Dear Skeptics…
Occasionally, the Skeptics get correspondence from the general public. Chair-entity Vicki Hyde responds to two such inquiries.
A question I have always wanted to ask you guys: If humans are unaffected by the planetary and other cosmic influences, as I understand your society believes, then where is the impermeable membrane that cuts you off from them? And your scientific proof for this is?
Er, why do you think there has to be an impermeable membrane to do this, rather than a simple inverse-square law at work? Space is very very very big after all – and just as well!
The inverse-square law has been demonstrated so many times and under so many conditions throughout the universe that it has been given the rare honour in science of being termed a law, rather than a theory. It simply says that the energy fields which we can measure unequivocally (ie regardless of spiritual belief) have a limit to their influence as the distance increases.
So, to use one hoary example, the gravitational influence of the midwife has much more effect than that of Jupiter on a newborn baby. Jupiter may be massive, but it’s a looooong way away. You don’t need a membrane of any sort to dilute it, just distance.
That said, there are planetary and cosmic influences which can affect humans – the gravitational force of the Moon is demonstrated daily in the tides; if we’re very very unlucky, we could all be wiped out by a neighbouring supernova. (Could do with an impenetrable membrane then!)
But it’s a big jump to go from this sort of thing to saying that, say, a random collection of stars categorised by the human eye at a particular point in just one culture’s development (aka a constellation) has a specific and real effect on, say, my career choice. This concept is a matter to do with the psychology of the human mind, not basic physics, and the former offers some very clear, simple explanations of the forces at work – and those forces originate squarely between the ears…
Many people for a long time have looked at various claims of this nature and, to date, have either found major flaws in the reasoning or alternative explanations which provide better answers. This is the nature of science. Its further strength is the capacity to discard an old explanation when the evidence becomes sufficient to warrant it. That’s something you don’t get in areas likes astrology, which tend to remain very static over time with very little capacity for doubt or self-reflection.
I gave up doing horoscopes when I finally started to think about the rather nasty psychology involved – all it was doing was pandering to stereotypes. If I find it ethically objectionable to classify people by skin colour (nigger!) or religion (Jew Christ-killer!), then it’s just as offensive and demeaning to do it by astrological sign (Scorpio!)…
Food for thought, I hope,
Vicki
During chapel service at my school, the reader took it upon himself to close by telling a story about Darwin. Apparently, on his deathbed he told his minister he wished he had devoted his life to the pursuit of God rather than the pursuit of science.
You were right to be skeptical.
This fabrication is known as the Lady Hope story and is equally discounted by people as widely divergent in other opinions as Stephen Jay Gould and the creationist folk at Answers in Genesis! Here is the general gist of the spread of the story and its subsequent rebuttal, taken from the book The Survival of Charles Darwin: a Biography of a Man and an Idea by Ronald W Clark, published by Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1985.
“Shortly after [Darwin’s] death, Lady Hope addressed a gathering of young men and women at the educational establishment founded by the evangelist Dwight Lyman Moody at Northfield, Massachusetts. She had, she maintained, visited Darwin on his deathbed. He had been reading the Epistle to the Hebrews, had asked for the local Sunday school to sing in a summerhouse on the grounds, and had confessed: “How I wish I had not expressed my theory of evolution as I have done.”
“He went on, she said, to say that he would like her to gather a congregation since he “would like to speak to them of Christ Jesus and His salvation, being in a state where he was eagerly savouring the heavenly anticipation of bliss.” With Moody’s encouragement, Lady Hope’s story was printed in the Boston Watchman Examiner.
“The story spread, and the claims were republished as late as October 1955 in the Reformation Review and in the Monthly Record of the Free Church of Scotland in February 1957. These attempts to fudge Darwin’s story had already been exposed for what they were, first by his daughter Henrietta after they had been revived in 1922.
“‘I was present at his deathbed,’ she wrote in the Christian for February 23, 1922. ‘Lady Hope was not present during his last illness, or any illness. I believe he never even saw her, but in any case she had no influence over him in any department of thought or belief. He never recanted any of his scientific views, either then or earlier. We think the story of his conversion was fabricated in the U.S.A. … The whole story has no foundation whatever.'” [Ellipsis is in the book.]
Clark’s source for Lady Hope’s supposed quotations of Darwin is given as Down, the Home of the Darwins: The Story of a House and the People Who Lived There by Sir Hedley Atkins KBE, published by Phillimore for the Royal College of Surgeons of England, 1974. Henrietta’s rebuttal is referenced more fully as: Mrs R B Litchfield, Charles Darwin’s Death-Bed: Story of Conversion Denied, The Christian, February 23, 1922.
If you’d like to read more on this, follow these links:
www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/ladyhope.html#Autobiography
www.talkorigins.org/faqs/hope.html
www.answersingenesis.org/creation/v18/i1/darwin_recant.asp
