{"id":100101,"date":"2023-05-21T13:35:52","date_gmt":"2023-05-21T19:35:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/?p=100101"},"modified":"2023-05-23T12:07:51","modified_gmt":"2023-05-23T18:07:51","slug":"against-dogmatic-rigidity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/2023\/05\/against-dogmatic-rigidity.html","title":{"rendered":"Against dogmatic rigidity"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>
\u201cLewis and Clark on the Lower Columbia,\u201d by Charles Marion Russell (1905)
(Wikimedia Commons public domain image)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

One of the speakers in our sacrament meeting today referred briefly to the story of John Colter, who appears to have been the first person of European descent to have explored the area of today\u2019s Yellowstone National Park and to have seen the Grand Tetons, and\u00a0 who is often termed the first of the \u201cmountain men.\u201d<\/p>\n

John Colter (or Coalter or Coulter) was born in the first half of the 1770s in Virginia.\u00a0 From 1804 to 1806, he participated as a member of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, the famous \u201cCorps of Discovery.\u201d\u00a0 Afterwards, though, during the winter of 1807-1808,\u00a0 he explored the area of modern-day Wyoming largely on his own, and he died in the vicinity of St. Louis, Missouri, on either 7 May 1812 or 22 November 1813<\/p>\n

Colter left no record of his own behind but, reportedly, he visited at least one geyser basin during his 1807-1808 journeys.\u00a0 Many authorities now believe that he most likely was near present-day Cody, Wyoming, which may still have had some geothermal activity at that time to the immediate west.<\/p>\n

Heading north and then west thereafter, he is believed to have come across Yellowstone Lake, another location in which he saw geysers and other geothermal features.<\/p>\n

At the conclusion of his adventure, Colter arrived back at Fort Raymond, which was located at the confluence of the Yellowstone and Bighorn Rivers in what is now known as Montana.\u00a0 When he reported jets of scalding water soaring into the sky (geysers), bubbling mudpots, and steaming pools of sulfurous water, very few in his audience believed him.\u00a0 Such things were far outside of their experience and seemed to them merely his fantasies.\u00a0 In fact, he was ridiculed for his claims, and the region of which he told came to be known, jokingly, as \u201cColter\u2019s Hell.\u201d<\/p>\n

We now know, of course, that Colter\u2019s reports were accurate, though we still don\u2019t know exactly where to locate \u201cColter\u2019s Hell.\u201d\u00a0 Many believe it to have been immediately west of Cody, Wyoming, where some thermal activity still exists and for which other reports from near Colter\u2019s time report phenomena similar to those that Colter had first described.\u00a0 The name \u201cColter\u2019s Hell\u201d may refer specifically to the region of the Stinking Water, which is now known as the Shoshone River, and particularly the section of it that runs through Cody. <\/sup>\u00a0The river\u2019s original name was given because of the presence of sulfur in the area surrounding it.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"John<\/a>
Expeditionen des John Colter zwischen 1803 und 1810 (erstellt durch \u201cBenutzer:Pandat\u201d)
Wikimedia Commons public domain image<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

W<\/strong>hen Benjamin Silliman and James Kingsley from Yale reported that stones had fallen from the sky over Weston, Connecticut, Thomas Jefferson, very much a man of the Enlightenment and very much in the spirit of the skeptical philosopher David Hume, reportedly commented that \u201cIt is easier to believe that two Yankee professors would lie than that stones would fall from heaven.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cJefferson\u2019s Humean skepticism about meteorites,\u201d wrote John Suppe, Blair Professor of Geosciences at Princeton University,<\/p>\n

\n

was not directed just at New England and it was not expressed out of scientific ignorance. He had published several geologic contributions, and he was aware of some details of the then-current scientific controversy over stones falling from the sky. For many skeptics the first convincing investigation had come a few years earlier, in 1803, when Jean-Baptiste Biot, a brilliant young professor of the College de France and friend of Laplace, was dispatched by the French Academy of Sciences to investigate a fall of stones near the town of L\u2019Aigle in Normandy. He collected detailed testimony from the surrounding villages that confirmed the time and place of the fall, that about 3000 stones fell in a 4-by-10-kilometer area, and that the stones were found lying on top of the ground and were of a type unlike rocks native to the area.<\/p>\n

Biot\u2019s evidence was overwhelmingly convincing\u2014but not to Jefferson, who wrote to a friend saying that the report was a result of \u201cthe exuberant imagination of a Frenchman . . . run away with his judgment. The evidence of nature, derived from experience, must be put into one scale, and in the other the testimony of man, his ignorance, the deception of his senses, his lying disposition.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a>
This is a photograph of a falling meteorite.\u00a0 Or else it represents an actual sighting of Lord Russell\u2019s teapot.\u00a0 (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

In our day, the evidence for meteorites is overwhelming and, so far as I\u2019m aware, no serious person doubts that stones\u00a0 can and do sometimes fall from the sky.\u00a0 In fact, Professor Suppe, writing about Jefferson\u2019s early-nineteenth-century skepticism in 2000, remarked that<\/p>\n

