The inevitable injustice of unreality and Al Mohler’s ongoing crisis of faith

October 25, 2011 By Fred Clark 34 Comments

Google Reader brings me a serendipitous, or perhaps providential, sequence of articles.

First up is Douglas Starr’s Discovery article, “Spark of Truth: Can Science Bring Justice to Arson Trials?”

At laboratories throughout the United States — some large enough to contain a three-story house — researchers have been lighting rooms and houses on fire and analyzing the results with the kind of scientific scrutiny that has upended several deeply entrenched misconceptions about how fires behave. The upheaval is more than academic. For generations, arson inspectors have used outmoded theories to help indict and incarcerate many suspects. But as new science is brought to bear on old cases, it is becoming clear that over the past several decades, dozens, perhaps hundreds, of people have been convicted of arson based on scant research and misguided beliefs. Many of those people are still in jail, hoping that someone will take up their cause.

“A lot of bad science has been applied to arson investigation,” says John Lentini, a renowned fire expert who has given exculpatory testimony in at least 40 arson cases since 2000. His most recent case, now under review, involves a Massachusetts man convicted of arson by Molotov cocktail, even though not a single glass fragment from the supposed bottle bomb was found at the scene.

“I shudder to think how many wrongful convictions there are,” says Richard Roby, president and technical director of Combustion Science and Engineering, a fire-
protection engineering firm based in Columbia, Maryland. Roby has testified for several men charged with arson. One, named Michael Ledford, could not have been 
at the scene when the fire that killed his son was allegedly set, according to Roby’s calculations, yet he is now serving a 50-year sentence. “It’s amazing to think how long it takes for basic science to be accepted,” Roby says. “I lose sleep over this every week.”

The stories of injustice and wrongful conviction are horrendous. But the new science is only slowly gaining a hearing due to how deeply entrenched the old, bad science “based on scant research and misguided beliefs” remains and how invested in it so many people still are. Their mistaken folklore of arson investigation is counter-factual and scientifically indefensible, but it has become an essential part of their identity, so they’re unwilling to abandon it even when it has been proven not to be true.

Next up in my reader is Al Mohler’s latest variation on his one and only theme. This time he’s denouncing Karl Giberson for being a physicist and Randall J. Stephens for being a historian:

They level their attack on figures like James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, and Ken Ham, founder of the Answers in Genesis ministry. Their main accusation is that these leaders, along with others, simply embarrass evangelicalism before the watching world by refusing to accept what Giberson and Stephens call “secular knowledge.” …

That’s an odd formulation: “what Giberson and Stephens call ‘secular knowledge.’” What else would you call it? It isn’t sectarian knowledge.

The atomic number of radium is 88. That’s true whether you’re a Southern Baptist, like Al Mohler, or a Presbyterian, Hindu, Mormon, atheist or Jew. It’s a fact, knowledge. And that knowledge is secular and wholly independent from and indifferent to the sectarian loyalties or perspectives of any given observer.

Mohler’s standard shtick is to cast himself as the righteous defender of “absolute truth” while those he disagrees with he always accuses of abandoning that truth. That’s once again the kicker for this column, in which he faux-laments the sorry state of Giberson and Stephens, shedding a smarmy tear over “the consequences of the evangelical surrender of truth.”

But the whole premise of Mohler’s article — not just this one, but the standard template of everything he writes — is a denial that there exists “what Giberson and Stephens call ‘secular knowledge.’” For Mohler, there is only sectarian truth.

Mohler condemns Giberson for writing, “I am happy to concede that science does indeed trump religious truth about the natural world.” That, Mohler says, is a rejection of the Bible. “Giberson has already made his view of the Bible clear,” Mohler sneers, “It is simply ‘trumped’ by science when describing the natural world.”

Mohler’s trademark combination of ignorance and condescension can be grating, but he’s generally less irksome than most of the culture warriors of the religious right because he’s not primarily interested in partisan politicking. He’s primarily interested in defending the faith.

And by “defending the faith” I mean defending his faith, which is a fragile construct he has come to believe requires the affirmation of several extrabiblical claims that have been thoroughly and devastatingly refuted by “secular knowledge.” Specifically, Mohler believes that if evolution is true then the Bible is a lie and there is no God, Christ is not risen, we are still dead in our sins and we are of all people most to be pitied.

And unfortunately for Mohler, evolution is, in fact, true.

So what we find in this column is what we find in nearly every Al Mohler column — him clinging white-knuckled to religious “truth” that he conflates with the Bible while shouting his refusal to accept nonsectarian truths that stubbornly refuse to care what he thinks.

While that gives me a measure of sympathy for Mohler and his perpetual crisis of faith, I also think it means he should never be allowed to serve on a jury in a case where someone stands accused of arson. Justice requires that verdicts be based on facts and evidence, on what Mohler would call, pejoratively, “secular knowledge.” For those who do not accept the legitimacy of such knowledge, there can be no such thing as justice and no such thing as truth.

The next item in my Google Reader comes from Ethan Siegel, the theoretical astrophysicist and educator who blogs at Starts With a Bang! Siegel’s post is simply titled “I Am a Scientist,” and it offers a patient and lucid explanation of what that entails, and why, for everything from gravity to evolution to climate change.

