Science as a Narrative: archive

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The Dartboard: "Banquet At Delmonico’s – How Darwinism Came to America"

Post Civil War America was looking for a new belief system, says social historian Barry Werth. Across the Atlantic Charles Darwin had proposed a new theory of biology, but had left the popularization of it to others. In Banquet at Delmonico’s, Werth chronicles the spread of Darwinian evolution in America, focusing on the works of English philosopher Herbert Spencer. (...) >>>
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Here's more by Terrell Clemmons. The following is a funny illustration of the lengths to which 'scientists' of the evolutionary, biochemical type go, to proof their point:

The Dartboard: "Pot’s Plan to Take Over the World?"

Last month PBS aired a two hour special on The Botany of Desire by science writer, Michael Pollan. Pollan set out to explore how four particular plants have evolved to satisfy human desires: the apple, which evolved to satisfy our desire for sweetness; the tulip, our desire for beauty; the cannabis (marijuana plant), our desire for intoxication; and the potato, our desire for control.

The documentary shows beautifully how over time man has cultivated, cross-bred, and aided the transfer of these plants from one native environment to another. What’s odd is that Pollan talks about the plants as if they’re the ones in control while all these things are going on. (...) >>>

Dec. 28, 2009
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David Berlinsky: "The Devil's Delusion"

David Berlinski is a writer, thinker, and raconteur who lives in Paris. His latest book is The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions, to be released in paperback in September 2009.

(...) Militant atheism is on the rise. Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens have dominated bestseller lists with books denigrating religious belief as dangerous foolishness. And these authors are merely the leading edge of a far larger movement–one that now includes much of the scientific community.

“The attack on traditional religious thought,” writes David Berlinski in The Devil’s Delusion, “marks the consolidation in our time of science as the single system of belief in which rational men and women might place their faith, and if not their faith, then certainly their devotion.” A secular Jew, Berlinski nonetheless delivers a biting defense of religious thought. (...) >>>

Dec. 27, 2009
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Image by evil nickname via Flickr

Salvo Magazine: "Blinded by Science? Don't Be; That's Just the New Atheists Masking Their Faith Choice", by Terrell Clemmons

In the November 2006 cover story of Wired magazine, Gary Wolf thoughtfully gave ear to some of atheism's most aggressive voices and labeled the movement that they lead “New Atheism.” Envisioning a brave new world in which science and reason overcome religious myth and superstition, New Atheists labor to purvey a comprehensive worldview that explains who we are and how we got here (Darwinian evolution), diagnoses our most urgent ill (ancient superstitions about God), and, most importantly, prescribes a cure for that ill (eradication of religion).

In the same month that Wired reported on New Atheism, Time magazine artfully depicted the science and religion quandary with a combination double helixÆrosary on its cover. The title, “God vs. Science,” might have led a casual reader to expect a story about a theologian opposing science, but the article actually covered a debate between two scientists. Geneticist Francis Collins, director of the Human Genome Project, and biologist Richard Dawkins of Oxford University weighed in on Time's questions about science, belief in God, and whether the two can peaceably coexist in an intellectually sound world-view. Collins said they can; Dawkins said absolutely not. (...)

Certainly, atheists, scientific or not, are free to adopt whatever belief system they choose, but can they legitimately claim science as the basis for atheism? Put more simply, has science disproved God, as the irreligionists maintain? A closer look at Richard Dawkins and Francis Collins sheds light on that question. The most significant difference between the two scientists is not that one believes in biblical creation and the other in Darwinian evolution. Both affirm Darwinism. The salient distinction is that Collins allows for the possibility of God, whereas Dawkins does not. But it wasn't always so. (...) >>>
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The heresy of questioning Darwin's Dogma:

The Dartboard: "Darwin’s Quantum Leap", by Terrell Clemmons

Early in 2009, the International Year of Darwin got underway in Shrewsbury, England, the birthplace of Charles Darwin. As part of the celebration marking both Darwin’s 200th birthday and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his seminal work, On the Origin of Species, a sculpture was unveiled in Shrewsbury’s Mardol Quay Gardens. Nearly forty feet high, sixty feet long, and weighing over 200 tons, the structure, named Quantum Leap, resembles a gigantic slinky placed on the ground like an upside down ‘U.’ Darwin coordinator, Jon King, explains, “What we wanted was an iconic structure – something that was big, was bold, but something that could be interpreted in different ways.” In an irony apparently lost on its celebrants, the name ‘Quantum Leap’ makes a fitting metaphor for the thinking of contemporary Darwinists. (...) >>>
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It's all based on false philosophy that's the problem ... again confusing truth with consensus (like in polls):

Salvo Magazine: "Scientocracy Rules - Creating Consensus Is the PC Way to Get Smart", by Casey Luskin

(...) scientific literacy is certainly not a bad thing. A scientifically literate individual is simply someone capable of making informed decisions about scientific questions in both his personal and his civic life. One might presume that, so long as a person has a working knowledge of science—perhaps even a college-level science education—he would be scientifically literate, even if he dissented from, say, neo-Darwinian evolution.

