From: salem@pangea.Stanford.EDU (Bruce Salem)
Subject: Re: self-deceptive belief maintenance
Organization: Stanford Univ. Earth Sciences
Distribution: world,local
Date: Tue, 29 Sep 1992 23:01:01 GMT

In article <28SEP199219122923@skyblu.ccit.arizona.edu> lippard@skyblu.ccit.arizona.edu (James J. Lippard) writes:
>I would like to collect examples of self-deceptive strategies which can
>be observed in argument techniques by creationists in order to avoid
>being persuaded by anti-creationist arguments.

	First, I think that the self-deception is due to belief
that is supposed to remain largely hidden from the audience. The
Creationist argues that he has a scientific alternative to evolution.
That is largely a ruse to give his more cherished beliefs of a
religious nature the legitimacy of careful research and objectivity
most people assign to science, and not the debatable status of
opinion, founded on strong belief and prejudice. The aim of such
a deception is to move the gounding of morality out of the arena
of subjectivity or history and to make it absolute. Creationists,
like many engineers, are control freaks, who seek social reform
through authoritarianism. That is wny amomg professionally trained
people it is the engineers who are most susceptable to Creationism
and other pseudosciences.

	I have something that I was going to post separately. It
is the piece of the sci.space FAQ that discusses the "Face of Mars"
beliefs of Richard Hoagland. who has been making the talk show circuit 
lately to criticize NASA for its policy on forthcomming imagery of the
Mars Explorer project. Despite NASA's long established policy of
restricting access to data for one year so that researchers can
write papers, Hoagland sees a conspiracy against him in NASA to
to doctor or censor data that could confirm his theory that a
formation that looks like a face and some geometric features on
the surface of Mars were created by intelligant alians. I think that
he examplifies many of the self-deceptive traits of people who
have an ax to grind with main-stream scientists who do not have
a stake in the pet theories of these fringies.

	I am posting the following material from the sci.space FAQ
	as background. Richard Hoagland has been making the talk
	show circuit, he appeared on CNN's "Sonja Live" this morning.

	What struck me is how similar Hoagland's attitudes toward
	the scientific community resembles that of Creationists. He
	sees a conspiracy within NASA to cover up data and to resist
	his theories about some extraterrestials making large artifacts,
	pyramids and the so-called Face of Mars to announce their
	existance to us. Hoagland at least made the pretence of being
	scientific in wanting to see what the images that will be
	taken by the Mars Explorer say, but his battle with NASA and
	his adherence to what is a most extraordinary explaination
	is characteristic of a crack pot. As the material below says
	there is a feature on Mars that really does resemble a face
	in partial shadow, but seen at higher resolution this gestalt
	will probabily vanish and its form will probabily be revealed
	as entirely natural.

	Like the Creationists the question of their credentials in science
	can be questioned. Hoagland's seen vague from the introduction
	given by Sonja Friedeman, herself a psychaitrist. Is Hoagland
	an engineer and not an astronomer, geologist, etc., does any
	one know?

	I am trained as a geologist and I can tell you that naturally
	formed formations can look like representations of animals
	especially faces. Pyramidial formations can easily be formed
	by wind erosion, and on a large scale if the winds are great
	enough. As Mars is seasonally obscured by dust storms, winds
	may exist there now to form such geometric features.

Bruce Salem

    THE "FACE ON MARS"

    There really is a big rock on Mars that looks remarkably like a humanoid
    face. It appears in two different frames of Viking Orbiter imagery:
    35A72 (much more facelike in appearance, and the one more often
    published, with the Sun 10 degrees above western horizon) and 70A13
    (with the Sun 27 degrees from the west).

    Science writer Richard Hoagland has championed the idea that the Face is
    artificial, intended to resemble a human, and erected by an
    extraterrestrial civilization. Most other analysts concede that the
    resemblance is most likely accidental. Other Viking images show a
    smiley-faced crater and a lava flow resembling Kermit the Frog elsewhere
    on Mars. There exists a Mars Anomalies Research Society (sorry, don't
    know the address) to study the Face.

    The Mars Observer mission will carry an extremely high-resolution
    camera, and better images of the formation will hopefully settle this
    question in a few years. In the meantime, speculation about the Face is
    best carried on in the altnet group alt.alien.visitors, not sci.space or
    sci.astro.

    V. DiPeitro and G. Molenaar, *Unusual Martian Surface Features*, Mars
    Research, P.O. Box 284, Glen Dale, Maryland, USA, 1982. [Apparently the
    first lengthy consideration of the Face published. Does anybody know
    what it costs?]

    R.R. Pozos, *The Face of Mars*, Chicago Review Press, 1986. [Account of
    an interdisciplinary speculative conference Hoagland organized to
    investigate the Face]

    R.C. Hoagland, *The Monuments of Mars: A City on the Edge of Forever*,
    North Atlantic Books, Berkeley, California, USA, 1987. [Elaborate
    discussion of evidence and speculation that formations near the Face
    form a city]

    M.J. Carlotto, "Digital Imagery Analysis of Unusual Martian Surface
    Features," *Applied Optics*, 27, pp. 1926-1933, 1987. [Extracts
    three-dimensional model for the Face from the 2-D images]

    M.J. Carlotto & M.C. Stein, "A Method of Searching for Artificial
    Objects on Planetary Surfaces," *Journal of the British Interplanetary
    Society*, Vol. 43 no. 5 (May 1990), p.209-216. [Uses a fractal image
    analysis model to guess whether the Face is artificial]

    B. O'Leary, "Analysis of Images of the `Face' on Mars and Possible
    Intelligent Origin," *JBIS*, Vol. 43 no. 5 (May 1990), p. 203-208.
    [Lights Carlotto's model from the two angles and shows it's consistent;
    shows that the Face doesn't look facelike if observed from the surface]