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A Blood Libel on Our Civilization. Can I expell Expelled?
National Review Online ^ | April 28, 2008 | John Derbyshire

Posted on 04/28/2008 12:01:40 PM PDT by Delacon

What on earth has happened to Ben Stein? He and I go back a long way. No, I’ve never met the guy. Back in the 1970s, though, when The American Spectator was in its broadsheet format, I would always turn first to Ben Stein’s diary, which appeared in every issue. He was funny and clever and worldly in a way I liked a lot. The very few times I’ve caught him on-screen, he seems to have had a nice line in deadpan self-deprecation, also something I like. Though I’ve never met him, I know people who know him, and they all speak well of him. Larry Kudlow, whose opinion is worth a dozen average opinions on any topic, thinks the world of Ben.

So what’s going on here with this stupid Expelled movie? No, I haven’t seen the dang thing. I’ve been reading about it steadily for weeks now though, both pro (including the pieces by David Klinghoffer and Dave Berg on National Review Online) and con, and I can’t believe it would yield up many surprises on an actual viewing. It’s pretty plain that the thing is creationist porn, propaganda for ignorance and obscurantism. How could a guy like this do a thing like that?

I turned over some possibilities, but decisively rejected them all. The first thing that came to mind was Saudi money. Half of the evils and absurdities in our society seem to have a Saudi prince behind them somewhere, and the Wahhabists are, like all fundamentalist Muslims, committed creationists. This doesn’t hold water, though. For one thing, Stein is Jewish. For another, he is rich, and doesn’t need the money. And for another, the stills and clips I have seen are from a low-budget production. Saudi financing would surely at least have come up with some decent computer graphics. No, Ben Stein is no crook. He must then be foolish; and that’s sad, because I now think less of a guy I once admired, and whom my friends admire. Life, it’s just one darn bubble bursting after another.

To return to the matter of computer graphics for a moment, it seems that the producers of Expelled, rather than go to the trouble and expense of making their own, may have just stolen some. (The creationists have posted a defense here. There will probably be a lawsuit under way, which I shall report back on. Oh, and as I write this, I see a Reuters report that our defenders of faith and morality may have stolen some music too. How many more shoes will drop, I wonder?) It is at any rate clear that they engaged in much deception with the subjects they interviewed for the movie, many of whom are complaining loudly. This, together with much, much else about the movie, can be read about on the Expelled Exposed website put up by the National Center for Science Education, which I urge all interested readers to explore.

These dishonesties do not surprise me. When talking about the creationists to people who don’t follow these controversies closely, I have found that the hardest thing to get across is the shifty, low-cunning aspect of the whole modern creationist enterprise. Individual creationists can be very nice people, though they get nicer the further away they are from the full-time core enterprise of modern creationism at the Discovery Institute. The enterprise as a whole, however, really doesn’t smell good. You notice this when you’re around it a lot. I shall give some more examples in a minute; but what accounts for all this dishonesty and misrepresentation?

My own theory is that the creationists have been morally corrupted by the constant effort of pretending not to be what they are. What they are, as is amply documented, is a pressure group for religious teaching in public schools.

Now, there is nothing wrong with that. We are a nation of pressure groups, and one more would hardly notice. However, since parents who want their kids religiously educated already have plenty of private and parochial schools to choose from (half the kids on my street have attended parochial school), as well as the option of home schooling, now very well organized and supported (and heartily approved of by me: I just wish I knew how they find the time); and since current jurisprudence, how correctly I am not competent to say, regards tax-funded religious instruction as unconstitutional; creationists are a pressure group without hope, if they campaign openly for the thing they want.

Understanding this, the creationists took the morally fatal decision to campaign clandestinely. They overhauled creationism as “intelligent design,” roped in a handful of eccentric non-Christian cranks keen for a well-funded vehicle to help them push their own flat-earth theories, and set about presenting themselves to the public as “alternative science" engaged in a “controversy” with a closed-minded, reactionary “science establishment” fearful of new ideas. (Ignoring the fact that without a constant supply of new ideas, there would be nothing for scientists to do.) Nothing to do with religion at all!

I think this willful act of deception has corrupted creationism irredeemably. The old Biblical creationists were, in my opinion, wrong-headed, but they were mostly honest people. The “intelligent design” crowd lean more in the other direction. Hence the dishonesty and sheer nastiness, even down to plain bad manners, that you keep encountering in ID circles. It’s by no means all of them, but it’s enough to corrupt and poison the creationist enterprise, which might otherwise have added something worthwhile to our national life, if only by way of entertainment value.

