Why does "Slate" persist in offering science-related articles to an ignorant buffoon who *hates* science and all that it stands for? Easterbrook is a young-earth creationist who frequently takes time to make pig-ignorant and nonsensical attacks on the entire discipline of astronomy in the course of his boring, bloviating epics on the subject of the NFL.

Easterbrook is a willfully ignorant, bigoted, religious fundamentalist. And he is *extremely* boring into the bargain. Asking him to write about anything remotely science-related is flat-out insulting.

Can you give us some backup citation on your information?

northwoods,

You can read his football columns at ESPN.com. Unlike benw, I like his football columns, and wish he would stick to them.

On recurring theme in them is dark matter and dark energy. He correctly points out that on current thinking they compose most of the universe but because they are invisible to us we don't really know anything about them. He then, invariably, goes on to say that if you can believe in dark matter and dark energy then surely you can believe in God. The point he seems to miss is that the dark theory arises from observation, not faith.

About three years ago, I think, in one of his football columns he wrote a tangled paragraph on Jewish movie moguls that was deemed anti-semitic enough to get him kicked off ESPN for a year or so (he is back).

He long, in his football column and in Slate, denied global warming existed at all. (Sift through Slate.) He has changed his tune recently, but only to move to the next fallback position of the deniers--that it is happening but there will be no serious consequences. That is, he is still in the mainstream of the global warming denier camp. (The evidence that global warming is occurring and it is because of us has become so overwhelming that only a peculiar and dwindling hardcore still maintains otherwise.)

I do not know that he is a young-earth creationist and would, like you, be glad to see some citations on this point. In his football column, which, along with a few Slate columns, is all that I have read by him, Easterbrooke comes across as a faithful Christian. He brings up his faith often, although in my view he becomes oddly incoherent whenever he does so (which is what got him into trouble at ESPN yo those few years ago).

But he comes across as very moderate, at least by recent American standards. For instance, he frequently mocks those who pray for their team to win, arguing that surely God has better things to do than decide the outcome of football games. (His columns repeat a limited number of well-worn themes.)

Many in the Fray have noted that he has a shaky science record. He is not a scientist himself and, I think for self-promotional purposes, seems to take flyers on scientifically dubious positions. There is his longstanding global warming denial. In a Slate piece a year or so ago he pedalled the view that autism is caused by TV. I'm sure other readers can rehearse more examples.

One can't really say that invisible matter about which we know nothing is the subject of "observation." Rather, it's a conjecture that makes the phenomena we can observe fit the theory.

Easterbrook is saying that one could just as easily conjecture that it is the hand of God that makes the numbers work out. This is true in a limited sense in that current science can tell us nothing more about dark matter than it can about the hand of God. Where the analogy breaks down, however, and where he's being too cute, is that dark matter is at potentially falsifiable, whereas faith in God is not. Future scientific advances may refine our knowledge.

Set aside what it says about Hollywood that today even Disney thinks what the public needs is ever-more-graphic depictions of killing the innocent as cool amusement. Disney's CEO, Michael Eisner, is Jewish; the chief of Miramax, Harvey Weinstein, is Jewish. Yes, there are plenty of Christian and other Hollywood executives who worship money above all else, promoting for profit the adulation of violence. Does that make it right for Jewish executives to worship money above all else, by promoting for profit the adulation of violence? Recent European history alone ought to cause Jewish executives to experience second thoughts about glorifying the killing of the helpless as a fun lifestyle choice.

Has it not been true that throughout human history, recorded history anyway, that the word "god" has been a catch all concept to explain anything we don't understand fully? Believers seem always to fall back on this process to "prove" the possibility of god. Well, if you can't see anti-matter, then it must surely be an indication of god. Or gravity or electrons or x-rays or ..............

I think believers have a much harder job in proving the existence of the object of their faith, in the long run, than scientists do in eventually understanding some phenomonen presently mysterious.

Observation notes the existence of some non-luminous matter that affects the structure of distant galaxies and galaxy clusters. Hence the wondrously mysterious and sinister 'Dark Matter'.

We can't see gravity either. We only know its properties by observing how this force acts on bodies.

Tom,

It goes beyond "conjecture", as if the "conjecture" of dark stuff was the same as the "conjecture" of god's hand.

The point is, given known (that is, well verified by many, many experiments) physical "laws", such as the law of gravity, there must be more matter--much more matter--out there than we can see given observed facts, such as that the galaxies have not spun apart.

In this sense, dark matter is inferred from observation. You could call it the hand of god if you want. But the problem is that doing so does not advance our understanding of the real world, or our ability to manipulate it, unless we can come up with a "law of the hand of god".

Falsifiability is much talked about, and Popper much refered to (not, thank goodness, by you) in such debates. But while it is important that physical laws be falsifiable, at least in principle, it is a bit of a red herring and, as is now very well known, it is not the principle of falsifiability that in fact drives scientific enquiry.

And it is not a good basis on which to attack religion either. All the religious need do is generate in principle falsifiable "laws of god" and say, there you are. Of course, some would, in fact be falsified. But this would not logically entail the end of religion, any more than falsification of, say, Newton's law of gravity entailed the end of religion. Rather, new physical laws were devised that accounted for the falsification.

At the end of the day, the new physical laws prevail because, in some instances at least, they are more useful than the old ones. They make correct predictions about things we care about, whereas under some circumstances (none that are likely to much affect our day-to-day lives) the old laws make wrong predictions.

given known (that is, well verified by many, many experiments) physical "laws", such as the law of gravity, there must be more matter--much more matter--out there than we can see given observed facts

This is just another way of saying that we have to assume the existence of an unexplained phenomenon in order to make our numbers work out in our theory. Maybe dark matter is there, or maybe the theory is wrong, like Einstein's cosmological constant, or Planet X.

My only point is that as of now, simply assigning the name "dark matter" to this phenomenon does not advance our understanding of the universe any more than calling it the hand of God. Assuming it exists, it's nothing like ordinary matter; we don't know what it's made of, or how to detect or describe it. We can't explain its origin or predict its behavior. Scientific American has gone so far as to say that "The terms we use ... 'dark matter' and 'dark energy,' serve mainly as expressions of our ignorance."

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I completely agree that the utility of science is in how usefully it predicts the behavior of the universe. I look forward to science advancing to that point with the theory of dark matter, but my understanding is that it's just not there yet. Hence my use of the term "conjecture," and maybe that's too loaded a word to use; I don't mean it to be derogatory or dismissive.