Sciences vs. Religion

[mortalterror]

Evolution is a fact. You are free to accept the fact that the earth moves round the sun or not. But you would look rather silly if you didn't accept it. If you completely trust astronomers when they tell you the earth moves round the sun, why wouldn't you completely trust biologists when they tell you evolution happened? One isn't "free to accept evolution as truth or not" unless you deny science itself, and throw doubt on every other scientific fact, like an extreme flat earther.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...lligent_design

While I believe in evolution, I still recognize that science and logic have certain built in limitations. Many atheists when they remove their faith in the infallibility of God tend to move it over to science as a foundational belief. But if they knew a bit more about science, they would probably be aware that as a human institution it suffers many of the same foibles as others have in the past. Scientists like priests are only human, and humans make mistakes.

A while back I collected some of my more thoughtful posts about religion, organized them into categories and set up links to them in my blog. I have a whole section devoted to this very subject.

Science No Substitute

Science is Amoral, Can Cause Harm, and Needs Ethical Guidance
http://forums.joerogan.net/showpost....postcount=1857
Modern Science and Technology caused the Holocaust
http://forums.joerogan.net/showpost....postcount=1997
Scientists Disagree with Each Other, and Science is not always objective or clear
http://forums.joerogan.net/showpost....postcount=2385
Science is Flawed, subject to fraud, scandal, and perversion, not the source of absolute truth
http://forums.joerogan.net/showpost....postcount=2386
Science and religion not at odds, Scientists are as likely to be Religious as Atheist
http://forums.joerogan.net/showpost....6&postcount=98
Scientists Not More Atheist than a Century Ago
http://forums.joerogan.net/showpost....2&postcount=66
Uncertainty is a Prerequisit of all Knowledge and The Bible Evolves like the Constitution
http://forums.joerogan.net/showpost....&postcount=250

[mal4mac]

MT - I can't log on to that forum, and I'm not going to as I'm trying to discourage you from posting links .

I agree with some of those headings, but certainly not:

"Modern Science and Technology caused the Holocaust"

It was Nazi ideology caused the holocaust, I just don't get how you can say this!

"Science and religion not at odds"

Then why does Dawkins get into all those arguments with religious types?

"Scientists are as likely to be Religious as Atheist"

If you define "scientist" as anyone who can polish a test tube, this might be true in America. But if you're talking *serious* FRS level scientists this is far from true! (About 97% FRS are atheists.)

[mortalterror]

MT - I can't log on to that forum, and I'm not going to as I'm trying to discourage you from posting links .

Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't realize people had to be logged into that forum to view my links. I guess I need to copy them here then.

This first comment was prompted by a fellow saying that science objectively improves human life as opposed to religion which can only subjectively improve it. My retort:

Well, I guess that depends which end of the science you are on.

What about the atomic bomb? Agent orange? Zyklon B? The machine gun? Sarin gas? Crack cocaine? Napalm? Chlorine and mustard gas? Attack drones?

Science also played a hand in the perpetuation of slavery, rationalized racism, and streamlined the mass extermination of people. Anthropology, craniometry, phrenology, anthropometry, ethnology, polygenism, and eugenics were used to justify racism, slavery, the Holocaust, imperialism, and apartheid.

In the United States, scientific racism justified Black African slavery to assuage moral opposition to the Atlantic slave trade. Alexander Thomas and Samuell Sillen described black men as uniquely fitted for bondage, because of their "primitive psychological organization".[57] In 1851, in antebellum Louisiana, the physician Samuel A. Cartwright (1793–1863), considered slave escape attempts as "drapetomania", a treatable mental illness, that "with proper medical advice, strictly followed, this troublesome practice that many Negroes have of running away can be almost entirely prevented". The term drapetomania (mania of the runaway slave) derives from the Greek δραπετης (drapetes, "a runaway [slave]") + μανια (mania, "madness, frenzy")[58] Cartwright also described dysaesthesia aethiopica, called "rascality" by overseers. The 1840 United States Census claimed that Northern, free blacks suffered mental illness at higher rates than did their Southern, enslaved counterparts. Though the census was later found to have been severely flawed by the American Statistical Association, John Quincy Adams, and others, it became a political weapon against abolitionists. Southern slavers concluded that escaping Negroes were suffering from "mental disorders".[59][60]

At the time of the American Civil War (1861–65), the matter of miscegenation prompted studies of ostensible physiological differences between Caucasians and Negroes. Early anthropologists, such as Josiah Clark Nott, George Robins Gliddon, Robert Knox, and Samuel George Morton, aimed to scientifically prove that Negroes were a human species different from the white people species; that the rulers of Ancient Egypt were not African; and that mixed-race offspring (the product of miscegenation) tended to physical weakness and infertility. After the Civil War, Southern (Confederacy) physicians wrote textbooks of scientific racism based upon studies claiming that Black freemen (ex-slaves) were becoming extinct, because they were inadequate to the demands of being a free man — implying that Black people benefitted from enslavement. In 1850 Louis Agassiz commissioned a series of daguerreotypes of slaves of Columbia South Carolina for studying of races http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism

Dr. Mengele was a scientist, and he justified sticking foot long needles into the bellies of pregnant women, or sewing twins together on the grounds that it was for the good of science. Science without religion is barbaric. It teaches the scientist that people are just things to be used like a chair or a compass.

(youtube video of a Russian scientists experiment keeping the head of a dog alive after separating it from the dogs body)

Your assumption that science is an unqualified good needs some fine tuning. Perhaps, it would be more fair to say that science is an amoral tool like a hatchet or a gun which can be used for both good and evil.

[mortalterror]

Modern Science and Technology caused the Holocaust

There is more than a wholly fortuitous connection between the applied technology of the mass production line, with its vision of universal material abundance, and the applied technology of the concentration camp, with its vision of a profusion of death. We may wish to deny the connection, but Buchenwald was of our West as much as Detroit's River Rouge -- we cannot deny Buchenwald as a casual aberration of a Western world essentially sane. -Edmund Stillman & William Pfaff, The Politics of Hysteria (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), p. 30-31.