This dishonesty showed up very soon after the creationists decided to don the mask of “alternative science” in the 1990s. A key episode was the Kunming conference of June 1999. In very brief — you can read the full story in Forrest and Gross’s Creationisms Trojan Horse (“A bad book, a very bad book,” shuddered the Discovery Institute’s Bruce Chapman when he saw it on my desk, like a vampire spotting a clove of garlic), pp.56-66 — there is a very interesting bed of extremely old fossils near Kunming, in southern China. Paul Chien, a little-known creationist of Chinese ancestry from San Francisco, acted as a front man for the Discovery Institute to organize a conference in Kunming, bringing in professional paleontologists from China and abroad, but without telling them of the Discovery Institute’s involvement. The aim was “to produce and then to promote a book containing the conference papers of [creationist] members immediately juxtaposed to those written by respected scientists in the relevant fields.” (Forrest & Gross, their italics.) When the real paleontologists found out what was going on, and how they had been brought across China, or around the world, they were not pleased. Embarrassing scenes followed. No book ever appeared.


Examples can be multiplied. The witty and mild-mannered federal Judge Jones, who presided over the 2005 Kitzmiller trial in Dover, Pa., felt moved to note that: “The citizens of the Dover area were poorly served by the members of the Board who voted for the ID Policy. It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID Policy.” The response of the Discovery Institute was to launch sneering, slanderous attacks on the professionalism and competence of Judge Jones (a church-going conservative Republican appointed by President George W. Bush).

So it goes with the stalwart defenders of truth and morality over at the Discovery Institute. So it goes with Ben Stein, apparently, since he has signed up with these mountebanks, for reasons that remain mysterious to me. The misrepresentations in Expelled are far too numerous for me to list here, and the task is unnecessary since others have done it. The aforementioned Expelled Exposed website is a great resource. Biologist P. Z. Myers, in a less organized way, has been pointing up the errors and deceptions in Expelled since the wretched thing hove into view. (Here he links to a whole stack of reviews, including a couple of positives.) Other science-literate bloggers have been weighing in, often very angrily. One of my favorite comments came from “Pixy Misa” (Andrew Mazels) who correctly called Ben Stein's accusing Darwin of responsibility for the Holocaust “a blood libel on science.”

I would actually go further than that, to something like “a blood libel on Western Civilization.” One of the most-quoted remarks by one conservative writer about another was Evelyn Waugh's on Kipling. It bears quoting again.

[Kipling] was a conservative in the sense that he believed civilization to be something laboriously achieved which was only precariously defended. He wanted to see the defences fully manned and he hated the liberals because he thought them gullible and feeble, believing in the easy perfectibility of man and ready to abandon the work of centuries for sentimental qualms.

Western civilization has many glories. There are the legacies of the ancients, in literature and thought. There are the late-medieval cathedrals, those huge miracles of stone, statuary, and spiritual devotion. There is painting, music, the orderly cityscapes of Renaissance Italy, the peaceful, self-governed townships of old New England and the Frontier, the steel marvels of the early industrial revolution, our parliaments and courts of law, our great universities with their spirit of restless inquiry.

And there is science, perhaps the greatest of all our achievements, because nowhere else on earth did it appear. China, India, the Muslim world, all had fine cities and systems of law, architecture and painting, poetry and prose, religion and philosophy. None of them ever accomplished what began in northwest Europe in the later 17th century, though: a scientific revolution. Thoughtful men and women came together in learned societies to compare notes on their observations of the natural world, to test their ideas in experiments, and in reasoned argument against the ideas of others, and to publish their results in learned journals. A body of common knowledge gradually accumulated. Patterns were observed, laws discerned and stated.

If I write with more feeling than usual here it is because I have just shipped off a review to an editor (for another magazine) of Gino Segrè’s new book about the history of quantum mechanics. It’s a good, if not very remarkable, book giving pen-portraits of the great players in physics during the 1920s and 1930s, and of their meetings and disagreements. Segrè, a particle physicist himself, who has been around for a while, knew some of these people personally, and of course heard many anecdotes from their intellectual descendants. It's a “warm” book, full of feeling for the scientists and their magnificent enterprise, struggling with some of the most difficult problems the human intellect has ever confronted, striving with all their powers to understand what can barely be understood.

