Science vs. God: Does Progress Trump Faith?

 Three out of five scientists do not believe in God, but two out of five do, said John Donvan, opening a debate on the issue of science and religion yesterday (Dec. 5) in New York.

The discussion pitted the perspectives from both sides against one another: Does science refute religion? Or does science address a different set of questions, with answers that can point toward religious truths?

No finely tuned universe

"Tonight, I want to emphasize that 500 years of science have demonstrated that God, that vague notion, is not likely," said Lawrence Krauss, a theoretical physicist at Arizona State University and one of two debaters arguing that science has rendered religion moot in this Intelligence Squared Debate.

Proponents for religion argue that the universe is finely tuned for life, with certain fundamental parameters in nature that make our existence possible. But Krauss turned this argument on its head.

"We would be surprised to find ourselves in a universe in which we couldn't live," Krauss said. What's more, "most of the universe is rather inhospitable to life."

Answering different questions

On the other side, Dinesh D'Souza, an author and former policy analyst, argued that the two — science and religion — are fundamentally separate.

"The questions to which God is the answer are not scientific questions," D'Souza said. Humans around the world want to know why the universe exists, the purpose of our existence and what will come afterward. Science doesn't "have a clue" as to the answers to these questions, D'Souza said.

"Why? Because none of these questions is amenable to being described empirically," he said. "Science can show us how we got a universe, but not why."

A modern, Christian perspective

The debate, which included an audience vote at the end, focused on a modern, mainstream interpretation of religion and God, rather than a fundamentalist take. So, there was no discussion of creationism or a literal interpretation of Scripture, for example. Both D'Souza and his fellow team member, Ian Hutchinson, a professor of nuclear science and engineering at MIT, acknowledge science as a powerful tool for understanding the world. [Tall Tales? 10 Creation Myths Explained]

Hutchinson pointed out the discussion centered on central tenets of religious faith, not peripheral issues, such as the centuries-old Christian belief that the sun orbited Earth, which science long ago debunked.

Both Hutchinson and D'Souza, who supported the compatibility of science and religion, are Christian, a point their opponents picked up on.

In the last 10,000 years, about 10,000 different religions have featured 1,000 different gods, said Michael Shermer, founding publisher of Skeptic magazine, adding that D'Souza and Hutchinson reject all but one of those gods, bringing them almost in line with atheists, who reject all of them.

"What I am asking you to do is go one god further with us," Shermer said.

But D'Souza and Hutchinson disputed this, saying they did not see other religions as "wrong." All religions can be seen as human enterprises to gain knowledge beyond the empirical, D'Souza said.

The nearly universal impulse

When asked about personal religious experiences, Shermer said advancements in neuroscience are showing how changes in the brain create phenomenon responsible for them, such as out-of-body experiences.

“The experiences are real, what we want to know is what do they represent,” Shermer said.

D'Souza responded: If 95 out of 100 people in a village say they know a villager named Bill, the simplest explanation is that Bill exists, he said. Likewise, widespread religious experience is unlikely to be the result of a mass hallucination, he said. [8 Ways Religion Impacts Your Life]

Krauss disagreed: "The fact something may be relatively universal suggests we may be programmed to believe in certain things. That doesn't mean they exist."

Shermer offered an evolutionary theory behind the universal religious impulse among humans. A propensity to make false-positive errors, such as assuming a predator was rustling the grass when it was only the wind, offered a survival advantage; in that way, our ancestors acquired a tendency to infer the existence of intentional forces. As human groups grew larger, religion evolved as a mechanism for social control, a source of morality — one that is no longer needed, he said.

"We know we can do it without God," Shermer said.

D'Souza, meanwhile, maintained that morality is beyond the realm of science, and he referred to theories that purport to explain away religion, as "pop psychology."

Pointing to God

"The last good argument against God came out in the 1850s," D'Souza said, referring to Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. (He later said Darwin lost his faith as a result of the death of his daughter, not because of his theory.)

Since then, "Science has made a whole bunch of discoveries, but they point in the opposite direction," D'Souza said.

For example, before the Big Bang theory came about, most scientists believed the universe was eternal, but this theory posited that the universe, as well as space and time, had a beginning.

"This was something the ancient Hebrews had said thousands of years ago," D'Souza said.

Krauss, who has worked in cosmology, had a very different take.

"We have a plausible explanation of how the universe could come from nothing," Krauss said. "Science has taught us we don't need God to exist."

Scientism & purpose

In summation, Hutchinson cautioned that his opponents were overreaching, and in so doing, damaging science. "Talking as if science is all the real knowledge there is alienates people from science who know better," he said, calling this approach "scientism" rather than science.

