Who "Peer Reviews" the Peer Reviewers?

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Apparently only e-mail hackers.  Here’s an excerpt from Mark Steyn’s recent article “Cooking the Books on Climate.”

The trouble with outsourcing your marbles to the peer-reviewed set is that, if you take away one single thing from the leaked documents, it’s that the global warm-mongers have wholly corrupted the “peer-review” process. . . .Here’s what Phil Jones of the CRU and his colleague Michael Mann of Penn State mean by “peer review”. When Climate Research published a paper dissenting from the Jones-Mann “consensus,” Jones demanded that the journal “rid itself of this troublesome editor,” and Mann advised that “we have to stop considering Climate Research as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers.”

So much for Climate Research. When Geophysical Research Letters also showed signs of wandering off the “consensus” reservation, Dr. Tom Wigley (“one of the world’s foremost experts on climate change”) suggested they get the goods on its editor, Jim Saiers, and go to his bosses at the American Geophysical Union to “get him ousted.” When another pair of troublesome dissenters emerge, Dr. Jones assured Dr. Mann, “I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”

Which, in essence, is what they did. The more frantically they talked up “peer review” as the only legitimate basis for criticism, the more assiduously they turned the process into what James Lewis calls the Chicago machine politics of international science. The headline in the Wall Street Journal Europe is unimproveable: “How To Forge A Consensus.” Pressuring publishers, firing editors, blacklisting scientists: That’s “peer review,” climate-style. The more their echo chamber shriveled, the more Mann and Jones insisted that they and only they represent the “peer-reviewed” “consensus.” And gullible types like Ed Begley Jr. and Andrew Revkin of the New York Times fell for it hook, line and tree-ring.

I have a question:  If the evidence for global warming is so persuasive, why the deception, censorship and blacklisting?

This strikes me as the same kind of dishonesty that goes on in the question of biological origins.  To even suggest that intelligence might be behind biological systems is to get one censored, blacklisted or fired (just ask Dr. Richard Sternberg and see the documentary “Expelled” for confirmation).  Those who control the “reputable” peer-reviewed journals are the self-selecting gate keepers who rarely publish anything other than their own party line, and then complain that for any opposing view to be considered respectable it must make it into their journals!  That’s like saying to Jackie Robinson, “to be considered a great baseball player you must play in the major leagues,” but then denying him the opportunity to play in the major leagues.

This again shows that science doesn’t say anything– scientists do.  All data must be gathered and then interpreted which means that science is only as objective as the people who do it.  If the scientists are corrupt or allow their philosophical or personal biases to influence their conclusions, you get the kind of incorrect conclusions we see with global warming and biological origins.

I haven’t studied the global warming issue in depth.  So for those who believe that man-made carbon emissions are responsible for changing the climate (whether the climate is actually changing is also under dispute),  I have a question:  why did the climate change so drastically long before there were man-made carbon emissions?  It seems that if the climate today actually is changing (again, disputable), there’s probably a much more potent natural cause.  True?

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Science Doesn’t Say Anything– Scientists Do

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You can’t put honesty in a test tube.

“Science” doesn’t say anything—scientists do.

Those are a couple of the illuminating conclusions we can draw from the global warming e-mail scandal.

“You mean science is not objective?” No, unless the scientists are, and too often they are not. I don’t want to impugn all scientists, but it is true that some of them are less than honest.  Sometimes they lie to get or keep their jobs.  Sometimes they lie to get grant money. Sometimes they lie to further their political beliefs. Sometimes they don’t intentionally lie, but they draw bad scientific conclusions because they only look for what they hope to find.

Misbehavior by scientists is more prevalent than you might think.  A survey conducted by University of Minnesota researchers found that 33% of scientists admitted to engaging in some kind of research misbehavior, including more than 20% of mid-career scientists who admitted to “changing the design, methodology or results of a study in response to pressure from a funding source.”  Think of how many more have done this but refuse to admit it!   (The researchers said as much in their findings.)

Outright lies and deception certainly seem to be the case with “Climate-gate.”  The exposed e-mails reveal cherry-picking; manipulating data; working behind the scenes to censor dissenting views; doubting what the measurements say because they don’t fit their pre-determined conclusion.   Matt Drudge headlined this yesterday as the “Greatest scandal in modern science.”