Gino Segrè’s book — and, of course, hundreds like it (I have, ahem, dabbled myself) brings to us a feeling for what the scientific endeavor is like, and how painfully its triumphs are won, with what sweat and tears. Our scientific theories are the crowning adornments of our civilization, towering monuments of intellectual effort, built from untold millions of hours of observation, measurement, classification, discussion, and deliberation. This is quite apart from their wonderful utility — from the light, heat, and mobility they give us, the drugs and the gadgets and the media. (A “thank you” wouldn’t go amiss.) Simply as intellectual constructs, our well-established scientific theories are awe-inspiring.

And now here is Ben Stein, sneering and scoffing at Darwin, a man who spent decades observing and pondering the natural world — that world Stein glimpses through the window of his automobile now and then, when he’s not chattering into his cell phone. Stein claims to be doing it in the name of an alternative theory of the origin of species: Yet no such alternative theory has ever been presented, nor is one presented in the movie, nor even hinted at. There is only a gaggle of fools and fraudsters, gaping and pointing like Apaches on seeing their first locomotive: “Look! It moves! There must be a ghost inside making it move!”

The “intelligent design” hoax is not merely non-science, nor even merely anti-science; it is anti-civilization. It is an appeal to barbarism, to the sensibilities of those Apaches, made by people who lack the imaginative power to know the horrors of true barbarism. (A thing that cannot be said of Darwin. See Chapter X of Voyage of the Beagle.)

And yes: When our greatest achievements are blamed for our greatest moral failures, that is a blood libel against Western civilization itself. What next, Ben? Johann Sebastian Bach ran a slave-trading enterprise on the side? Kepler started the Thirty Years War? Tolstoy instigated the Kishinev Pogrom? Dante was a bag-man for the Golden Horde? Why not go smash a few windows in Chartres Cathedral, Ben? Break wind in a chamber-music concert? Splash some red paint around in the Uffizi? Which other of our civilizational achievements would you like to sneer at? What else from what Waugh called “the work of centuries” would you like to “abandon … for sentimental qualms”? You call yourself a conservative? Feugh!

For shame, Ben Stein, for shame. Stand up for your civilization, man! and all its glories. The barbarians are at the gate, as they always have been. Come man the defenses with us, leaving the liars and fools to their lies and folly.



TOPICS: Crime/Corruption; Culture/Society; Editorial; News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: benstein; creationism; derbyshire; directedpanspermia; expelled; intelligentdesign; moviereview; panspermia
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To: tpanther
Not evil, just Godless.

But you can't just dismiss the science as saying it's Godless. True, science doesn't look to God for an answer. It will try to prove the 2+2=4 every single time without looking for a supernatural explanation for that.

Science is wholly unequipped to test or even postulate supernatural explanations for anything. If it did, there would be no science. Sir Isaac Newton's apple would fall to the ground because God wanted it to. No further investigation is necessary.

God could be behind the Big Bang or not, or He could be behind the origin of life (which is what I favor until I see any evidence to the contrary), or he could be behind the physical rules of the universe that made Darwin's concept the most likely explanation for the origin of species (which I also believe).

You and I see this differently in that we can see the same things, and you believe one side is saying God can't be involved, and I see that He could be involved in every single step.

That's a matter of philosophy and religion, and there is nothing wrong about arguing about that. That's a good thing. We have a chance of making each other smarter by doing that.

We might, I don't know, disagree whether the Creation story in Genesis is literal or alleghorical. But I don't think we disagree that God's hand is all over where we are now. If we're worried about God, He can take care of Himself, and I don't think it's required that everyone believe EXACTLY the same thing about our origins to know Him.

441 posted on 05/01/2008 4:18:15 PM PDT by Dog Gone
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To: tpanther
So yeah, call it survival of the fittest or God’s chosen people, but I think to a large extent som of Isral’s enemies have asked for it.

I have to tread carefully here, lest I be misunderstood, but both the ancient Iraelites and the Nazis saw themselves as superior to other people. Both acted upon that belief.

Enjoy the movie, and I look forward to hearing your comments afterward.

442 posted on 05/01/2008 5:35:54 PM PDT by Dog Gone
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To: Dog Gone
By the way, there is no such thing as Darwinism. Using the term shows that you have already decided that one branch of science is a religious cult.

And the folks who are doing so are generally so completely devoid of scientific arguments to use against the theory of evolution that they can only resort to name calling.

