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Mathematics, music, and hearing: Vi Hart does it again.

This, one of the videos from the remarkable Vi Hart, is absolutely brilliant.  It's twelve minutes long and worth every minute.  Watch with your kids.

(Incidentally, Vi Hart has recently been hired by Salman Khan to make videos for the Khan Academy.  Hard to imagine a better match.)

Science "curricula."

I frequently get questions from other homeschooling parents about how I teach science.  I suppose this is not terribly surprising.  Most people (including most elementary school teachers) don't have heavy specialization in science and math.  I can make the analogical leap:  I don't have much education in art or music, and so I am often interested in how truly creative and knowledgeable people train their children in these fields.  

(Although sometimes I avoid asking, because I periodically feel guilty about how little art and music we do in our homeschool.)

When it comes to science curricula, I'm afraid that I suffer from Expert Paralysis.  That is, I know enough science to hate every elementary school science curriculum I've ever seen.  NONE OF THEM ARE ADEQUATE.  There.  That is my opinion.   They all dumb things down.   They are all nonrigorous, insufficiently mathematical, and generally artificial in the way they set up so-called "experiments."  Probably they dumb things down in entirely appropriate ways.    But I can't bear to teach from them.  So I don't.

I think of it this way:  The academic goal of teaching elementary school science is to ensure that they are prepared for high school science, which can be rigorous and not dumbed-down.    And this is what I think kids need in order to be prepared for high school level science education (physics, chemistry, biology):

• Strength and comfort with mathematics. 
• Memorization strategies and skills.
• Strategies for acquiring unfamiliar vocabulary.
• Practice in making direct observations and accurately describing them in writing.
• Logical thinking, especially in classification and identification of cause-and-effect.
• A grasp of the scientific method and why it represents an ideal process for learning from observation.  (A historical approach can work for this, I believe, even better than an experimental one.)
• Wide-ranging reading and/or documentary film viewing on topics of the natural world and of human technology (again, a historical approach can work for this), to build a broad base of information and vocabulary.
• Deep interest in any one aspect of the natural world, or a few, and the opportunity to have developed it freely.
• An understanding of the value of scientific inquiry among the various fields of human endeavor:  its powers and limitations.

None of this requires a science curriculum.  None.  You can certainly borrow units from textbooks; probably there's something out there that does a great job of teaching the scientific method, for instance.  And you could certainly use textbooks to help a child develop his or her deep understanding of a subject that is dear to him or her.  And of course most people will choose a math curriculum of some kind.  Some will choose a logic curriculum, or will rely on some other subject (say, Latin grammar or proof-based geometry) to develop logical skills.

My kids aren't in high school yet, so I can't say whether my approach is "working" or not.  (I'll define "working" as "they succeeded in high-school level chemistry, physics, and biology.") But this is the form my approach has taken:

• Lots of books around on various science-type topics.
• The kids are encouraged to watch nature documentaries and other similar videos -- pretty much freely.
• I do pick a topic or two each year -- but I have taught it by getting living books out of the library, reading aloud from them, and talking about it.  I'm a scheduler by nature, so I tend to plan ahead what books I'll check out and what topics to discuss, but there's no reason why this couldn't be done more spontaneously.
• Science kits are great, but I think that unless you have a fairly methodical kid, then the sort of thorough learning that I consider to be school-worthy won't happen on its own.  (It's fine to use science kits as free-exploration toys.  I'm just saying that I wouldn't necessarily count that kind of play as "school.")   So I use science kits but assign the projects from them in a specific order.

I need to get ready for my co-schooling day, so I have to stop here, but I will make another post with a detailed description of one "electric circuits" unit study I did for a third-grader using the Snap Circuits kit and some other resources.

Third post about science and faith: Three ways to approach the problem of "lack of scientific evidence for the divine."

This is the third in a series of post in response to a reader's request, asking me to write about the "lack of scientific evidence for the divine," from the perspective of a "scientifically-minded" individual who began Church practice as an adult.

In the first post, I offered a working definition of "scientific evidence" and explained why I wouldn't expect there to be any such evidence for the divine anyway.  In my second post, I considered why a so-called "scientifically-minded individual" would be expected to be less likely to become a believer.  In that post I suggested that it is less a matter of such individuals coming to belief in a special, er, scientifically-mnded way, than it is a matter of finding a way around particular obstacles to accepting the possibility of the divine.