I actually think there is another great scientific scandal, but its misrepresentations are not quite as obvious.  In this scandal, instead of outright lies, scientific conclusions are smuggled in as philosophical presuppositions.  Such is the case with the controversy over the origin of life and new life forms.  Did natural forces working on non-living chemicals cause life, or is life the result of the intelligent activity?   Did new life forms evolve from lower life forms by natural forces or was intelligence needed?

Dr. Stephen Meyer has written a fabulous new best-selling book addressing those questions called Signature in the Cell.   Having earned his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge in the philosophy of science, Dr. Meyer is at the top of the science food chain.  In our August 8th radio interview, he told me he’s been working on his 600+ page book—which isn’t short of technical detail—for more than a decade.

What qualifies a man who has a Ph. D. in the “philosophy of science” to write on the origin of life or macroevolution?  Everything.  What some scientists and many in the general public fail to understand is that science cannot be done without philosophy.  All data must be interpreted.  And much of the debate between Intelligent Design proponents (like Dr. Meyer) and the Darwinists (like Oxford Professor Richard Dawkins) is not a debate over evidence—everyone is looking at the same evidence.  It’s a debate over philosophy.   It’s a debate over what causes will be considered possible before we look at the evidence.

Scientists look for causes, and logically, there are only two possible types of causes—intelligent causes or non-intelligent causes (i.e. natural causes).   A natural cause can explain a geologic wonder like the Grand Canyon, but only an intelligent cause can explain a geologic wonder like the faces of the presidents on Mount Rushmore.  Likewise, natural laws can explain why ink adheres to the paper in Dr. Meyer’s book, but only an intelligent cause can explain the information in that book (i.e. Dr. Meyer!).

How does this apply to the question of the origin of life?  Long after Darwin, we discovered that “simple” single-celled life is comprised of massive volumes of DNA information called specified complexity—in everyday terms, a complicated software program or a really long message.  Richard Dawkins admits that the information content of the “unjustly called ‘primitive’ amoeba” would fill 1,000 volumes of an encyclopedia!

What’s the cause of this?  Here’s where the philosophy comes in.  Dr. Meyer is open to both types of causes.  Richard Dawkins is not.  Dr. Meyer’s book explains why natural forces do not appear to have the capacity to do the job, only intelligence does.  However, Dawkins and his Darwinist cohorts philosophically rule out intelligent causes before they look at the evidence.  So no matter how much the evidence they discover points to intelligence (as a long message surely does), they will always conclude it had to be some kind of natural cause.   In other words, their conclusion is the result of their philosophical presupposition.

While Dawkins has no viable natural explanation for life or the message contained therein, he says he knows it cannot be intelligence.  That philosophical presupposition leads to what appears to be an unbelievable conclusion:  To believe that 1,000 volumes of an encyclopedia resulted from blind natural forces is like believing that the Library of Congress resulted from an explosion in a printing shop.  I don’t have enough faith to believe that.

“This is a ‘God of the gaps’ argument!”  Dawkins might protest.  No it isn’t.  We don’t just lack a natural explanation for “simple” life—1,000 encyclopedias worth of information is positive empirically verifiable evidence for an intelligence cause.  Consider the cause of the book The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, for example.  It’s not merely that we lack a natural explanation for the book (of course we know that the laws of ink and paper couldn’t have written the book).  It’s also the fact that we know that messages only come from minds.   Therefore, we rightly posit an intelligent author, not a blind natural process.

Why is it so hard for Dawkins and other Darwinists to see this?  Maybe they refuse to see it.  Maybe, like global warming “scientists,” they have their own political or moral reasons for denying the obvious.  Or maybe they’ve never realized that you cannot do science without philosophy.  As Einstein said, “The man of science is a poor philosopher.”   And poor philosophers of science may often arrive at false scientific conclusions.  That’s because science doesn’t say anything—scientists do.

This column appeared on Townhall.com on November 25.

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Odd Man In: Profile of Conservative Professor Mike Adams

World Magazine is running a profile of my friend, and atheist turned Christian, Dr. Mike Adams (click here).   Mike has successfully sued to invalidate speech codes (installed by liberals) at several American Universities. He’s an engaging speaker, writer and teacher.