\n

It is . . . ironic that nearly 200 years later, convincing evidence has been amassed in Chesapeake Invader<\/em> by C. Wylie Poag, a paleontologist from the U.S. Geological Survey in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, that a vastly larger meteor impacted south of the Mason-Dixon line, creating a 100-kilometer-wide crater that lies deeply buried under Chesapeake Bay and the shores of Jefferson\u2019s Virginia.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

[See John Suppe, \u201cReports of Stones Falling from the Sky,\u201d Books & Culture: A Christian Review<\/em> (May\/June 2000) (https:\/\/www.booksandculture.com\/articles\/2000\/mayjun\/14.44.html)]<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Bolide<\/a>
A NASA artist\u2019s conception of a massive terrestrial meteor impact
(Wikimedia Commons public domain image)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

What should we conclude from such stories as that of Jefferson\u2019s reported skepticism about meteorites?\u00a0 What can we learn from the first reactions to John Colter\u2019s discovery of geothermal activity in the area of modern Yellowstone National Park?\u00a0 Surely one lesson to be learned is that, while gullibility is surely a fault to be avoided, closed-minded skepticism can also be a barrier to understanding reality.<\/p>\n

All truth, it is said, passes through three stages:\u00a0 First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is passionately and sometimes even violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as\u00a0self-evident.<\/p>\n

Something similar happens, unfortunately, with certain falsehoods.<\/p>\n

The reputations of Nicolas Copernicus, Galileo Galilei, and Johannes Kepler don\u2019t rest upon their acceptance of the astronomical consensus of their times.\u00a0 Albert Einstein, accepting the consensus of a static and unchanging cosmos, mistakenly shied away from the expanding universe predicted by his own equations.\u00a0 His reputation rests on his achievements in other regards, where, more characteristically, he didn\u2019t fear to go against commonly held opinion.\u00a0 Unintimidated by consensus, Edwin Hubble and Alexander Friedmann and Father Georges\u00a0Lema\u00eetre gave us the Big Bang and the subsequently expanding universe.<\/p>\n

Alfred Russel Wallace and Charles Darwin didn\u2019t originate the theory of evolution by deferring to consensus.<\/p>\n

Ignaz Semmelweis argued for the importance of disinfection during surgeries, but his argument did not sit well with his medical colleagues.\u00a0 His life ended in an asylum for the insane, where he died after being beaten by the guards.\u00a0 A few years later, Louis Pasteur confirmed the germ theory of disease and Joseph Lister pioneered improved medical hygiene.<\/p>\n

Alfred Wegener\u2019s proposal of \u201ccontinental drift\u201d directly clashed with the geological consensus of his day, and it didn\u2019t help matters that he was an outsider whose doctorate was actually in astronomy.\u00a0 The\u00a0American Association of Petroleum Geologists\u00a0organized an entire symposium specifically devoted to rebutting Wegener\u2019s hypothesis, and George Gaylord Simpson, arguably the most important paleontologist of the twentieth century, went out of his way to oppose it.\u00a0 Nearly a century after Wegener\u2019s premature death during a 1930 expedition in Greenland, continental drift is universally accepted among serious geologists.<\/p>\n

So slavish conformity to scientific or other consensus has little if anything to commend it.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, unless there are strong reasons to oppose<\/em> consensus, it\u2019s generally safest in intellectual and other regards to be guided by it.\u00a0 Vaccination is almost certainly useful against COVID-19 and almost certainly does\u2019t cause autism.\u00a0 Petroleum jelly probably doesn\u2019t cure blindness.\u00a0 It\u2019s very unlikely that the Great Pyramid of Giza was built by aliens.\u00a0 A program of repeated enemas most likely won\u2019t cure cancer.\u00a0 Earth almost certainly isn\u2019t flat.\u00a0 You probably shouldn\u2019t take arsenic as a remedy for leukemia or malaria.\u00a0 The Biden administration probably isn\u2019t run by a secret cabal of cannibalistic pedophiles.\u00a0 The white race very likely wasn\u2019t created by a black scientist named Yakub in a laboratory on the Isle of Patmos 6600 years ago.\u00a0 Dr. Pepper isn\u2019t a brain tonic.\u00a0 Dr. Kilmer\u2019s Swamp Root almost certainly won\u2019t cure \u201cinternal slime fever,\u201d which almost certainly doesn\u2019t exist.\u00a0 Hitler isn\u2019t living in Brazil.\u00a0 And Bubba Ho-Tep<\/i> may not be entirely based on fact.<\/p>\n

The fact that an idea or theory is overwhelming rejected by a consensus of scientists doesn\u2019t prove it true.<\/p>\n

This isn\u2019t rocket science.\u00a0 Heck, it\u2019s not even homeopathy or iridology.\u00a0 Let alone herpetology.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0 \u00a0 One of the speakers in our sacrament meeting today referred briefly to the story of John Colter, who appears to have been the first person of European descent to have explored the area of today\u2019s Yellowstone National Park and to have seen the Grand Tetons, and\u00a0 who is often termed the first of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1019,"featured_media":100107,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[36111,4591,36114,9090,4648,5946],"class_list":["post-100101","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-john-colter","tag-meteor","tag-meteorite","tag-skepticism","tag-thomas-jefferson","tag-yellowstone"],"yoast_head":"\nAgainst dogmatic rigidity<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"    One of the speakers in our sacrament meeting today referred briefly to the story of John Colter, 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