In this post, I want to describe three fundamentally different ways that the scientist who is also a believer deals with the lack of scientific evidence for the divine.

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1.  "What lack of scientific evidence?  I see scientific evidence for a Creator everywhere."

In my first post, I wrote that I, personally, do not believe that there is any scientific evidence for the divine, and in fact I don't expect that there ever will be any.

But that's me.  

You will, of course, find people with scientific or technical training who are deeply impressed by the mathematical laws of the universe, or the structure of the human eye, or the workings of the transformation of species.  They see the handiwork of the Designer there.

I would not call this "scientific" evidence.  What I would call that is an intuitive reaction to realities that required a scientific or technical education in order to fully appreciate.  Perhaps you could fairly characterize it as an accumulation of apparently supporting evidence, or at least of evidence that fails to argue against the divine.

Maybe xkcd captures the spirit I'm talking about best:

Just substitute "evidence for the divine" for "wonder and beauty" and that is pretty close to what we're talking about.

In this category you could also include any people who are seriously into the various philosophies that fit under the umbrella of "intelligent design."  I confess that I am not very current on the details of what the philosophical leaders (as opposed to the political leaders) of the ID movement are discussing right now.  It strikes me that the fundamental philosophical prerequisite is twofold:

• It is possible that a rational being created the laws of the universe, and it cannot be proved otherwise;
• The benefit of the doubt is given to the proposition "There is a God who created the laws of the universe," and it is the opponents who must prove their case.

The latter is arbitrary and, I think, largely a matter of personal non-rational processes.  There is nothing wrong with the yes-to-God proposition, from a purely philosophical standpoint.  But there is really no arguing for or against it in a purely logical way.  Some people (scientists or no) think it better to give the benefit of the doubt to the no-God proposition.   Some refuse to give it to either.   

 

2.  The philosophical approach:   Evidence from within the interior experience of the human person.

Just because a person is a scientist or an engineer or a technician or a computer programmer or an applied mathematician does not mean that she necessarily subscribes to the "scientific evidence is the only important kind of evidence" view.  Pure philosophy, in other words, is accessible to logical thinkers whether or not they possess particular scientific interest or expertise.

Besides the kind of evidence that can be reproduced experimentally or demonstrated to others, so that those others may directly evaluate them, every human being has access to a certain set of direct observations which cannot be demonstrated or reproduced to others.  To the individual, they are experienced as reality, even though they cannot be transferred. 

I'm speaking here of observations of one's own powers of reason and insight, or of the existence of an internal moral code.  

A fact that is unappreciated in our society:  There is absolutely no way you can derive a moral conclusion, a "what ought to be done," from purely natural knowledge ("what is") or from technical expertise ("what could be done").  Scientific and technical expertise is immensely useful in contributing to the discussion of "what ought to be done," because knowledge of what is, and knowledge of what could be, is relevant to narrowing down the choices:  that kind of expertise helps us predict the likely consequences of our actions.  That is why it is useful to have specialists in scientific and technical fields on policy committees.   But even if the consequences of our likely actions could be perfectly predicted by the technical experts, and perfectly explained by them to the public at large. we are still left with the question of which consequences ought to be preferred.  And that question belongs to all humans, not just to the ones with technical expertise.  

I look inside myself and I see a moral code.  Other people tell me that they look inside themselves and see moral codes (they can't prove it to me, but for the purpose of this argument I will assume they are not lying).  It is in this personal moral code that many people are forced to conclude that they really do believe in free will, in the existence of "right" moral decisions and "wrong" ones, and through a philosophical chain of reasoning conclude that all this must be discarded unless the proposition "God exists" is accepted.  Not wanting to discard the propositions that the will is free and that certain decisions are right and others wrong, they choose to accept the "yes to God" proposition.

A basic outline of this essentially philosophical basis for the "yes to God" proposition can be found in the opening pages of C. S. Lewis's popular work Mere Christianity.  ("Look inside" the book and you'll get the gist of it.  There's nothing about being "scientifically minded" that would make a person any more or less likely to accept Lewis's argument, as it's accessible through propositions and logic, not through technical expertise.  Whether the propositions are accepted or not is, I think, personal.)

A different interior observation on which to found belief in a Deity could be observation of the self's powers of reason.  I know that some have argued that rational thinking (which can't be demonstrated or transferred, only observed within the self) must arise from rational, not irrational processes.  I haven't explored this line of thinking myself; but I know others who have.