`It bears,' he wrote, `witness to the advance of civilization'. It was an advance, let us add, in a double sense. In the Final Solution, the industrial potential and technological know-how boasted by our civilization has scaled new heights in coping successfully with a task of unprecedented magnitude. And in the same Final Solution our society has disclosed to us it heretofore unsuspected capacity. Taught to respect and admire technical efficiency and good design, we cannot but admit that, in the praise of material progress which our civilization has brought, we have sorely underestimated its true potential. The world of the death camps and the society it engenders reveals the progressively intensifying night side of Judeo-Christian civilization. Civilization means slavery, wars, exploitation, and death camps. It also means medical hygiene, elevated religious ideas, beautiful art, and exquisite music. It is an error to imagine that civilization and savage cruelty are antithesis ... In our times the cruelties, like most other aspects of our world, have become far more effectively administered than ever before. They have not and will not cease to exist. Both creation and destruction are inseparable aspects of what we call civilization. -Richard L. Rubenstein, The Cunning of History (New York: Harper, 1978), pp. 91, 195.

I propose that the major lesson of the Holocaust is the necessity to treat the critique seriously and thus to expand the theoretical model of the civilizing process, so as to include the latter's tendency to demote, exprobate and delegitimize the ethical motivations of social action. We need to take stock of the evidence that the civilizing process is, among other things, a process of divesting the use and deployment of violence from moral calculus, and of emancipating the desiderata of rationality from interference of ethical norms or moral inhibitions. As the promotion of rationality to the exclusion of alternative criteria of action, and in particular the tendency to subordinate the use of violence to rational calculus, has been long ago acknowledged as a constitutive feature of modern civilization -- the Holocaust-style phenomena must be recognized as legitimate outcomes of civilizing tendency, and its constant potential.
-Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust 1989 p.29

The self-imposed moral silence of science has, after all, revealed some of its less advertised aspects when the issue of production and disposal of corpses in Auschwitz has been articulated as a `medical problem'. It is not easy to dismiss Franklin M. Littell's warnings of the credibility crisis of the modern university: `What kind of a medical school trained Mengele and his associates? What departments of anthropology prepared the staff of Strasbourg University's "Institute of Ancestral Heredity"?' 37 Not to wonder for whom this particular bell tolls, to avoid the temptation to shrug off these questions as of merely historical significance, one needs search no further than Colin Gray's analysis of the momentum behind the contemporary nuclear arms race: `Necessarily, the scientists and technologists on each side are "racing" to diminish their own ignorance (the enemy is not Soviet technology; it is the physical unknowns that attract scientific attention) ... Highly motivated, technologically competent and adequately funded teams of research scientists will inevitably produce an endless series of brand new (or refined) weapon ideas'. -Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust 1989 p30-31

Bureaucracy's double feat is the moralization of technology, coupled with the denial of the moral significance of nontechnical issues. It is the technology of action, not its substance, which is subject to assessment as good or bad, proper or improper, right or wrong. The conscience of the actor tells him to perform well and prompts him to measure his own righteousness by the precision with which he obeys the organizational rules and his dedication to the task as defined by the superiors. What kept at bay the other, `old-fashioned' conscience in the subjects of Milgram's experiments, and effectively arrested their impulse to break off, was the substitute conscience, put together by the experimenters out of the appeals to the `interests of research' or the `needs of the experiment', and the warnings about the losses which its untimely interruption would cause. -Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust 1989 p.161

[mortalterror]

Scientists Disagree with Each Other, and Science is not always objective or clear

This comment was prompted by a fellow telling me that scientists always weigh evidence objectively, readily admit when they are wrong and change their minds, and if he presented evidence to Neil Degrasse Tyson that contradicted a popular scientific belief, Neil would agree with his evidence acknowledge the mistake:

You make a number of assumptions. First, that a man will always admit when he is wrong. Second, that he will agree he indeed is wrong when provided with proof. Third, that you would have enough quantity and quality proof to sway his opinion. Fourth, that everyone else will see things as you do and accept your standards of proof. Fifth, that the proof of a given proposition is objective and identifiable, that there are neither shades of grey nor alternative explanations. Sixth, that a liar will always be found out. Seventh, that Tyson has an interest in the truth, which outweighs competing interests. Eighth, that a scientific truth, once discovered, immediately gains widespread acceptance.

That is naive and not how science works. He could just as easily preserve his credibility by making you look wrong as he could lose credibility by a perceived cover up. You just have to look at the history of scientific disagreements with all the mud slinging and back stabbing that goes on. There's the controversy between Newton and Leibniz over who discovered Calculus, Peary and Cook over who was first to the North Pole, Adams or Le Verrier on who discovered Neptune, Edison vs Tesla and Westinghouse on electricity, Tesla vs Marconi on the radio, Alexander Graham Bell and Antonio Meucci on the telephone, Cope and Marsh on dinosaur bones.

The Bone Wars, also known as the "Great Dinosaur Rush",[1] refers to a period of intense fossil speculation and discovery during the Gilded Age of American history, marked by a heated rivalry between Edward Drinker Cope (of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia) and Othniel Charles Marsh (of the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale). Each of the two paleontologists used underhanded methods to try to out-compete the other in the field, resorting to bribery, theft, and destruction of bones. Each scientist also attacked the other in scientific publications, seeking to ruin his credibility and have his funding cut off. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bone_Wars

And that's mostly where scientists blackened each others eyes over things they mostly agreed upon but couldn't decide who should get the credit. When they actually disagree about fundamental points of science things can get downright nasty. There's the controversy of Derek Freeman and Margaret Mead over Samoan anthropology, Hobbes-Wallis over squaring a circle, etc.

You have scientists championing peculiar and wrong headed pet theories all the time, like Newton did with Alchemy. The authoritative force of a major scientific personality lends credence to otherwise easily discredited ideas. For decades, people searched for the planet Vulcan because the mathematician Urbain Jean Joseph Le Verrier proposed it's existence to account for peculiarities in Mercury's orbit. Flaws in Galen's medical theories remained unaddressed until the Renaissance because he was considered an unquestionable authority.

