Embedded Files
( - previous issue - / - next issue - )
Apologia Report 21:9 (1,282)
March 2, 2016
In this issue:
PORNOGRAPHY - are "76% of Christian young adults actively seeking out porn on the Internet?"
SCIENCE - Skeptical Inquirer takes on Hugh Ross and Reasons to Believe
+ "why most published research findings are false"
PORNOGRAPHY
In a mass-mailing from the Josh McDowell Ministry (JMM) dated February 10, 2016, McDowell writes about "a study I commissioned from the Barna Group <www.goo.gl/ZML0Oc> [which recently] found that among Christian young adults:
* - "76% actively seek out pornography on the Internet
* - "Only 1 in 20 have a friend who says pornography is wrong
* - "52% say that not recycling is wrong while only 32% say porn is
* - "93% say they talk with their friends about porn in neutral, accepting and encouraging ways"
JMM is hosting an April 4-7 conference in Greensboro, NC to focus on the porn problem. Learn more here: <www.goo.gl/gI0GX0>
While we don't doubt that JMM is touching on a critically important service here, this wretched, "too *bad* to believe" news reminds us of widely circulated findings from the Barna Group which were challenged by the Journal of Religion & Society. We covered this in AR 17:41 noting the authors’ conclusion that "supporters, critics, and the general populace embraced statistics portraying Christians as having high divorce rates. Even though more-scientific sources present statistics suggesting otherwise, the high Christian divorce rate described by Barna has become widely accepted. As a result, this particular construction of moral fear helps stigmatize Christians as immoral and hypocritical. ...
"'As Christian teachers emphasize negative statistics to spur Christians into better Christian practices, this emphasis may have the unintended effect of demoralizing their audience' and encouraging those hostile to the faith, as the authors also explain." <www.goo.gl/zY2WzB>
POSTSCRIPT (May 15, 2016): "Porn in the Pulpit and the Pews," a brief news piece in the April 2016 issue of Christianity Today (p24), refers to the above-mentioned conference and reports that Barna found 21 percent of youth pastors are "currently struggling" with porn, and of that group 56 percent "say they are addicted." For senior pastors, the rate is 14 percent struggling, with a third of that group addicted.
According to the study, radical differences exist between pastors and adult Christians in response to addressing pastoral porn: e.g., 41 percent of adult Christians say the pastor should not continue in ministry while only 8 percent of pastors think so.
---
SCIENCE
When an anti-supernaturalist magazine profiles a Christian ministry, one would be surprised if it weren't hostile. In "Does the Scientific Method Have Biblical Origins?" Brian Bolton lives up to expectations as he places Hugh Ross and the Reasons to Believe Ministry (RTB) in the crosshairs. Only upon reaching the end does one realize that Bolton - himself a retired psychologist - has curiously omitted any reference to Ross's outstanding academic credentials. <www.goo.gl/NWJZae>
Bolton reports that RTB "holds the least popular creationist viewpoint among Christian fundamentalists and the least known among Christians of all persuasions. This is most likely because RTB accommodates three major conclusions from mainstream science.
"Specifically, RTB creationism stands apart from its creationist competitors (Answers in Genesis <answersingenesis.org>, Discovery Institute <discovery.org>, and Institute for Creation Research <icr.org> [URLs not in original]) in adopting the 13.5 -billion-year-old universe and the 4.5-billion-year-old Earth and rejecting the biblical worldwide flood. Reasons to Believe maintains that the Noachian Deluge was a regional flood that drowned all humans (except eight), since they all lived in a small area of the planet. Also, while endorsing the Adam and Eve narrative, Reasons to Believe dates the event to about 50,000 years ago."
This article is constructed around a review of Ross's book, More Than a Theory: Revealing a Testable Model for Creation [1]. It is as though the Skeptical Inquirer (Mar/Apr '16, pp53-55) has only just recently learned about RTB as a result of stumbling upon the seven-year-old book.
Bolton complains that in his book, Ross "continually invokes [scientific] terms ... when favorably characterizing RTB creationism and castigating his creationist adversaries who make exactly the same theological assumptions he does. He even compares them to flat-Earth and geocentrist believers.
"After severely criticizing the other biblical creationists for their lack of scientific credibility, Ross then contradicts himself ... preferring instead the Adam and Eve story. ...
"Ross asserts that the scientific method could more accurately be called the 'biblical method.' ...
"Ross's unequivocal claim is that the scientific method has its roots in the Bible. What direct evidence does Ross provide to support his claim? Quite appropriately, he cites six verses from scripture that he believes document his case."
For Bolton, these verses "do not constitute anything like a scientific investigation involving objective tests of observable phenomena in the natural world. Ross simply equates the words *test* and *tested* with scientific methodology. ...
"Ross asserts that good science involves using models that make predictions that can be tested for validity. ... Ross is referring to his own test of how well four creation and evolution viewpoints predict future scientific discoveries."
