Earth is lucky to have us. Otherwise…
 
Oh! The things we’ve missed seeing, the vicissitudes of air, sea, and land. Take ancient floods, for example. Go back about 5.5 million years to the ancient Mediterranean Sea. Oh! Wait! There wasn’t much of a sea at that time, termed Zanclean. Seems that the Med had pretty much been cut off from the Atlantic back then, allowing evaporation to do its work, drying up much of the water in the huge hole and allowing salts to accumulate. It was the Messinian Salinity Crisis. And then the water poured back in. Lots of water and very fast. Think Niagara and Victoria are wondrous? Think again. Think that the Amazon sends lots of water through its channel? Think again.
 
Marine geologists have known about the “salinity crisis” for decades, but a new study adds to their perception of the reflooding episode and reveals how little we truly know about the past and events that helped to shape the present. Here’s the nutshell version. The Mediterranean Sea, as you know, is open to the Atlantic at the Strait of Gibralter, currently just about nine miles wide. The Camarinal Sill, which in some places lies only 100 meters below present sea level serves as a kind of dam with about a 100-meter drop in sea level. About five and a half million years ago, evaporites (salts) began to accumulate in both shallow and deep water, indicating evaporation (When salt water evaporates, it leaves behind its salts). It appears that the inflow from the Atlantic was cut off. According to research by a French team of researchers led by Georges Clauzon in the 1990s, there were two dessication events, one affecting shallow basins that occurred during a cooling world climate, and another that that occurred during a warming world climate during which sea level dropped enough to isolate the deeper basins. *
 
Today, the Mediterranean Sea is a sea, right? That means the water had to return, spilling in from the Atlantic and flowing in from encompassing rivers, such as the Nile (which also overlies a much deeper channel that it filled in as sea level rose). Anyway, for the Med to refill, there had to be a very large inflow. In a 2018 paper on that inflow as it cut canyons and laid down sediments, A. Micallef, Daniel Garcia-Castellanos, and others report that the inflow off the coast of Sicily, evidence supports a flood equal to 100 million cubic meters per second—a thousand times greater than the Amazon’s discharge.**
 
Why should you bother with such information, especially if you have no interest in marine geology, eustacy, or salt deposits on the bottom of a sea? Probably two reasons. First, the world climate obviously went through a dramatic change, enough to allow evaporation to lower the Mediterranean by more than a thousand meters (over 3,000 feet). That’s three-fifths of a mile of water over 2.5 million square kilometers (965,000 square miles). By comparison, California covers just over 400,000 square km, or about 150 thousand plus square miles. The Med lost lots of water; imagine a similar lowering of sea level today if you can. There's been no comparable event in your lifetime. Second, you live in a very small window of “earth time,” and you’ve missed all the wondrous changes and big events of the past. Imagine seeing that ancient flood as water spilled back into the Mediterranean. Think of one thousand Amazon Rivers discharging their water through a narrow opening not much wider than the current Amazon.
 
You’ve missed very big events that were probably instrumental to your being here. Extinctions, for example. Great swings in world climate. Tropical forest giving way to savanna and opening the way for bipedalism. Even great changes in atmospheric composition. Take oxygen levels as an example. Today, you breathe easily in a bath of air that is about 21% oxygen. That wasn’t always so, however. Go back a very long way, between 2.5 and four billion years ago, and free oxygen wasn’t readily available. Then there was a period called the Great Oxidation Event about 2.4 billion years ago, lasting about 350 million years. Microbes proliferated. Microbes abounded. And then. Big drop in O. Little critters dying off everywhere. A worldwide change in life. *** Of course, you’re not sympathetic. Microbes. Oooo! Yuck! Shudder to think of one-celled organisms making up the entire biosphere. But every event leads to another event, not in a straight-line causation, but in opportunities for other life-forms to rise. And so, oxygen levels once again began to rise, even if slowly, until they reached another high at the time of the dinosaurs just before their extinction. And, cut to the chase, here we are.  
 
Climates come and go. Sea level falls and rises. Storms wreak havoc on life here and there, sometimes frequently, sometimes infrequently. Now add the human being into the equation. “The sky is falling; the sky is falling.” It’s our nature in general to panic and to believe all that occurs, occurs in our lifetimes. That we’ve seen the worst Mother Nature has to offer isn’t necessarily so, hurricanes, volcanic eruptions, and tsunamis notwithstanding. Ask those microbes that underwent a mass die-off 2 billion years ago. Ask the 95% of all species that died off during the Permian Extinction’s Great Dying. Ask the dinos at the end of the Cretaceous. Could things be worse than they are now? Obviously, yes.  
 
So, now we’re worried about sea level rise. Or, maybe not. Didn’t I hear a former President say in a nomination victory speech that “this is the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal….” **** That must really have been the moment. Really. That former President just bought a multimillion-dollar home and property on Martha’s Vineyard, one of the very seaside locations where sea level over the past two million years has been radically different, an island of shifting sands subject to the whims of Mother Nature that would have been submerged at times and high and dry at other times. Sea level rise? Problem solved. Mediterranean drying up and then reflooding? Problem solved. Extinctions? A thing of the past. As that President once said (on Super Tuesday), “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.” Seaside resort owners, rejoice. Seaside luxury home owners, too.
 
We were born too late to see the Great Oxidation Event and the subsequent extinction of the microbes, too late to witness the Great Dying, too late to see the dinosaurs kick the bucket, too late to see the ice cover much of the Northern Hemisphere, too late to see sea level 100 meters or more lower during the ice advances, and even more recently, too late to see the sea rise to levels above current eustacy, and much too late to see the Mediterranean Sea dry up and reflood. Lucky us. And lucky Earth. “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” and so have the realtors on Martha’s vineyard.
 
