Intellectual honesty in science: the Marcus Ross case.

This is an example of how scientists can 'compartmentalise' (in Richard Dawkins terminology) their scientific work from their religious and faith positions. Dr. Marcus Ross is an extreme example. Could he be described as being 'dishonest'?

Posted on: February 21, 2007 1:11 PM, by Janet D. Stemwedel

By now, you may have heard (via Pharyngula, or Sandwalk, or the New York Times) about Marcus Ross, who was recently granted a Ph.D. in geosciences by the University of Rhode Island. To earn that degree, he wrote a dissertation (which his dissertation advisor described as "impeccable") about the abundance and spread of marine reptiles called mosasaurs which disappeared about 65 million years ago.

Curiously, the newly-minted Dr. Ross is open about his view that the Earth is at most 10,000 years old.

There have been interesting discussions in the comments on the linked posts about what precisely a Ph.D. signifies (that you have completed coursework and banged out a defensible piece of research, or that you are fit to enter a holy society of scientists?), about whether science is primarily concerned with facts or methodologies, about whether it is possible simultaneously to hold contradictory ideas in your head. Because those discussions are happening elsewhere, I don't want to replicate them here.

Rather, I'd like to examine whether it would be possible for someone like Marcus Ross -- a self-professed Young Earth Creationist (YEC) -- to write a doctoral dissertation in geosciences that is both "impeccable" in the scientific case it presents and intellectually honest.

I take it that the main worry about Dr. Ross's dissertation is that what he wrote was some distance from his actual views. Larry Moran writes:

Ross did not discuss his YEC beliefs in his thesis, Instead, he wrote his thesis as though he believed in an Earth that was billions of years old and as though species evolved and went extinct over periods of millions of years. In other words, Ross did not tell the truth about his true "scientific" beliefs when he wrote his thesis. I assume that he also didn't discuss his true beliefs during the Ph.D. oral exam when his examining committee questioned him on his thesis work, including his interpretation and its implications. ...

The Ross case gets complicated because he did not do what any honest scientist should do and defend his "scientific" opinion in public. There's nothing in his thesis about Young Earth Creationism. However, his real views were well known because he had been consorting with Young Earth Creationists for some time. ...

In this situation we have an example of someone who carefully hid his true belief from the thesis committee, or at least went out of his way to give them an excuse to avoid facing up to the main problem. This is deceptive and antithetical to how science is supposed to operate ... It opens a whole other can of worms. While most of us would agree that openly advocating a young Earth in your thesis would be grounds for failure, we couldn't fail someone who effectively lied about his "scientific" opinion. We put our faith in honesty and scientific integrity whenever possible. It's the default assumption.

If Ross wrote a dissertation that asserts something that he then disavowed elsewhere (and in such a short interval of time that clearly he must not have believed it when he asserted it in the dissertation or in his defense of it), that looks like lying. One might wonder how big a leap it is to go from, "These critters lived in these places until they went extinct about 65 million years ago (although actually they can't have lived that long ago since the Earth was created much more recently than that)" to "Here's the data from the isotope-dating of the fossils I found in these locations (although actually I didn't find any fossils so I just made the data up)." My suspicion is that Ross would not cross the line of actually making up data; what is the principled difference between crossing that line and making assertions that one does not believe?

One possibility is that Ross saw his dissertation as an exercise in presenting the inferences one could draw from the available data using the recognized methods of geoscience. In other words, here's what we would conclude if all the assumptions about the age of the earth, deposition of fossils, isotope dating methods, etc., were true. Given Ross's YEC, he presumably has reason to think at least some of these scientific assumptions are false. (They are religious reasons, not scientific reasons. If there were scientific reasons to doubt these assumptions, it seems like examining those could only lead to a stronger body of knowledge in geosciences, and that Ross could have made such an examination the focus of his doctoral research.)

Is it an obligation for a scientist who has concerns about the goodness of an assumption on which people in his field rest their inferences to voice that concern? Is it an obligation for that scientist to gather data to test that hypothesis, or to work out an alternative hypothesis that is better supported by the data? Or is it OK to keep your doubts to your self and just use the inferential machinery everyone else is using?

A shorter way of asking the same question: Does intellectual honesty in science just cover the way you use the inferential structure and the inputs (i.e., data) from which you draw your inferences? Or does it require disclosure of which assumptions you really accept when drawing your inferences and which you are inclined to think are mistaken?