In the end, Bolton finds that Ross's conclusions about these viewpoints are "just a contrived and meaningless expression of [his] highly favorable opinion of his own biblically derived viewpoint and the corresponding abysmal failure of all others."
It's almost enough to tempt one to ask Bolton what he thinks of our next item.
"Making It All Up" by Andrew Ferguson, senior editor at The Weekly Standard -- ready for another scandal in the academy? "One morning in August, [Shankar Vedantam,] the social science reporter for National Public Radio ... glumly told his [listeners that researchers] 'found something very disappointing. Nearly two-thirds of [related] experiments did not replicate, meaning that scientists repeated these studies but could not obtain the results that were found by the original research team.'" The extent of the damage, it turns out, is that a whopping "two out of three experiments in behavioral psychology have a fair chance of being worthless.
"The most surprising thing about the Reproducibility Project <https://osf.io/ezcuj/>, however - the most alarming, shocking, devastating, and depressing thing - is that anybody at all was surprised. The warning bells about the feebleness of behavioral science have been clanging for many years.
"The widespread failure to replicate findings has afflicted physics, chemistry, geology, and other real sciences. Ten years ago a Stanford researcher named John Ioannidis published a paper called 'Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.' <www.goo.gl/7l31Vl>
"'For most study designs and settings,' Ioannidis wrote, 'it is more likely for a research claim to be false than true.' [M]ost systematic efforts at replication in his field have borne him out. His main criticism involved the misuse of statistics....
"Two economists recently wrote a little book called The Cult of Statistical Significance [2], which demonstrated how ... a researcher strains to make his experimental data statistically significant. The book was widely read and promptly ignored, perhaps because its theme, if incorporated into behavioral science, would lay waste to vast stretches of the literature.
"Behavioral science shares other weaknesses with every field of experimental science, especially in what the trade calls 'publication bias.' ...
"Surveys have shown that published studies in social psychology are five times more likely to show positive results - to confirm the experimenters' hypothesis - than studies in the real sciences.
"This raises two possibilities. Either behavioral psychologists are the smartest researchers, and certainly the luckiest, in the history of science - or something is very wrong." Ferguson explores the possible reasons for this.
"In a survey of the membership of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology <www.bit.ly/1SgQMfd>, 85 percent of respondents called themselves liberal, 6 percent conservative, 9 percent moderate. Two percent of graduate students and postdocs called themselves conservative. ...
"The self-correction essential to science is less likely to happen among people whose political and cultural views are so uniform. This is especially true when so many of them specialize in studying political and cultural behavior. Their biases are likely to be invisible to themselves and their colleagues. ...
"In his book Moral, Believing Animals [3], Christian Smith, a sociologist at Notre Dame, described the worldview that undergirds politicized social science. ...
"Perhaps most consequentially, replications failed to validate many uses of the Implicit Association Test, which is the most popular research tool in social psychology. ... Sifting data from the IAT, social scientists tell us that at least 75 percent of white Americans are racist, whether they know it or not, even when they publicly disavow racial bigotry. ... The test is commonly used in courts and classrooms across the country. ...
"That the United States is in the grip of an epidemic of implicit racism is simply taken for granted by social psychologists - another settled fact *too good to check.* [Emphasis mine. - RP] Few of them have ever returned to the original data. Those who have done so have discovered that the direct evidence linking IAT results to specific behavior is in fact negligible, with small samples and weak effects that have seldom if ever been replicated. ...
"Amid the rubble of the replication crisis, the faithful of social science have mounted a number of defenses" - only to be skewered by Ferguson at significant length. "Social psychology proceeds by assuming that the objects (a revealing word) of its study lack the capacity to know and explain themselves accurately. This is the capacity that makes us uniquely human and makes self-government plausible. We should know enough to be wary of any enterprise built on its repudiation.
"This is probably why humility among social scientists never lasts; it's not in the job description." The Weekly Standard, Oct 19 '15. <www.goo.gl/RX4zS6>
Just don't give up: <www.goo.gl/x9jA3W>
-------
SOURCES: Monographs
1 - More Than a Theory: Revealing a Testable Model for Creation, by Hugh Ross (Baker, 2012, paperback, 304 pages) <www.goo.gl/TCt7Q4>
2 - The Cult of Statistical Significance: How the Standard Error Costs Us Jobs, Justice, and Lives, by Stephen T. Ziliak and Deirdre N. McCloskey (Univ of Mich Prs, 2008, paperback, 352 pages) <www.goo.gl/9k4X9f>
3 - Moral, Believing Animals: Human Personhood and Culture, by Christian Smith (Oxford Univ Prs, 2009, paperback, 172 pages) <www.goo.gl/YFAH1z>
------
( - previous issue - / - next issue - )
Page updated
Google Sites
Report abuse