*Clauzon, Georges, et al., Alternate interpretation of the Messinian salinity crisis: Controversy resolved? Geology, April 1996. V 24, no. 4, p. 363-366.
 
**Micallef, Aaron, Angelo Camerlenghi, Daniel Garcia-Castellanos, Daniel Cunarro Otero, Mark-Andre Cutscher, Giovanni Barreca, Daniele Spatola, Loreno Facchin, Riccardo Geletti, Sebastian Krastel, Felix Gross, and Morelia Urlaub. Evidence of the Zanclean megaflood in the eastern Mediterranean Basin. Nature. Scientific Reports. 18 January 2018., 8:1078 | DOI:10.1038/s41598-018-19446-3 https://drive.google.com/file/d/18D4BOvzvJzecmWPfqD7kmNz9uMj4PG4s/view
The average discharge of the Amazon is over 200,000 cubic meters per second or over 7 million cubic feet per second.
​ 
***Hodegskiss, Malcolm S. W, Peter W. Crockford, Yongbo Peng, Boswell A. Wing, and Tristan J. Horner. A productivity collapse to end Earth’s Great Oxidation. PNAS August 27, 2019. vol. 116 no. 35 17207-17212. DOI: 
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1900325116
 
**** https://obamamessiah.blogspot.com/2008/06/this-was-moment-when-rise-of-oceans.html
 
 
 
 
 

In his self-deprecating way, the detective Columbo knew how to break down the confidence of a suspected killer. If you’ve seen an episode from the TV series, you know Columbo’s trademark act: After asking a suspect a few questions, none of which were very penetrating, Peter Falk would walk away, then turn, and say something like “one more thing” before asking a question that introduced doubt into the mind of a perpetrator formerly certain that he or she had committed the perfect murder.  
 
In matters philosophical, psychological, sociological, political, and scientific, if you’re not asking yourself or another “one more thing,” you’re complacent. Life’s a mystery, and you’re the detective. There’s always “one more thing” to ask.   

Remember what Simplicio says? “Contra negantes principia non est disputandum.” * That’s where we are today. We live in an age when political groups argue from axiomatic positions rather than from reason. What one group assumes to be self-evident, another group denies as a self-evident precept.
 
That means that no one can advance an argument. In Galileo’s The Two Chief World Systems, written in the form of a debate, the character Simplicio makes the statement about axioms (principia) and then says he can’t be persuaded by reason. Whatever seems to be a self-evident truth is beyond argumentation. And though every age prior to and post Galileo has adhered to its axioms, this current one seems to be the epitome of such adherence.
 
That even Euclid’s geometry axioms have been both questioned and refuted is a good indication that things that appear self-evident aren’t always so. The name-calling we see today in pundit shows and in social media rest on such axiomatic thinking. “Why, it’s just self-evident that So-n-So is Such-n-Such.” I will leave you to supply the names and accusations.
 
Humans will always find axioms for their polar positions, but now that we live in an age of one-liners, headlines, and conspiracy hypotheses, there appears to be little anyone can do to convince others through rational discussion. We’ve lost the art of debate and found the art of innuendo.
 
Arguing from different axioms will never result in a consensus. All who argue thus are modern incarnations of Simplicio. ** There are very few people who will change what they believe to be a self-evident truth because of someone else’s reasoning. Think about that the next time you get into a heated debate about contemporary issues. Unless both sides of an argument are willing to deny their own axioms’ validity through reasoning, no one is going to win a debate except through ad hominem and ad populum attacks in which the louder and more widespread axiom is more attractive to the unconvinced mind than a quieter and less widespread axiom.
 
And that’s how political debates go nowadays. Assume and argue, rather than question and debate. Ultimately, every public argument can be reduced to a prideful holding of an axiomatic position. To change means wounding pride, not logic. To accept the argument of another over political matters requires denying one’s own basic assumptions. Very few of us have the humility to do that because most of us are incarnations of Simplicio.     
 
*Basically: “It’s no use arguing against the denial of axioms.”
 
**One example that rests on axiom: Health care as a “right.” Another: The economic efficacy of wealth redistribution by government fiat.  

Wreakers of actual havoc, fear no troll’s disdain. Trolls have more important concerns, personally meaningful concerns to express on social media.  
 
Isn’t it amazing how easily we become mired in petty concerns while we are surrounded by some very harsh realities. There are, to put it mildly, bad guys out there, people who for no apparent reason, are driven by “motiveless malignity,” if I may borrow Thomas Carlyle’s description of Iago. Who are these "bad guys"? People randomly shooting people; people stabbing strangers; people trying to wreak havoc on people they don’t know. Yet, in the midst of such real dangers, we find people steeped in inconsequential matters, arguing over someone’s photo, for example.
 
Yes, arguing over a photo. Seriously arguing. You know how it’s virtually impossible for you to turn on a computer without encountering the strangest stories about whatever occupies people’s minds? Well, I turned on mine and encountered a story about an actress holding Thor’s hammer—the movie prop, not the actual hammer Mjolnir of the real god Thor. Seems that the photo elicited a number of negative comments from the fictional Thor’s fan base. *
 
A movie prop. A MOVIE PROP! It’s time for a reality check.
 
Is this removal from reality the wave of the future? Is this “controversy” over a movie prop the culmination of a failed educational system in a super-affluent society protected from events with dire consequences? Or is it just a continuation of the human way that manifested itself long before there were online trolls? Tragedies and dangers that don’t affect people personally might always have been fictions, whereas fictions might always have been realities for some segment of a population. Meaning comes from personal involvement; for those who involve themselves in a pretend world, the fictional world becomes meaningful.
 