 

This category of "interior, personal human experience" could also refer to a person who believes he has received a personal communication or revelation from God.  Ultimately, this too is an interior experience (in the sense that it cannot be shared directly with others).  It can't be transferred.  And yet the individual who is confident in its authenticity has what can be called direct experience that, depending on its strength, could easily trump all arguments.

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3.  Historical evidence.

I mentioned historical evidence in the first post, because I wanted to point out that it is a common category of evidence which is not scientific.  (Because not reproducible -- by definition.)  And yet most people, even scientists, commonly accept propositions which are based on nothing but this kind of evidence.  Historical evidence includes hearsay, accounts from witnesses long dead, scraps of copied and recopied text, minor details in works of fiction, damaged artifacts, and oral histories.   And yet we are still confident in many of our conclusions. We have a list of the names of the Egyptian pharaohs. We teach kids that Leif Ericson led the first European expedition to land in North America.  We know that William Shakespeare of Stratford, England wrote Othello, even though a small group disputes that.  Well:  certain arguments for the existence of God also rest on what are essentially historical claims.  Disputed?  Yes.  So are other widely-accepted historical events, and not always by a small fringe group.  

Christianity, at least, is a faith which turns entirely on a single historical claim.   Christians claim that just outside Judea, on a Sunday morning around Passover time, during the governorship of Pontius Pilate, this particular guy who had been executed by the Romans the previous Friday, and buried by some Jewish friends of his, rose from the dead of his own accord.  

It is this claim, and nothing else, that (if true) would lend credence to the rather outlandish ideas that the guy had been spouting in the months leading up to his execution.

We moderns tend to lose sight of the fact that the Christian claim is fundamentally about a historical event that either did or did not happen.  This is because the Christian claim leads its followers down some startling philosophical paths, and the conclusions necessarily conflict with those arrived at by people starting from different beginning points.  Consequently, many layers of questions and answers have been built up around that claim in defense of the conclusions.  

So:  A good many modern believers approach the question in the opposite direction -- first asking, Do I believe there is a God? and then asking What ought God be like?  and finally Which faith seems to me to have the right claims about God?    If that question leads them to Christianity, then they have to consider whether they believe the Resurrection really happened.  There's no doubt that the moral and theological teachings of Christianity are appealing to many folks.  Presumably a great many are pleased enough with Christian practice and teachings that, once they burrow to the center of it, they are ready to assent to the historical question too, if only to prevent cognitive dissonance.  

(Others don't bother with the Resurrection thing.  It is not hard to find Christians who regard it as largely symbolic.  I assume they find other ways to deal with the cognitive dissonance.)

But the ancients who converted to the new faith necessarily went in the opposite direction.   Did you hear about this guy who hinted that he was God and then when they killed him he rose from the dead? And people saw him walking around and eating at cookouts and showing off his death wounds and explaining stuff to people?  And:  So what else did this guy say about God before they killed him?  And:  So what are they saying he said after that?

The scientific worldview and faith: Part two of a series.

(Note:  I added formatting to this post a few hours after publishing it.)

In a post from a few days ago, I wrote:

I've been asked privately to write publicly about my perspective as a "person with a strong scientific education and worldview... coming to know or believe in God's reality and divinity." With an eye toward the "lack of scientific evidence for the divine;" an eye toward the "lack of a need" to rely on supernatural or divine explanations when constructing an appreciative theory of the world.

Here is a more direct quote from the emailed request:

"I was wondering if you could share with me your reasoning and experience with coming to know or believe on God's reality and divinity. ...I'd really appreciate hearing your perspective, especially given your coming to church practice as an adult." 

I find myself wanting to phrase my response as if the sender had asked me certain specific questions, even though he actually didn't. I suppose that counts as my "perspective," the questions that form the framework of my response. So, for the sake of clarity, here are the questions that my interlocutor did not ask me, but which it seems I am trying to answer:

1. How do I, personally, deal with the question of lack of scientific evidence for the divine?
2. How is it that I, a "scientifically minded person" [his words, not mine, mind you], came to knowledge and/or belief in the divine?  
3. What special experience or insight can I offer because I was (just) past childhood when I came to Church practice?

