Stumble it!Heddle’s Billions
posted in Creationism by themaiden |Apparently…
Physicist David Heddle’s full post is here, including a discussion of Sagan’s now discredited assumption that Earth is situated in an unremarkable backwater of the Milky Way.
… Jonathan Witt is easily convinced by annoyingly sparse sound bites. He even thinks that Heddle actually discusses something. What Heddle does is take a jab at, I dare say, a better scientist that he.
Recent astronomical data have again demonstrated that few scientists have simultaneously achieved such widespread acclaim while consistently being wrong as the late Carl Sagan.
Heddle then promotes himself as an authority on the subject at hand…
I wonder if the same is true for Dawkins? Unlike Sagan’s work, I am not competent to judge Dawkins. I do know that on matters of culture, Dakwins is as much a fool as Sagan—perhaps more so—but I simply couldn’t say how good or bad his biology is. Sagan is a different story.
… even though he is a nuclear physicist, not an astrophysicist or astronomer as was Sagan, though there are significant overlaps. But this is a minor point, given the absurdity of his next sentence.
What Sagan had to say concerning Astronomy is largely nonsensical.
Some of what Sagan said has turned out to be wrong, but Sagan was no maverick. Where he was wrong so were many of his contemporaries. Nor were Sagan and his peers wrong because they were nit-wits, as sniping like Heddle’s suggests. They did what they could with the evidence they had. No more can be asked of anyone, and criticizing, effectively, someone for not having evidence and equipment not available for twenty, thirty, and forty years is nothing short of childish.
As evidence that Sagan was “wrong, wrong, wrong”, Heddle offers two things.
One of the more erroneous teachings of the late Cornell showman was that the earth was in a particularly unimpressive location in the galaxy—a galactic backwater if you will.
…Sagan was wrong, wrong, wrong. The earth is in a privileged location (not just for life as we know it, but for any kind of complex life imaginable), as discussed quite convincingly by Gonzalez and Richards in the Privileged Planet.
The Privileged Planet? The Privileged Planet turns reason on its head. That is an extraordinarily unconvincing damnation.
Take “The Privileged Planet”. The book, and I am assuming the video as well, argues that “Contrary to all expectations, the laws of physics seem precisely “fine-tuned” for the existence of complex life.” Wowie-zowie! Pretty striking… until you realize that it turns reason inside out. I can march myself down to the ocean and board an ocean liner. As I am sitting on the deck sipping my lemonade, I think, “Gee, the ocean seems to be perfectly designed, fine tuned if you will, to support this ship.” Well, that is pretty obviously silly. The ocean was not fine tuned for the ship. It is the other way around. The ship was built for the ocean. If the ocean were somehow different, ships would be different. If the ocean did not exist, there would be no ships. You cannot, however, argue that because we have ships the oceans must have been designed with them in mind. That is foolish. That is nonetheless exactly what these ‘privileged’ arguments do. Stand logic on its head if you want but it will convince no one but the choir.
And the second “error”?
Another related Sagan error: look for signals of life coming from (or broadcast signals of our existence toward) regions with a high density of stars, which in fact is exactly the wrong place to look—given the hostile environment they represent: life-extinguishing radiation and catastrophic gravitational perturbations.
Yes, that is the wrong place to look. Oops! Pick a scientist, do some research, and much to no one’s surprise you’ll find that that scientist has been wrong before. Well… gee, what exactly is the point? It is a damned common one. I’d expect it to have a point. The only one I’ve ever been able to work out is something of an attack on science itself, as well as on common sense. I’m not sure that this is where Heddle is heading, but his “Sagan was wrong” crap smells a lot like it.
The implication is that scientists have been wrong before and are just as wrong now. That is, today’s ‘eternal truths’ are tomorrows ‘crackpot theories.’ By presenting the subject as he does, though he does not say as much, the only conclusion that can be drawn is that science is nonsense ultimately. While on the surface this is an attack on science, underneath it is an attack on common sense and, in fact, upon all reasoning. Science is nothing more than looking around and learning from experience, coupled with experiment—the placing oneself in a position to experience what may not be easily observed accidentally. In science, as in life, one must change one’s opinion as new information arrives. If then, science can be faulted because past conclusions have been incorrect, it is equally correct to fault all learning from experience. The result is the undoing of human knowledge. Accept Snow’s criteria and everything becomes unreliable. We’ve all held wrong opinions, is it truly reasonable to therefore conclude that no opinions are reliable?
More damning, perhaps, of Heddle’s drivel is the fact that Sagan wasn’t wrong about everything, or, to be more accurate: Sagan wasn’t wrong about billions of things. To build his case, Heddle mentions two things, the first of which is highly debatable and the second of which is a criticism that can be leveled at any scientist one cares to name, especially after a few decades have past. Sagan wasn’t wrong about Titan or Europa, Jupiter’s atmosphere, the atmosphere of Venus or global warming. Sagan wasn’t wrong about UFO reports, of which he was skeptical. Why aren’t these mentioned?
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