There was the example of an academic feud where Edward Teller (father of the H bomb) testified that J. Robert Oppenheimer (father of the A bomb) was a communist security risk and should be taken off all scientific government projects. You have the example of Wilson, Watson, and Crick all winning Nobel prizes for the discovery of DNA while minimizing and downplaying the contributions of Rosalind Franklin. Freud's disagreements with his disciple Jung about the collective unconscious. The Einstein Bohr debates about measuring electrons lasted for three decades.

Ignaz Semmelweis was the first doctor to propose washing hands before surgery as a way to limit the spread of disease. For that, he was fired, shunned by the medical community. Prominent medical doctors disputed his findings, and he eventually had a mental break down, was admitted to an asylum where he was beaten to death by the guards. It wasn't until after his death that his ideas were accepted.

Then there are all the ways that results are "swayed" and "massaged" to be more palatable and serve the interests of whoever funds the science. As Aldous Huxley wrote in 'Science, Liberty and Peace', "The man who pays the piper always calls the tune."

Unfortunately, censorship of scientists and the manipulation, distortion, and suppression of scientific information have threatened federal science in recent years.

This problem has sparked much debate, but few have identified the key driver of political interference in federal science: the inappropriate influence of companies with a financial stake in the outcome.

A new UCS report, Heads They Win, Tails We Lose, shows how corporations influence the use of science in federal decision making to serve their own interests.
Methods of Abuse

The report describes five basic methods that corporations use to influence the scientific and policy-making processes:

Corrupting the Science. Corporations suppress research, intimidate scientists, manipulate study designs, ghostwrite scientific articles, and selectively publish results that suit their interests.

Shaping Public Perception. Private interests downplay evidence, exaggerate uncertainty, vilify scientists, hide behind front groups, and feed the media slanted news stories.

Restricting Agency Effectiveness. Companies attack the science behind agency policy, hinder the regulatory process, corrupt advisory panels, exploit the "revolving door" between corporate and government employment, censor scientists, and withhold information from the public. http://www.ucsusa.org/scientific_int...t-science.html

Corporations and politicians both tend to employ or fund teams of scientists which are highly motivated to find scientific results that flatter the opinions of their masters. Neil DeGrasse Tyson is an employee of corporations like Fox who pay his salary and he is beholden to making them happy either by agreeing with them or by omitting where he disagrees with them.

[mortalterror]

Scientists Disagree with Each Other, and Science is not always objective or clear

This comment was prompted by a fellow telling me that scientists always weigh evidence objectively, readily admit when they are wrong and change their minds, and if he presented evidence to Neil Degrasse Tyson that contradicted a popular scientific belief, Neil would agree with his evidence acknowledge the mistake:

You make a number of assumptions. First, that a man will always admit when he is wrong. Second, that he will agree he indeed is wrong when provided with proof. Third, that you would have enough quantity and quality proof to sway his opinion. Fourth, that everyone else will see things as you do and accept your standards of proof. Fifth, that the proof of a given proposition is objective and identifiable, that there are neither shades of grey nor alternative explanations. Sixth, that a liar will always be found out. Seventh, that Tyson has an interest in the truth, which outweighs competing interests. Eighth, that a scientific truth, once discovered, immediately gains widespread acceptance.

That is naive and not how science works. He could just as easily preserve his credibility by making you look wrong as he could lose credibility by a perceived cover up. You just have to look at the history of scientific disagreements with all the mud slinging and back stabbing that goes on. There's the controversy between Newton and Leibniz over who discovered Calculus, Peary and Cook over who was first to the North Pole, Adams or Le Verrier on who discovered Neptune, Edison vs Tesla and Westinghouse on electricity, Tesla vs Marconi on the radio, Alexander Graham Bell and Antonio Meucci on the telephone, Cope and Marsh on dinosaur bones.

The Bone Wars, also known as the "Great Dinosaur Rush",[1] refers to a period of intense fossil speculation and discovery during the Gilded Age of American history, marked by a heated rivalry between Edward Drinker Cope (of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia) and Othniel Charles Marsh (of the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale). Each of the two paleontologists used underhanded methods to try to out-compete the other in the field, resorting to bribery, theft, and destruction of bones. Each scientist also attacked the other in scientific publications, seeking to ruin his credibility and have his funding cut off. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bone_Wars

And that's mostly where scientists blackened each others eyes over things they mostly agreed upon but couldn't decide who should get the credit. When they actually disagree about fundamental points of science things can get downright nasty. There's the controversy of Derek Freeman and Margaret Mead over Samoan anthropology, Hobbes-Wallis over squaring a circle, etc.

You have scientists championing peculiar and wrong headed pet theories all the time, like Newton did with Alchemy. The authoritative force of a major scientific personality lends credence to otherwise easily discredited ideas. For decades, people searched for the planet Vulcan because the mathematician Urbain Jean Joseph Le Verrier proposed it's existence to account for peculiarities in Mercury's orbit. Flaws in Galen's medical theories remained unaddressed until the Renaissance because he was considered an unquestionable authority.

There was the example of an academic feud where Edward Teller (father of the H bomb) testified that J. Robert Oppenheimer (father of the A bomb) was a communist security risk and should be taken off all scientific government projects. You have the example of Wilson, Watson, and Crick all winning Nobel prizes for the discovery of DNA while minimizing and downplaying the contributions of Rosalind Franklin. Freud's disagreements with his disciple Jung about the collective unconscious. The Einstein Bohr debates about measuring electrons lasted for three decades.

Ignaz Semmelweis was the first doctor to propose washing hands before surgery as a way to limit the spread of disease. For that, he was fired, shunned by the medical community. Prominent medical doctors disputed his findings, and he eventually had a mental break down, was admitted to an asylum where he was beaten to death by the guards. It wasn't until after his death that his ideas were accepted.