Apparently, that which is not personal is not meaningful.
 
 
* https://www.complex.com/pop-culture/2019/08/haters-brie-larson-holding-thor-hammer

There’s a curious property to the universe: It’s describable. And we are the describers. If we didn’t exist, would the universe be describable? (Insert partial apology for the circularity here: “Sorry, reader”) The describability of the universe means, of course, that all our science is ultimately a description of one sort or another, even a mathematical one. Unfortunately, as Bertrand Russell once said, “…infallibility is not granted to mortals…,” and we are those mortals, so our descriptions might not be as permanently applicable as we might think.
 
Prescribing isn’t what we do when we “discover” a law of nature; again, we describe, and we leave the prescribing to God (or, for atheists, scientists, and humanists, to some as-yet-to-be-discovered Source-of-Everything like Chaos, quantum effects in a vacuum, and any cosmic rebirth theory involving colliding branes).   
 
That we are limited to describing, rather than prescribing the Cosmos as a whole means that we are the artisans of understanding. We draw the picture; we say, “This is how we interpret what we experience, and this is what we think makes sense.” It doesn’t have to be the ultimate description, just one that makes sense in our time and to people who appear to be “in the know.” We always have “experts” to provide descriptions, but there’s a weakness in our dependence on them.  
 
As history has shown, descriptions work for the describers but not necessarily for later generations imbued with greater knowledge and understanding. So, for example, the ancient Greeks, without knowledge of the Copernican Solar System and Keplerian orbits, were still able to predict lunar and solar eclipses. Their astronomical math worked though it was based on a faulty understanding of planetary motions. They effectively described the appearance and not the reality. Thus, Ptolemy was able to describe for his time and ensuing centuries and in a perfectly acceptable way the “retrograde motion” of the planets, which is an effect of our perspective as we travel around the sun and look at other planets orbiting either closer or farther and either faster or slower than Earth. * The description made sense even though it was based on apparent, and not actual, orbits. This is how Morris Kline phrases it: “From the standpoint of the search for truths, it is noteworthy that Ptolemy, like Eudoxus, fully realized that his theory was just a convenient mathematical description which fit the observations and was not necessarily the true design of nature.” **
 
Are we any different? The so far irrefutable General Theory of Relativity and the almost complete Standard Model are, in my guess, the best descriptions we have to date, though their assumed incompatibility, Dark Matter, and Dark Energy are reasons to think a new description or a new modifier currently lies hidden. Will we eventually arrive at a paradigm shift equivalent to Copernicus’ overturning Ptolemy or Einstein’s overturning Newton? That is, will we discover that our current descriptions so replete with complicated math are just the most convenient descriptions and not “the true design of nature”? ***
 
What is the endpoint of our descriptions? Pretty much it’s still the mind of God. That means that even humanists’ mathematical descriptions of the Macro Cosmos and the Micro Cosmos have their roots in ancient Greek and medieval Christian attempts to uncover the secrets of creation. It was in the Middle Ages that such describing of Nature came to be closely associated with, in Kline’s words, “a search for God’s mathematical design of nature.” In short, scientific descriptions were meant to provide an understanding of God’s prescription; modern scientific description was born as a religious quest to understand the mind of God (Kline, 38,39).**** One might not adhere to any religious belief, but the root of any quest for the ultimate irrefutable description of the universe lies in that ancient tie between Creator and Creation, even those descriptions that deny any purposeful Prescriber of Nature and accept randomness as the force of creation.  
 
To avoid any sense that science is connected to that ancient and medieval quest, we become the modern version of Pythagoreans, for whom mathematical reality WAS reality. That we describe mathematically is an acknowledgement that we believe math is the key to understanding “laws” that exist beyond our mere describing of appearances. Having removed “God” from the language of science, some believe they have acquired a new approach to describing reality. In contrast, I see what science does as a continuation of that ancient desire to understand the prescription for the cosmos.
 
We’ve been very good at describing the how of Nature. Our descriptions work. We’re a long way off from settling on the why, however. This is a point Richard P. Feynman makes in QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter. He writes, “…while I am describing to you how Nature works, you won’t understand why Nature works that way. But you see, nobody understands that. I can’t explain why Nature behaves in this peculiar way” (10).***** If you want to know the WHY, you just have to get into the “mind” of Nature’s Prescriber.
 
One last note: Whys are really difficult, aren’t they? Take human behavior, for example. We should, as humans, understand the why of others’ actions, but we are left after, say, a tragedy like a mass shooting asking, “Why?” We can describe the past influences on an individual mass shooter, but those with similar influences who choose peaceful paths in life don’t shoot people. Why, therefore, is more difficult to explain than who, what, where, how, and when, all of those five having the property of describability.   
 
*Just imagine looking at Mars from Earth. Since we orbit the sun in fewer days than Mars, we pass it. As we begin to catch up to it, it appears to move in one direction (East to West), and after we pass it, it appears to move in another direction (West to East). See the 4-minute video at https://video.search.yahoo.com/yhs/search;_ylt=AwrEZ6of8V1dF0cAjxsPxQt.;_ylu=X3oDMTByMjB0aG5zBGNvbG8DYmYxBHBvcwMxBHZ0aWQDBHNlYwNzYw--?p=retrograde+motion+of+mars&fr=yhs-pty-pty_maps&hspart=pty&hsimp=yhs-pty_maps#id=5&vid=b43946f23d273d5b7cf20a5f90530046&action=view
 
**Kline, Morris. Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty. New York. Fall River Press, 1980 and 2011. p. 29. My regular readers will recognize that this is not the first instance of my quoting from Kline’s book. I happen to think it is one of the most insightful books written in the last half century, and I recommend it.
 
