People's Interpretations

One of the most interesting things about putting a book out there is the ways in which people react from their own biases. I have a lot to say about different audiences for anything one writes that I won't go into a lot of detail here. Suffice it to say there is always a group of people who know far more about the subject than the rest of the populus and unless you say exactly the same thing as what they believe they know, then they will raise a hue and a cry about how you are incorrect.

It's important to realize both as a writer -- and if you're a huer and a crier -- that the experts are not your audience. The experts have a knowledge base, and they are often frustrated by things that are factually correct, but just rub them the wrong way. Or alternatively, they are committed to a certain theory when you propound another one. This kind of bias is not easy to spot and can be disconcerting when you encounter it.

I'm here today to discuss a whole different kind of "the wrong" audience. By "wrong" I simply mean people who are not going to get out of a book what you were aiming to give them. One of my favorite cases is from The Big Bang Theory.

It is an interesting device of those who are anti-science to point fingers at a theory's weaknesses and then say "See! It's clearly wrong, even scientists have to agree there are problems, and so the entire scientific approach is wrong and we should return to a simpler life/believe the bible literally/jettison technology that is destroying the world."

As it happens, the whole point of my Big Bang book was to analyze how robust a theory it is, where there are holes that still need to be patched up, what seems proven completely, what isn't, etc. Therefore, I naturally went into detailed discussions about the weaknesses (weaknesses that, mind you, have already changed in the two years since the book was published -- cosmology is a fast-moving field. . . ) I wrote in the introduction that it would be foolish to think that because there was room for discussion about the theory, one should embrace, say, Creationism instead. One can, and should, accept change in science, without feeling that science as a way to analyze the world is fundamentally untenable.

Ok, that was the background to the fact that in the article THE BIG BANG THEORY—A SCIENTIFIC CRITIQUE [PART II] by Bert Thompson, Ph.D., Brad Harrub, Ph.D., and Branyon May on a website dedicated to defending fundamentalist Christian beliefs in the face of scientific data, I am described as "admitting" the problems with the Big Bang Theory.

Karen Fox admitted:

The fact is that the dark matter problem is reaching something of a crisis, although few astronomers have been willing to admit this yet. Forget not finding any ideal dark matter candidates. The problem isn’t that no one can find the missing matter (although they can’t) but that even if theorists stomp their feet and shake their heads, observations haven’t even shown that the universe is at the critical density (2002, pp. 122-123, parenthetical item in orig.).
But if “observations haven’t even shown that the universe is at the critical density,” then that plays havoc with the idea of inflation producing a Big-Bang-type of Universe that is flat, and that will expand indefinitely.

As Fox casually remarked: “The dark matter problem affects the basics of the big bang model” (p. 124). It certainly does!)

It also describes me as "confessing":

Evolutionist Karen Fox confessed: “This radiation in and of itself doesn’t require the big bang theory per se be correct” (2002, p. 134).

Never mind the fact that they call me an "evolutionist" -- which, yeah, I am, but which has nothing to do with the big bang -- I just love this. I love the fact that I write a section entitled "How Good a Theory Is It?" with a chapter called "Glitches", in which the whole point is to describe what the problems about the theory are . . . and it's interpreted as this dirty secret, where I have to "admit" that everything is not smack-dab perfect within the world of cosmology. The words echoed throughout the web. . . On a Christian Message board arguing the Big Bang theory versus a 6-day creation describes says my "admission speaks volumes."

I have not, of course, attempted any discourse with the authors in question -- it wouldn't get any of us anywhere. But as I gear up for the next round of reactions on this current book, some of which I'm sure WILL be negative and WILL affect me more deeply than the above examples, it's great to be reminded how often feedback is rooted in biases I can never hope to affect.