Then there are all the ways that results are "swayed" and "massaged" to be more palatable and serve the interests of whoever funds the science. As Aldous Huxley wrote in 'Science, Liberty and Peace', "The man who pays the piper always calls the tune."

Unfortunately, censorship of scientists and the manipulation, distortion, and suppression of scientific information have threatened federal science in recent years.

This problem has sparked much debate, but few have identified the key driver of political interference in federal science: the inappropriate influence of companies with a financial stake in the outcome.

A new UCS report, Heads They Win, Tails We Lose, shows how corporations influence the use of science in federal decision making to serve their own interests.
Methods of Abuse

The report describes five basic methods that corporations use to influence the scientific and policy-making processes:

Corrupting the Science. Corporations suppress research, intimidate scientists, manipulate study designs, ghostwrite scientific articles, and selectively publish results that suit their interests.

Shaping Public Perception. Private interests downplay evidence, exaggerate uncertainty, vilify scientists, hide behind front groups, and feed the media slanted news stories.

Restricting Agency Effectiveness. Companies attack the science behind agency policy, hinder the regulatory process, corrupt advisory panels, exploit the "revolving door" between corporate and government employment, censor scientists, and withhold information from the public. http://www.ucsusa.org/scientific_int...t-science.html

Corporations and politicians both tend to employ or fund teams of scientists which are highly motivated to find scientific results that flatter the opinions of their masters. Neil DeGrasse Tyson is an employee of corporations like Fox who pay his salary and he is beholden to making them happy either by agreeing with them or by omitting where he disagrees with them.

[mortalterror]

Science is Flawed, subject to fraud, scandal, and perversion, not the source of absolute truth

Science gets things wrong all the time, Flint. Looking to it for absolute authority and truth is a losing game. You have the guys who deny climate change publishing their science on the one hand, and then articles come out about mainstream Global warming scientists doctoring their research. Back in October there was all that news about a faked cancer study.

A cancer drug discovered in a humble lichen, and ready for testing in patients, might sound too good to be true. That's because it is. But more than a hundred lower-tier scientific journals accepted a fake, error-ridden cancer study for publication in a spoof organized by Science magazine.

The fake study points to a "Wild West" of pay-to-publish outlets feeding off lower tiers of the scientific enterprise by publishing studies without any appreciable scrutiny, say research ethics experts. (See "Who's Afraid of Peer Review?")

Some 8,250 "open-access" scientific journals worldwide are now listed in a directory supported by publishers. Unlike traditional science journals that charge for subscriptions or fees from those wishing to read their contents, open-access journals make research studies free to the public. In return, study authors pay up-front publishing costs if the paper is accepted for publication.

"From humble and idealistic beginnings a decade ago, open-access scientific journals have mushroomed into a global industry, driven by author publication fees," says journalist John Bohannon, writing in the Science magazine report of his survey-style spoof of review practices at such journals.

The cover of Science magazine.

Image courtesy Science/AAAS

"The goal was to create a credible but mundane scientific paper, one with such grave errors that a competent peer reviewer should easily identify it as flawed and unpublishable," Bohannon says. Of 255 open-access journals that said they would review his study, 157 accepted the fake study for publication. "Acceptance was the norm, not the exception," he writes.

Science Spoofs Not New

Spoof studies intended to spotlight problems with individual journals and their review practices have made news before. New York University physicist Alan Sokal spoofed the cultural studies journal Social Text in 1996 with a crackpot physics treatise. And last month, Serbian academics spoofed a Romanian journal with a similarly ludicrous data-processing paper.

But the Bohannon study, which claimed to have discovered a cancer-fighting, lichen-derived drug ready for immediate testing on patients, represents a first systematic test of review practices, or their absence, across many journals at once, says research ethics expert Nicholas Steneck of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/n...review-cancer/

I punched Science scandals into google and an alarming number of articles showed up from the Sokal Affair:

The Sokal affair, also known as the Sokal hoax,[1] was a publishing hoax perpetrated by Alan Sokal, a physics professor at New York University. In 1996, Sokal submitted an article to Social Text, an academic journal of postmodern cultural studies. The submission was an experiment to test the journal's intellectual rigor and, specifically, to investigate whether "a leading North American journal of cultural studies – whose editorial collective includes such luminaries as Fredric Jameson and Andrew Ross – [would] publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions".[2]

The article, "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity", was published in the Social Text Spring/Summer 1996 "Science Wars" issue. It proposed that quantum gravity is a social and linguistic construct. At that time, the journal did not practice academic peer review and did not submit the article for outside expert review by a physicist.[3][4] On its date of publication (May 1996), Sokal revealed in Lingua Franca that the article was a hoax, identifying it as "a pastiche of left-wing cant, fawning references, grandiose quotations, and outright nonsense...structured around the silliest quotations [by postmodernist academics] he could find about mathematics and physics".[2]

The resultant academic and public quarrels concerned the scholarly merit of humanistic commentary about the physical sciences; the influence of postmodern philosophy on social disciplines in general; academic ethics, including whether Sokal was wrong to deceive the editors and readers of Social Text; and whether the journal had exercised appropriate intellectual rigor before publishing the pseudoscientific article. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair

to The Schon Scandal:

The Schön scandal concerns German physicist Jan Hendrik Schön (born 1970 in Verden) who briefly rose to prominence after a series of apparent breakthroughs with semiconductors that were later discovered to be fraudulent.[1] Before he was exposed, Schön had received the Otto-Klung-Weberbank Prize for Physics and the Braunschweig Prize in 2001 as well as the Outstanding Young Investigator Award of the Materials Research Society in 2002, which was later rescinded.

The scandal provoked discussion in the scientific community about the degree of responsibility of coauthors and reviewers of scientific papers. The debate centered on whether peer review, traditionally designed to find errors and determine relevance and originality of papers, should also be required to detect deliberate fraud. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sch%C3%B6n_scandal

And this article from The Scientist on the Top Science Scandals of 2012:

A widely discussed research study published this year showed that more than sloppy mistakes or accidental omissions, retracted papers are most likely to be withdrawn from publication because of scientific misconduct or knowlingly publishing false data. In fact, more than 65 percent of the 2,000 or so papers studied were retracted because of poor ethical judgment. According to that report, high impact journals have been hardest hit by the increasing rate of retractions over the past decade.

