Month: November 2016

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“Ego-centric” (Geocentrism)

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Of the many anti-science ideas afloat today, perhaps the most egomaniacal is the geocentric one, which requires a belief that the universe literally revolves around you.  

To show this is the incentive for holding such a position, I offer this quote from scipturecatholic.com: “If the earth is indeed the center, then God is trying to tell us that we are special to him. We are unique.”

The website then dismisses contrary evidence with this straw man: “This is why the atheists and agnostics want so badly to disprove geocentrism, because if they can do that, they can argue that there is no God. They want to argue that there is no God because they don’t want to be accountable to him.”

Of course, one could argue that there is no god without bringing up geocentrism, just like one could argue for helicocentrism without asserting it proves there is no god. So without addressing the existence of any deities, we will examine the substantial proof of helicocentrism.

First, the other view. The egotism addressed earlier is, of course, unrelated to whether the sun and its planets orbit Earth, but this position requires suspending what we know about astronomy and physics. Almost all adherents are a subset of Catholics, for whom the Bible and papal dictates are preferable to observation, research, and confirmation. A tiny number of Orthodox Jews and even fewer Muslims also embrace the cause.

I occasionally see digs from fundamentalists that scientists (especially Darwin) are held in such high regard by the pro-science crowd that they are secular saints whose dogma must never be questioned. In truth, Darwin’s ideas have been added to, subtracted from, and refined as more evidence has been gathered since On the  Origin of Species was published. That’s how science works and the development of the heliocentric model is an excellent example of this.

While Ptolemy considered the universe geocentric, he deduced that astronomical bodies were moving, and he came up with the idea of planets being in motion around Earth. In order to account for Mars’ seeming retrograde motion, his model incorporated the Red Planet’s trajectory as having a large circle and a second smaller circle on which it moved.  

About 1,400 years later, Copernicus suggested a heliocentric model where Earth is one of several planets circling about the sun. This accounted for retrograde motion, but was inconsistent with the observed position of the planets. Kepler solved that problem when he hypothesized that planets have an elliptical orbit, and subsequent observations supported this.

The invention of the telescope allowed Galileo to collect strong evidence of helicocentrism, such as noticing that Jovian moons were orbiting Jupiter rather than Earth. Newton further solidified the idea by developing a model for gravity that included planets with elliptical orbits.

This systematic, fact-based approach is far more admirable than the stance of groups such as Catholic Apologists International, whose leader, Robert Sungenis, wrote, “The geocentric cosmological view of the universe is in accordance with the literal, infallible, and inspired Word of God which, according to Pope Leo XIII, is inerrant in all matters.”

A literal reading would also require denying the existence of earthquakes, as Psalm 105:5 reads, “Thou didst set the earth on its foundations, so that it should never be shaken.”

I am unconcerned with a man’s faith, but when he tries to cram into the scientific arena, I respond with counterproofs.

Proofs such as Venusian phases. Venus and the sun could not both orbit Earth and move farther away from each other. Yet Venus appears lighter or darker (and larger or smaller) depending on its phase. In the heliocentric model Venus is largest when it’s closest to Earth and smallest when it’s on the other side of the Sun, and this is consistent with what astronomers observe.  

Let’s continue the stroll through our galactic neighborhood and hit Neptune. If all astronomical bodies were rotating around Earth, then everything more than 2.5 billion miles away would need to exceed warp speed to complete its orbit within 24 hours. The fact that the eighth planet is unable to do so is a fatal blow to geocentrism. Meanwhile, Jupiter and Saturn would need to approach the speed of light to complete a daily orbit, meaning they would be demonstrating relativistic length contraction. Their observed shape would resemble the side of a quarter rather than the coin when looking at George Washington’s profile.

Then there is the Coriolis Effect, which affects satellites, missiles, and long range artillery shells. When the Germans attacked Paris from 75 miles away in World War I, they took the Coriolis Effect into account. This effect exists only because we are on a rotating planet. Someone looking at Earth from space would see objects tending to move in straight lines but being pulled into curving paths by Earth’s gravity.