If you understand satire and sarcasm, you’ll enjoy his wildly-popular columns at Townhall.com.   If you don’t get that kind of thing, you might not want to infuriate yourself.  If you read and disagree with Mike, I encourage you to join the anti-fan club he started on Facebook called I Hate Mike Adams.

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Abortion and Body Parts: A Personal Account

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Amy Hall of Stand to Reason wrote this post on the STR blog a few days ago.  It’s a chilling and personal account of what an abortion doctor– Lisa Harris– experienced as she performed second trimester abortions, and the moral questions that she could not avoid; namely, how can I kill an unborn baby in one room of the hospital and then work to save another of the same age in another room?  This account literally makes me queasy.

Here is most of Amy’s post (The entire post can be found here: Abortion and the Malleable Conscience):

An article posted on The Abortioneers [see the cached page here while you can], a pro-choice blog, is an interesting, inside look at the inner conflict often experienced by second trimester abortion providers, who use “large forceps with destructive teeth to remove the fetus, generally in parts.”

Since many abortion providers undergo “serious emotional reactions” after aborting a second trimester fetus and thereafter choose to limit their own services to the first trimester, the author of the article, Lisa Harris, is trying to promote more open discussion by providers about the “physiological symptoms, sleep disturbances (including disturbing dreams), effects on interpersonal relationships and moral anguish” that they experience.  Her hope is that when these reactions are squarely faced, a way of viewing them and dealing with them will be developed that will make it easier for abortion providers to continue with their work, creating a stronger pro-choice movement.

Harris describes her own experience when aborting an 18-week-old fetus while she was also 18 weeks pregnant:

As I reviewed her chart I realised that I was more interested than usual in seeing the fetal parts when I was done, since they would so closely resemble those of my own fetus. I went about doing the procedure as usual…. I used electrical suction to remove the amniotic fluid, picked up my forceps and began to remove the fetus in parts, as I always did. I felt lucky that this one was already in the breech position – it would make grasping small parts (legs and arms) a little easier. With my first pass of the forceps, I grasped an extremity and began to pull it down. I could see a small foot hanging from the teeth of my forceps. With a quick tug, I separated the leg. Precisely at that moment, I felt a kick – a fluttery “thump, thump” in my own uterus. It was one of the first times I felt fetal movement. There was a leg and foot in my forceps, and a “thump, thump” in my abdomen. Instantly, tears were streaming from my eyes – without me – meaning my conscious brain – even being aware of what was going on. I felt as if my response had come entirely from my body, bypassing my usual cognitive processing completely. A message seemed to travel from my hand and my uterus to my tear ducts. It was an overwhelming feeling – a brutally visceral response – heartfelt and unmediated by my training or my feminist pro-choice politics. It was one of the more raw moments in my life.

Harris acknowledges that while the moral status of a fetus is under debate, “it is disingenuous to argue that removing a fetus from a uterus is no different from removing a fibroid.” She also fully recognizes the strangely contradictory approaches doctors take toward fetuses of the exact same age:

As a third-year resident I spent many days in our hospital abortion clinic. The last patient I saw one day was 23 weeks pregnant. I performed an uncomplicated D&E procedure. Dutifully, I went through the task of reassembling the fetal parts in the metal tray. It is an odd ritual that abortion providers perform – required as a clinical safety measure to ensure that nothing is left behind in the uterus to cause a complication – but it also permits us in an odd way to pay respect to the fetus (feelings of awe are not uncommon when looking at miniature fingers and fingernails, heart, intestines, kidneys, adrenal glands), even as we simultaneously have complete disregard for it. Then I rushed upstairs to take overnight call on labour and delivery. The first patient that came in was prematurely delivering at 23–24 weeks. As her exact gestational age was in question, the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) team resuscitated the premature newborn and brought it to the NICU. Later, along with the distraught parents, I watched the neonate on the ventilator. I thought to myself how bizarre it was that I could have legally dismembered this fetus-now-newborn if it were inside its mother’s uterus – but that the same kind of violence against it now would be illegal, and unspeakable.

Harris distrusts her intuitive reaction to not only the abortions, but to the contradictions, and she goes on to remind us that though it struck her at the moment as bizarre, the reality was that the “difference between the [two fetuses] was, crucially, its location inside or outside of the woman’s body, and most importantly, her hopes and wishes for that fetus/baby.”