In light of these findings, researchers and other observers have proposed several initiatives to help the scientific community with its apparent honesty issues. One suggestion was the creation a Retraction Index. Unlike the Impact Factor, which is based on a journal’s citation rate, the Retraction Index would indicate the number of retractions a journal has for every 1,000 papers published. Following suit, Adam Marcus and Ivan Oransky at Retraction Watch blog suggested creating a Transparency Index, which could include a score for how well a journal controls its manuscript review process, including how it conducts peer review, whether supporting data are also reviewed, whether the journal uses plagiarism detecting software, and a number of other measures. Finally, the lab-services start-up Science Exchange and the open access journal PLOS ONE have collaborated to suggest the Reproducibility Initiative, which would provide a platform for researchers to submit their studies for replication by other labs for a fee. Studies that are successfully reproduced will win a certificate of reproducibility.

Still, The Scientist found no shortage of stories to discuss in this year’s roundup of misconduct stories. Here are a few of the most glaring examples of scientific fraud in 2012:

10 years of fabrication

This year, University of Kentucky biomedical researcher Eric Smart was discovered to have falsified or fabricated 45 figures over the course of 10 years. His research on the molecular mechanisms behind cardiovascular disease and diabetes was well regarded, despite his having used data from knockout mouse models that never existed. “Dr. Smart’s papers were highly cited in the specific caveolae/cardiovascular research field,” Philippe Frank of Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia told The Scientist. Smart resigned from his university post in 2011, when the investigation in his misconduct started, and agreed to exclude himself from federal grant applications for the next 7 years. He now teaches chemistry at a local school.

Record-setting retractions

Setting the record for the most publications up for retraction by a single author, Japanese anesthesiologist Yo****aka Fujii fabricated data in a whopping 172 papers. Beginning his career in falsification in 1993 while at the Tokyo Medical and Dental University, he continued it at the University of Tsukuba, and at Toho University in Tokyo, where he was finally dismissed in February 2012. According to investigations, Fujii never actually saw the patients he reported in his clinical studies, failed to get ethical review board approval for his research, and misled co-authors, sometimes including their names without their permission or knowledge. Although the retractions are not expected to have a large impact on the field—many of them had low citation rates—Fujii used the publications to further his career, publishing a total of 249 papers.

False forensics

The results from roughly 34,000 criminal drug cases were put into question earlier this year, when forensic chemist Annie Dookhan at the shuttered Department of Public Health Lab in Massachusetts was discovered to have falsified records on samples she was assigned to process. Instead, she forged signatures and did not perform tests she recorded as complete, according to investigations. Suspicions may have first arisen due to her impressive output—she claimed to have processed 9,000 samples in a year, whereas colleagues only averaged around 3,000. As a result of her actions, a number of defendants may have been wrongly imprisoned, while others who may have been rightly accused were freed. This month, Boston police warned of an expected spike in crimes due to the large number of convicted drug offenders who will be released because of Dookhan’s misconduct.

Creative reviewing strategies

Rather than falsify data in order to get published, researchers have taken a new tack this year by writing glowing expert reviews for their own papers. When asked by journal editors to suggest names of experts in their field who were not involved in their research, at least four submitting authors suggested names and emails that then forwarded back to their own inboxes. The trend, first reported by Retraction Watch, was caught by one journal editor when author Hyung-In Moon, assistant professor at Dong-A University in Busan, South Korea, offered up names of reviewers with Google and Yahoo rather than university email accounts. “It should be a wake-up call to any journals that don’t have rigorous reviewer selection and screening in place,” Irene Hames, a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics, told The Chronicle of Higher Education. http://www.the-scientist.com/?articl...ndals-of-2012/

Apparently, this kind of thing happens all the time.

Also Flint, Science isn't always rational, logical, or objective. Consider the findings of Thomas Kuhn who wrote The Structure of Scientific Revolutions:

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is a 1962 book about the history of science by Thomas S. Kuhn. Its publication was a landmark event in the history, philosophy, and sociology of scientific knowledge and triggered an ongoing worldwide assessment and reaction in—and beyond—those scholarly communities. Kuhn challenged the then prevailing view of progress in "normal science". Normal scientific progress was viewed as "development-by-accumulation" of accepted facts and theories. Kuhn argued for an episodic model in which periods of such conceptual continuity in normal science were interrupted by periods of revolutionary science. The discovery of "anomalies" during revolutions in science leads to new paradigms. New paradigms then ask new questions of old data, move beyond the mere "puzzle-solving" of the previous paradigm, change the rules of the game and the "map" directing new research.[1]

For example, Kuhn's analysis of the Copernican Revolution emphasized that, in its beginning, it did not offer more accurate predictions of celestial events, such as planetary positions, than the Ptolemaic system, but instead appealed to some practitioners based on a promise of better, simpler, solutions that might be developed at some point in the future. Kuhn called the core concepts of an ascendant revolution its "paradigms" and thereby launched this word into widespread analogical use in the second half of the 20th century. Kuhn's insistence that a paradigm shift was a mélange of sociology, enthusiasm and scientific promise, but not a logically determinate procedure, caused an uproar in reaction to his work. Kuhn addressed concerns in the 1969 postscript to the second edition. For some commentators it introduced a realistic humanism into the core of science while for others the nobility of science was tarnished by Kuhn's introduction of an irrational element into the heart of its greatest achievements. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Str...ic_Revolutions

Scientific consensus can often be achieved in some weird ways, such as through the cult of personality that hovers around famous scientists like Stephen Hawking or Albert Einstein. Galen and Aristotle's errors went unchallenged until the Renaissance because they were advanced for their time, and much of what they said was true; so other scientists put their faith in all of the men's theories.