***Discovery of some currently unknown facet of the universe will probably change our description just as discovery of some unknown facet of another person changes our view (“I didn’t know that about him/her”). With regard to people with hidden lives, I think of those we come to know in one venue without knowledge of their lives in another venue, like actors whose fans might be ignorant of their military service. See https://www.historyhit.com/famous-actors-who-served-in-world-war-two/ for some examples.
 
****Should we argue that Galileo and Newton told us “how” things fall, whereas Einstein told us “why” they fall? If so, then we argue that Einstein did discover both the nature of the prescription and the mind of the Prescriber. Of course, one could argue that Relativity’s “why” is merely another manifestation of  “how.”
 
*****Princeton. Princeton University Press. 1985, 2006.
 
 

It’s a common question: “What do you do?” Less common, but in every New Age first meeting: “Who are you?” 
 
Now the question for you: Can you say who you are without some reference to what you do? “Sure,” you say. “I can refer to how I think, what I think, when I think, for example. I can say I’m an optimist, a worrywart, a logical kind of person. I don’t have to refer to what I do.”
 
Good. But let me tell you a story as Seneca relates it. Seems there was this old guy, ninety-years-old plus. He worked for Caligula—not an easy guy to work for—as some sort of administrator. Picture this; it’s Rome between 37 and 41 AD (Oh! for those for whom Anno Domini must be replaced by CE, 2019 – 37 and 2019 – 41, or between 1,982 and 1,978 years ago). Caligula has this old guy working for him, efficiently working for him, according to Seneca. The old guy, Sextus Turannius, was minding the business of the Empire and the Emperor when Caligula just up and fires him. Ancient downsizing, I guess. So, what do you think Sextus Turannius did? Did he simply retire? Did he take a job as a greeter at Walmart? No, Sextus had his family and slaves lay him out as a corpse while he was still alive. His entire household mourned because of the unemployment. Strangely (I say "strangely" because of his history of cruelty and sadism), Caligula acquiesced and rehired Sextus. We don’t know how long Sextus continued to work. We do know that his employer, the Emperor, went into very permanent retirement in the year 41 when Cassius Chaerea and some of the Praetorian Guard killed him.
 
But I digress. Sextus Turannius didn’t want to give up his job because, it seems, it gave his life meaning. I mean, why else pretend to be dead with all the trappings of a funeral just because you lose your job at age 90 plus? So, Seneca makes some interesting points about people who keep working, and working, and working simply because they don’t know what to do with themselves when they retire. This is what Seneca writes in “On the Shortness of Life”:
 
            “Can it be such a pleasure to die in harness? Many are convinced that it is, and their eagerness to work outlasts their capacity for it. They struggle against physical infirmity, and they consider old age a hardship for no other reason than that it removes them from active life. The law does not draft a soldier after his fiftieth year nor require a senator’s attendance after his sixtieth; it is harder for men to obtain release from themselves than from the law.” *
 
Now, if you aren’t near retirement age, you might wonder how this applies to you. Ordinarily, I would leave you surmising, giving you, as I often do, a point of departure for your own deep thoughts. But, I feel like saying what I think is “the obvious.” Those questions I posed at the beginning about who you are and what you do apply here. Apparently, Sextus Turannius couldn’t separate who he was from what he did. His doing was his being and losing the doing was losing being.
 
Probably all of us rely somewhat on what we do as a ready definition of who we are. You’ve asked that “what do you do” question numerous times. Would it be strange for you, in meeting another person, to ask and say, “Who are you? And by that I just don’t mean your name. I want to know the ‘real you,’ not the occupation, not the musical, literary, or artistic talent you exhibit. I want to know who you are without all those activities. I want to know the essence of you.”
 
Of course, you’re not going to ask and say that at a party lest you end up drinking and snacking alone in a corner. But, risking my own ostracization and banishment to the room’s darkest corner next to the ficus, I have to ask about your own response to the question about who you are.
 
 
Hadas, Moses. Trans. The Stoic Philosophy of Seneca: Essays and Letters. New York. W. W. Norton Company, 1958. p. 73.
 
            

When your dogma requires as much attention as your dog, it’s time to rethink your intellectual pet ownership. In the rethinking, we should look at fundamentalism as it manifests itself in both religion and, yes, maybe also in science.
 
Ah! Man’s best friend. A critter that wags its tail, settles into predictability, and faithfully protects against threatening strangers: The dog. It becomes one with its owner, the personality of one reflecting the personality of the other. The dog understands the owner’s preferences, even anticipates them, and likewise the owner. The relationship lasts for years. The two species bonded by needs and loyalty, by comfort and security, and by deep emotions give something, one to the other.  
 
Dogma can be like that. We domesticate it, and then we expect it to protect us from intellectual threats. As culture changes, we tend to our dogma, either by defensive measures or subtle changes we impose consciously or unconsciously. It comforts us because we develop an emotional tie to it, just as we relate to pets.
 
Of course, scientists, if they are worth their apparatus, would dissociate themselves from any form of fundamentalism and dogma. And yet,
 
Have you ever noticed…
 
Have you ever noticed the lengths to which some people go to pursue the negation of ideas they don’t favor even when the effort amounts to naught? And have you ever noticed the opposite? That is, have you noticed how owners of dogma, in negating the ideas of others, spend a seemingly inordinate time tending to and defending their own ideas? It’s as though we humans share an occupation centered on dogmas: Working either at chasing others’ dogmas out of our backyards, and/or working at maintaining a fence to keep our dogma corralled.
 