Not so. Though Mooney might claim otherwise, Unscientific America appears based upon the premise that “science literacy” requires full assent to the “consensus” on controversial topics like evolution, embryonic stem-cell research, and global warming. It’s not even clear whether scientific literacy demands an understanding of science, provided that one endorses all the proper policy positions. (...) >>>

Dec. 26, 2009
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RenewAmerica: "Corruption of the science establishment: causes and cures", by Fred Hutchison

By now, most of my readers have heard of the scandal nicknamed "Climategate," involving the suppression of information that contradicts a supposed consensus of the science establishment about global warming. For ten or fifteen years, we have been told that when scientists have reached a consensus, all further debate should stop. (...) The most remarkable part of this strange story is there never was a consensus in the scientific establishment in the first place. (...) Why? Why are the scientists lying about having a consensus? The central thesis of this essay is that when a scientist pursues consensus instead of seeking truth, decay settles into his professional ethics and his intellectual prowess. Interestingly, the same is true of philosophers, theologians, politicians, and those seeking to be good Christians and good citizens. (...) >>>

December 25, 2009
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Nourishing obscurity: "Academic dishonesty from the days of the so-called Enlightenment"

Tiberius Gracchus, worthy historian and all round good guy, wrote, on the post about The Admissibility of Evidence:

James, legal evidence is not the same as historical evidence.

After my expostulation “rubbish”, I then presented an article explaining why this was so. In a nutshell, this is precisely the three card trick that the dark Enlightenment philosophers pulled on an unsuspecting world in the C18th and which has poisoned academic thought from those days onwards.

In short, it was iniquitous academic dishonesty of the grossest kind. I don’t blame Tiberius because he is of a generation which had its education in the post-modern, humanist times we live in today [which I narrowly escaped] and thus his view is a parroting of that same old line. (...) The major movement in the C18th century was the revolution in thought and the dawn of the “scientific age”. Look at the people seen as heroes today – Copernicus, Newton, Galileo – presented as railers against the dead hand of the Church and its narrow-minded bigots. The argument has been presented by the humanist Enlightenment philosophers that questioning is good, ever-upwards technology is good and that in the stars lie the answers.

Hence Darwin and his quite shaky theory based on the fossil record, the theory of natural selection by no means established, though the fossil record itself – the entity, not the philosophy which has been spun from it – is of course there. Thus, even the manner in which we judge truth and historicity has been skewed so as to be interpreted solely through the new god Science but even in its supposed empiricism lies a host of small deceits. (...) >>>

Dec. 24, 2009
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Related: 

- "Greenism" - dossier includes the Climategate journal
- "Live Ethics" - dossier includes pro life issues, genetics, eugenics, euthanasia, abortion, etc.

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Introduction to subjective, nominalist strands of thinking, currently rife in academe, Pragmatism, Skepticism, Positivism, all are in one way or another relativist in nature. This is bad enough in the humanities, but it's downright destructive in exact science. Postmodern (relativist) thinking rejects objective truth on principle: to them science is but a Western, subjective narrative. We should not be surprised that 'consensus' - the postmodern arbiter of 'truth' - has taken the place of objective knowledge?

This is still a hypothesis, but there may be a pattern: it's like the history of Emmanuel Kant is repeating itself in Climategate. Kant went into non-contradictory philosophy - the traditional vehicle to truth since Aristotle and St Thomas of Aquinas - and rendered it useless by stretching it to such irrational lengths that it seemed to disprove itself: as an Orwellian avant la lettre, he called it Pure Reason. Since that time we have the 'speculative' version of philosophy, which has given the entire field a bad name. Kant's ideological crime is that he did it purposefully so as to "make room for the faith".

Ever since, contradiction is not viewed as a symptom of error, but rather that "something interesting is going on". As a result, anything goes - provided that it supports the argument, usually an article of political ideology. It is reminiscent of Climategate. Truth and billions of taxpayer's money are at stake here, but the real victims might well be science and humanity itself. Already there are commentators declaring science invalid for having produced untruth. Time will tell where this is going. After philosophy, will we lose science too?