Does intellectual honesty require that you disclose as well the fact that you don't actually accept this inferential structure as a good way to build knowledge?

reposted from: Scienceblogs - and see this page for comments
my highlights / emphasis / comments

The Trouble with Atheism by Rod Liddle

My Quote snippets:

• " We will be able to explain everything through Science" Prof. Peter Atkins, Univ. Oxford, Physical Chemist
  
• Give me your views on the existence or otherwise for god? Their is no god, no evidence for a god, no reason to believe in a god, so dont believe in a god and i think it is rather foolish to believe in a god. Arrogance? What is wrong with arrogance if you are right! Peter Atkins (12mins)
• "I dont think that God is scientifically knowable or the non existence of god would be scientifically knowable. I think that the character of the world is supportive of the idea of a divine mind or purpose behind it, but i dont think it amounts to a proof that that is so. I dont think anyone has knockdown proofs of that character whether or not we are theists or atheists. Sir John Polkinghorne, retired Physicist & lay preacher (17mins)
  
• "Soviet Unions atheist regime killed 20 million people" Rod Liddle
  

In the past atheists were often persecuted in God-fearing societies. Today they pose an open challenge to religious philosophies. Is a society without God a society without a moral code? Or do human beings create their own system of ethics?

Atheism is a disbelief in a god or gods. The word 'atheism' first appeared in Europe in the 1500s, although scepticism about the existence of gods can be traced back to the early Greek philosopher Epicurus who lived 2,300 years ago.

In the past atheists often suffered persecution and death in God-fearing societies. Today they are largely tolerated and can pose an open challenge to religious philosophies.

The issues

• Believers say that without God and religion there are no ethical or moral codes.
• Atheists say that even though killing is outlawed by religious moral codes, wars continue to be fought in the name of religion. And if you believe you have God on your side you can justify any acts of war.
• Believers accuse godless societies such as Stalin's Russia of carrying out murderous crimes but atheists say his crimes were committed without reference to his beliefs about religion.
• Atheists accuse religion of being divisive because each religion is intolerant of other beliefs.
• Religious leaders proclaim that, despite their differences, they share many similar beliefs and more unites them than divides them.
• Religious leaders say that God created people. Atheists say people created God to explain what they could not understand.
• Believers claim that atheists cannot disprove the existence of God.
• Atheists say there is no evidence for God's existence.
• Atheists base their beliefs on what they can see and know. They claim that scientific advances have explained 'natural disasters' that were once attributed to the 'hand of God'.
• Some scientists are religious and some scientists have become priests.
• Some religious scientists believe that the complex and intricate structure of the natural world proves that it was created by 'intelligent design' and is not the result of evolution.
• Atheist scientists say that natural disasters, for example, those caused by tectonic imperfections, disprove the idea of 'intelligent design'.
• Atheists hold to scientific theories regarding the creation of the Earth, such as the Big Bang theory.
• Some religious believers ask what preceded the big bang.
• Advocates of religion admit that their beliefs are based on faith in what they cannot see and unquestioning belief in sacred texts. They claim that atheists, too, are basing their ideas on faith – in the powers of science – and won't question texts such as Charles Darwin's Origin of Species.
• Atheists say that the scientific evidence points to evolution.

Trouble with Atheism Part 1/5


Trouble with Atheism Part 2/5


Trouble with Atheism Part 3/5


Trouble with Atheism Part 4/5


Trouble with Atheism Part 5/5

Humanist ethical outlook is non-religiously based

Those who are not religious have available to them a rich ethical outlook, all the richer indeed for being the result of reflection as opposed to conditioning.

AC Grayling

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November 21, 2006 10:00 AM | Printable version

The current quarrel between religious and non-religious outlooks is another chapter in a story whose previous main incidents are be found in the mid-nineteenth century and the early seventeenth century, in connection respectively with Darwin's discoveries in biology and the rise of natural science. Both are moments in the slow but bloody retreat of religion; so too is what is happening now. For, despite all appearances, we are witnessing the death-throes of religion: I make the case for this claim in Prospect Magazine.

Here I wish to comment on something that, in the current climate of debate, has been mainly overlooked: the fact that those who are not religious have available to them a rich ethical outlook, all the richer indeed for being the result of reflection as opposed to conditioning, whose roots lie in classical antiquity when the great tradition of ethical thought in Western philosophy began.