443 posted on 05/01/2008 5:42:29 PM PDT by Coyoteman (Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.)
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To: Dog Gone

Let me put it this way, when a “family” straps bombs to a child and marches him into a cafe to murder innocent men women and children, and the entire culture condones it, then THAT culture has destroyed itself, and Israelis have every right to defend themselves.

And I can see no evidence anywhere that Israelites hated God and/or mankind in such as a way as to behave as this.

Yet we still have such a culture seemingly locked into 7th century thinking right now behaving such a way.

Nazis were what Israelites were fighting.

And yes, I see Israeli culture then and today superiror to such an abomination.


444 posted on 05/01/2008 5:50:33 PM PDT by tpanther (The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing-----Edmund Burke)
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To: Polonius

“I’m sorry to say this, as someone who also used to like reading and watching Ben Stein, but arguing that science is to blame for the Holocaust and should therefore be rejected is completely nutty. Science and the fruits of science can, have and will continue to be misused by evil people, but that doesn’t make the science invalid or scientific inquiry respsonsible for those misuses.

Stein has gone around the bend.”

Well said.


445 posted on 05/01/2008 5:55:08 PM PDT by Delacon ("The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule." H. L. Mencken)
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To: Coyoteman

It’s why the crevo threads at FR have been so traditionally difficult for the forum.

This one really hasn’t been that bad in comparison to those in past years. Of course, many of the former participants on one side were unceremoniously booted from the forum.

But I’m not sure how you ever resolve an argument between two sides, one of which says “Well, it is what it is”, and the other side who insists “Nope, it has to be what I want it to be.”

There can be some common ground there, but it’s going to be fairly rare, I think.


446 posted on 05/01/2008 5:56:10 PM PDT by Dog Gone
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To: tpanther

I suppose I was misunderstood, because I wasn’t addressing the modern state of Israel or current geopolitics in any manner.

I’m not sure you can compare the Philistines or Amalekites of those days to current Palestinians at all.

So never mind. This side discussion can go nowhere.


447 posted on 05/01/2008 6:02:23 PM PDT by Dog Gone
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To: Dog Gone

But scientists are human beings with biases, even hatred that poisons science.

IF “science” doesn’t find any purpose to me that’s Godless. It’s not a bad word or evil it just IS simply Godless!

On the otherhand, if a scientist sees something differently than another and sees creation, purpose, intelligent design, that doesn’t mean they see what they see the WRONG way, it simply means they have a wholly different perspective!

The same is true of religion, history etc.

For instance...someone stated 2/3 of scientists are believers...the number isn’t important but they naturally see God in all aspects of their beings. There’s no magical switch believers turn off when they’re in a laboratory, therefore they see God in all that is in all that they do, see feel touch, experience. There’s no way to somehow REMOVE God from science therefore.

We can argue all day and forever about God’s existence, and rather or not all they see and experience and smell and do is simply imagnied, but there’s no way to really know that, as you say to prove one way or the other, so until it can or can not be proved it therefore isn’t “right” or “wrong” or “real” or “unreal” perception.

I’m sure the reverse is true for the reverse situation...no matter how hard a person tries, let’s say he can go to church, yet simply not see any possibility of God! Therefore, there’s no way to say he’s “wrong” if he doesn’t see God!

Current science isn’t some magical vacuum as we perceive it.

Put it this way, would there be “science” if there was no life to be found anywhere, ever?

Science isn’t some pristine and perfect entity with a neutral and natural mind of it’s own, it’s a tool of infallible human beings to assist in them understanding the many facets of perception in the world around them, but certainly not all, and not even close.


448 posted on 05/01/2008 6:07:24 PM PDT by tpanther (The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing-----Edmund Burke)
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To: Dog Gone

I think there could be some cases where violence isn’t necessarily a bad or evil thing in other words.

If a man came into your home with a gun and you killed him protecting your family, I for one would see the need.

And yet there are some who would say YOU were the bad guy
‘cause the other guy is dead, can’t apeak for himself, you planted the gun, he was only hungry, a product of evil America...OMG there’s literally a million excuses!

People go to jail for doing such a thing and they weren’t even at fault, for all kinds of wrong reasons, all over the world.

Just like we would think it harsh if a kid had a hand lopped off for taking an apple, it’s again all about perception isn’t it?

If you were born and raised in Japan, a Japanese, once your brain perceived WW2, the very first thought in your mind would probably be Hiroshima (and/or Nagasaki).

But if you were American, it may more likely be Pearl Harbor.

That’s the way I see science, either with or without God’s fingerprints (with or without purpose).