Also, If Earth moves, the stars should appear to shift in position. A man identified online only as Mr. Emmanuel earned my great sympathy by debating Sungenis, and told him, “Just as a person walking into the rain sees raindrops hitting at a slant, moving with respect to starlight causes the starlight to appear to come at an angle to its true path. If light starts from 300,000 kilometers away, it will take one second to reach Earth. In one second, Earth moves 30 kilometers in its orbit. So the starlight will hit 30 kilometers from its original aiming point.” In what passed for Sungenis’ retort, he chirped, “You’re just parroting someone else without understanding what is being said.” Even if it was parroted and not understood, that wouldn’t impact it being true.

Emmanuel also noted that geocentrism violates the laws of physics. There are no known cases of massive objects circling around lighter ones. The conservation of momentum requires that when one object circles another, the center of mass of that system must remain fixed. When one object is much larger than the other, like the earth and moon or the sun and earth, the center of mass is within the larger object.

It won’t take long to present the other side because there really isn’t one. Unlike Youth Earth Creationists, Flat Earthers, and moon landing deniers, geocentrists seldom mess with sprinkling in a calculus term or attempting to confuse visitors with winding essays. They mostly limits themselves to quoting Bible verses and attacking nonbelievers. For instance, the Kolbe Center’s main plank is that helicocentrism is a moral failing. It never explains why, and even if Earth whirling around its star were somehow ethically bankrupt, that would have no bearing on whether it’s happening.

Similarly, fixedearth.com’s contributions to astronomy are summed up in this unsubstantiated assertion/ad hominem: “Earth is not rotating nor is it going around the sun. The universe is not one ten-trillionth the size we are told. The Bible teaches that Earth is stationary and immovable at the center of a small universe, with the sun, moon, and stars going around it every day. Today’s cosmology fulfills an anti-Bible religious plan disguised as science.”

It also claims that true science supports biblical teaching. So if something seems to support the Bible, they consider it science, neatly completing this affirming the consequent fallacy. Fixedearth.com also throws in doses of anti-Semitism and manages to blame evolution for obesity, UFOs, and Madonna.

There are many more examples but they’re all the same. Sungenis will infrequently throw some mathematics into his argument, but mostly answers science with scripture, a personal attack, or both. When Emmanuel outlined arguments such as those addressed here, and cited astronomers as his sources, Sungeies, responded with, “It’s amazing to me how you can follow these atheists. If I were you, I would take a good hard look into my soul and find out where my allegiances really are.”

Like our planet does to the sun, geocentrists keep going round and round.

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“A horse is a tapir, of course” (Mormon anthropology)

tapir

The American Family Association’s resident lunatic, Bryan Fisher, has speculated that the Church of Latter-Day Saints should be considered the fourth Abrahamic religion, along with Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

I continually stress that an argument is what must be addressed and never the person. Dealing with the likes of Fisher is an excellent opportunity to test that principle. His views are, to be charitable, distinctive. He has argued that the United States is a Christian theocracy because, while the Constitution mentions no gods and forbids establishing an religion, the document was signed using the phrase “In the Year of our Lord.” He has called for the execution of whales and has argued that shaking iPod earbuds in their box disproves evolution. Less humorously, he has defended the genocide perpetrated against Native Americans since Christians needed the land and resources. 

But to do proper critical thinking, we must avoid poisoning the well (and other logical fallacies), and must look at each stance a person takes independent of their other views. And his take on Mormons is that their beliefs are so iconoclastic that they should not be called Christians. Fisher considers it blasphemous to believe that a man can become a god, that virtually no one besides Judas and the demons will go to Hell, and that there is a Mrs. God (sorry for the generic title, I’m not terribly well-versed in Mormon female deities lexicon).

I, however, consider Mormons to be Christians. They believe in the deity of Jesus, in the miracles attributed to him, in the resurrection, and in Biblical authority. At the same time, I think Mormons can be said to be a distinctive brand of Christianity, holding many beliefs not shared by any other Christian sect or denomination.  