For convenience I use the term "humanists" to denote those whose ethical outlook is non-religiously based - which is, in other words, premised on humanity's best efforts to understand its own nature and circumstances.

Consider what humanists aspire to be as ethical agents. They wish always to respect their fellow human beings, to like them, to honour their strivings and to sympathise with their feelings. They wish to begin every encounter, every relationship, with this attitude, for they keep in mind Emerson's remark that we must give others what we give a painting; namely, the advantage of a good light. Most of their fellow human beings merit this, and respond likewise. Some forfeit it by what they wilfully do. But in all cases the humanists' approach rests on the idea that what shapes people is the complex of facts about the interaction between human nature's biological underpinnings and each individual's social and historical circumstances.

Understanding these things - through the arts and literature, through history and philosophy, through the magnificent endeavour of science, through attentive personal experience and reflection, through close relationships, through the conversation of mankind which all this adds up to - is the great essential for humanists in their quest to live good and achieving lives, to do good to others in the process, and to join with their fellows in building just and decent societies where all can have an opportunity to flourish.

And this is for the sake of this life, in this world, where we suffer and find joy, where we can help one another, and where we need one another's help: the help of the living human hand and heart. A great deal of that help has to be targeted at the other side of what the human heart is - the unkind, angry, hostile, selfish, cruel side; the superstitious, tendentious, intellectually captive, ignorant side - to defeat or mitigate it, to ameliorate the consequences of its promptings, to teach it to be different; and never with lies and bribes.

Humanists distinguish between individuals and the wide variety of belief systems people variously adhere to. Some belief systems (those involving astrology, feng shui, crystal healing, animism...the list is long) they combat robustly because the premises of them are falsehoods - many, indeed, are inanities - and, even more, because too often belief in some of those falsehoods serves as a prompt to murder. Humanists contest them as they would contest any falsehood. But with the exception of the individuals who promote these systems when they should know better, humanism is not against the majority who subscribe to them, for it recognises that they were brought up in them as children, or turn to them out of need, or adhere to them hopefully (sometimes, and perhaps too often, unthinkingly).

These are fellow human beings, and humanists profoundly wish them well; which means too that they wish them to be free, to think for themselves, to see the world through clear eyes. If only, says the humanist, they would have a better knowledge of history! If only they would see what their own leaders think of the simple version of the faiths they adhere to, substituting such sophistry in its place! For whereas the ordinary believer has a somewhat misty notion of a father-cum-policeman-cum-Father Christmas-cum-magician personal deity, their theologians deploy such a polysyllabic, labyrinthine, intricate, sophisticated, complexified approach, that some go so far as to claim (as one current celebrity cleric does) that God does not have to exist to be believed in. The standard basis of religious belief - subjective certainty - is hard enough to contest, being non-rational at source, but this is beyond orbit. It is hard to know which are worse: the theologians who are serious about what they say in these respects, and those who know it for a game.

In contrast to the utter certainties of faith, a humanist has a humbler conception of the nature and current extent of knowledge. All the enquiries that human intelligence conducts into enlarging knowledge make progress always at the expense of generating new questions. Having the intellectual courage to live with this open-endedness and uncertainty, trusting to reason and experiment to gain us increments of understanding, having the absolute integrity to base one's theories on rigorous and testable foundations, and being committed to changing one's mind when shown to be wrong, are the marks of honest minds. In the past humanity was eager to clutch at legends, superstitions and leaps of credulity, to attain quick and simple closure on all that they did not know or understand, to make it seem to themselves that they did know and understand. Humanism recognises this historical fact about the old myths, and sympathises with the needs that drive people in that direction. It points out to such that what feeds their hearts and minds - love, beauty, music, sunshine on the sea, the sound of rain on leaves, the company of friends, the satisfaction that comes from successful effort - is more than the imaginary can ever give them, and that they should learn to re-describe these things - the real things of this world - as what gives life the poetry of its significance.

For that is what humanism is: it is, to repeat and insist, about the value of things human. Its desire to learn from the past, its exhortation to courage in the present, and its espousal of hope for the future, are about real things, real people, real human need and possibility, and the fate of the fragile world we share. It is about human life; it requires no belief in an after life. It is about this world; it requires no belief in another world. It requires no commands from divinities, no promises of reward or threats of punishment, no myths and rituals, either to make sense of things or to serve as a prompt to the ethical life. It requires only open eyes, sympathy, and reason.