“Enjoy the movie, and I look forward to hearing your comments afterward”

I’ll make a point to share them with you! (BTW, what’s ‘Dog Gone’ about?)

I’m seriously thinking about Iron Man tomorrow or this weekend though, my son is chomping at the bit...and most likely I’ll see Stein’s movie alone ‘cause no one in my family cares too much about culture wars and politics etc.

SMART! :)


449 posted on 05/01/2008 6:21:54 PM PDT by tpanther (The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing-----Edmund Burke)
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To: tpanther

Science isn’t about perspective, unless you’re getting into the Theory of Relativity. Any scientist, Christian, Hindu, Atheist, or whatever, should be able to look at the same set of evidence and reach the same scientific conclusion.

Now it’s true that someone trained as a scientist who is Hindu can look at the same piece of bacteria as an atheist and assert the conclusion that he’s looking at the reincarnation of his grandmother. But he will have interjected something into his decision-making that is non-scientific.

Again, that doesn’t mean he’s wrong. That bacteria might be his grandmother. But science will not agree with his conclusion because it’s not based on anything anyone else can test or verify.

You can and must remove religion from scientific study or there is no such thing as science. Yet even that is a qualified statement. Certainly the most fundamentalist Christian and avid atheist could work together to map the human genome, because they would be problem-solving in a task-oriented project without drawing any conclusions to the task bigger than that.

But once a scientist suggests that the only answer to an unsolved mystery is God, you need to fire him. That’s not the default answer, and he could give that answer to any question posed to him. If that answer is good enough for you, then you have no need for science at all.


450 posted on 05/01/2008 6:30:06 PM PDT by Dog Gone
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To: tpanther
I’ll make a point to share them with you! (BTW, what’s ‘Dog Gone’ about?)

The day I signed up at FR, I was really really pissed at Bill Clinton, although I forget the exact incident that prompted me to make the leap to making my first post.

My first thought of a screen name was Damn It, but I sensed that might be too harsh a name for the forum, and that my mood might not always be one of fury towards Bill.

Doggoneit was the G-rated version of my first inclination, and thus I signed up as Dog Gone.

No dogs were lost in the making of this screen name.

451 posted on 05/01/2008 6:37:43 PM PDT by Dog Gone
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To: YHAOS
You opened the door by means of a grossly out-of-context reference to the constitutional powers of Congress in promoting the progress of science and the useful arts.

Garbage. The poster I responded to claimed "science is a religion". That is easily refuted by the fact that Congress was delegated the power to promote science, whereas it was forbidden to promote religion. An assertion was made, the assertion was rebutted.

As it was, you would seem to be perfectly content to leave the impression that Congress has virtually unlimited powers to promote science and the useful arts could you have gotten away with that misperception.

You have no basis for saying that I was trying to leave such a misperception. The Constitution is not an obscure reference, and it makes no sense to think I would attempt to get away with such a thing when it is so easily refuted.

You're just being flat out dishonest, IMO.

452 posted on 05/01/2008 6:41:48 PM PDT by Ken H
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To: Dog Gone

That’s true, it SHOULDN’T be, but I don’t know how it’s possible! They SHOULD be able to, but I’ve already proven beyond a shadow of doubt that they don’t. Not always and quite possibly more frequently than we know!

I’m relativly sure it’s been done, but we can’t know that. HUMAN conclusions be they scientific or what have you, couldn’t by definition BE “perfect”. There’s some potential for having overlooked something. I think.

Maybe this is because I work in medicine, you know where things are “sterile”? How is it possible for ANYTHING to be perfectly “sterile”? Not shooting blanks, but the kind without potential “pathogens/foreign agents”. One can heat something to thousands of degrees, but a pathogen may be there science has yet to detect.

I’ll give you yet another case: how about scientists studying the effects of red wine...surely you’ve heard of the benefits of anti-oxidants, and of course there’s alcohol, grapes (sucrose), etc. and their effects on the human body (and mind).

Is it good for you, bad, good, bad...the data’s hard to keep up with...just like drugs & other foods, to the point I don’t even listen anymore cause it changes all the time and may not even be “right” in the first place!

Now let’s say one of the dozens of scientists working on this research had a parent die from liver cirrhosis due to alcholism.

Let’s say another’s great uncle owns a vineyard.

You can see how either could come to biased conclusions outside of science that they might not even be remotely aware of, and no one else on the team could either!

You might say, well one or two will be over-ridden by all the others outcomes, etc., but add to that all the others’ unknown biases OR what if one or both of those two were in charge of the team? Then POLITICS begins to effect outcome!