Most of their views are untestable. There are many planets out there and there’s no way to determine if one is Kolob. Magic underwear could be tested for its alleged protective properites, but until someone produces it, that won’t happen.

But we are able to determine the Book of Mormon’s accuracy when when it tells of Israeli expatriate tribes that lived in the Americans from about 3100 BCE to 400 CE. These tribes – the Nephites and Lamantites – are now said to be the ancestors of the Incans, Mayans, and Aztecs, though this was shoehorned in about a century after Joseph Smith announced he had received the golden tablets. It was axiomatic at the time that the tribes and their descendants were white.

Even today, it might make Latter-Day Saints feel better to think the whites made it here first, but there is no evidence for that or anything else the Book of Mormon claims about ancient America. One racist rationalization is that God cursed the Nephites and Lamanites by darkening their skin. However, all DNA evidence from Native American tribes indicate they arrived from Asia via the Bearing Strait and not from the vicinity of Jerusalem.

Native American populations are in one of four main branches of the human genealogical tree and are characterized by their Y chromosome markers and mitochondrial DNA, which correspond to known early migrations from eastern Asia. These points are unanimous among biological anthropologists not employed by BYU. 

The website fairmormon.com defends its holey holy book against biology, archeology, anthropology, and logic. It embraces little science other than sometimes cherry picking an outlier that they asset lends credence to their position. It occasionally sprinkles in science terms to make it sound legitimate, but they are not testing their claims for falsifiability or reproducibility and never submit them for peer review.

They also rely on negative evidence, where the fact that we can’t disprove their assertion is counted as a point for their side. For example, the Book of Mormon claims that steel was used by Nephite neophytes. With no anthropological evidence to support this, fairmormon.com speculates that a steel-like substance may have been able to be produced by hammering pig-iron. And maybe Walt Disney stole his characters from the Jew next door, then locked the creator away for 40 years. We can dream up any scenario we like, but should only assert as true what we can back up with facts.  And all the evidence shows that many technologies and species described in the Book of Mormon were introduced to the continent in modern times. Moreover, the evidence also shows that all Native Americans are descended from Asian migrations many thousands of years before the Book of Mormon has Jesus stopping by what is today Arrowhead Stadium.

The Aztec, Incan, and Mayan hypothesis requires ignoring the total lack of evidence regarding these peoples being of Israeli origin or that they worshiped the Abrahamic god. There is also no evidence they had access to many of the animals, food, plants, technologies, and implements Smith had them using.

Smith’s former golden plates tell of a Mesoamerican menagerie of horses, elephants, cattle, goats, swine, deer, and sheep, none of which were around during the time period specified. Some had been galloping and stomping around millennium before that, but the fossil records showed they had gone extinct around 10,000 BCE, and only returned when Europeans reintroduced them beginning in the 15th Century.

Besides creative anthropology, Mormons also show dexterity at linguistic contortions. As one example, they claim the horses mentioned in the Book of Mormon were actually tapirs. They attempt similar tricks with any animal mentioned in the Book of Mormon that is not confirmed by anthropology and biology. This is special pleading, as apologists insist on absolute literalism except when an item needs to be changed into a similar beast/plant/tool in order to make the overall picture fit. This strategy is only used when evidence fails to back their scripture. For instance, if Smith references a buffalo, they never argue he really meant deer.

As to what these animals and their owners were eating and wearing, that too is anachronistic. Wheat and silk was introduced to America by Europeans, yet Smith writes of barley and silken clothing.

Onto the modes of transportation. Evidence of wheeled vehicles has not been found in Mesoamerica, nor would it have even been suitable in most of the land, yet the Book of Mormon contains chariot accounts. 

Also, steel are iron are mentioned several times, yet no evidence has been produced of iron being hardened to produce steel. Primitive metallurgy existed in South America, but metal use was limited to reasons of adornment.

Finally, Smith portrays the Nephites as writing a language with Israeli and Egyptian roots even though no known ancient American people were writing anything similar to hieroglyphic Hebrew.