As science has explained the laws of nature, the gods humans once used to explain the world around us have progressively fallen by the wayside, Krauss said.

He also addressed D'Souza's earlier assertion that science cannot answer "why."

"'Why' presupposes purpose, what if there is no purpose? Does there need to be a purpose?" he said.

Audience polls before and after the debate revealed a winning team: Krauss and Shermer, who increased their share of the votes from 37 percent to 50 percent, while D'Souza's and Hutchinson's share increased by 4 percentage points, from 34 percent to 38 percent.

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AP Exclusive: Japan scientists took utility money

TOKYO (AP) — Influential scientists who help set Japan's radiation exposure  limits have for years had trips paid for by the country's nuclear plant operators to attend overseas meetings of the world's top academic group on radiation safety.

The potential conflict of interest is revealed in one sentence buried in a 600-page parliamentary investigation into last year's Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear power plant disaster and pointed out to The Associated Press by a medical doctor on the 10-person investigation panel.

Some of these same scientists have consistently given optimistic assessments about the health risks of radiation, interviews with the scientists and government documents show. Their pivotal role in setting policy after the March 2011 tsunami and ensuing nuclear meltdowns meant the difference between schoolchildren playing outside or indoors and families staying or evacuating their homes.

One leading scientist, Ohtsura Niwa, acknowledged that the electricity industry pays for flights and hotels to go to meetings of the International Commission on Radiological Protection, and for overseas members visiting Japan. He denied that the funding influences his science and stressed that he stands behind his view that continuing radiation worries about Fukushima are overblown.

"Those who evacuated just want to believe in the dangers of radiation to justify the action they took," Niwa told the AP in an interview.

The official stance of the International Commission on Radiological Protection is that the health risks from radiation become zero only with zero exposure. But some of the eight Japanese ICRP members do not subscribe to that view, asserting that low-dose radiation is harmless or the risks are negligible.

The doctor on the parliamentary panel, Hisako Sakiyama, is outraged about utility funding for Japan's ICRP members. She fears that radiation standards are being set leniently to limit costly evacuations.

"The assertion of the utilities became the rule. That's ethically unacceptable. People's health is at stake," she said. "The view was twisted so it came out as though there is no clear evidence of the risks, or that we simply don't know."

The ICRP, based in Ottawa, Canada, does not take a stand on any nation's policy. It is a charity that relies heavily on donations, and members' funding varies by nation. The group brings scientists together to study radiation effects on health and the environment, as well as the impact of disasters such as Chernobyl and Fukushima. In Japan, ICRP members sit on key panels at the prime minister's office and the education ministry that set radiation safety policy.

The Fukushima meltdowns, the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl, brought a higher level of scrutiny to Japan's nuclear industry, revealing close ties between the regulators and the regulated. Last month, some members of a panel that sets nuclear plant safety standards acknowledged they received research and other grant money from utility companies and plant manufacturers. The funding is not illegal in Japan.

Niwa, the only Japanese member to sit on the main ICRP committee, defended utility support for travel expenses, which comes from the Federation of Electric Power Companies of Japan through another radiation organization. Costs add up, he said, and he has spent tens of thousands of yen (thousands of dollars) of his personal money on ICRP projects and efforts to decontaminate Fukushima. All ICRP members fly economy, except for long flights such as between Argentina and Japan, he said.

The Federation declined comment.

Clouding the debate about radiation risks are the multiple causes of cancer, including diet, smoking and other habits. That's why it is extremely difficult to prove any direct link between an individual's cancer and radiation, or pinpoint where one cause begins and another ends.

The ICRP recommends keeping radiation exposure down to 1 millisievert per year and up to 20 millisieverts in a short-term emergency, a standard that takes into account the lessons of Chernobyl.

"Health risks from annual radiation exposure of 20 millisieverts, the current level for issuance of orders to evacuate an affected area, are quite small particularly when compared against the risks from other carcinogenic factors," the ICRP says.

The risk of getting cancer at 20 millisieverts raises the already existing 25 percent chance by an estimated 0.1 percent, according to French ICRP member Jacques Lochard, who visits Japan often to consult on Fukushima.

While that's low, he says it's not zero, so his view is that you should do all you can to reduce exposure.

Kazuo Sakai, a Japanese ICRP member, said he was interested in debunking that generally accepted view. Known as the "linear no threshold" model of radiation risk, the ICRP-backed position considers radiation harmful even at low doses with no threshold below which exposure is safe.

