the scientific method works in this way; it allows us to form extremely accurate models of how the universe functions without relying on having a complete history at hand.

He also explained a bit about the concept of measurement, since I had also mentioned that old creationist line, “We haven’t observed evolution on that large scale.” This kind of argument relies on a misconception about how we measure things. He used another example – if I ask you what temperature it is outside, and you walk to the window, look at a thermometer outside, that’s a “direct” measurement, unlike the observations that we use to test evolution theory, right? Well, no, not technically. You’re not observing the temperature, you’re observing a certain band of electromagnetic radiation that has recently been reflected off of a blob of mercury inside a piece of glass. What’s the difference? Well, nothing, really, it’s still an observation. That’s the point. The things we know about how reality works allow us to go from a blob of mercury in a piece of glass to a decent estimate of the temperature. The thing is, this is the same for any observation that we make.

Exactly like looking at a thermometer outside a window to get an estimate of the temperature, we can look at an organism’s obvious biological features, geographical location, and genetic make-up as they relate to a second, different organism, and yes, we can get a pretty damn good estimate of how closely related the two organisms are. The point being, there is no hard line between a “direct” observation and an “indirect” observation; if the principles that you base your observation on are rooted in sufficient proof that this is how the world works, the observation must be addressed.

So, yeah. I can’t even comprehend how much better off I’d be today if the simple basics of the scientific method were taught to me at home or in early schooling, instead of a random godless stranger picking up the slack in a Christian chatroom in my twenties. How much better off would society be if this basic critical thinking were taught nationwide?