Day: May 21, 2019

Reasons to be an Atheist #1: Science Works

Posted on by Dan

The reasons to be an atheist today are numerous and varied. This article will be the first in a series of articles outlining the many reasons to be an atheist. The first reason to be discussed acknowledges that we have a better system of explaining the world than a religious one. The world is big, complex, and many times confusing. This is one of the reasons people turn to religion, because they feel that religion will provide answers to some of life’s biggest questions. However there is a more accurate system of thought out there that provides these answers and unlike religion, it actually works. It’s called science.

Science vs Faith
Quote by Tim Minchin

Civilizations have invented thousands of religions over the centuries in an attempt to explain the world around them.  After centuries of debate the results of religion are inconclusive on most topics and it’s been a spectacular failure on the rest.  As for one popular example, in the early 17th century the Catholic Church forbid Galileo Galilei from teaching the Copernican view of the Solar System that placed the Sun at the center of the system with the Earth and the other planets orbiting around it. According to the church at the time this view was in conflict with the teachings of the Bible. Clearly, the Bible got this basic fact wrong. On the other hand, there is overwhelming evidence that science works very well as a system of thought for explaining the world around us.  By adapting a scientific worldview we have no reason to be religious.

Science works because of its method and its commitment to the principles of scientific objectivity. Religion relies on blind faith to reveled prophecy. The two systems of thought for attempting to understand the world couldn’t be more polar opposites. Let’s take a look at why science works by looking at the five steps of the scientific method and the five principles of scientific objectivity.

The Scientific Method

The scientific method consists of five steps.

  1. Making an observation – this involves observing some phenomena that requires an explanation of the phenomena
  2. Asking a question – the purpose here is to identify a specific problem and to narrow the focus of the inquiry
  3. Formulating a hypothesis – the hypothesis is an educated guess that can be tested
  4. Testing the prediction in an experiment – this is the investigation to see if the real world behaves as the hypothesis predicts
  5. Analyzing the result – here is where the conclusion is drawn on whether the evidence supports or rejects the hypothesis
The Scientific Method as an Ongoing Process
The Scientific Method
(Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Scientific Objectivity

The scientific method works because it is objective. While it is true that scientists are people, and peoples perceptions of the world are subjective, that doesn’t mean that science hasn’t figured a way around that problem to become objective in practice. Scientific objectivity also consists of five principles.

  1. Observability – for something to be scientifically objective it must be observable. This includes things that our senses cannot observe directly but we can observe the effects through equipment such as infrared radiation.
  2. Universality – for something to be scientifically objective it must consider and account for all relevant data.
  3. Self-consistency – all of the observable data must fit into a self consistent pattern to produces accurate results.
  4. Reproducibility – the data must be reproducible by other people.
  5. Debatability – the results must be debatable. The is the error-correcting process in science since individual people make strong emotional attachments to their idea’s or sometimes make mistakes.

The Difference Between Science and Religion in Explaining how the World Works

The scientific method along with its adherence to scientific objectivity provides the strongest tools we have to answering questions about the world around us. The universe works how it works and its up to us to discover how it works. That’s what science does, it discovers how the world works through observation and experimentation. Inventing superstitious religious stories and institutionalizing them over the generations doesn’t prove they must be correct, especially when observation and experimentation say otherwise. There is an enormous wealth of observable evidence that fits into a self consistent pattern that we call the theory of evolution by natural selection and which explains how humans, and all other species, evolved on this planet. There is absolutely no observable evidence for the creation myth of Adam and Eve in the book of Genesis from the Bible.

As the body of scientific knowledge has grown over time it has replaced religious explanations with scientific explanations. Religion still thinks it can provide answers to questions that science can’t yet answer, but that doesn’t mean that science won’t ever answer them. The remarkable progress of scientific knowledge over the past few centuries is one of the strongest reasons to abandon your religion and become an atheist.

Further Reading: Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan; The Magic of Reality by Richard Dawkins; The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins; A Devil’s Chaplain by Richard Dawkins; Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris; God and the Folly of Faith: The Incompatibility of Science and Religion by Victor Stenger

1977: Voyager Program

Posted on by Dan

The Voyager Program represents an ambitious undertaking in exploring the boundaries of the Solar System, and beyond.  The program consists of two spacecraft, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, launched by NASA in 1977 in order to probe the four outer planets of the Solar System as well as their moons, rings, and magnetospheres.

