What's New Friday January 9, 2009

WHAT’S NEW   Robert L. Park   Friday, 9 Jan 09   Washington, DC 

1.  JESUS: EARTH IS RIVEN BY CONTINUOUS RELIGIOUS WARS.  
WN promised to contrast Jesus of Nazareth with Isaac Newton, who came 
along 16 centuries later.  What was I thinking?  A third of the all the 
people on Earth count themselves as followers of Jesus.  Do I need 2.2 
billion people mad at me?  They believe Jesus, an itinerant Galilean 
preacher and healer, to be the divine Son of God.   All that’s known about 
him comes from the four gospels.  The earliest copies are in Greek and, 
according to biblical scholar Bart Ehrman in “Misquoting Jesus” (Harper, 
2005) they contain a multitude of mistakes and intentional alterations by 
earlier translators.  In 585BC, long before Jesus, the Greek philosopher 
Thales of Mellitus concluded  that every observable effect must have a 
physical cause.  The discovery of causality is now taken to mark the birth 
of science, and Thales is immortalized as its father.  But causality also 
means the death of superstition.   What went on in the 1600 years between 
Jesus and Newton?  It was the Middle Ages; religious superstition was the 
dominant belief.  

2.  NEWTON: NO WARS ARE FOUGHT OVER SCIENTIFIC DISPUTES.
Himself a devout Christian, Newton was a Unitarian; he did not accept the 
doctrine of the Holy Trinity and spent more time on his religious writings 
than on the laws of motion.  He discovered the laws of gravity and motion, 
and invented calculus to derive the orbits of the planets.  Also an 
alchemist and brilliant experimentalist, he used a prism to decomposed 
sunlight into its constituent colors, and invented the reflecting 
telescope to avoid chromatic aberration.  His greatest contribution was to 
show that natural law can be described by differential equations, leading 
to hope that science may someday explain everything.  There is, in any 
case, no other way of knowing.  See: Robert L. Park, "Superstition: Belief 
in the Age of Science" (Princeton, 2008).  Newton became a bit strange in 
later life (who doesn’t?) and worked on a literal interpretation of the 
Bible.  

3.  MODERN WAR: THE AIR FARCE ACUPUNCTURE PROGRAM.
A thousand years ago, crosses were placed on the wounds of Crusaders to 
aid healing.   Placebo-controlled double-blind studies were a thousand 
years in the future, but who could doubt the power of the cross?  The Air 
Force Surgeon General is now starting a program to teach "battlefield 
acupuncture" to 32 Air Force doctors who will deploy to Iraq or 
Afghanistan.  Acupuncture goes back 5,000 years, but it seems to have 
stopped working.  Numerous, placebo-controlled double-blind studies show 
no benefit.  See R. Barker Bausell, Snake Oil Science, (Oxford, 2007). 

4.  ALTERNATIVE PROFIT: NO RECESSION IN SEA-WATER SALES.
The economic downturn is worldwide, but so is human gullibility.   
According to the Inter Press Service News Agency the Zimbabwe Traditional 
Healers Association prescribes washing with seawater if an enemy has 
bewitched you.  Zimbabwe has no coastline, so the seawater must be carried 
in backpacks across neighboring Mozambique.  

THE UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND.
Opinions are the author's and not necessarily shared by the
University of Maryland, but they should be.
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