Sakai called that model a mere "tool," and possibly not scientifically sound.

He said his studies on salamanders and other animal life since the Fukushima disaster have shown no ill effects, including genetic damage, and so humans, exposed to far lower levels of radiation, are safe.

"No serious health effects are expected for regular people," he said.

The parliamentary investigation found that utilities have repeatedly tried to push Japanese ICRP members toward a lenient standard on radiation from as far back as 2007.

Internal records at the Federation of Electric Power Companies obtained by the investigative committee showed officials rejoicing over how their views were getting reflected in ICRP Japan statements.

Even earlier, Sakai received utility money for his research into low-dose radiation during a 1999-2006 tenure at the Central Research Institute of Electric Power Industry, an organization funded by the utilities.

But he said that before his hiring he anticipated pressures to come up with research favorable to the nuclear industry and he made it clear his science would not be improperly influenced.

Niwa, a professor at Fukushima Medical University, said that residents need to stay in Fukushima if at all possible, partly because they would face discrimination in marriage elsewhere in Japan from what he said were unfounded fears about radiation and genetic defects.

Setting off such fears are medical checks on the thyroids of Fukushima children that found some nodules or growths that are not cancerous but not normal.

No one knows for sure what this means, but Yoshiharu Yonekura, president of the National Institute of Radiological Sciences and an ICRP member, brushes off the worries and says such abnormalities are common.

The risk is such a non-concern in his mind that he says with a smile: "Low-dose radiation may be even good for you."

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Volcanoes, Not Meteorite, Killed Dinosaurs, Scientist Argues

 SAN FRANCISCO — Volcanic activity in modern-day India, not an asteroid, may have killed the dinosaurs, according to a new study.

Tens of thousands of years of lava flow from the Deccan Traps, a volcanic region near Mumbai in present-day India, may have spewed poisonous levels of sulfur and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and caused the mass extinction through the resulting global warming and ocean acidification, the research suggests.

The findings, presented Wednesday (Dec. 5) here at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union, are the latest volley in an ongoing debate over whether an asteroid or volcanism killed off the dinosaurs about 65 million years ago in the mass die-off known as the K-T extinction.

"Our new information calls for a reassessment of what really caused the K-T mass extinction," said Gerta Keller, a geologist at Princeton University who conducted the study.

For several years, Keller has argued that volcanic activity killed the dinosaurs.

But proponents of the Alvarez hypothesis argue that a giant meteorite impact at Chicxulub, Mexico, around 65 million years ago released toxic amounts of dust and gas into the atmosphere, blocking out the sun to cause widespread cooling, choking the dinosaurs and poisoning sea life. The meteorite may impact may also have set off volcanic activity, earthquakes and tsunamis. [Wipe Out: History's Most Mysterious Extinctions]

The new research "really demonstrates that we have Deccan Traps just before the mass extinction, and that may contribute partially or totally to the mass extinction," said Eric Font, a geologist at the University of Lisbon in Portugal, who was not involved in the research.

Sea cockroach

In 2009, oil companies drilling off the Eastern coast of India uncovered eons-old lava-filled sediments buried nearly 2 miles (3.3 kilometers) below the ocean surface.

Keller and her team got permission to analyze the sediments, finding they contained plentiful fossils from around the boundary between the Cretaceous-Tertiary periods, or K-T Boundary, when dinosaurs vanished.

The sediments bore layers of lava that had traveled nearly 1,000 miles (1,603 km) from the Deccan Traps. Today, the volcanic region spans an area as big as France, but was nearly the area of Europe when it was active during the late Cretaceous period, said Adatte Thierry, a geologist from the University of Lausanne in France who collaborated with Keller on the research.

Within the fossil record, plankton species got fewer, smaller and maintained less elaborate shells immediately after lava layers, which would indicate it happened in years after the eruptions. Most species gradually died off. In their wake, a hardy plankton genus with a small, nondescript exoskeleton, called Guembilitria, exploded within the fossil record. Keller's team found similar trends in their analysis of marine sediments from Egypt, Israel, Spain, Italy and Texas. While Guembilitria species represented between 80 percent and 98 percent of the fossils, other species disappeared.

"We call it a disaster opportunist," Keller told LiveScience. "It's like a cockroach — whenever things go bad, it will be the one that survives and thrives."

Guembilitria may have come to dominance worldwide when the huge amounts of sulfur (in the form of acid rain) released by the Deccan Traps fell into the oceans. There, it would've chemically binded with calcium, making that calcium unavailable to sea creatures that needed the element to build their shells and skeletons.

