To state the obvious: I hammer away at evolution acceptance and denial in the United States, science denial in general, and religious lunacy in total here on Forms Most Beautiful. I've just read a statement by the International Planetarium Society (IPS) asserting and explaining the age of the universe (courtesy of the NCSE). This statement provides a primer on the various and independent lines of inquiry that have led astronomers, astrophysicists, and cosmologists to accept the date. It's also a sad commentary on the state of scientific knowledge in contemporary American culture.
The statement interests me because it shows us why and how scientists can make the knowledge claims that they do. In essence, it's a nice statement on science's means of making knowledge claims (epistemology) and does a nice little job of introducing people to the philosophy of science. IPS states that:
These measurements of age are accepted by nearly all astronomers, including both research astronomers and planetarium educators. These astronomers come from nations and cultures around the world and from a very wide spectrum of religious beliefs.
A fundamental reason why these ancient ages are so widely accepted by the scientific community is that they are derived from several independent lines of evidence accumulated by independent and often competing teams of researchers...
A second reason why these ages are so widely accepted is that for scientific results to be published in research journals, they must be critically reviewed by other scientists who are experts in the same research area...
A third reason why these ages, and other scientific paradigms such as Einstein's theory of relativity, are so widely accepted is that by the nature of its acquisition--through independent lines of evidence and always subject to scrutiny--scientific evidence is built up only very slowly, one step at a time. Only when a very large and diverse body of evidence has been accumulated is a broad conclusion accepted. Even then, a broad conclusion remains subject to inspection, as further evidence may reinforce or refine it, or in rare cases, overthrow it.
I think that the IPS statement succinctly describes why scientists justifiably believe the things that they come to believe and can therefore categorize their belief as acceptance. You can believe anything you like but can you justify that belief without special pleading, appeals to authority, or appeals to revelation? Many of our beliefs seem to require such things. But the scientific method needs no such thing. It uses independent lines of inquiry, it uses the competitive human ambition to check these findings against one another, and then awaits to make its conclusions - which are tentative and reviseable - until a great deal of data has been gathered and put through the wringer.
It seems a bit sad that this statement even had to be written though. Creationists, bloated on their own zeal and buoyed by wealth, have successfully vaulted ignorance onto the public, seeding doubt in people's minds. They generate bad reasons to believe in superstition all the while calling good science religion while using bad science to hold up bad religion.
I'm glad the IPS has this statement and yet I sort of cry that it even had to come out. It's not just evolution. It's the whole scientific enterprise that plenty of creationists want to take down...maybe not all of them, but enough of them that you should take pause and consider how reasonable any of their claims might seem to be. This is not just a slippery slope they hope to lead us down, but a hefty shove on a slick cliff.