There are numerous historical examples, such as the geologists of the early twentieth century somewhat disdainfully rejecting Wegener’s “continental drift.” The geology of his day could not admit any variation to isostasy. Then there was the physicist Ernst Mach, who, as John S. Rigden writes, “may have been the last scientist to deny the existence of atoms,” whose existence was demonstrated in Einstein’s May, 2005, paper “On the Movement of Small Particles Suspended in Stationary Liquids Required by the Molecular-Kinetic Theory of Heat.”* Einstein, in turn, did not accept the implication that through “entanglement,” “spooky action at a distance,” as he called it, could occur in a seeming violation of the dogmatic limiting speed of light. It seems that even the brightest among us have difficulty accepting principles that change the intellectual status quo. We get a pet, we become accustomed to the pet, we cherish the pet.
 
You might argue that we progress intellectually by tearing down the old and constructing the new. That is a valid point. We could say that our ideas work until they don’t, but we have to acknowledge that competing ideas have always coexisted and have “worked” to explain the world as it is. A fundamentalist can go through life just as easily as a humanist. And both, not just fundamentalists, rely on faith of some sort. In that they have something in common; yet, the animosity between the two groups is obvious: Keep your dogma dog out of my yard.  
 
Take atheists and theists. Why the fuss? “Okay, you over here believe; you over there don’t.” So? Make a point if you wish, and then move on. I thought about this when I picked up a recent issue of Skeptic magazine to peruse while I drank coffee at Barnes and Noble. My reading was interrupted by my having to meet my wife, and I was too cheap to buy the magazine on my way out of the store, so I had only a few minutes to skim through an article disproving God’s existence—or should I say, offering the standard disproof in the form of syllogisms and either/or arguments.
 
As I left the store, I thought of the TV show by Cornerstone Network, Origins. Then I thought of the other TV shows that bear the titles Origin and Origins, the secular versions that offer alternative explanations for our existence, our ethics, and our natural and human history. The atheists would argue that Cornerstone Network’s episodes are based on the intractable dogma of fundamentalism, whereas the secular shows are based on facts uncovered by scientific inquiry. That would seem reasonable from a humanist point of view, but then, regardless of their faith, the Cornerstone people keep pointing out gaps in and debates about cosmic origin science, accusing the scientists of their own reliance on faith.   
 
Thanks, YouTube, the Web, and online streaming for allowing me to see bits (all I had the patience to watch) of the various programs labeled Origins. Let me review the one centered on a literal acceptance of the Bible first. In the episode “Creation to Christ: The Old Testament in a Nutshell,” a two-part video featuring Jay Seegert, dinosaurs are placed on a 6,000-year timeline as are the sedimentary rocks—both fossiliferous and tectonically distorted. ** Apparently, according to Seegert, dinosaurs lived contemporaneously with Adam and Eve, having been created as part of the “land animals” on the Sixth Day, and the fossiliferous rocks were deposited during the Deluge of Noah’s time. Seegert argues that the emplacement of fossils found on tall mountains occurred at the time of the Flood and that the folded rocks occurred while the sediments were still “soft” and un-lithified. Seegert also states that the Bible records an orogeny (worldwide?) shortly after the Flood. I looked through Genesis, but I don’t know where that orogeny is recorded. And while I looked, I stumbled on Noah’s sacrificing animals: “he offered holocausts on the altar.” Hmnn. Seegert doesn’t mention that after Noah saved the animals, he stepped off the Ark, and “he took of every clean animal and of every clean bird” for those sacrifices. Okay. You get the point. Big hole in the dogmatic explanation. Did those animals Noah worked so hard to save go extinct at his altar?
 
Any humanist/atheist is going to look for the contradictions, the faulty logic, and the leaps of faith required by the Biblical account. In turn, Seegert represents fundamentalist thinking in saying that those humanists/atheists simply take on faith that some soft tissue in a dinosaur bone was able to survive millions of years in the ground or that the discovery of carbon-14 in some dinosaur bone doesn’t disprove their millions-of-years timeline. There’s no corpus callosum to connect the two sides of the issues.  
 
And then there’s the origin of the Cosmos in the dogma of modern science. The Big Bang makes sense in light of the COBE and WMAP images of the microwave background discovered by Penzias and Wilson and Hubble’s discovery of an expansion of the universe. But here again, we run into some gaps in the dogma, enough of them that some have injected eternal universes, virtual particles in a vacuum, an unprovable eternal Universe, or some other mechanism to account for the origin of Everything. For a while, the dogma surrounding the Big Bang was established, but the questions that have since arisen center in part on our inability “to see” the universe as it was before 300,000 years after the Big Bang. That limitation keeps us in the dark and makes formal math our only tool of scientific observation. And in the dark, we tend to speculate and rely on our faith in our speculations when they cannot be experimentally proved.
 
Now, I go back to the fuss. All the arguing is for naught. Theists and atheists rarely alter their opposing beliefs. Why spend the time in arguing? Why go to the great lengths of publishing magazines or producing videos that devote so much energy to attacking the opponents’ dogmas? Aren’t both sides preaching (or lecturing) to captive and sympathetic audiences (or, preaching to the choir)? Both sides also argue syllogistically. I suppose such arguing has some validity, but in my viewing of both, I see ellipsis marks within the syllogisms.
 
Finally, in driving to pick up my wife, I wondered how far back humans have relied on dogs and dogma. Apparently, after dogs diverged from wolves, humans started to develop an attachment to them, and dogs, seeing a good deal, decided that life in the encampment was better than life in the wild. Dogmas probably followed closely behind if burial of a dog with a human indicates some religious tendencies in the vicinity of Oberkassel, Bonn in Germany about 14 or 15 millennia ago. Am I taking this supposed faith on faith? Why bury a dog with a human? Is my assumption provable? Does it account for the closeness of the pet and the significance of the joint burial? Am I doing archaeological “science” by assuming or hypothesizing a dogmatic faith in the minds of the ancient people?
 
