Picking Jon Stewart's Bone

No wait!  Not a good title!

Here's what I'm talking about, and many people will be familiar with it.  On July 8, 2010 (I don't let go of things well...) Jon Stewart hosted The Daily Show and his guest was Marilynne Robinson, author of the book Absence of Mind.  My opinion of Marilynne Robinson and her book is unimportant.  My problem is with Jon Stewart himself.

I do understand that Jon is not a scientist, but that should make him more careful when he makes statements about science and/or scientists if he's going to "go there" -

I've always been fascinated that the more you delve into science, the more it appears to rely on faith ... You know, when they start to speak about the universe, they say, "... most of the universe is antimatter." "Oh, really, where is that?" "Well, you can't see it." ... " Well, where is it?" "It's there." "Can you measure it?" "Eh, we're working on it."

This is just crazy and only serves to embolden teh stupid.

First, there are different types of faith.  I have faith in the brakes of my car, as has been pointed out to me several times.  This is meant to demonstrate how even I, as an atheist, has to have faith.  However, if the next time I get in my car I apply my brakes but it doesn't retard my motion at all I will have lost all faith in my brakes.  It makes no difference if my brakes work almost every time, I will have lost ALL faith in them because they've demonstrated to me that they're not reliable.

If someone declares a faith in their god but their god never blatantly reveals itself to them, and even they will admit that not all prayers are answered, that is a blind faith.

In case you don't see the difference, there is faith based on experience and there is faith based on wishful (supposedly) thinking.  One requires evidence and reliability, the other requires that the evidence opposes it and that it can't be reliable.  I'm sure someone will say that they have plenty of evidence of their god because they've prayed and had their prayers answered.  That they can't pray and have it answered reliably is explained away as their god's will.

Context can greatly change the meaning of a word.  If you don't specify which country you're referring to, "football" is a very different game.  I look at a word like faith to be a bit like the pain scale they ask you to rate your pain, with one being the lowest and ten being the highest.  When you're in pain that you would rate as ten, you feel like telling them that your pain is twenty.  Claiming that faith in scientific concepts or mechanical objects, or even human behaviour, is the same as their faith in their god is so wrong it's not even wrong.

Don't try and inject an argument that since there are ideas in science that are accepted as say, an axiom (something that you hold to be true without having sufficient evidence), the first definition still applies.  Axioms and their "ilk" are only used if they're useful in research or if they seem to be reliable in producing results consistent with known evidence.  Once it is shown to be unreliable for use it will be dropped, but as long as it seems to be okay and seems to advance research or development it will be used.  At sometime it will either show itself to be reliable and the evidence will be compelling, or it will show itself to be unreliable and not acceptable to use for that purpose.

So I have a beef with Jon Stewart over this.  Conflating the two meanings of "faith" in this context wasn't something that was humorous, and I don't mean that in the sense that I didn't find it funny but in the sense that clearly in context he wasn't making a joke.  He was expressing his opinion but he was factually wrong.

Just to pile on, it makes it worse that he isn't even familiar with the concepts that he says scientists believe.  As has been speculated by most people who have commented on it, he was probably mistaking antimatter, a form of matter that we know a great deal about and can create and use, with dark matter, a form of matter that doesn't seem to have the same properties as the matter we're aware of.  Dark matter's existence is fairly well accepted and there is growing evidence of it's affect on matter.  The confusing thing about using the term "dark matter" is that it makes it seem both magical and "known".  Think of the term as a place-holder, a "best guess" about something that seems to exert a gravitational effect, something we can measure, but something we have yet to directly measure or observe.  All we have to define what dark matter really consists of is the observed effects that it has.

No one would be surprised that Jon Stewart isn't well-versed in astrophysics, or cosmology, or particle physics, or quantum physics etc.  Mr. Stewart does know that he has influence over many people, and he also acknowledges the harm that misinformation can have.  These factors considered together can forgive the mistaking of antimatter with dark matter, but it does nothing to the conflation of two different meanings of "faith".

Like other mistakes of misinformation, I would at least like to have seen Mr. Stewart clear up this mistake in a way that a Google search would bring up.  If this has been done I'd appreciate a link to it but I've been unable to find anything in several searches.  I don't expect that he devote a segment of his show to it, although I'm sure he would do so with humour, but just a publicly available statement that it turns out he's not an astrophysicist, etc. and that he was mistaken on his conflation of faith and his depictions of science and scientists.

I hope that becomes part of an update to this post, but until then I'll be picking this bone...