The book, while scary and disheartening, is truth-seeking and ultimately optimistic. Ritchie doesn’t come to bury science; he comes to fix it. “The ideals of the scientific process aren’t the problem,” he writes on the last page, “the problem is the betrayal of those ideals by the way we do research in practice.”

In a year where scientists seemed to have gotten everything wrong, a book attempting to explain why is bizarrely relevant. Of course, science was in deep trouble long before the pandemic began and Stuart Ritchie’s excellent Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth had been long in the making. Much welcomed, nonetheless, and very important.
For a contrarian like me, reading Ritchie is good for my mental sanity – but bad for my intellectual integrity. It fuels my priors that a lot of people, even experts, delude themselves into thinking they know things they actually don’t. Fantastic scientific results, either the kind blasted across headlines or those which gradually make it into public awareness, are often so poorly made that the results don’t hold up; they don’t capture anything real about the world. The book is a wake-up call for a scientific establishment often too blinded by its own erudite proclamations.
Filled with examples and accessible explanations, Ritchie expertly leads the reader on a journey through science’s many troubles. He categorizes them by the four subtitles of the book: fraud, bias, negligence, and hype. Together, they all undermine the search for truth that is science’s raison d’être. It’s not that scientists willfully lie, cheat, or deceive – even though that happens uncomfortably often, even in the best of journals – but that poorly designed experiments, underpowered studies, spreadsheet errors or intentionally or unintentionally manipulated p-values yield results that are too good to be true. Since academics’ careers depend on publishing novel, fascinating and significant results, most of them don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. If the statistical software says “significant,” they confidently write up the study and persuasively argue their amazing case before a top-ranked journal, its editors, and the slacking peers in the field who are supposed to police their mistakes.
Ritchie isn’t some crackpot science denier or conspiracy theorist working out of his mom’s basement; he’s a celebrated psychologist at King’s College London with lots of experience in debunking poorly-made research, particularly in his own field of psychology. For the last decade or more, this discipline has been the unfortunate poster child for the “Replication Crisis,” the discovery that – to use Stanford’s John Ioannidis’ well-known article title – “Most Published Research Findings Are False.”
Take the example of former Cornell psychology professor Daryl Bem and his infamous “psychic pornography” experiment that opens Ritchie’s book. On screens, a thousand undergraduates were shown two curtains, only one of which hid an image that the students were supposed to find. The choice was a coin toss, as they had no other information to go on. As expected, for most kinds of images they picked the right curtain about 50 percent of the time. But – and here was Bem’s claim to fame – when pornographic images hid behind the curtails, students choose the right one 53 percent of the time, enough to pass for statistical significance in his sample. The road for top-ranked publication was wide open.
When the article came out after passing peer review, the world was stunned to learn that undergrads could see the future – at least when images of a sexual nature were involved. Proven by science, certified by The Scientific Method™, the psychology world was thrown into chaos. The study was done properly, passed peer review, and published in a top field journal, with the same method that underlies all the other well-known results in the field. Still, the result was totally bonkers. What had gone wrong?
Or take the don of behavioral economics, Daniel Kahneman, whose many quirky experiments convinced an entire economics profession of individual irrationality and ultimately earned him the Nobel Prize. The psychological literature on so-called ‘priming,’ part of which is used by behavioral economists, suggested that tiny changes in settings can produce remarkably large impacts in behavior. For instance, subtly reminding people of money – through symbols or the clicking noise of coins – makes them behave more individualistically and less caring of others. “Disbelief is not an option,” wrote Kahneman in his famous best-seller Thinking, Fast and Slow, “you have no choice but to accept that the major conclusions of these [priming] studies are true.”
Beginning in the 2010s, psychologists tried to replicate these famous results and more. When tried elsewhere, with other students, better equipment, or larger samples – or sometimes with the exact same data – the same results wouldn’t emerge. How odd. Lab teams tried to replicate many established findings, coming up way short: “The replication crisis seems,” writes Ritchie, “with a snap of its fingers, to have wiped about half of all psychology research off the map.” There was something structurally wrong in the way that psychology found and displayed knowledge. Some research.
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To love as God loves, we must long to see our enemies saved from the wrath to come. This is the most radical aspect of the book of Jonah…the sovereign mercy of God. May God give us the grace to love the Ninevites in our life as God loved us.