Kuhn made several notable claims concerning the progress of scientific knowledge: that scientific fields undergo periodic "paradigm shifts" rather than solely progressing in a linear and continuous way; that these paradigm shifts open up new approaches to understanding what scientists would never have considered valid before; and that the notion of scientific truth, at any given moment, cannot be established solely by objective criteria but is defined by a consensus of a scientific community. Competing paradigms are frequently incommensurable; that is, they are competing accounts of reality which cannot be coherently reconciled. Thus, our comprehension of science can never rely on full "objectivity"; we must account for subjective perspectives as well, all objective conclusions, being ultimately founded upon subjective conditioning/worldview. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Kuhn

In fact, you might even question whether the majority of American scientists are atheist because they've been indoctrinated into that society by their peers and elders. This jump to atheism in the sciences is a relatively recent trend over the last couple of decades, and it may just be another temporary fad specific to a culture. Sort of like how, there is some reason to think that universities often espouse a liberal bias reflected in who they hire and what they teach their students; or how a lot of ancient Greek philosophers were homosexual, but homosexuality was not a prerequisite to being a good philosopher. Atheism may be incidental to the logic, objectivity, and scientific rationalism they've been trained in and more a vestige of their human culture, scientific role models, peer pressure, etc. Basically, I'm saying that if all of your teachers are Jesuits you might become a Catholic scientist.

[mortalterror]

Science and religion not at odds, Scientists are as likely to be Religious as Atheist

Well, Issac Newton did believe in Christianity but also believed in things like alchemy. (I'm halfway done with the JRE with Louis Theroux by the way)

I stand by my claim that religion held back scientific advancements.

Like I said, you don't understand the history of science. Science and religion have rarely been at odds and more often religion and science have helped each other than conflicted. You are operating under a biased assumption called the Conflict Theory propagated by 19th century Atheists Draper and White to discredit religion. It's been disproved for nearly a century and no modern historian of science believes it, but the myth persists just like young Earth creationism because a certain stubborn part of the population won't let it go.

The conflict thesis, which states that there is an intrinsic intellectual conflict between religion and science, remains generally popular for the public; most historians of science no longer support it.[1][2][3][4] Other contemporary scientists such as Stephen Jay Gould, Francisco Ayala, Kenneth R. Miller and Francis Collins hold that religion and science are non-overlapping magisteria, addressing fundamentally separate forms of knowledge and aspects of life. Some theologians or historians of science, including John Lennox, Thomas Berry, Brian Swimme and Ken Wilber propose an interconnection between them. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relatio...on_and_science

All I really care about is what we believe NOW.

Modern scientists are for the most part agnostics/atheists because they have MUCH more data to work from that people before the 20th century.

Let's examine that thought. According to the Pew Research Organization scientists are about 50/50 in terms of agnosticism and belief in God. That's far less religious than the general populous but still just a draw. Also, the rates of atheism and agnosticism haven't changed in the scientific professions for a century, so there is no relation between the progress of scientific knowledge and disbelief.

A survey of scientists who are members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press in May and June 2009, finds that members of this group are, on the whole, much less religious than the general public.1 Indeed, the survey shows that scientists are roughly half as likely as the general public to believe in God or a higher power. According to the poll, just over half of scientists (51%) believe in some form of deity or higher power; specifically, 33% of scientists say they believe in God, while 18% believe in a universal spirit or higher power. By contrast, 95% of Americans believe in some form of deity or higher power, according to a survey of the general public conducted by the Pew Research Center in July 2006. Specifically, more than eight-in-ten Americans (83%) say they believe in God and 12% believe in a universal spirit or higher power. Finally, the poll of scientists finds that four-in-ten scientists (41%) say they do not believe in God or a higher power, while the poll of the public finds that only 4% of Americans share this view. http://www.pewforum.org/2009/11/05/s...ts-and-belief/

Let's see the actual breakdown of what scientists believe.

http://www.pewforum.org/2009/11/05/s...ts-and-belief/

Okay, so looking at this graph, we can clearly see that 17 percent of scientists are atheists which is a significant departure from the 2 percent of the general population who are atheists. What is really interesting is that this religious attitude gap hasn't grown or shrunk in almost a hundred years.

The recent survey of scientists tracks fairly closely with earlier polls that gauged scientists’ views on religion. The first of these was conducted in 1914 by Swiss-American psychologist James Leuba, who surveyed about 1,000 scientists in the United States to ask them about their views on God. Leuba found the scientific community equally divided, with 42% saying that they believed in a personal God and the same number saying they did not.

More than 80 years later, Edward Larson, a historian of science then teaching at the University of Georgia, recreated Leuba’s survey, asking the same number of scientists the exact same questions. To the surprise of many, Larson’s 1996 poll came up with similar results, finding that 40% of scientists believed in a personal God, while 45% said they did not. Other surveys of scientists have yielded roughly similar results. http://www.pewforum.org/2009/11/05/s...ts-and-belief/

The answer to that is possibly because scientists tend to view science and religion as non-overlapping magisteria and not in conflict with one another.

The Pew Research Center poll of scientists also found that levels of religious faith vary according to scientific specialty and age. For instance, chemists are more likely to believe in God (41%) than those who work in the other major scientific fields. Meanwhile, younger scientists (ages 18-34) are more likely to believe in God or a higher power than those who are older.

Unless scientists lose their religion in old age, then this newest generation may actually be getting more religious, and we may see a trend in that direction. But what the poll also shows is how different scientific subjects are an indicator of how religious the scientists might be. This shows that scientists religious beliefs are less likely to be swayed do to pure reason and scientific method than by a culture of their peers.

Another interesting fact is that doctors tend to be more religious than the general population.

The first study of physician religious beliefs has found that 76 percent of doctors believe in God and 59 percent believe in some sort of afterlife. The survey, performed by researchers at the University and published in the July issue of the Journal of General Internal Medicine, found that 90 percent of doctors in the United States attend religious services at least occasionally, compared to 81 percent of all adults. Fifty-five percent of doctors say their religious beliefs influence how they practice medicine. http://chronicle.uchicago.edu/050714/doctorsfaith.shtml

Physicians are educated, intelligent, trained scientists but their job often requires things like compassion, morality, empathy, and charity which synch up well with a religious lifestyle.

