Posted on 01/11/2003 9:53:34 PM PST by DWar
You don't know squat.
At the core of your appalling ignorance is your silly belief that scientists are wholly objective and rational, somehow parahuman, living in spheres of pure passionless thought beyond the stain of personal bias and grubby venality. Well, maybe not all scientists, but at least the members of the whitefrocked unholy priesthood that you worship are.
Scientists (and their know-nothing sycophants and toadies such as yourself) who worship at altar of today's materialist "facts" are absolutely no different from the alchemists of medieval period. New platoons of scientists are constantly churning new "facts" that upset the settled order of "facts" which the old order refuses to let go.
How does the old order respond? With wails and howls and belittling the new order (e.g., the neodarwinists who pooh-poohed Gould and his theory of punctuated equilibrium; the ranks of classical Newtonian mechanists who scorned and launched ad hominem attacks at the first whisper that quantum mechanics was unknitting their clockwork universe; the physcists who were appalled at the slamdunk results of the COBE research that proved the universe had a beginning not so very long ago, which upset their settled faith that the universe has been around for multiple trillions of years, long enough to allow for the magic of Darwinism to pull the full range of amino acids out of its brainless, aimless, pointless hat).
But mostly the established order responds by steadfast denial, and by ridiculing the messenager and attempting to shun him into obscurity. I'll give you just one example. His name was Marcel Schutzenburger and he was quite possibly the greatest combinatorialist of the latter half of the 20th Century. Unlike the gadlfly self-important Darwinists in the biological sciences, whose grasp and understanding of mathematics is only sufficient to satisfy the minimum academic requirements of their speciality, Schutzenburger lived and breathed mathematics of the highest order every day of his professional life. Schutzenburger was one of the first pure scientists to crunch the numbers. The numbers showed that the notion that random and aimless natural processes could spark the genesis of life was wholly untenable, beyond absurd, given the paltry 10 to 20 billion years for it to take place. How did the settled order respond? By shouting him down--certainly not by challenging the mathematics. How could they challenge the math? They were as ignorant on the mathematics as you are on cellular biology.
Schutzenburger died a few years back. His hard-number challenge to the priesthood of the unholy Order of Darwin yet lives, stands unmet and unacknowledged outside the little true believer cublicle they have sequestered themselves within.
Denial is not a scientific defense, but a human defense. Scientists use it with the same zeal as anyone else.
IMHO, many people put every bit as much confidence in the scientists as they do in their own doctors. But neither can claim to be without intellectual prejudice.
Prejudice is common in politics and theology, but even there - IMHO - more people would rather be vocal spectators than actually understanding what they so eagerly endorse.
I see every advantage in being a critical thinker and in raising our children in that tradition.
I like your tagline. (Always knew my high school Latin would come in hand some day.) But maybe "frater" should be capitalized -- Magnus Frater -- like it's his name. Is "tu" in the proper case? I'm not sure. Picky, picky.
Maybe there will be a return to civility after all...
This one of course means "Big Brother is watching you!" and the one I had previously been using means "This isn't my real name!". Please click on the link, they are hilarious.
Hugs!
Utinam logica falsa tuam philosophiam totam suffodiant!
(May faulty logic undermine your entire philosophy!)
Everyone knows there is an autokeyed tunnel in the Interspiritual Protocol firewall.
. . . * my additions ! ! !
I could truly relate to the last paragraph of the interview with Marcel-Paul Schützenberger. It seems to me that when science has its back against the metaphysical wall, it tends to shrug its shoulders by appealing to either the anthropic principle or the plenitude argument. I gave some examples at post 5445 on the big thread.
That would seem to sum up your post as well as your attitude. Nice to see that you've mellowed after your difficult and prolonged adolescence.
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