The most shocking element of the Jonah narrative is not the fish that swallows the cantankerous prophet. It is the providential mercy of God who saves both the cantankerous prophet and the people of Assyria.
Why was Jonah’s Sin?
When Jonah receives word to go to Ninevah, he disobeys God and heads into the dark hull of a ship destined for the other side of the known world. Though some scholars believe Jonah’s revulsion to the Assyrian empire was driven by racism and cultural prejudice, the author of Jonah makes no such claims. Jonah most certainly did not view the culture that made a name for itself by creating towers with its captives’ skulls favorably. But he did not run from them because of unsubstantiated fears about what they might do to him. He ran from his God because he desired to save the wicked.
Though Jonah’s nebulously short sermon might appear to be an early Bible-thumping, fire and brimstone message, it was nothing of the sort. It contained illusions to both God’s wrath and his mercy. The word translated ‘repent’ in Jonah 3:4 could also mean to overturn or change. In other words, Jonah’s message could have had a double meaning: destroy sin or be destroyed by sin. Moreover, Jonah’s mention of 40 days would have also reminded the original Hebrew listeners of both Moses and Noah. After 40 days, Moses came down from the mountain and condemned the nation of Israel for having worshiped a golden calf. Conversely after 40 days, Noah emerged from the Ark having survived the flood. Thus, number 40 contained both the potential for death and salvation. And it was this very possibility of forgiveness that troubled Jonah’s soul.
When the prophet gives us unfiltered insight into his motives, he says, “That is why I made haste to flee to Tarshish; for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from disaster (4:2).” Jonah ran not from geopolitical realities but from the idea that God would save the sinners…sinners who cared nothing for the laws and regulations of God’s wordIn other words, Jonah took no issue with the salvation of those who offered sacrifices and faithfully read the Torah.
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Traditional Reformed worship is dialogical, meaning God and the worshippers are in a kind of conversation. But the agenda for the conversation is set by God’s declarations. This is why, traditionally, Reformed worship begins with a call to worship and ends with a benediction. God gets the first word and the last word. Our singing, confession, and prayers are a response to God’s Word. God’s Word also takes center stage in the high point of a Reformed service, which is the preaching of the Word of God.

The following post is part of our ‘Principles of Reformation’ series. For the first post in the series, please click here.
In order to make progress in a course of reformation, it is necessary to define the goal of any efforts that proceed under the Reformed banner. As Reformed believers, what is our target? What is the ultimate goal of our reformation?
Is our goal an increase in Bible knowledge and theological acumen? It must be said that many today who use the label Reformed or who discover Reformed theology find it intellectually stimulating and satisfying. For some, Reformed teaching answers basic questions and opens vistas for further intellectual exploration. This is a wonderful thing. Reformed churches have always insisted that pastors be educated and skilled in sound doctrine, and the best theologians in the Reformed tradition have tried to engage with the leading intellectual movements of their day. They do so drawing on a clear and realistic understanding of the nature of man and the sovereignty of our Creator God.
This means that Reformed theology can offer someone who is intellectually inclined much to study and talk about. At its core, though, Reformed theology is a balanced and thoughtful declaration of the teaching of Scripture. It is meant to shape lives and cultivate churches that are centered on the glorious gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. It is a theology for life – not just the life of the mind, but the life of the whole person dedicated to God completely. This complete dedication to God is regularly expressed in the worship which God’s people render wholeheartedly to Him.
Meeting with God in Worship
Reformed theology has a high view of God. He is the sovereign Creator of all things, and He rules over His creation. This should provoke us to praise Him in a way that acknowledges His holiness. Because God is so majestic, so powerful, so great, our praise to Him ought to reflect this. The Bible says, “Great is the LORD, and greatly to be praised” (Ps. 145:3). The ultimate goal of reformation is to glorify our great God as He is, as He deserves, and as He decrees.
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