In my first post, linked above, I treated the first question. I explained that I am confident that, if God exists, we would find no scientific evidence for him; and that, if God does not exist, we would equally find no scientific evidence for him; therefore the lack of scientific evidence says nothing whatsoever about God's existence. I also defined "scientific" evidence for the purpose of my argument, and alluded to the existence of evidence other than what I call scientific evidence.  

Now I want to turn to the second question. But first I find myself wondering what is meant by a scientifically minded person, and why it should be surprising that such a person expresses a belief in the supernatural.

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What is a "scientifically-minded person" anyway? Anyone who might be expected to be skeptical? How is that different from the average person? What is this class of persons who are "scientifically minded?" Anyone who does not seem like the sort of person who would firmly embrace the existence of God, or who would have confidence in the teaching of the Church?  

Maybe not just anyone. Who are the people whose faith surprises us? People who have it all, materially speaking, surprise us when it turns out they have a real and lively faith too, because supposedly it is hard to be rich and faithful -- the Bible even says so -- yet some apparently are given the grace to make it work; a few of our saints were even princes and princesses, queens and kings. People who have nothing and are yet faithful sometimes surprise us too, because while on one hand it is understandable that a suffering man would seek comfort in the promise of a better life after death, it is undeniable that for many others, apparently undeserved suffering calls the goodness of God into question.  

Why are people with scientific or engineering training expected, these days, to deny or to doubt the existence of God? Maybe it is merely an accurate assessment of our chances; scientists do appear  to be less likely to believe in God at all, and less likely to hold strong religious beliefs, than the general population.

But that leads us to ask why scientists are less religious than the general population.  

Maybe it is an unsurprising side effect of the training. Correct application of the scientific method requires a constant positive skepticism: it is not proper to the method to accept a proposition merely on the authority of the one proposing it, nor is it proper to the method to accept a proposition because it seems logical or, to put it bluntly, pleasant or elegant. Though elegance can and does guide us in the selection of which hypotheses to test, testing is still required. Perhaps this habit of skepticism toward propositions which are in the domain of science can bleed outward into propositions which are not in the domain of science, so that the scientifically trained person expects to reject all propositions which have not been tested.

It is probably worth noting, though, that the proportion of believers among those who have had technical educations varies widely by discipline (see the above link for some of this information). Medical doctors, for example, are very likely to believe in God, possibly even more likely than the general population. Physicists are among the most likely to be atheists. The rest of us, including all the engineers, are somewhere in the middle.  

It is possible that the different educations we receive condition us in different ways, but I tend to think that the causality runs the other way. I suspect that religiosity drives the selection of the educational path.

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In any case, though, I think it is wrong to assume that what's special about a scientist, or a scientifically-minded person, is that he or she "comes to belief or knowledge of the divine" in a different way from most other believers.  

Here in America, most people privileged enough to receive an education do not have to "come" to belief and knowledge of the divine; the knowledge tends to come to us. It is around us for the taking. A large number of us hear about God from our own families, and even those who don't are steeped in a culture which, for all its competing attractions, constantly makes reference to "God" and is full of churches and of believers and libraries and universities and other resources. Anyone who is sufficiently curious and has enough access to those resources ought to find plenty of information about what believers believe and why they say they believe it. Scientists "come to belief and knowledge of God" in the same ways as the rest of the population.

What may be particular about scientists or scientifically-minded persons is the specific objection they have to accepting or to investigating the ever-present proposition, "God exists." 

  In other words, when a scientifically minded person changes from belief to disbelief, it is more a matter of removing something from him -- his objections to faith -- than it is a matter of adding something to him -- faith itself. Although once the objections are removed then he may find that he still has a lot to learn.

Next post: Three independent ways by which such objections are, it seems, either held at bay or removed. The post will not, I think, contain any actual attempts to argue for the existence of God, so all you scientifically-minded people can safely continue reading.

Science and history: Part one of a series.

I've been asked privately to write publicly about my perspective as a "person with a strong scientific education and worldview... coming to know or believe in God's reality and divinity."  With an eye toward the "lack of scientific evidence for the divine;" an eye toward the "lack of a need" to rely on supernatural or divine explanations when constructing an appreciative theory of the world.

This will take me more than one post, but I think I will enjoy the assignment.  

Let me turn first to the concept of "scientific evidence for the divine" or a "need" to include supernatural or divine explanations.  I know that many theists, the intelligent-design folks in particular (and maybe also the blokes responsible for that Creation Museum in Kentucky) claim that there is plenty of scientific evidence for the divine.  