There are plenty of fine books about imaginary people, fantastic creatures, and advanced civilizations. I suggest grabbing some Asimov, Verne, or Clarke instead. You’ll get a more compelling plot, better developed characters, and you won’t be doubly criticized for downing a Coke and whiskey.

 

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“Feeling board” (Ouija)

ouija

Many persons consider the Ouija Board to be harmless fun, but I disagree. It’s really not much fun.

In my youth, I never really got the thrill of sitting around asking questions of something that couldn’t answer. At least the Magic 8-ball offered a response. I was screwing around with the board once, which showed I had some naivete that it might work. But then I figured if a spirit really knew the answers it could move the planchette by itself. And if it were unable to move a light object a few inches, it wasn’t a very powerful entity.

Ouija sessions can be solo, but are usually done in groups, with everyone placing their hands gingerly on the teardrop-shaped planchette, which itself rests on a board. Imprinted on the board is the alphabet, along with  “yes,” “no” and “goodbye,” presumably so the spirit can tell us when he’s tired of fielding candlelit queries about deceased aunts and the cute new boy in algebra class.

The board was originally a fraudulent spiritualist tool in the 19th Century, then enjoyed a 1960s and 1970s heyday as a bonding experience for sleepover tweens. But among those for whom everything is either sacred or sinister, the boards helped summon demons or angry ghosts.

There is indeed an invisible force behind the gliding planchette and it’s an unconscious, involuntary movement called the ideomotor effect. In motor behavior, there are two parts of brain activity. The first drives motor activity, while the second is the conscious registration of that activity. The ideomotor effect occurs when this registration is skipped, and while neurologists are uncertain of the mechanisms behind it, we know it exists for reasons we’ll address shortly. Instances of the effect were occurring as early as the Fourth Century when messages were divined in held pendulums, and the effect is also the force behind dowsing and facilitated communication.

In a Vox article, Aja Romano wrote, “Paradoxically, the less control you think you have, the more control your subconscious mind is actually exerting. The planchette makes it easier to subconsciously control your muscle movements, because it focuses and directs them even while you believe you aren’t in control of them. The appeal of the ideomotor effect is that you actually may be communicating with something you can’t typically access — your own subconscious — and that the experience can feel like communicating with something paranormal.”

Whenever participants are blindfolded, they are no longer able to produce discernible answers. This means that they were either in charge of the planchette all along or that the spirit is now speaking in its unknown language. In either case, the board is useless for deducing a message from another realm. In some of the experiments, the board is stealthily reversed when the subjects are blindfolded and the planchette is in invariably moved to where the letters had previously been.

Ouija boards were derived from Talking Boards, which assumed a variety of forms and were sold by those preying on the grieving following the Civil War. The boards were touted as a device to communicate with dead relatives and friends, and the various incarnations were consolidated into the Ouija Board and planchette, which were patented in 1890.

In a rare early 20th Century collaboration between Catholics and evangelicals, both condemned the device as demonic, and that reputation still largely holds in these communities.

Then there are those who believe in the board, but who think it’s excellent, not evil. For these types, ad hoc reasoning is used to dismiss the evidence that participants are providing the planchette power. When 1960s studies suggested that the ideomotor effect was behind it all, believers insisted the effect was a manifestation of ESP. And I found one guy online who explained the blindfolded problem by suggesting that the spirit must be able to see through the eyes of its conduits. These seem shaky rationalizations at best, but wanted to consult my go-to source on such matters and was told, “Reply hazy, try again.”

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“Con and Quartered” (Ghost hunt)

ghostjail
I prefer when possible to immerse myself in the subject of my posts, so I was disappointed to be out of town when a local paranormal group offered the chance to spend the night in a house brimming with ghosts, ghouls, and goblins.
For one thing, the cost was $20, which is the best bang for your disembodied spirits buck. Similar evenings run $150 or more in other locales. Plus, I’ve never been able to experience one of these first hand, nor are the hosts used to having the questioning within their midst. It could have made for an interesting mix.
 