Eventually, just as dogs settled into the daily lives of peoples around the world, dogmas did likewise. And then the fuss started. Socrates had to go, Giordano Bruno, too, for questioning the dogmas of their day. In science, the human sacrifices—and career sacrifices—have been numerous, especially when some upstart like an Alfred Wegener comes along to suggest the scientific dogma of the day is erroneous or incomplete.
 
Eventually, dogmas become so entrenched in science that they quash either by intent or accident the potential for the discovery of alternate explanations. Take string theory, for example. Peter Woit takes the “theory” to task in his Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory and the Search for Unity in Physical Law. *** There’s a whole theoretical industry built on string theory, so that in the late 1990s and early 2000s, physicists seeking jobs as researchers and professors in “elite” physics departments were more likely to gain employment if their focus was string theory. String theory was becoming the “dogma” of the time. But as Woit notes, “superstring theory is at the moment unarguably an example of a theory that can’t be falsified, since it makes no predictions” (207). Remember Karl Popper’s dictum about falsification. If a science isn’t falsifiable, it ain’t science. So, for all its intricate mathematics, what is string theory if it offers no current possibility for testing? Does it rely on an entrenched dogma? Where’s the connection to what you and I might call experimental science? Sure, the math is impressive, but then it’s math. And I have to ask if we are back to the questions asked by the ancient Greek Pythagoreans and Aristotle: Is mathematics the world reality?
 
String theorists haven’t been alone in accepting something beyond experimentation. Woit quotes a 67-year-old Einstein, who writes, “I would like to state a theorem which at present can not be based upon anything more than upon a faith in the simplicity, i.e., intelligibility, of nature…” (2). Later in his book, Woit discusses Einstein’s refusal to incorporate quantum mechanics in his attempt to discover a unity through classical field theories. Woit writes, “genius is not protection against making the mistake of devoting decades of one’s life to an idea that has no chance of success” (181). We could say the same for the many geniuses who have proposed a fundamentalist dogma.  
 
Is there dogma in science? Apparently. Is there dogma in religion? Definitely. Are both kinds of dogma comforting? Yes, like pets. All those string theorists doing all those complicated math problems centered on six, or ten, or more than 200 dimensions they’ll never see, and all those cosmologists who accept a holographic universe or a multiverse, branes, and virtual particles they will never see, find comfort in what they are doing. Yes, their math has added a little to the Standard Model, but it hasn't given us the reality they say exists beyond our experience. Their adherence to their favored dogmas and their long-term commitments to extolling their "theory's" qualities imbue them with a comfortable feeling. The "faithful" string theorist will, without a chance of running an experiment, remain faithful to the end of a career. “Here, Fido.” Faithful is a good name for a pet. But maybe the pet owners should also be called Fido. Makes me wonder whether humans, regardless of their leaning toward or away from religion, have become the pets of dogmas.
 
 
*Rigden, John S. Einstein 1905: The Standard of Greatness. Cambridge. Harvard University Press, 2005, p. 72.
**Origins: “Creation to Christ, part 1,” http://origins.ctvn.org/

​When your dogma requires as much attention as your dog, it’s time to rethink your intellectual pet ownership. 

Indonesia is a land with a problem: Its capital is subsiding. The problem isn’t new for the city of ten million. Jakarta’s subsidence was first noted in 1926. Now people are complaining.
 
What might seem to be a problem specific to Jakarta is actually an old problem. Coastal cities and cities built on unconsolidated sediments have been subsiding since the rise of civilization. In the United States, New Orleans has a similar problem. Deltas don’t remain above sea level unless they get a new influx of sediments, hardly a condition of the city with a controlled river like the Mississippi. Jakarta has 13 rivers, some highly controlled. And Jakarta has an added problem. It doesn’t have the infrastructure of water pipelines to service all ten million residents. What do they do? They pull out groundwater. * Since 1926, the people have sucked enough groundwater from the Quaternary sediments on which the city lies to mimic the subsidence caused in mid-twentieth-century Long Beach, California. One can’t take the apples out of the pie and expect the crust to be unaffected.
 
When one lives at sea level, sea level is a problem. On the positive side, marine archaeologists have something to dig in all those once-above-water, now-sunken cities; on the negative side, the government of Indonesia might have to move the city off West Java and onto Borneo. It’s not that capital cities of countries haven’t been moved before; think Brasilia. But in the case of Jakarta, the displacement might be forced not by the government’s desire to open new territory for exploitation but rather by the residents’ exploitation of an underground resource.  
 
So, why should anyone outside Indonesia pay attention to Jakarta’s subsidence problem? The answer lies in our daily lives. Just by occupying a place we alter it in some way. For billions of us the alteration isn’t noticeable, or we believe someone else will take care of the “problem.” Occupied as we are with occupations and life in general, we don’t spend much time thinking that what we do has ramifications beyond our lifetimes and local geography. When most realize a problem in the making or one already made, they complain.
 
And that brings me to the news, however iffy, that July, 2019 was the warmest month on record. First, a caveat: Such information should be understood in the context of our limited weather records that start only a couple of hundred years ago and only in specific, and not global, places and with the realization that Earth has had periods much warmer than the current temperature regime. Second, a question: What are you personally going to do about the news?
 
Do you think the average Indonesian in Jakarta will stop taking groundwater from those Quaternary sediments? Right. Probably not. Jakarta will continue to subside unless some government entity takes measures similar to those taken at Long Beach, California, where subsidence dropped the local region by about thirty feet in just two decades.
 