BTW, I see this in nursing decisions that make ME sick! Let alone doctors putting feeding tubes into dying people in a CRAZY misunderstood ‘first do no harm’ idiocy run off the rails OR another way to get yet another payment for an unneeded procedure from medicare!

HEY! Examples with not a thing in the world to do with God/religion btw!

It occurs to me that you and I are virtaully on the same page, working towards a conclusion of sorts, yet not concensus, just from a different angle! :)


But once a scientist suggests that the only answer to an unsolved mystery is God, you need to fire him. That’s not the default answer, and he could give that answer to any question posed to him. If that answer is good enough for you, then you have no need for science at all.

>>>>>Agreed, I would posit that the opposite is also true, someone that submits there’s “no place for God” in science or that a scientific mystery CAN NEVER EVER BE God, is EQUALLY sadly mistaken and disingenuine! :()


453 posted on 05/01/2008 7:15:04 PM PDT by tpanther (The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing-----Edmund Burke)
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To: Dog Gone

I suppose I was misunderstood, because I wasn’t addressing the modern state of Israel or current geopolitics in any manner.

>>>>>>>No, I was, that’s all.

Just illustrating how a culture can be so self-destructive as to negatively effect those around it.

Naziism was an ideology, not a culture.

There may have been cultures for instance in the Amazon that LITERALLY ate itself to death, out of existence.


454 posted on 05/01/2008 7:18:34 PM PDT by tpanther (The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing-----Edmund Burke)
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To: tpanther

I believe you understand that there are good scientists and bad scientists. There are good doctors and hopefully fewer bad doctors. But yes, they exist.

Bad scientists are less likely to last long because the of the peer review process and the entire Scientific Method. I forget how long ago, but maybe 20 years ago a couple of scientists made worldwide headlines with their discovery of “Cold Fusion.”

The trouble was that nobody else could recreate what they did. It was probably the most recent version of the Piltdown Man fraud.

But it wasn’t church ladies who exposed the Piltdown Man fraud, keyboard warriors who exposed the Cold Fusion fraud. It was other scientists. The scientific method not only expects, but demands that your conclusions be checked and verified by other experts in the same field, published for comment and then perhaps accepted as a new finding.

Doctors kind of are subject to Board and State investigation if they get enough complaints, so it’s not the same process at all.

Your red wine example is an interesting one, because you’re right about how the discussion went.

But keep in mind that it is very hard for the public, much less our stupid MSM, to detect a true scientific conclusion from a “rent a guy with a science degree” and an opinion to issue a press release. Having a science degree doesn’t mean that you even agree with the scientific method. It means you got the answers right on the test questions you were given.

At any given time, there is bad science out there. This is especially true in any BRAND NEW TOP OF THE NEWS HOUR thing that will interest you. Hence your red wine example.

Parts of the Einstein’s Theory of Relativiy are being tweaked today, and that’s been around over 100 years, but the tweaks are at the edges. Nobody has blown a hole through it, and it’s mostly been confirmed. The Theory of Evolution is older than that, and the same is true.

That’s an uncomfortable fact for some to accept, but it is what it is. I have trouble understanding how I could travel at the speed of light from earth for 20 years, and return, and it would be (oh, I’m going to screw up here...) maybe 50,000 years after I left. But the Theory of Relativity shows that to be true (but probably not my dates).

Once something has been out there for decades and subjected to rigorous examination by people much more specialized in the various aspects of this, we need to say, it is what it is, even if we don’t understand it fully, or we’re not entirely happy about it.


455 posted on 05/01/2008 7:44:09 PM PDT by Dog Gone
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To: Dog Gone

Yes, I can’t disagree with any of that, only add that as infallable imperfect human beings, we simply HAVE no way to verify, through our understanding, if scientific principles are truly “accurate” in the end. It may well be just the best we can do.

Take the scientists that believed the earth was flat.

We knew it was round long before we could take pictures of it from space to determine it was round. Same for the sun rising in the east, setting in the west. I don’t think anything will happen in the future EVER to change our knowledge of an earth that revolves around the sun, or comes up in the east, sets in the west.

But how could we ever know we completely misread something considered definitive, agreed upon, concensus of science and just got it all wrong because, not by any bias or “bad” scientists but because of inherent human limititatons?

Like a dog that watches television and barks at a cat he sees on TV, he’s convinced the cat is actually somewhere behind the screen, in the box...SOMETHING more tangible, yet forever limited to ever know there’s no cat in the vicinity.