Background and Objectives of the Voyager Space Program

The primary objective of the Voyager space program was to complete a comprehensive study of the outer edges of our Solar System.  This mission was made possible due to a bit a good luck.  Known as The Grand Tour, a rare geometric alignment of the four outer planets that happens roughly once every 175 years allowed for a single mission to fly by all four planets with relative ease.

Originally, the four-planet mission was deemed too expensive and difficult, and the program was only funded to conduct studies of Jupiter and Saturn. and their moons.  It was known, however, that fly-by of all four planets was possible.  In preparation of the mission over 10,000 trajectories were studied before two were selected that allowed for close fly-by’s of Jupiter and Saturn.  The flight trajectory for Voyager 2 also allowed for the option to continue on to Uranus and Neptune.  

The Different Instruments of the Voyager Spacecraft
The Different Instruments of the Voyager Spacecraft
(Credit: Nasa.gov)

The two Voyager spacecraft are identical, each equipped with several instruments used to conduct a variety of experiments. These include television cameras, infrared and ultraviolet sensors, magnetometers, plasma detectors, among other instruments.

In addition to all of its instruments, each Voyager spacecraft carried on it an addition interesting item called the Golden Record.  The Golden Record is a 12-inch gold-plated copper disk designed to be playable on a standard phonograph turntable.  It was designed to be kind of time capsule, intended to communicate the story of humanity to any extraterrestrial civilization that might come across it.  The Golden Record contains a variety of sounds and images intended to portray the diversity of culture on Earth.  This includes:

  • greetings in 55 languages, including both common and lesser-known languages.
  • a collection of music from different cultures and eras including Bach, Beethoven, Peruvian panpipes and drums, Australian aborigine songs, and more
  • a variety of natural sounds such as birds, wind, thunder, water waves, and human made sounds such as laughter, a baby’s cry and more.
  • various images such as human anatomy and DNA, plant and animal landscapes, the Solar System with its planets and more
  • a “Sounds of Earth” Interstellar Message, featuring a message from President Jimmy Carter and a spoken introduction by Carl Sagan
The Golden Record from the Voyager Space Mission
The Golden Record from the Voyager Space Mission

A committee chaired by the astronomer Carl Sagan was responsible for selecting the content put on the record.  The value of the Golden Record is, in Sagan’s own words:

“Billions of years from now our sun, then a distended red giant star, will have reduced Earth to a charred cinder. But the Voyager record will still be largely intact, in some other remote region of the Milky Way galaxy, preserving a murmur of an ancient civilization that once flourished — perhaps before moving on to greater deeds and other worlds — on the distant planet Earth.”

Carl Sagan

The Launch, Voyage and Discoveries

Voyager 2 was launched on August 20,1977 from the NASA Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida, sixteen days earlier than Voyager 1.  The year 1977 provided a rare opportunity where Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune were all in alignment allowing Voyager 2 to fly by each of the four planets.  Voyager 1 was on a slightly different trajectory and only flew by Jupiter, Saturn, and Saturn’s largest moon Titan. 

Voyager Space Probe
Voyager Space Probe

Voyager 2’s fly-by of Jupiter and Saturn produced some important discoveries.  It provided detailed and close up images of both planets and its moons.  While much was learned about each planet, its useful to note one important discovery of Jupiter and Saturn.  On its fly-by of Jupiter, Voyager 2 revealed information on its giant red spot such as its size and structure (a complex storm with a diameter greater than the Earth!), dynamics, and its interaction with the surrounding atmosphere.  On it’s fly-by of Saturn, Voyager 2 revealed information on its rings such as its structure (close up images revealed the rings are made up of countless, individual particles), dynamics, and various features.

After the success of the Jupiter and Saturn fly-by’s, NASA increased funding for Voyager 2 to fly by Uranus and finally Neptune.  Currently both spacecraft are leaving the Solar System as they continue to transmit data back to Earth.

Continue reading more about the exciting history of science!