We’re little more than the beavers when it comes to making our homes convenient. They change dry land into wetlands, and we do the opposite in places like Jakarta’s swamps and marshes, in New Orleans and Long Beach, and in the Netherlands.
 
I remember some friends telling me that they bought property in Florida in the 1970s. Well, not property exactly, but future property. What they bought was still underwater, but it was slated for development in one of those projected coastal communities with homes neatly lined along newly formed canals. They could have their own boat dock right outside their future home. Today, if one flies over Florida, such communities stretching not only along the ocean but also into the Everglades are quite evident. Many of the residents, now second and third generations of those original families, probably live unaware that where they live is another version of Jakarta, albeit one with pipeline infrastructure. If problems arise, such as those associated with changes in the Everglades, do you think individuals will take it upon themselves to rectify those problems?  
 
Jakarta’s subsidence problem is a long way from being solved. Ten million people doing what they do has an inertia that is almost impossible to overcome. If the Indonesian government, short of building the infrastructure to supply water to all its residents, tries to solve the problem by adding clean fill to the subsiding areas, it will discover a problem related to unconsolidated sediments in an active earthquake zone. Yes, on the southern side of Java lies the Java trench, a subduction zone that, as many around the world learned at Christmas, 2004, can generate very large earthquakes and subsequent tsunamis. Seismic shaking liquifies sediments. People in Alaska lost their homes to such liquefaction in 1964, and the Marina District residents of San Francisco suffered losses when their unconsolidated sediments liquefied during the Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989.
 
You might say, “So, what am I supposed to do about any of this?” And that’s the point here. Of the seven plus billion people on the planet, relatively few have any awareness of how we alter Nature just by our occupation. Still even fewer act to prevent or mitigate problems caused by our interaction with the planet.
 
Say you are one who thinks that global warming is a problem. Now, what are you personally doing about it? Say you think your community is overusing some resource like groundwater. What are you personally doing about it?
 
We live in a society of complainers. We live in a society that waits for others to take some action on our behalf. Not that that is unusual. It’s been the way of the world since the rise of the first communities. But the complaining is louder now, I believe, because of our interconnectedness. It’s become collective complaining. And in the collective, the individual loses individuality. How so? Being an individual, if I may be permitted an opinion, means exhibiting personal responsibility. And for those who would say, “But I’m just one person,” I might ask, “So?”
 
* Abidin, H.Z., Djaja, R., Darmawan, D. et al. Natural Hazards (2001) 23: 365. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1011144602064
Land Subsidence of Jakarta (Indonesia) and its Geodetic Monitoring System.
 
 

I remember being a young professor and not understanding the nature of “scientific rigor.” That was the term my older and wiser colleagues bandied about every time someone wanted to publish something or report “something new.” And the bandi-abouters (or bandi-doubters) had good reason. Isn’t science supposed to deal in verifiable quantities, in experiments conducted under the strictest controls and scrutiny, and in precisely calibrated apparatus? And that means that science must, ultimately, rely heavily on math to eliminate hints of subjectivism. The numbers just have “to add up” if peers are asked to accept results.
 
But, of course, the world is unimaginably complex. Don’t believe me? Hey, I’m not alone in this. The problem is that we cannot know all at any moment. Our lack of omniscience makes us vulnerable to error, hasty conclusion, and non-sequiturs. First, let me give you an example of the complexity from a recently published book; second let me engage you in speculation about social sciences.
 
First: Professor Bill Sullivan suggests a possible link among genes, germs, and characteristic beliefs and behaviors. His book, Pleased to Meet Me: Genes, Germs, and the Curious Forces That Make Us Who We Are, relates findings that genes might have an influence on political leanings and gut bacteria might have some influence on behavior. Sullivan writes, for example, “All of us like to think that we march to the beat of our own drum. But science has revealed that the rhythm is played by percussionists we can’t see with the naked eye.” * Scary thought, that. Just when you finished looking in the mirror and saying, “Good morning, I look and feel great today, and I’m really pleased with my thoughts and behavior,” some guy comes along and says you might be a bit of a marionette whose strings are pulled from the inside. For Sullivan, this means that we have a “false sense of self” (14), and that “almost everything we know about ourselves is wrong” (14). Just got scarier, right? The person in the mirror isn’t the person you imagined. One more “fact”: “About 10,000 species of bacteria reside in our gut, supplying us with an extra eight million genes [cells have about 21,000 each]. Their collective weight is up to three pounds” (31). Yeah, equivalent to a brain’s weight. Sullivan calls such science about genes and germs an “ego crusher.”  It suggests we are possibly just as much controlled as controlling. Yet, and here’s my transition into the second part of this discussion, we can’t know for sure about who or what controls even in the face of these biological facts that Sullivan reveals to us biological laymen. (Before I change to my speculation, I’ll note that Sullivan doesn’t dismiss environmental conditions. They, too, influence who we are)
 
Finding out about this complexity hidden within us helps us to understand more about who we are, but it is a stretch to say the rigor of the biological science leads to irrefutable rigorous conclusions. I think Sullivan points out that separated twins reunited in later life discover that they have much in common, including leaning toward the same political points of view—40% of the time. Think about that: 40%. Maybe the influence of genes and germs should be taken seriously just 40%. Is that rigorous enough? And since genes appear to serve multiple functions, can we ever completely know that this or that gene is the reason that you, for example, lean this way or that politically, religiously, socially? And we can ask the same question about the validity of ascribing influence to gut bacteria. Isn’t there a hint in Sullivan’s research that the genes of individual bacteria seem to work in unison to produce in you some tendency? Is a hint a matter of rigor?
 