My main problem with religion is that the tool they use to understand the universe is a book from the bronze age.

ONE of the tools that modern science is using is one of these bad boys:

How anybody can see more awe/truth in ancient texts when compared to JUST the Hubble telescope is beyond me.

So no love for the Vatican Observatory?

In the 18th century, the Papacy actively supported astronomy, establishing the Observatory of the Roman College in 1774. In 1789-1787, the Specola Vaticana in the Tower of the Winds within the Vatican was established under the direction of Msgr. Filippo Luigi Gilii (1756-1821). When Msgr. Gilii died, the Specola was closed down, as inconvenient to students in the city, and with the dome of St. Peter's obstructing its view. Its instruments were transferred to the College Observatory. A third facility, the Observatory of the Capitol, was operated from 1827 to 1870.
Father Angelo Secchi SJ relocated the College Observatory to the top of Sant'Ignazio di Loyola a Campo Marzio (Church of St. Ignatius in Rome). In 1870, with the capture of Rome, the College Observatory fell into the hands of the Italian Government. Out of respect for his work, however, Father Secchi was permitted to continue using the Observatory. After Secchi's death in 1878, though, the Observatory was nationalized by the Italian government and renamed the Regio Osservatorio al Collegio Romano ("Royal Observatory at the Roman College"), putting an end to astronomical research in the Vatican.
In 1891, however, Pope Leo XIII issued a Motu Proprio re-founding the Specola Vaticana (Vatican Observatory) and a new observatory was built on the walls at the edge of the Vatican.[3] The new Vatican Observatory remained there for the next forty years.
By the 1930s, the smoke and sky-glow of the city had made it impossible to conduct useful observations in Rome.[1] Pope Pius XI relocated the Observatory to Castel Gandolfo, which is 25 kilometres (16 mi) southeast of Rome. By 1961, the same problems of light pollution made observing difficult at Castel Gandolfo. The Observatory then established the Vatican Observatory Research Group, with offices at the Steward Observatory of the University of Arizona in Tucson, Arizona.[1]
D.K.J. Q'Connell produced the first color photographs of a green flash at sunset in 1960.[4] In 1993, VORG completed construction of the 1.8 metres (71 in) Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope, which is at Mount Graham near Safford, Arizona. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vatican_Observatory

Gregor Mendel, father of genetics, friar, demonstrated the laws of inheritance in pea plants

Adam Sedgwick (1785–1873) Adam sedgwick.JPG Anglican priest and geologist whose, A Discourse on the Studies of the University discusses the relationship of God and man. In science he won both the Copley Medal and the Wollaston Medal.

Angelo Secchi (1818-1878) Angelo Secchi,[S.J.] was a Catholic priest and Italian astronomer and physicist. He "worked in stellar spectroscopy, made the first systematic spectroscopic survey of the heavens, pioneered in classifying stars by their four spectral types, studied sunspots, solar prominences, photographed solar corona during the eclipse in 1860, invented the heliospectroscope, star spectroscope, telespectroscope and meteorograph. He also studied double stars, weather forecasting and terrestrial magnetism. He became director of the Vatican Observatory at the age of 32." He has been called the "father of Astrophysics."

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) A Catholic priest, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J., was a French philosopher of science and religion who trained as a paleontologist and geologist. He took part in the discoveries of the Peking Man and Piltdown Man in China. His main work is The Phenomenon of Man, an magnum opus that tried to build an entire theology on the theory of evolution. The evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky wrote of Chardin's ideas that "Teilhard was a creationist, but one who understood that the Creation is realized in this world by means of evolution."

Georges Lemaître (1894–1966) Roman Catholic priest who was first to propose the Big Bang theory.

Mary Celine Fasenmyer (1906-1996) Member of the Sisters of Mercy known for Sister Celine's polynomials. Her work was also important to WZ Theory.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...ers_in_science

[mortalterror]

Scientists Not More Atheist than a Century Ago

In my opinion humans are now moving above the organised religion stage, my guess is that in 20 years - observance levels will have plummeted.

Unlikely. 83% of Americans are involved in a formal religion. A further 6% of unaffiliated Americans hold some sort of spiritual belief.

http://religions.pewforum.org/reports
Only 1 in 10 Americans hold no religious or spiritual ideology. That's similar to the number of Americans who are homosexuals, and nobody is claiming that in 20 years we will all be gay. There are always going to be a certain number of people who fall outside of the mainline cultural norms. Many of the current crop of atheists are only atheists because of a misguided sense of individuality, a longing to be different, outsider complexes where they feel rejected by society and adopt counter culture tendencies as a defense mechanism. If most of society were atheists, their contrarian nature would push them to adopt religious attitudes.

Some people think that the slightly shrinking religious portion of the population is do to the progress of reason, science, and our access to information which somehow "disproves" religious ideology. However, the proportion of scientists who hold religious beliefs hasn't budged in a century.

The recent survey of scientists tracks fairly closely with earlier polls that gauged scientists’ views on religion. The first of these was conducted in 1914 by Swiss-American psychologist James Leuba, who surveyed about 1,000 scientists in the United States to ask them about their views on God. Leuba found the scientific community equally divided, with 42% saying that they believed in a personal God and the same number saying they did not.

More than 80 years later, Edward Larson, a historian of science then teaching at the University of Georgia, recreated Leuba’s survey, asking the same number of scientists the exact same questions. To the surprise of many, Larson’s 1996 poll came up with similar results, finding that 40% of scientists believed in a personal God, while 45% said they did not. Other surveys of scientists have yielded roughly similar results. http://www.pewforum.org/2009/11/05/s...ts-and-belief/

More than half of scientists hold spiritual beliefs. Most just don't interpret religious teachings literally. Scientists tend to believe less than the general public, but that is largely a matter of the subculture (peers and teachers) rather than the impact of science itself on their beliefs. The actual percentage varies depending on which scientific discipline you poll, with biologists being the lowest and mathematicians who deal with subjects like probability being higher.