God may well have created far more intelligent beings that might look at us like we look at dogs & chuckle that, I don’t know, can’t understand we’re traveling back and forth in time, but simply aren’t aware and never going to BE aware of it! Perhaps we’re able to do such a thing in our dreams...and are actually DOING it, but can’t ever understand that we are, because we’re always dreaming and unconscious when we do and there will never ever be any possible way to overcome that limitation.

Something like that knowledge would turn virtually all we know about science on it’s ear!

We MIGHT uncover new data or understanding or whatever, but there’s no guarantees that we ever will, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t so either. We’re perhaps just designed to never understand so much out there that exists, not in this life, or ever, and we have to accept THAT possibility as well! We not only don’t know it all, we might NEVER!

It would be logical to assume that 1000 years from now, assuming we don’t destroy ourselves, or be destroyed, that we’ll learn some things that will make something we think of as common agreement that will seem alot like the flat earth scenario, because we simply learn as we go along.

Maybe we regain ancient lost science and levitate?

Sounds nuts, but a kid in the 1800’s dreaming of space travel sounded insane and foolish too.

What if we were created to experience 3 dimensions and no more, but other life forms are?

I just think it’s impossible to assume what is or isn’t science, pseudo-science, science fiction, etc.; based on the limted knowledge we now exhibit we know of it!

I don’t think it’s so much good or bad scientists or doctors as much as it is flawed, imperfect human ones, with various opinions and perceptions, biases, and limitations, etc.

True for all human endeavors, philosophy, religion, science, and for all we know are still in their ultimate infancy.

I could be way off and we’re nearing the end too.

Time will tell, but probably long after we’re gone.

Yes, it is what it is, as we NOW understand it. I guess my whole point is limited human understanding sure isn’t perfect and never will be, and subject to change from one moment to the next.

Red wine, is it good for you?

Regardless of the MSM, it’s still the scientists telling us if it is or not, which is the whole point...influenced by alot of things other than science! It’s hard indeed to tell what’s science with a few people able to answer questions correctly and get science degrees, our instant gratification society WHICH IS MY POINT! Defining science is still too much all about concensus or who has what degree, who ha what motive or how pure it is...there’s simply NO WAY TO AGREE!

I’ve often told patients I could tell them I might feel differntly tomorrow about their pain control based on newly gathered data, or even how something strikes me in a different way, which is difficult for people to grasp...just like when a patient yanks out a catheter and one nurse might put it right back in while another won’t, but there’s no “right” or “wrong” in coming to such a decision either way, you could make a choice either way, based on experience, or all kinds of variables and things, or outside influences.

Indeed we often hear nursing, medicine itself is a combination of art and science! Yet they are science degrees, not art agrees!

We even have a relatively new branch in nursing called “pastoral nursing”, because believers have been able to improve their well being, comfort etc. based on their faith and belief system and prayer.

There’s ceratinly enough data supporting it, and people might cringe if that’s called science, but hey, whatever works for people, and I doubt if they care if others are adamant about that not being science!

I also wouldn’t think there’d be alot of success in trying to get “science in nursing degrees” changed to “art or religious degrees in nursing” for pastoral care nursing either!


456 posted on 05/01/2008 9:01:13 PM PDT by tpanther (The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing-----Edmund Burke)
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To: All

Mr. Derbyshire has a good follow-up on the Corner:

Against the Fall of Dark   [John Derbyshire]

No, David. "The world is truly revealed as upside-down and backward" when intelligent young Jews sign up to the anti-science crusade.

One of the best reasons to be a philosemite in our time is sheer gratitude at the disproportionate contribution Jews have made to the advance of Western civilization, and to our understanding of the world, this past two hundred years. The U.S.A. dominated the 20th century in culture and technology, to the great benefit of all mankind, in part because of the work done in math and science by the great tranche of pre-WW2 immigrant Jews from Europe.

Now you have joined up with people who want to trash the scientific enterprise and heap insults on one of the greatest names in intellectual history. For reasons unfathomable to me, you and Ben Stein want to sneer and scoff at our understandings, hard-won over centuries of arduous intellectual effort. Don't the two of you know, don't Jews of all people know, where this anti-intellectual agitation, this pandering to a superstitious mob, will lead at last? If you truly don't, I refer you to the fate of Hypatia, which you can read about in my last book (Chapter 3), or in Gibbon (Chapter XLVII). You new pals at the Discovery Institute no doubt think Hypatia got what she deserved.