It is utterly amazing to me that a person could see some of these things so clearly, could be informed so strongly by her own moral intuition, could grasp the contradictions, and yet could have a response that seeks to find a way to overcome the “visual and visceral ways in which first and second trimester abortions are different,” rather than to reflect logically on what these things might mean and ask the question, How on earth could one person’s “hopes and wishes” magically transform “unspeakable violence” against another person into something acceptable that one ought to work hard to encourage?

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Big Apologetics Conference Coming Soon

Join me along with Chuck Colson, William Lane Craig, Greg Koukl, Hank Hanegraaff, Gary Habermas, Alex McFarland, as well as many others in Charlotte, NC on November 13-14 for the nation’s largest apologetics conference. Click here for details.

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The American University: Lockstep Liberalism

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Surveys show that American universities are more likely to demand lock-step conformity to liberalism and secular humanism rather than championing the free exchange of ideas. In a column posted at AmericanThinker.com, recently-retired professor Ron Lipsman offers his first-hand observations:

“The overwhelmingly liberal atmosphere on campus is well known. In the one place in society at which there should be diversity of thought, exploration of conflicting ideas and a propensity to challenge conventional wisdom, we have instead a mind-numbing conformity of opinion and a complete unwillingness to entertain any thought or idea that deviates from the accepted truth. That conformity encompasses:

  • The legitimacy of virtually any program that promotes the interests of minority and female faculty, staff and students, even if the program is blatantly racist or sexist — justified by a belief that America’s past unjust treatment of blacks, American Indians and Japanese-Americans, and its unfair treatment of women render such discrimination necessary and lawful.
  • A multicultural mentality, which preaches that America’s Eurocentric, white, Christian heritage is responsible for colonialism, imperialism, racism and sexism, and that its replacement by a culture that “celebrates diversity” will transform the US into a more just and humane society.
  • A distrust of free markets and democratic capitalism, and its severe limitation in favor of a centralized, government-controlled economy that will redistribute the wealth of America more fairly.
  • A denigration of religious belief and its replacement by the “worship” of secular humanism, with mindless environmentalism occupying a central place in the new religion.

. . . I believe the liberal brainwash has been so effective on campus — and in the national educational system in general — that many in the liberal majority can’t even fathom that there is anyone who doubts the legitimacy of their point of view.

My final observation is the following. The liberal hegemony exists in many quarters of the country beside academia — e.g., the mainstream media, major foundations, law schools and the trail lawyers they produce, public school teachers, the Democratic Party, even big corporations. But none of these can maintain the atmosphere as effortlessly as campus profs and administrators. Politicians encounter opposition from their constituents; the media from its readers, listeners and viewers; trail lawyers from their clients; and corporations from their stockholders and consumers. But the educational establishment-both higher and lower-encounters little resistance. The students are ignorant, the parents are cowed, and Boards of Regents are cowardly. The ivory tower is alive and well in America and the intellectual product it presents is completely one-sided. What a tragedy for our nation and especially for its youth.”

The need for CrossExamined college events has never been greater.

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Bart Ehrman’s "Misquoting Jesus"

Some have come to doubt the reliability of the New Testament documents by reading Bart Ehrman’s Misquoting Jesus.  But after reading Dr. Thomas Howe’s response to that popular book, if you’re fair minded you’re more likely to doubt the reliability of Misquoting Jesus.  You can download Dr. Howe’s detailed response here.

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Matthew’s "Raised Saints"

Some question why the dead “saints” who were “raised” after Christ’s resurrection are mentioned in Matthew (Mt. 27:52) but not anywhere else. This is a fair question. After all, if this really happened, why didn’t the other gospels mention it?

When addressing this question, we must keep in mind that each saint’s body was not resurrected into a glorified, imperishable state as was Jesus’s body. After Christ’s resurrection (as Matthew puts it), the bodies of the saints were raised. It seems that they were resuscitated into their previous mortal bodies, which would mean they would die again. In other words, the “saints” would have looked like normal people–like Lazarus, so only family members and their closest friends would know about this, if those friends and families were still alive at the time. We don’t know how many, if any, were still alive. If they weren’t still alive, probably few other people would know about this. If some friends and families were still alive, the word would have spread among some in Jerusalem about these saints being raised, but not to the extent of the resurrection of Christ (a public figure who also performed miracles). So perhaps only Matthew of the four writers knew about this.

