As you may have seen lower down on this page, I posted a couple of videos from an interview Richard Dawkins conducted with a representative from an organisation called Concerned Women of America. Lest there be any confusion, CWoA is basically a Christian fundamentalist organisation that holds a number of right wing positions on issues such as abortion. In the interviews, Professor Dawkins is concerned with extrapolating from Wendy Wright the logic and reason behind her organisation's rejection of the theory of evolution. There are seven videos spanning about 60 minutes of interview. I watched all of them and was impressed by the way Ms Wright used a number of very clever debating tactics to essentially avoid having to provide evidence to support her arguments. Instead, when pressed, she simply claimed that 'there was no real evidence supporting 'macro-evolution''. What is this to do with truth?
Well, for about the last 400 years, academics have sought to arrive at a better understanding of the world around us through more rigorous and externally verifiable methods of experimentation. The key here is that an experiment must be able to be replicated by another person and have exactly the same result in lets say 99.9% of cases for that experiment to yield information that we can regard as a fact; a fact being information that we can rely upon when making other decisions or carrying out actions. For example, it is a fact that if a person jumps out of a window without a parachute or other means of buoyancy he or she will 99.9% of the time move with increasing rapidity 'downwards' or in a direction toward the earth's surface. Let's leave the .1% for a freak tornado or passing plane that whisks said person upwards. You would not find that many people who would disagree with that contention. It is therefore out of the realm of theory and in the realm of fact since most of us from our childhood can attest to having spectacularly failed to prove this fact wrong when our feet failed to arrange themselves in a manner as to keep us upright. This is why some people call walking 'controlled falling'.
Why people fall I don't know, but I do know that most people now attribute this to a phenomenon called 'gravity' though the exact properties and purposes of that are still debatable. That there is some 'law' of physics acting to pull us downward has pretty much been accepted and settled as fact and, here's the kicker, reams of scientific and technological advances have been built upon it leading to aircraft, spaceships, tall buildings etc
I'm not trying to teach my grandmother to suck eggs here, just to illustrate how fact gets established as not just a normative truth value but a UNIVERSAL one. I'll be the first to say now that there are very few facts that are universal in our world and almost none when it comes to culture. Indeed, despite the very tangible problems Ms Wright points out in Darwin's theory being used to justify appalling behaviour by people to other people and the world around them (much deriving from a variant of Darwin's theory called 'social darwinism'), it is actions done in the name of defending or preserving certain cultural norms that have done the most damage - see here the tragedy of shark fin soup and tiger based medicinal 'remedies'.
When it comes to creationism and climate change denial we are now witnessing, a la Ms Wright, an attitude to truth that it is entirely subjective and, given the difficulties of establishing truth on issues that fall beyond the scope of normal human perception, entirely debatable on all matters.
How is this attitude operationalised? Simple: A person holds BELIEF X (it is important that we use the word belief as opposed to Truth) and wishes to defend it in the face of evidence to contrary that FACT Z exists and has been clearly established. Of course, they don't BELIEVE that there is evidence to the contrary so the first step is to claim that there is no evidence to the contrary and that numerous other people all share this belief. This argument goes nowhere since if you do provide evidence (verbally) the reply will be that the person either does not believe that orally delivered evidence or that since Y number of people also share their beliefs, that constitutes reasonable grounds for arguing that the fact is still 'debatable'. Therefore:
X times Y = evidence of the questionability of fact Z.
This is an easy one to disprove with allegory (most people believed the earth was flat but that didn't make them right) but extremely hard to disprove without actually pulling up and displaying the physical evidence during a debate over the validity of fact Z.
Since with evolution it would be very hard to produce physical evidence on the spot (it is contained within countless scientific papers and fossil artefacts that are not generally accessible to a man on the street having a debate), this provides the debater defending the questionability of evolution a 'get out' clause that they think gives them just cause to repeat the argument, ad nausea, 'show me the evidence'. This is exactly what Ms Wright does. Again and again. She does this precisely because she knows that a person on the street in a debate does not have that evidence at hand. This in her mind constitutes the means to winning the debate.
The other methods are divertissement (arguing on an invalid and loosely related point) and crying the victim (our BELIEFS are under attack - this is against freedom of speech! and against real scientific enquiry!). Additionally, the bedrock of the creationist's arguments is that a god exists which (usually 'he') created the universe and the world and since a god cannot be disproved or proved it is another get out clause since the debated always falls back on their BELIEF which is innate and only known to them as fact - a fact that non-believers cannot see because they have not opened their hearts and 'souls' to the 'truth'. The disingenuousness of this argument is quite plain to see but does nothing to help a person argue against it.
Finally, the last argument used (especially by Ms Wright) is that since some of Darwin's ideas were used badly in the past (and maybe still in the present), this is evidence that Darwin's theories are wrong: Darwin's theories are unpalatable and have been used to justify horrendous acts so therefore we should discard them. This is a political position and not one based on facts. That power uses facts to justify its ends does not negate the truth value of a fact - it just demonstrates that people and power are willing to manipulate data to further their own agendas.
Where does climate change denial come into this picture? Read this exchange of views on climate change and you will see the methods above in action. There is considerable if not overwhelming evidence that man-made warming through carbon emissions is warming up the atmosphere of the Earth. To climate change deniers this evidence is not enough and may even be the result of some shadowy conspiracy to effect certain resource and power allocation outcomes. Thus they stubbornly resort to continually questioning evidence that has generated a consensus that is close to being factual. This is the same as X times Y = evidence of the questionability of fact Z with the exception that X has been established through scientific experimentation repeated by unrelated persons working independently, as opposed to a small group of people working together and just insisting, without scientific method or evidence, that X is a fact; a fact that cannot be verified by independent study outside of the group.
Thus creationism and climate change denial are bedfellows in the sense that they both rely on methods of argument rather than evidence to support their claims. They are also relations in that they are more based on BELIEF than FACT.
When a majority of the world's scientists, using scientific methods that are replicable by other people with the same results, come to say that there IS a god who created the world and that carbon dioxide emissions are not warming the world to the degree that we think they are I will consider their evidence and, if reliable, adjust my views accordingly. Until that time I will not accept their 'truth'.
In the meantime, biodiversity and biointegrity are decreasing and average global temperatures are rising. I argue that we must put aside the issues of power, resource allocation and the defence of culture to address these problems as soon as possible. Why? if we are wrong then at least we have helped clean the world but if we are right and do nothing then no amount of apologies from creationists and climate change deniers will reduce my anger at the way they compromised our ability to act together at the time when we most needed to.
