Posted on 08/22/2006 9:01:26 AM PDT by shroudie
That is essentially what I am saying. You cannot have science without interpretation of data, and you cannot have interpretation of data without a belief system. It is simply the nature of science to have limited objectivity.
And how do you know that this is the author's interest? I happen to know that the author would rather that religion not be discussed in the science classroom. But science teachers can not be afraid to face up to it when it arises.
In the case of the shroud, scientists explored the subject and found no good answers.
Nonsense. Note that his objections are every one scientific, and quite convincing ones in my humble opinion.
If you have a scientific objection to his analysis, by all means share it.
Still wrong. You fail to consider that science is a world-wide universal phenomenon. Though some nutcase sub-culture (feminists, gays, etc.) may through "interpretation" hijack an area of science temporarily, other scientists from outside that sub-culture WILL point out the shortcomings of their data interpretation. For the most glaring historical example, see Lysenkoism.
In 1959 or so, Scientific American I believe ran a survey on how many scientists believed in the Steady State Hypothesis. The answer was an overwhelming majority. Fred Hoyle (and no doubt others) was particularly convinced that people like Abbe Georges Lemaitre, the Belgian priest physicist who extrapolated relativity into what is now known as the Big Bang Theory, were just trying to read Genesis into cosmology. Relativity which, by the way, was a sea change in physics which overturned centuries of classical Newtonian mechanics.
Further, it is my understanding that when Darwin's theory first burst upon the scene, its most strenuous opposition was by zoologists and taxonomists who were busy collecting samples from the world over and were not at all convinced that such diversity could possibly be due to common ancestry.
The reason I bring all this up is to demonstrate that, while the underlying experimental/observational data is often sound, not just subcultures, but *mainstream science* sometimes works on theories that are very very wrong and needs to be corrected down the road. And even those corrections may not often be completely right.
I have a particular and profound love for things scientific. But it certainly evolves in its own understanding over time, so it is not exactly the pristine objective yardstick that some make it out to be.
Yes, but THOSE "incorrect theories" are NOT derived from or determined by cultural influences---they were the best explanations of the data available at the time. OF COURSE as new evidence comes in, old theories get modified or thrown out completely. That's what science is SUPPOSED to do.
Oh, I wouldn't be too sure of that. The expanding universe was staring Einstein and Hoyle right in the face. Hoyle didn't like Lemaitre's theory, as far as I know, for little other reason because it smacked too much of Genesis and because he was a hard-core atheist. I'm not a historian of physics, but I'm not sure what data the steady state universe could have been based on. It was a mere theoretical assumption going back to the Greeks.
Look, as one who has been on both sides of the aisle on this one, I can assure you that academia--science included--very definitely has its cultural biases that color "the best explanations available at the time."
For instance, nowadays a good sight too many scientists have come to adopt the cultural/philosophical (not scientific) position of secualar humanism, which contains an automatic dismissal of any miraculous or supernatural event whatsoever. Science can make absolutely no determination that a miraculous event is impossible or that the supernatural does not exist.
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