On Consensus

Yesterday I made a couple of tweets about consensus of opinion, and how various groups talk about a lack of consensus in the scientific community when the lack of consensus among their own community is orders of magnitude larger.

Now, the climate change debate is a great contemporary example of this, we have the US President Elect talking about how there isn't a scientific consensus on the subject.  But for the purposes of this argument I'm going with something less controversial as an example - the parallels with climate science opposition should be clear enough.

Let's look at creationism in its various forms.  Creationists like to talk about gaps in the fossil record, they like to talk about the things science doesn't yet know (e.g. exactly how the jump was made from chemistry to life [1]).  However, if you actually look at different schools of creationism, you see completely irreconcilable differences, usually deriving from how literally proponents interpret the bible.

Consider the question, how come the Earth looks like it's 4.5 billion years old.  Anyway you slice it, from any branch of Earth Science or Astronomy, you always come up with the same answer.  4.5 or to be exact 4.567 billion years old (easy to remember :)).  Within creationism there are at least 3 different *inconsistent* answers to the question "How come the Earth looks like it's 4.5 billion years old", and I summarise:

1. No it doesn't.  Really, there are plenty of books out there and plenty of people arguing that the science is wrong, carbon dating isn't valid, the astronomical arguments are wrong, all sorts of stuff.

2. Because god made it look like that on purpose.  Either as a test of faith or simply because mysterious ways, what can you do.  This argument is at least self-consistent, although amusingly, logically it's exactly the same as arguing that everything was created 10 seconds ago complete with fake memories. [2]

3. It is 4.5 billion years old, the bible should be taken metaphorically rather than literally, god set the wheels in motion etc. etc.

My point is not to spend time debunking these arguments, fun as that can be, but simply to point out that they are *completely inconsistent with each other*.  A creationist making argument 3 actually has a lot more common ground with the scientific view than he does with creationist making argument 1.  But, correct me if I'm wrong, I never hear creationists discussing with each other which version is correct.  They're just all lining their guns up against the scientific consensus, and even more than that, enjoy trying to exaggerate very small scientific differences of opinion, or gaps in the knowledge, that are mere cracks compared to the Grand Canyons between *each other*.

Likewise in Intelligent Design vs Evolution, there are various different evolution arguments like everything was created in situ 6000 years ago with no changes since ;  evolution has happened since Noah's Ark (to deal with the problem that a 100 foot Ark could hardly have accomodated every single species of life we have today) ; and again it actually is what we see but god started off the process, and so on.

We can also see this in climate change opposition, we can see it in conspiracy theories like 9/11 - some people argue the planes were holograms, some argue they were packed with explosives and directed by the Government, all kinds of arguments that again can't be reconciled with each other.  Some moon landing hoaxers say nothing has ever been outside the Van Allen belts, some say only the first missions were fake, etc., all the while hanging their own arguments on tiny inconsistencies in the official accounts.

So I think that's probably enough for now, I was going to expand into the scientific method but I'll leave that for another post.  In the meantime it's a big red flag when people arguing against a scientific or "official" position can't agree amongst themselves about what the "real truth" is, and even more so when they're trying to talk about a lack of consensus in the scientific community or "official account", which is often simply the fine print being discussed and debated as of course it should be.

[1] Whatever life is, the definition itself is remarkably hard to pin down.

[2] One thing with this argument is that it should take all physical evidence off the table.  If god can make anything just so, why not satan?  Or the easter bunny?  But the same people are often happy to point at a few bits of wood on Mount Ararat and say "Ha!  Physical evidence of the Ark!"