It was set for two four-hour blocks, beginning at dusk. These are always held in the dark, even though there is no reason to think spirits of the deceased are more active at these times. The times are chosen to create more mood and drama, which is fine if it’s being presented as entertainment, such as with campfire stories. I love a good ghost tale and have a huge collection of black and white monster movies and watching these during the daytime is mostly a waste. With this ghost hunt, though, the promoters were suggesting the sinister spirits were real.
 
The locale also plays on stereotypes, as the evening is spent in a four-story, 19th Century mansion. Along with castles, huge antique homes are the favored locales for ghosts, who always seem to bypass split-level ranch homes, subdivisions, and Dillard’s.
 
Attendees were promised they “will learn how to use equipment as well as how to review audio and visual. We will have our 16 camera systems hooked up as well as some other gadgets and gizmos.” Presumably some nitnoids and doohickeys as well. The hosts were none too specific about what these are, but none of them are manufactured for the purpose of capturing Casper and less-friendly apparitions. For that matter, no ghost hunter ever offers many specifics as to how their equipment works to find their prey, or how we can know the results are indicating a poltergeist presence.
 
The evening took place on Rock Island Arsenal’s Quarters One, which is the second largest federal residence behind White House, and which contains 51 rooms of potential ghostly malevolence. The hunt’s promotional literature lists three military officers who died there. It refrains from explicitly saying their spirits roam the halls, but it does follow that list by announcing, “There are SEVERAL claims of activity.” This is the one part I’m inclined to believe, as I have no doubt many persons think something spooky happened. It’s the confirmation of those claims that I find lacking.
 

Claims such as this: “There is a man in the basement who constantly calls one of our investigators the B-word. He frequently uses fowl language.” I guess they mean he’s either profane or howls like an owl. In truth, it probably does sound more ornithological than human. Alleged ghost voices are usually the result of electronic interference, wind, whistling pipes, cracks, and floors settling, and it requires conditioning, expectation, and suggestion to turn these sources into a misogynistic missive from the netherworld.

Other assertions are that a maintenance man who hung himself lurks about Quarters One, and that there are unexplained opening and closing of doors, pacing of floors, flashlights flickering, doors locking, men chatting, furniture moving, shadows darting, and children leaving footprints in the dust. This is proof of haunting as long as your criteria is unverified evidence instead of data collected under controlled conditions and that is subject to falsification and replication, and which uses defined terms.

The hosts noted that “Weird EMF spikes can be found in certain areas on 2nd floor.” This is probably true, and there are many reasons beyond ghosts that can explain with. The mansion rests on the banks of the Mississippi River, where ships and their electronic devices incessantly pass. EMF sounds that resemble speech are the result of flaws in the equipment and those handling the equipment and was addressed  in an earlier post.

Additional claims include:

“Visitors experience hot and cold spots.” This is very common for huge homes that have seen their sesquicentennial.

“Mists have been photographed.” None that cannot be explained using the terminology of photography. Shots taken in dark by amateurs will likely feature these flaws.

These items all highlight the key problem with ghost hunts, which is that every feature that seems out of place is inferred to be poltergeists. This in an instance of Tooth Fairy Science and magical thinking, plus it usually requires a great deal of imagination and desire to reach these conclusions.

I would have loved to have experienced it first hand to see what tricks were being used and to try and determine if those putting on the production believed it or were just selling it. I would have let my fellow customers have their fun and would not have pissed on anyone’s poltergeist parade. But I would have engaged the hunters privately and would have been most curious about what they would do with a ghost if they ever caught one. 

Ghost hunting is not in the same category as the anti-vaccine movement that inflicts newborns with Whooping Cough. It is not equivalent to activists who convinced two African governments to deny genetically modified food to famine victims. Nor are the hunters comparable to conspiracy theorists who torment victim’s families.

Rather, ghost hunters share terrain with proponents of a Flat Earth and ESP, in that they mostly are only impacting themselves. Still, they promote unproven ideas, encourage post hoc reasoning instead of critical thinking, and assume anecdotes are of more value than the Scientific Method. It is sad to see 21st Century adults gobbling this up and I would have liked the chance to confront it. My schedule did not allow for this, but that’s OK.  The Quad Cities Psychic and Paranormal fair is next week.