I think their arguments are not useful, because they are based upon faulty premises, and most especially upon sloppy definition of terms.

I say there is no scientific evidence for the divine, and no need to include supernatural or divine explanations when constructing a scientific theory of the physical world.  In this post I'd like to elaborate on that, before going on to explain why this has not been an obstacle to my coming to Church practice as an adult or to continuing it -- even as my conviction that there is no scientific evidence for the divine has become firmer.

Begin as always by defining terms: What do you mean by "science?"

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They Might Be Giants can help us out here.  From their kids' CD Here Comes Science:

“As the philosopher Rudolf Carnap once said, 'Science is a system of statements based on direct experience and controlled by experimental verification.'”

That'll do.  A little closer look at that "experimental verification" thing, via the Wikipedia article "Scientific Method:"

Scientific researchers propose hypotheses as explanations of phenomena, and design experimental studies to test these hypotheses via predictions which can be derived from them. These steps must be repeatable, to guard against mistake or confusion in any particular experimenter. Theories that encompass wider domains of inquiry may bind many independently derived hypotheses together in a coherent, supportive structure. Theories, in turn, may help form new hypotheses or place groups of hypotheses into context.

Scientific inquiry is generally intended to be as objective as possible, to reduce biased interpretations of results. Another basic expectation is to document, archive and share all data and methodology so they are available for careful scrutiny by other scientists, giving them the opportunity to verify results by attempting to reproduce them. 

My working definition of science is the body of human knowledge that is added to by forming hypotheses, constructing experiments or proposing observations that can be repeated or replicated by others, and using the results of the experiments and observations (the "scientific evidence") to test the hypotheses.   The utility of science is its ability to generate predictions about the future:  if I do such-and-such under specified condtions, this outcome will result.  This property of science is intimately bound up in the requirement that experiments, tests, and observations are repeatable:  every test that deserves to be called "scientific" is a test that can be performed under similar-enough conditions to produce a consistent result.  

The result of these tests -- scientific knowledge -- consists of statements about what happens.   Science tells you what happens.  This is the short soundbite.

Note the tense of the verb.

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The definition logically implies two things which we can use to clarify what is not science, even if many people call it that.

(1) If I have a hypothesis and I cannot test it -- if I cannot "find a way to show what would happen if [I] were incorrect" -- then I cannot make any scientific statements about the truth or falsity of the hypothesis.  I have no scientific evidence.

 I may be able to speculate convincingly.  I may be able to estimate the probability.  I may be able to report a gut feeling.  I may be able to present a collection of other scientifically tested hypotheses that are not inconsistent with the hypothesis under study.  In other words, I may have many statements to make about my hypothesis, but none of them are scientific ones.  And so, in the formulation, reporting, and defense of this hypothesis, I am not performing science.

Theoretical physicists find themselves in this boat sometimes.  They are often in the business of proposing hypotheses that cannot possibly be tested with existing technology (and occasionally that can be proved to be impossible to test under any technology).  You can read entire books on the subject of whether string theory, for example, is actually "science" or whether it deserves instead to be classified as metaphysics.    Proposing hypotheses that might possibly be tested some time in the future when technology has improved is an important part of scientific work, but it is not sufficient to be called "science" because it does not generate any evidence and therefore generates no new additions to the body of human scientific knowledge.

(2) If I have a hypothesis and I can test it to produce evidence, but the test cannot be repeated by anyone working independently of me, then the test and the evidence and any statements I make about the truth or falsity of my hypothesis are also not scientific.  If no one can repeat my experiment, then no one can judge conclusively whether I am mistaken or confused or lying.  

(This is different from repeating an experiment but failing to reproduce the result. I mean, the experiment cannot be performed a second time.)  

We have stated that science is based on direct experience.  If I am the only person who can have a particular experience, if the experience cannot be communicated to the wider human community, then it cannot become part of science -- except in a very limited way, as part of the body of my personal knowledge, the so-called science limited by my own head.  It cannot become a part of the body of general human knowledge.

Now it may be that the evidence I present is convincing.  It may be that I have documented my observations in perfect accord with all the procedures accepted by the scientific community.  It may be, further, that I have previously demonstrated trustworthiness, and still further, that I am charismatic enough to cause people to desire to align their conclusions with mine.  Therefore I may be able to cause a large number of scientists and people with scientific training to agree with my conclusions.  My analyses may make their way into scientific journals and textbooks and be taught in science classes.  They may be called "science" according to the common usage of the term ("stuff that gets taught in classes of chemistry, biology, physics, geology, etc.")  My statements may even be true.  But they would not be "science" according to the precise definition of the term which I have proposed.

