Posted on 10/28/2005 3:29:36 PM PDT by Crackingham
***God is outside the domain of Science.***
So are "alternate universes" - being that they are metaphysical (outside the physical universe) but that doesn't stop scientists from babbling on about them.
Science addresses the origin of the universe. That clearly brings God into the picture.
It's not accepted as unchallengeable dogma. Never has been. Nor is any other part of science. If you can come up with evidence for something better have at it.
...you wouldn't accept it. Quit fooling yourself. You're not fooling anyone else.
It wasn't an argument against science.
The question was "Is the US becoming hostile to science?"
I said that, "Yes, the US is becoming hostile to science. "
Killing people can be the easiest and cheapest way to solve some "problems."
Since killing is easy and cheap, there is less incentive to find particular helpful solutions for particular people.
Researchers are being discouraged, by a pro-death climate, from trying to help some people. There is little chance that researchers will search for solutions for some of the most difficult cases.
Therefore, I agree that the US is becoming hostile to science.
"...you wouldn't accept it. Quit fooling yourself. You're not fooling anyone else."
I already believe in God. I had a specific personal experience 23 years ago that convinced me beyond any doubt.
Why would my beliefs bother you? I'm not trying to impose them on you.
"Therefore, I agree that the US is becoming hostile to science."
I agree with your conclusion... but not several of your logic steps - but that's ok too.
Yes, Americans are becoming hostile to certain scientists who see it as their duty to tell local Boards of Education what they can and can't do.
It's called blowback.
***Not really.***
You are saying that science does not address the origin of the universe?
I misinterpreted your prior statement.
Not in the 'who or what created space/time' it doesn't. That's more a function of religion and metaphysics.
Much ado about nothing. If anything, we're freer to science than any other country, with our advents in technology. Abiogenesis is a very new science that's philosophical and theoretical in its approach (Much like other new sciences like psychology) rather than a science we can actually touch or see.
This is actually a pretty political issue...
"Science" doesn't "prefer" to do anything. It's a descriptive word, not a person. Perhaps much of the alleged problem has to do with attempts to anthropomorphize an entire discipline into some sort of political interest group -- which in many cases it is.
Further, those who claim to speak for "science" tend to be an arrogant lot who, again, seem to be awfully political.
If there's a "hostility" toward science, I suspect it's not really toward "science" per se, but rather a class of scientists who rub people the wrong way by relegating non-scientists to the lower echelons of humanity.
Add to that an antipathy toward the old ideal of "progress" that has been growing over the past 40 years or so. It used to be the idea that progress=good, and that science=hope were unquestioned. But the advance of science has led to a lot of unpleasant side-effects, too -- and people tend to focus on such things.
And of course, there's the whole ID debate, which is really what this article's about. The fact of the matter is that most people are nowhere near as impressed by "evolution-only" arguments, because most people believe in God, and they are logical enough to understand that belief in God confers legitimacy on the idea of "design."
Certainly you can disagree with the steps.
And my argument is unclear, since I've only recently realized
If a problem is too difficult, it's easy for them to turn their backs on it.
Thanks for discussing this with me and helping me take baby steps in thinking through this idea.
I know but this in reality is a very small issue and the implication by academia is that intelligent design somehow stifles "science". Now I say if social science is taught as "science" then certainly we can teach intelligent design. After all look at how far science has carried us even though social issues aren't really science at all. Evidence that is "created" to fit an agenda is more dishonest and intellectually stifling than throwing an intelligent design course into the curriculum or giving some it some attention. After all through all of history man has looked to a higher power in some way or another for answers and some things are not explained at all by science.
Michurin at least bred some fruit varieties, including gigantic apples [about 1.5 pounds each, and acidic as hell - very handy in food fights]. The only problem was to find another Newton on whose head it was supposed to fall.
Well, as a self-described hyper-Popperian (whose main qualms about the neo-Darwinian synthesis have to do with its misuse in extra-scientific domains, annoyance at the misapplication of 'random' to mean something much weaker than stochastic (a rhetorical mistake, since 'random' translates into the popular mind as 'mere chance'), and the sense that the theory has become so broad and nebulous in its formulation that it is actually best described by Popper's 'pre-recantation' characterization as a 'metaphysical research program') I agree with your characterization of 'alternate universes'.
There are, however, some practicing scientists whose view of science is not so strictly tied to refutability.
I take it from your post that you are unfamiliar with Lee Smolin's Darwinian cosmology. Smolin, faced with the 'anthropic problem' in cosmology--the fact that there are a host of constants of nature known only by observation, which are parameters in currently well-validate versions of physical theory (e.g. particle masses, without the unverified Higgs mechanism there isn't anything to set them), which, if they were even slightly different would make life impossible (in some cases just life as we know it, in others any kind of self-reproducing system)--proposed that 1. there are many universes, 2. black-holes in any universe beget new universes with slightly different physical constants (random variation). 'Reproductive fitness' in his scheme is the number of black-holes, and thus 'daughter universes' produced. My closest colleague, who had been a good friend of Smolin, proposed that universes with sentient life will be very 'fit' because during the heat-death of such a universe, sentient beings would produce black holes as energy sources.
Very cute, completely naturalistic, but also, for those with any respect for Popper's insight, not science. Another universe is by definition unobservable, and what happens inside the event-horizon of a black hole is unobservable to those outside (again by definition--if a signal can get out, it's not a black hole), so that the entire theory is patently unfalsifiable.
Howerver, as for science not addressing the origin of the universe. Are you of the view that Hawkings null-initial condition cosmology is not science? As I understand it, it has testable consequences. (It is also a sort of Roschach test for one's theological inclinations--theists see it as a mathematical model of a universe created ex nihilo (there isn't even a 'before' before the beginning); atheists (who seem to believe that the philosophical category of causation is limited to physical causation) see it as 'removing the need for a first cause'.)
You contradict yourself. If you "don't know" then you don't know there are only two sides. We'd have to consider, and teach, any and every view we could find. There's a LOT more than just two, as anyone familiar with fringe and psuedo sciences can readily attest. For instance we'd have to cover some version of antievolutionism as held by the Hare Krishna, who assert that each individual species is biologically fixed (it's souls that evolve -- through reincarnation) something that even most "creationists" do not believe.
If we "don't know" in the dismissive (and permissive) sense that you suggest, then we "don't know" what to teach.
We do, however, know which theories have earned and maintain standing in science -- that is which ones are actually used and implicated by working scientists in the conduct of ongoing, original research -- and which have not, or at least have not yet. And because the content of the professional scientific literature reflects (with a reasonable level of fidelity) the ideas that are so employed in the conduct of research, we know this as objective fact.
So what not base what we teach in a science class on what we objectively know about the content of science? If some creationistic or design theory (or something else non- or extra- evolutionary) someday actually earns scientific standing on merit, then it can be taught too.
And, btw, if some new theory is sufficiently successful to supplant evolution completely, then evolution should be dropped from the curricula, just as would be done with any other scientific theory abandoned by working scientists.
Sorry, but I find this just obvious. And I find your view that we should just teach "both sides" to be relativistic, wimpy, wishy-washy and anti-intellectual.
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