But if the others did know about it, why didn’t they include it? Perhaps because each gospel writer appears to have a different audience in mind, and all authors must select what they choose to include and exclude. The main focus of each gospel writer was to report the historical facts about Jesus to their different audiences, not to report on everything significant that may have happened (indeed, it would be impossible to do so as John asserts at the end of his gospel). Amazingly, the gospel writers seem so concerned with sticking to just the historical facts that they hardly even mention the theological implications of Christ’s resurrection; only John briefly notes its impact on individual salvation (John 20:31). So including the saints event (if they knew about it), may not have served their purposes with their intended audiences.

However, it may have helped Matthew accomplish his purpose. How so?

Matthew is the gospel written to the Jews. The theme of Matthew is that Jesus is the true Israel– He does what Israel failed to do. His resurrection is what makes the ultimate resurrection predicted in the Old Testament possible (a resurrection is predicted in Daniel 12:2 and Ezekiel 37:12b-13). Matthew mentioning these saints being raised confirms his main point– that Jesus accomplished what Israel could not. Because of His perfect life, the resurrection is guaranteed and the barrier between God and man due to sin has been torn down signified by the veil in the temple being torn in the verses just preceding it. So while it didn’t fit the purposes of the other gospel writers, Matthew briefly mentioned the saints being raised because of its theological significance to his Jewish audience.

Another possibility is that the resurrection of the saints was not literal, but symbolic. Dr. Michael Licona will be advancing this theory in a forthcoming article called “The Saints Go Marching in” (of which I have a copy). Citing many examples, Licona points out that when writing about the death of an emperor, ancient Jewish and Roman authors frequently used phenomenological language in a symbolic manner. Writing to his Jewish audience, Matthew may have done the same.

But does that mean Christ’s resurrection could also be symbolic? Licona answers no. He writes:

There is no indication that the early Christians interpreted Jesus’ resurrection in a metaphorical or poetic sense to the exclusion of it being a literal event that had occurred to his corpse. Indeed, that a literal bodily resurrection was the primary intended interpretation seems clear. Paul asserted that Christian faith is worthless if Jesus had not been raised (1 Cor. 15:17). It is difficult to imagine Paul informing Caiaphas that, although he had believed it had been God’s will for him to hunt down Christians and destroy the Church, he was now more strongly compelled by their metaphor of Jesus’ resurrection and would jeopardize his eternal soul by abandoning the Judaism to which he had clung in order to become a Christian. Moreover, if Jesus’ resurrection was meant to be interpreted as a poetic metaphor, why is it that no known Christian opponent criticized the early Christians or their opponents for misunderstanding poetry as history? Why was there no known correction from any of the early Christian leaders to this effect? The early opponents proposed that Jesus survived death, his body was stolen, the witnesses were unreliable, and that the disciples hallucinated. These are all answers to claims of a literal bodily resurrection.

It also seems unlikely that the early Christian martyrs would die for a metaphor. Moreover, John’s gospel talks of feeling literal wounds (John 20:27), and Luke states explicitly that the body of Jesus was made of “flesh and bones” (Luke 24:39).

What about the skeptical view that Matthew meant it to be literal, but it never really happened? That would certainly defeat biblical inerrancy, but it would not defeat the evidence for the resurrection of Christ. There are too many early, eyewitness sources that testify of it, and too much converging circumstantial evidence (prophecy, embarrassing details, martyrs, establishment of the church, etc.) that confirm it. (For details see I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist.)

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A Beautiful Mind

I’m amazed by this man’s ability. How did such a mind arise: from matter or a greater mind? In fact, how did any mind arise?

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Atheist vs. Theist Debates Online

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I think that atheists and theists can agree on at least one thing– this site, assembled by atheists, is a valuable resource for those interested in atheist vs. theist debates.  Over 400 debates are listed there!  Many of them can be viewed or heard on line.

For those who are serious about investigating atheism vs. theism further, I have one word of caution:  don’t rely on debates to give you the whole truth.  Most debates provide only 20 minutes for each debater to make his/her case, and rhetorical skills can sometimes obscure the truth.  If you are seriously looking for truth, watch the debates and then read the books of the debaters.  You’ll learn a lot more.

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