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And yet there are many such statements which we find useful, and indeed, which we accept and discuss as if we were confident they were true.  We would even say that they are part of the body of human knowledge.  Indeed they are -- just not part of the body of human knowledge that depends on direct experience.  

For example, there is another discipline of human knowledge which we call "history."

If science tells you what happens, then history tells you what happened.  

History is not unrelated to or independent of science.  Like science, it is based on the examination of evidence.  This evidence is not merely imaginary.  It includes a wide variety of tangible material:  natural objects, landscapes, artifacts, documents, linguistic structures, cultural practices.   Historians often rely on technology to discover and interpret evidence; those technologies having been developed, tested, and refined by individuals relying on scientific knowledge and the scientific method.  And so, for example, we have useful technologies such as radiocarbon dating, or x-ray imaging of an artifact to see beneath the surface, or audio recording devices to make it easier to accurately transcribe interviews, or the methods developed by archaeologists to systematically catalogue and describe the remains left at the site of some historical event.

But note this:  You can only dig up the shard of pottery once.  After that, it's been dug up.  No one can ever dig it up from its original resting place again.

The shard of pottery, dug up, is real evidence, but it is historical evidence, not scientific evidence.  It cannot be incorporated into a theory of what happens.  It can only be incorporated into a theory of what happened.

With apologies to George Santayana:  History is not, in fact, replicable.  

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This does not mean that history is inferior to science.  However, it operates under different limitations and different rules.  Because it cannot be replicated, persons engaged in historical  research can and must rely on indirect rather than direct experience.  They must rely on reports.  And they are allowed to (indeed they must) subjectively interpret the evidence they find in order to reach conclusions about it.  As in scientific research, historical researchers can and should strive to be unbiased in the sense of removing sources of error that originate from non-rational attachment to ideas.  But because the evidence they investigate is not in the form of repeatable experiments, there is no analogous way to adequately guard against mistake or confusion (or outright lying).  The best they can do is document their findings as scrupulously as possible and offer a coherent argument to defend their interpretations.  And then show how those interpretations fit, without contradiction, into what is already commonly accepted -- or else, to show that what is commonly accepted should now be rejected.

This looks a little bit like scientists defending their hypotheses and using them to add new statements to a scientific theory.  But because of the lack of repeatability, the evidence is not scientific evidence, and so we can't use the term "theory" as scientists understand it. 

The work of historical research is to add new statements to a narrative.  Historical researchers are engaged in constructing and refining a narrative of what happened in the past all the way up to the present moment.

Normally, the term "history" is only applied to those parts of the narrative that involve human beings, sometimes even only literate human beings.  The narrative before human beings or before preliterate human beings is then called "prehistory."  This distinction is common enough that I wish to note it with some respect, but for these purposes I prefer the more expansive definition of Stephen Hawking's famous title  A Brief History of Time.   Regardless, the narrative under construction is a continuous narrative.  The only discontinuity introduced by human beings is that we produce a new kind of evidence when we start writing. That continuity implies a unified field of knowledge, and so I'm going to go on using "history" to mean the set of statements about what happened -- including what happened before there were people around to comment on what had happened to them. 

The inevitable conclusion is that much of the work we often call "science" really belongs to the construction of that narrative of "what happened" -- what happened once and can never happen again.  Archaelogy, for example, is sometimes considered a science; and perhaps if we look deeply enough we can find some archaeologists testing repeatable hypotheses; but generally archaeology is concerned with using artifacts and other physical evidence to construct a narrative of what happened at a particular site.  Paleobiology "uses biological field research of current biota and of fossils millions of years old to answer questions about the molecular evolution and the evolutionary history of life" -- well, when it is answering questions about what happens when DNA, RNA, and proteins evolve, it is contributing to science, but when it is answering questions about what happened during the evolutionary history of life, it is contributing to the narrative -- to history.  A forensic anthropologist contributes to science when he or she experiments with blades and bones to find out what kind of marks are left by what weapons; but contributes to history when he or she examines a set of remains and expresses a judgment about the cause of death.  We cannot re-animate the corpse and kill it again to see if the same thing happens.