We’re all free to follow Al Mohler’s example and reject the secular knowledge Siegel lays out in favor of some sectarian claim, but that’s a recipe for a self-inflicted perpetual crisis of faith. So if you make that choice know what you’re getting yourself into: A lifetime of churning out desperate columns for outlets like The Christian Post.

Reality: If you lived here, you’d be home by now.

 

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Flashback post: "What's the score?"

April 29, 2011 By Fred Clark 43 Comments

The following was originally posted in March of 2005 (using actual scores from actual NCAA tournament games). I’m reposting it today because: A) it’s still true, and B) we’re still having this same argument at the paper and I’m still losing it. And I’m a sore loser.

The sports section is still safe. It is, in some ways, the last bastion of reality-based journalism.

Turn to the sports pages and there you can read the unambiguous results of a sporting event. You will find the final score and statistics for any given contest. Sports writers may inject into their stories a bit of personal opinion and local sympathy, but whatever biases they might have, the facts of the game are never in dispute. A sports writer may detest Bobby Knight and may say so explicitly in his story, but he won’t therefore go on to question whether it is in fact true that Texas Tech has advanced to the Sweet 16 of the men’s NCAA Tournament.

Contrast this with the alleged “hard” news sections of the newspaper. Here the facts are rarely stated as plainly or as confidently as “Texas Tech 71, Gonzaga 69.” Instead, all claims are treated as equally valid by virtue of the fact that someone is claiming them. News reporters consider it their responsibility to quote these claims accurately, not to evaluate them against any notion of knowable reality or anything as seemingly objective as a scoreboard.

Imagine trying to update your brackets for the NCAAs if your only source of information were, say, members of the White House Press Corps: “Texas Tech supporters were claiming victory Sunday after their regional quarterfinal game against Gonzaga. In Spokane, however, proponents of Gonzaga disputed this claim, noting that their team’s point total was equal to that of Kentucky’s and greater than that of Utah’s, and that both of these teams are advancing to the next round.”

It is sometimes said, in rants like this against the plague of he-said/she-said journalism, that news reporters behave like they’re covering a tennis match. But the real problem is that he-said/she-said journalists are nowhere near as responsible as sports writers. Sports reporters, first and foremost, have a duty as indifferent arbiters of the facts. That’s a duty that hard news journalists have long since abandoned.

The paper I work for today is running a Q&A from the Associated Press about “the facts” of the Terry Schiavo case. One of the questions asks if Schiavo is in a persistent vegetative state. The Q&A does not provide an answer — it provides instead two, mutually exclusive answers: Some doctors say she is, but her parents’ doctors say she isn’t. That’s not a Q&A, that’s a Q&Q. “Who are we too say?” is not an answer.

The Schiavo case demonstrates the problem of partisan epistemology. We now have “red facts” and “blue facts.” Newspapers — hoping not to upset either faction of their potential circulation — have no intention in taking sides in such disputes. Thus two competing sets of claims, two very different sets of facts, two opposing narratives, are treated as equally valid. News reporters, unlike sports reporters, feel no responsibility to check the scoreboard, or even to acknowledge that there is a scoreboard. They tend to deny the possibility that a scoreboard might even exist.

In the case of Terry Schiavo there is such a scoreboard, and what it tells us is nowhere near as murky and ambiguous as the AP’s Q&Q or CNN’s vapid, incurious coverage would suggest. The facts of the matter have been hashed out, again and again and again, in court.

Congress and President Bush, like the absurd hypothetical Gonzaga fans above, would prefer that the facts were other than they are. They have, therefore, declared by legislative fiat that the scoreboard be reset to zero and that the game be replayed. Here, however, the sporting analogy breaks down. If the Red Raiders and Bulldogs were to replay their game, the result might be different. But the facts of the Schiavo case will not change, no matter how many times these facts are replayed and reviewed.

Dahlia Lithwick summarizes this congressional battle with the facts of the case in a must-read Slate article:

This congressional authority to simply override years of state court fact-finding brings with it other superpowers …

Members of Congress have apparently also had super-analytical powers conferred upon them, as well. Senate Majority Leader, and heart surgeon, Bill Frist felt confident last week — after reviewing an hour of videotape — in offering a medical diagnosis of Schiavo’s condition, blithely second-guessing the court-appointed neurologists who evaluated her for days and weeks. His colleagues are similarly self-appointed neurological experts. Years of painstaking litigation, assessment, and evaluation by state courts are dismissed by Tom DeLay as the activist doings of a “little judge sitting in a state district court in Florida.” Only the most extraordinary levels of congressional hubris could allow a group of elected citizens to substitute their personal medical, legal and ethical judgments for those of the doctors, judges and guardians who have been intimately involved with this heartbreakingly sad case for years.

The facts of the Schiavo case are indeed “heartbreakingly sad.” But just because they are so deeply sad does not mean we have the power to change them. Congress, with all of its power — even combined with all the power it can usurp from the judicial branch — cannot make this poor woman talk, or wake, or think again.

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