Civilization is a thin veneer, David. Reason and science are bulwarks against the dark.

I am sure you know the fine speech that Robert Bolt put in the mouth of Sir Thomas More, but "people need to be reminded more often than they need to be instructed":

More    …  What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?

Roper     I'd cut down every law in England to do that!

More     (Roused and excited)     Oh?    (Advances on Roper)     And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you — where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat?     (He leaves him)     This country's planted thick with laws from coast to coast — man's laws, not God's — and if you cut them down — and you're just the man to do it — d'you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then?     (Quietly)     Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake.

Bolt's More understood a thing you and Stein don't understand, the thing that Waugh credited Kipling with understanding in that quote I posted earlier in the week, and that Adolf Hitler (hey, you started the reductio ad Hitlerum), in his own way, and of course from the other side of the Wall, also understood.

You and Stein are playing a dangerous game, a game that Jews should be the very last to play. The ADL, for all its faults, at least understands that.

I really, seriously wonder how much of a future the U.S.A. has. We are sinking into a bog of mediocrity, frivolity, superstition, and ignorance. When even Jews join the parade of folly, it's hard to keep hoping.

Yesterday (thanks! to a generous friend who got me in) I had the colossal privilege of watching Kurt Masur conduct Anne-Sophie Mutter in rehearsal. While Tchaikovsky's wonderful music filled the hall I found myself thinking, as I always do: How long shall we have this? How long will it last? How long before it is all swallowed up in the great grinning, jeering maw of hip-hop, the worship of worthless "celebrities," reality TV, Oprahified politics, and "intelligent design" — junk religion meets junk science? How long have we got?

Our civilization is on the way out. I hope it at least outlives me, but I am less and less sure it will. I'll be damned if I won't go down fighting, though.


457 posted on 05/02/2008 9:38:32 AM PDT by Delacon ("The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule." H. L. Mencken)
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To: Delacon
Derbyshire--We are sinking into a bog of mediocrity, frivolity, superstition, and ignorance.

He's visited the crevo threads!

458 posted on 05/02/2008 9:49:14 AM PDT by Coyoteman (Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.)
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To: Ken H
Garbage.

Hogwash

Article I, Section 8, Clause 8, altogether deals with the right to intellectual property, and in no manner touches upon the establishment of religion. Its authority is confined strictly to patents and copyrights (ironically enough, including the copyrighting of religious materials). The continuing controversy over what constitutes an establishment of religion stems from the conflicting interpretations of portions of the First Amendment. The ultimate outcome of that controversy can have no influence on a constitutional clause enabling the issuance of patents and copyrights

You claim that you can’t possibly be arguing that Clause 8 grants to Congress virtually unlimited powers to promote science, yet you continue to refer back to the clause with the fascination of a mouse transfixed by a snake. Likewise you admit that the Feds have no power to fund or regulate education, yet you suggest that I am ducking the “challenge” of an issue you have already conceded. You switch arguments more frequently than the costume changes in a one-man show.

459 posted on 05/02/2008 1:25:40 PM PDT by YHAOS
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To: YHAOS
Article I, Section 8, Clause 8, altogether deals with the right to intellectual property, and in no manner touches upon the establishment of religion. Its authority is confined strictly to patents and copyrights (ironically enough, including the copyrighting of religious materials). The continuing controversy over what constitutes an establishment of religion stems from the conflicting interpretations of portions of the First Amendment. The ultimate outcome of that controversy can have no influence on a constitutional clause enabling the issuance of patents and copyrights

That's correct. But the point is, Congress was empowered to promote science. Therefore, the other poster's claim that "science is a religion" was not shared by the Founders. Your attempt to read more into my words is an act of deceit, IMO.

You claim that you can't possibly be arguing that Clause 8 grants to Congress virtually unlimited powers to promote science, yet you continue to refer back to the clause with the fascination of a mouse transfixed by a snake.

The other poster claimed "science is a religion" - I.8.8. is my evidence against that assertion. I need to keep referring to it as part of my argument to counter your dishonesty.

Likewise you admit that the Feds have no power to fund or regulate education, yet you suggest that I am ducking the "challenge" of an issue you have already conceded.

Your postings have given me doubts about your truthfulness. I was hoping to see whether you held a principled view of I.8.3. IOW, it was a character test.

460 posted on 05/02/2008 4:37:03 PM PDT by Ken H
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