Around the same time in India, fossil evidence of land animals and plants vanished, suggesting the volcanoes caused mass extinctions on both land and in the sea there.

Global impact

In past work, the team has also found evidence at Chicxulub that casts doubt on the notion of a meteorite causing the extinction.

Sediments containing iridium, the chemical signature of an asteroid, show up after the extinction occurred, contradicting the notion that it could have caused a sudden die-off, Keller said.

A meteorite impact also would not have produced enough toxic sulfur and carbon dioxide to match the levels seen in the rocks, so it may have worsened the mass extinction, but couldn't have caused it, she said.

"The meteorite is just too small to cause the extinction."

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Science Reveals Simple Way You’ll Miss Best Holiday Deals

 Want to find a better holiday deal this season? Look left…or even right, for that matter. Just don’t look straight ahead.

New research finds that shoppers most often choose items at the center of store displays regardless of whether it’s the best product or price. What’s even more surprising is that we don’t even know we’re doing it.

It turns out that the shopper’s eye has a very central focus.

“Consumers are more likely to purchase products placed in the middle of a display — without even being aware of it,” said Onur Bodur, associate professor from Concordia’s John Molson School of Business in Montreal, who has studied the phenomenon.

Using eye-tracking devices, Bodur and his colleagues investigated how location influences choices for a variety of products, including cosmetics and food items.

They found that consumers would increase their visual focus on the central option in a product display area in the final five seconds of the decision-making process — and that was the point at which they determined which option to choose.

It turns out that the process is a subconscious one. When asked how they had come to choose which product to buy, consumers did not accurately recall their reasons for their decision. What’s more, they were not aware of any conscious visual focus on one area of the display over another.

What does uncovering these unconscious habits mean for the average shopper? Greater awareness of buying behaviors should lead to more informed choices. Says Bodur, “By using this newfound knowledge that visual attention is naturally drawn to the center of a display, consumers can consciously train themselves to make a more thorough visual scan of what’s on offer.”

When it comes to holiday shopping, the visual equivalent to thinking outside of the box just might lead to savvier selections.

Bodur co-authored the study along with marketing researchers at HEC in France and the Aston Business School in England. It appears in the Journal of Consumer Research.

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SpaceX Launches Sales of Falcon, Dragon Space Patches

 The company  responsible for the first private spacecraft to resupply the International Space Station introduced a different type of space supply for sale — mission patches.

Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, updated its online shop on Friday (Dec. 7) to offer embroidered emblems for its rocket and spacecraft flights for the first time. Based in Hawthorne, Calif., SpaceX is led by millionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, who also co-founded PayPal and Tesla Motors.

"The limited-edition mission patch collection includes a full set of all SpaceX mission patches, a total of 9," SpaceX wrote on its website at shop.spacex.com. "From the first launch of the Falcon 1 rocket to the most recent Falcon 9 mission to the International Space Station, you can review and relive SpaceX's historic launches."

The colorful, 4-inch wide (10.2 centimeters) cloth patches are based on the official emblems that were created by the company for each of its launches, from its ill-fated first Falcon 1 launch in March 2006 through its history-making Falcon 9 launch in October that lofted the first of a dozen NASA-contracted Dragon capsules to deliver to and return cargo from the space station. [Photos: Dragon's 1st Space Cargo Delivery]

The insignias also include the patch for the June 2010 maiden flight of the Falcon 9 — the booster's first stage nine Merlin engines are highlighted on the emblem — and the company's first flight of the Dragon in December 2010 that established the capsule as the world's first private craft to orbit the Earth and be safely recovered.

The gumdrop-shape Dragon, which from its start has been designed to eventually carry astronauts to space, too, is one of two commercial spacecraft contracted by NASA for resupply services and one of three such vehicles currently being developed for the space agency's commercial crew program.

The Dragon is currently the only cargo craft that launches from the United States, and the only vehicle worldwide that can return significant amounts of cargo to Earth, after the retirement of NASA's space shuttle fleet in 2011.

All but three of the nine SpaceX patches share a common design element: a four-leaf clover. It wasn't until the fourth flight of SpaceX's Falcon 1 in September 2008 that the company achieved its first successful spaceflight and as that mission's emblem included the small green icon, all of the company's flight patches have since included a clover for good luck.

SpaceX is offering just 200 of the nine-patch sets for $30 each through its website. The package ships with a color information card embossed with a metallic Dragon logo.

Previously, only one of the patches in the set, that of the emblem for the May 2012 second test flight of the Dragon spacecraft, was authorized for sale to the public.

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