by CKR
The New York Times today brings us another blast in the ongoing war against science by a small subset of those who call themselves religious. It’s a version of the accusation of “you’re doing it too.” This starts out as a particularly weak argument and proceeds to a fundamental misunderstanding of science.
If what is being done is wrong or procedurally unacceptable, accusing another of doing it too may weaken his case, but it doesn’t bolster one’s own case.
What is alleged is that science an arbitrary belief system, just like religion. The attacker then goes on (he thinks) to show that science (or scientists, not the same thing) is unwilling to examine its assumptions, just like religion. Why someone thinks it is a good thing to be an adherent of an arbitrary belief system that is unwilling to examine its assumptions is beyond me, but that’s in the realm of psychology and I’d rather stay with philosophy.
So let’s look at the claims in the Times article.
All science proceeds on the assumption that nature is ordered in a rational and intelligible way. You couldn’t be a scientist if you thought the universe was a meaningless jumble of odds and ends haphazardly juxtaposed.The trouble with these claims is that they have science backwards. It appears that the author was exposed to poor science teachers and never got over it.…to be a scientist, you had to have faith that the universe is governed by dependable, immutable, absolute, universal, mathematical laws of an unspecified origin.
The idea that the laws exist reasonlessly is deeply anti-rational.
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