Note that history is not inferior to science.  Historical evidence is not inferior to scientific evidence.  It includes the best available information about much that is important to human beings.  But it is worthwhile distinguishing clearly between the construction of the "theory of everything that happens" that is the domain of what we properly call science, and the construction of the "theory of everything that happened" -- the world-track -- that is the domain of what we properly call history.  The distinguishing mark of science is replicability. 

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If the distinguishing mark of scientific evidence is replicability, there never has been any scientific evidence for the divine.  Because to look for God using the scientific method, to look for scientific evidence of God, is to look for a God who appears at the push of a button:  a God who can be made to seem to obey us.  And this is, I think, not what people mean when they say "the Divine."  

When we find something that appears at the push of a button, so to speak, we call it "a law of nature."   It will never appear supernatural to us because it will only appear natural.  Because, in fact, the natural universe in the present (but not in the past) is precisely the domain where repeatable observations can be made.  

I believe that "the supernatural" has never created any evidence that could ever be correctly called "scientific."  I expect that a real "supernatural," were it real, never would create any such evidence.  Therefore the absence of such "scientific" evidence has no bearing whatsoever on the truth or falsity of the statement "The supernatural is real" (equivalently stated:  "There are realities other than the natural universe").

My interlocutor might object:  Is this a long way of saying "Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence?"  Because if the evidence has no bearing on the truth or falsity of a statement, why say anything about it at all?

No; it's a long way of saying "Common human practice demonstrates that absence of scientific evidence is never in practice taken as evidence of absence, because we persist in pretending to make meaningful statements about what happened in the past."

In other words, there's at least one other kind of evidence besides scientific evidence that we all use.  We stipulate that it is useful even if it is not entirely reliable and even if it is inherently subjective.  I'm willing to rely on it to construct my mental model of the world, and chances are good that you do too.

And this concludes part one.

(Part two is here.)

Nerd mom.

I like Jamie's my-little-boy-is-growing-up-(sniff) story from yesterday.  I like it a lot.

It's good to be a nerd.

Not that kids are slime molds or anything. 

All I'm saying is, I may not be a speech pathologist like Jamie, but the language of nerd is a universal one, and nerd-mom is even better.

(Comic here)

A multi-age, whole-family science curriculum.

This week I wasn't able to get together with Hannah for co-schooling, so I gave the kids Tuesday and Thursday off and dedicated a day and a half for school planning:  mainly, to throw together a week-by-week curriculum for next year's science.

This coming year I want to try out something new:   teaching the same subject to my three school-age children as a group.  I figured we'll read some picture books and have some discussions and activities together, and then my sixth-grader can be sent off for some extra independent work.  I thought I'd try it with the subject block we call "science."  I typically hate -hate-hate prepackaged elementary school science programs anyway, so as long as I'm going to be winging it I might as well save time and teach the same subject to all three kids.

(Why do I hate prepackaged science curricula?  Let's be blunt:  I have had enough training in physical science that I tend to get morally outraged by all holes, errors, oversimplifications, and gaps.  This causes me intense irritation that I don't experience when trying to teach other subjects, such as art appreciation or history.   I recognize that every curriculum contains holes, errors, oversimplifications, and gaps, but even when they are obvious to me, they don't bother me as much as they do in science curricula.  I would be interested to find out if other homeschooling parents get exceptionally irritated  about the shortcomings in curricula covered by their particular fields of expertise).

Since it's the first time I'll have tried teaching science to three levels at once, I want to pick a topic that would be easily accessible to all of them.  That is, I want to choose a field with the potential for hands-on demonstrations and experiences that can involve the kindergartener and second-grader; at the same time, I want the sixth-grader to keep a laboratory notebook,  make precise measurements, run calculations, and self-evaluate.  

I briefly considered botany, but decided to save it for another year on the grounds that I would have to do a lot of preparatory review myself (I've only had one year of high school biology, from a ridiculously incompetent teacher).  Earth science would be good, except my sixth-grader already had that as a second-grader; I'll repeat that curriculum (which I designed, natch) for the younger kids some year when he's doing something else.   The sixth-grader has also already done electric circuits, anatomy, and a chemistry-in-your-kitchen sequence.  Hannah has been teaching ornithology to the younger kids for months now; come to think of it, she has done such a great job at it that I ought to ask her to write a guest post about it!

