>>DoodleDawg wrote: "Mr. Olive is also a young earth Creationist so I’d be curious as to just what kind of scientist he is supposed to be."
>>Joey wrote: "For what it's worth, the word "kalamata" is Greek for "reed" as in "weak reed arguments", and can also be read to sound like "good eyes" as in "refuses to use his good eyes to see what is". >>Joey wrote: "As for which branch of science is his expertise, I think I can guess, based on his posts here, he must have advanced training, degrees and long experience in the sciences of propaganda and denial. It could also be "Biblical Science"..."
Joey doesn't understand science, but he can fool the non-scientist with his slick, Lincoln-like rhetoric.
A scientist is obliged to follow the data where ever it leads him. Ideologues, like those in the Evolutionism Orthodoxy that have hijacked science education, reject anything that doesn't fit their ideology. For example, this is the Evolutionary Biologist and devout Marxist, Richard Lewontin of Harvard University:
"Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door." [Lewontin, Richard C., "Billions and Billions of Demons: Review of Sagan's 'The Demon Haunted World'." New York Review of Books, 1997]
The first highlighted sentence should read,
"We take the side of EVOLUTION in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs."
That is anti-science. Scientists do not take sides; pseudo-scientists do. Scientists simply follow the data.
Mr. Kalamata
Kalamata:
"Joey doesn't understand science, but he can fool the non-scientist with his slick, Lincoln-like rhetoric." I will take the comparison to Lincoln as a compliment, even though completely undeserved.
Kalamata: "Ideologues, like those in the Evolutionism Orthodoxy that have hijacked science education, reject anything that doesn't fit their ideology.
For example, this is the Evolutionary Biologist and devout Marxist, Richard Lewontin of Harvard University:"
I don't know of Lewontin, never heard the name before so far as I can remember, but I'd say here he's just trying to be provocative, and for what purpose?
Kalamata: "That is anti-science.
Scientists do not take sides; pseudo-scientists do.
Scientists simply follow the data."
What the Lewontin quote says is somewhat similar to what I say, but in different words, namely, that natural-science is limited by definition to natural explanations of natural processes.
Everything else, i.e., theology, is by definition "not science".
So here Lewontin complains about the apparent limits of natural-science and seemingly, wouldn't it be easier and more fun just to claim some supernatural process is at work?
Answer: maybe, conceivably, but by definition that's not science, no matter how insane it makes people like Kalamata.
Indeed, it drives Kalamata so insane he loudly declares by writ of his own unique authority that natural science is bunk and only his own "Biblical science" is really true.
Anyway, I can't tell what Lewontin's problem is, and more important, I care less, but the fact remains that by definition natural science is still limited to natural explanations no matter how much Lewontin or Kalamata may cry about that. ![]()