Second, and back to the matter of rigor: in my relative youthful ignorance I looked at literary criticism, ethnology, and social sciences in general to see whether or not such activities lacked scientific rigor. And what of history, also, I asked myself? I had a number of colleagues who worked in anthropology, archaeology, and history, all in my youthful mind related by the category “social science.” How could peer historians, anthropologists, and archaeologists judge work submitted to journals without applying judgments based on their biases and incomplete knowledge? Where’s the rigor in that process? Maybe we just want the “generally true” and not the “absolutely true.”
 
You probably want an example. For a while, and maybe still so, one of the most critically examined poems in the English language was “The Windhover” by Gerard Manley Hopkins. Just about everyone agrees that it is a great poem, but people keep arguing about it, especially about the line that contains the words “here buckle.” All those “great literary critics,” and yet, there is no final agreement. Is there rigor in literary research? Maybe in something like counting the number of polysyllabic words in a work, or in counting metaphorical references to the sun. And what of archaeology? Can the archaeologists agree on whether or not a Neanderthal burial 60,000 years ago implies a religion? Or, does it imply fear of scavengers near an encampment after a death? And do 430,000-to-540,000-year-old scratch marks on a shell found in Java represent language, math, or the amusement of a Homo erectus child? Or take anthropology. Should we question the work of Margaret Mead in light of Derek Freeman’s re-evaluation of her work and report that one of the girls Mead interviewed said she and her girlfriends were just pulling Mead’s leg about Samoan sexual mores? Another: What of behavioral biology that explains the “motives” of various animals? (Could someone please poll the orcas?)
 
When I began to see a movement toward “qualitative” research, I was even more confused about rigor. How does one rigorously deal with any quality without injecting some personal feeling or point of view? Yet, there was a growing body of such research, all taken quite seriously by “peers.” And that type of research seems to be proliferating. To me, much of it seemed reminiscent of nineteenth-century works that aimed to explain Man and Animal. So, recently, I went back to one of those roots of social “sciences,” not all the way into the nineteenth century, but to a century ago. It was there that I found some clue about the rise in qualitative research.
 
Here’s a passage from the 1921 Introduction to the Science of Sociology by Park and Burgess “Social questions have been endlessly discussed, and it is important that they should be. What the student needs to learn, however, is how to get facts rather than formulate opinions. The most important facts that sociologists have to deal with are opinions (attitudes and sentiments), but until students learn to deal with opinions as the biologists deal with organisms, that is, to dissect them—reduce them to their component elements, describe them, and define the situation (environment) to which they are a response—we must not expect very great progress in sociological science.”**
 
I guess I haven’t progressed much since those days long ago when I was still trying to get a handle on rigorous research. The student shouldn’t “formulate opinions,” but the facts of the “science” are “opinions (attitudes and sentiments).” That’s pretty much a matter of qualitative over quantitative research and a branch of human inquiry that begs a question about rigor. Ask yourself whether or not I can trust the validity of your opinion as you express it. Come on, admit it: You have changed over the years, but some of your past lingers in your present.  
 
And that brings me to one aspect of social science with which everyone is familiar: Polls on feelings, attitudes, and tendencies we see—daily—that serve as the dissection of opinions Park and Burgess suggest make up a science of sociology. There is an entire industry centered on such incessant polling and dissection. Among the pollsters are mathematicians, specifically statisticians. Certainly, their presence lends rigor to polling. Or does it? They can do the math only on the data that the pollsters hand them.
 
The question about the rigor of the process is significant because the math makes no judgments. Its weakness might be in that it doesn’t give an answer about the design of the poll itself: Who wrote the questions? Are the questions devoid of any modifiers that can be loosely interpreted by the polled? Certainly, we might ask about the rigor of any poll that asks a single question, one requiring, for example, acknowledgement of favor or disfavor. Yet, many people attempt to engage others in such simplifications. And, of course, there’s the question of how many questions make a good poll, that is, what level of specificity should a poll attain? The rigor in polling comes, I believe, from highly specific questions. That’s when the statisticians can do their best work.
 
But now, I have to ask whether or not in my responding to a poll, am I responding? Are my genes responding? Are my gut bacteria responding?
 
Genetics, gut biology, and the social sciences all seem to have something to teach us about ourselves, but all of us who read studies from the fields need to ask first about the rigor of the research and second about the possibility that something might be missing, some unknown influence on the matter at hand. The unknowns, however, can’t be rigorously examined. I know that I don’t have to agree with everything that supposedly like-minded people hold dear. Where’s my individuality if I do? Do I associate intellectually with those with similar gut bacteria and genes? But, one can belong to a particular religion or denomination and still hold exceptions. One can belong to a political party and also disagree with some tenets of that party.

I suppose that until someone does some definitive rigorous research we can all accept on what humans are and why they believe and behave the way they do, we’ll be at the mercy of those who draw conclusions tainted by unknowns and opinions. What if I say that I believe our lack of omniscience is behind our willingness to accept levels of rigor as they serve our needs in the topics du jour? What if I argue that our tendencies have their origin in both our culture and our biology? If my argument were rigorous, would I be able to assign a proportion to the influence of both? Woe is me. I don't have the wherewithal to make rigorous studies that demonstrate the validity of any such conjectures. Sullivan's book reopens the old question about Nature vs. Nurture and once again forces us to ask about our own beliefs about why we are who we are and behave the way we do.
 
*Washington, D.C., National Geographic Partners, LLC, 2019. p. 11.
 
**Park, Robert E. and Ernest W. Burgess. Introduction to the Science of Sociology. Chicago. The University of Chicago Press, 1921. p. vi.