In the end I settled on human nutrition:

• There are a seemingly endless supply of relevant picture books in the library system.
• The subject is obviously and practically related to daily life, which fits my philosophy for primary-grade nature study.
• The "labs" are mostly cooking, but the sixth-grader will be able to find some test-tube-and-beaker work.
• I can use the subject to teach some useful practical-life skills, like snack-making and food budgeting.
• The topic is interdisciplinary in an interesting way.  By that I mean I can use some good children's literature about food (food preservation unit study = Blueberries for Sal!) and I can let it creep into social studies at the edges (what children around the world eat for breakfast; economics) as well as getting into several different branches of science and technology (chemistry, anatomy, ecology, agriculture) and, as a bonus, some rhetoric (why do we have a "food pyramid" and not some other shape?).

Once I got that figured out, I picked a sixth-grade nutrition textbook with decent scope and some ideas for experiments -- yes, it's full of holes, errors, oversimplifications, and gaps -- and used that as a sort of skeleton to hang my own ideas on.   

Just when I had made up my mind to teach human nutrition, along came Jamie's suggestion via email that I should review Ellyn Satter's Secrets of Feeding a Healthy Family (I'm giving it a mixed review:  I criticize some aspects here and here, and I begin to point out some good stuff here).  One of the appendices is entitled "Nutrition Education in the Schools," and it gave me some good ideas for organizing my approach toward the differently-aged children.  Because of its influence, I think I will save all the "nutrient" discussions for the sixth-grader, and spend my time with the younger children exploring the world of human food: classifying, growing, harvesting, buying, cooking, preserving, displaying, tasting, and digesting.  

 So far I've assigned a topic to each of the thirty-six weeks of the school year, based on the kind of work I think my sixth-grader ought to be doing.  Now I'm going down through the topics and searching through the library catalog for good picture books that match up with each topic.  (I am doing subject searches like:  "Vegetables -- Juvenile fiction" and "Refrigeration and refrigeration machinery -- Juvenile literature.")  This is the fun part.   It'll give me an excuse to check out a whole lot of kids' cookbooks, if nothing else.  

Once I get all the topics in order with a list of good picture books appended to each one, it'll just be a matter of requesting  the books a week or two in advance so I can plan some activities.  I'm pretty used to doing this by now with history, so I have a lot of confidence that I can "wing it" on a week-to-week basis as long as I have a topic plan in place.  If I have time before the year starts, though, I can plan more details in advance and so cut down on the winging it.

This.

xkcd this morning.

I think it explains why I love my husband.  

Not that he reminds me of a slime mold or anything.

Information at your fingertips.

We were wondering how cold we could let our beer get, outside, before risking exploded cans and/or bottles. 

Google to the rescue!

Here to report that if you type in "what temperature" into Google, the third pop-up autofill on the list is "what temperature does beer freeze."

Sweet.

Right after "what temperature does water boil" and "what temperature to cook a turkey."

Jobs I might have liked.

Bill Nye, on his show for kids, used to have a feature called "Way Cool Scientist" in which he featured some interesting science-related job.

(My memory is that often the "Way Cool Scientists" were actually engineers or technicians, and I was a little bit annoyed that they all got lumped together).  

(Also I would like to argue with They Might Be Giants's album Here Comes Science for the same reason. Didn't they notice that several of the songs are about engineering or technology?  But.  I digress.)

Anyway, every once in a while I come across some cool kind of research, and I always think about it as "Maybe I should have majored in that." 

Here is a nifty slideshow about a cool bit of linguistic field research.  It looks just like the sort of thing I would have liked to study, if I had been a linguist instead of a chemical engineer.   I know, I know, these things always look a lot more glamorous when they're done than when they begin, usually with a lot of very tedious background research, trying to figure out what's already been done and what's left to figure out.  Actually the beginning can maybe be more exciting than the middle part, when the annoying intractable little problems start to crop up in earnest.  What I'm getting at is that I'm aware that when NSF decides to make a nifty slideshow about your research, they are cherry-picking the nifty parts on purpose, and editing out all the non-nifty parts, so that people will look at it and think:  Cool!  Let's make sure the government keeps giving money to the Nifty Science Foundation!  Still:  nifty.

h/t Literal-Minded, in a post worth reading on its own and that explains a little more about linguistic clicks.

(Disclosure:  My own doctoral research was funded partly by the NSF.)