The Pew Research Center poll of scientists also found that levels of religious faith vary according to scientific specialty and age. For instance, chemists are more likely to believe in God (41%) than those who work in the other major scientific fields. Meanwhile, younger scientists (ages 18-34) are more likely to believe in God or a higher power than those who are older. http://www.pewforum.org/2009/11/05/s...ts-and-belief/

And it's not a matter of intelligence either. Doctors are significantly more likely to be religious than the general population.

The first study of physician religious beliefs has found that 76 percent of doctors believe in God and 59 percent believe in some sort of afterlife. The survey, performed by researchers at the University and published in the July issue of the Journal of General Internal Medicine, found that 90 percent of doctors in the United States attend religious services at least occasionally, compared to 81 percent of all adults. Fifty-five percent of doctors say their religious beliefs influence how they practice medicine. http://chronicle.uchicago.edu/050714/doctorsfaith.shtml

Physicians are educated, intelligent, trained scientists but their job often requires things like compassion, morality, empathy, and charity which synch up well with a religious lifestyle.

There is a diminishing population of religious people, but they are not becoming atheists. They are becoming agnostics and unaffiliated. They are unsure, and uninformed. You know how every election cycle we have Republicans, Democrats, Third Partiers, and a big block of non-voters or Undecided? Well, if religion were an election then the growing block of non-religious people would be the non-voting apathetic and the uninformed Undecided. They aren't lit up by the lights of reason, they are extinguished by the despair, nihilism, relativism, and existential angst of our modern philosophy and culture.

[mortalterror]

Uncertainty is a Prerequisit of all Knowledge and The Bible Evolves like the Constitution

so when it breaks, if you can't fix it yourself, do you employ the services of someone who better understands the [s]magic[/s] science that makes it work...to fix it? and if there is no one available, rather than praying for a miracle, have you ever empowered yourself by doing some research and maybe learning how to fix it yourself?

I don't have a problem with science, but you seem to have a problem with uncertainty and the possibility that uncertainty can exist in spite of scientific method or empiricism. I will try to put this another way.

Professor of Mathematics and philosopher of science at University of Oxford John Lennox has stated, "Faith is not a leap in the dark; it’s the exact opposite. It’s a commitment based on evidence… It is irrational to reduce all faith to blind faith and then subject it to ridicule. That provides a very anti-intellectual and convenient way of avoiding intelligent discussion.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faith#E...idity_of_faith

The view that faith underlies all rationality holds that rationality is dependent on faith for its coherence. Under this view, there is no way to comprehensively prove that we are actually seeing what we appear to be seeing, that what we remember actually happened, or that the laws of logic and mathematics are actually real. Instead, all beliefs depend for their coherence on faith in our senses, memory, and reason, because the foundations of rationalism cannot be proven by evidence or reason.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faith_and_rationality

Objective evidence and certitude are doubtless very fine ideals to play with, but where on this moonlit and dream-visited planet are they found? I am, therefore, myself a complete empiricist so far as my theory of human knowledge goes. I live, to be sure, by the practical faith that we must go on experiencing and thinking over our experience, for only thus can our opinions grow more true; but to hold any one of them--I absolutely do not care which--as if it never could be reinterpretable or corrigible, I believe to be a tremendously mistaken attitude, and I think that the whole history of philosophy will bear me out. There is but one indefectibly certain truth, and that is the truth that pyrrhonistic scepticism itself leaves standing,--the truth that the present phenomenon of consciousness exists. That, however, is the bare starting-point of knowledge, the mere admission of a stuff to be philosophized about. The various philosophies are but so many attempts at expressing what this stuff really is. And if we repair to our libraries what disagreement do we discover! Where is a certainly true answer found? Apart from abstract propositions of comparison (such as two and two are the same as four), propositions which tell us nothing by themselves about concrete reality, we find no proposition ever regarded by any one as evidently certain that has not either been called a falsehood, or at least had its truth sincerely questioned by some one else. The transcending of the axioms of geometry, not in play but in earnest, by certain of our contemporaries (as Zöllner and Charles H. Hinton), and the rejection of the whole Aristotelian logic by the Hegelians, are striking instances in point.
-William James, The Will to Believe, section V-VI http://educ.jmu.edu/~omearawm/ph101willtobelieve.html

The idea that I am trying to get across to you is one of human limitations. One where a belief in science is possible, but with limiting factors as to it's scope. That not just science but all areas of human knowledge are faulty in fact. And that the belief that science has all the answers is a relatively recent trend in history known as Scientism.

Scientism is a term used, often pejoratively,[1][2][3] to refer to belief in the universal applicability of the scientific method and approach, and the view that empirical science constitutes the most authoritative worldview or most valuable part of human learning to the exclusion of other viewpoints.[4] It has been defined as "the view that the characteristic inductive methods of the natural sciences are the only source of genuine factual knowledge and, in particular, that they alone can yield true knowledge about man and society."[5] An individual who subscribes to scientism is referred to as a scientismist.[6][7][8][9][10] The term scientism frequently implies a critique of the more extreme expressions of logical positivism[11][12] and has been used by social scientists such as Friedrich Hayek,[13] philosophers of science such as Karl Popper,[14] and philosophers such as Hilary Putnam[15] and Tzvetan Todorov[16] to describe the dogmatic endorsement of scientific methodology and the reduction of all knowledge to only that which is measurable.[17]

Scientism may refer to science applied "in excess". The term scientism can apply in either of two equally pejorative senses:[18][19][20]

To indicate the improper usage of science or scientific claims.[21] This usage applies equally in contexts where science might not apply,[22] such as when the topic is perceived to be beyond the scope of scientific inquiry, and in contexts where there is insufficient empirical evidence to justify a scientific conclusion. It includes an excessive deference to claims made by scientists or an uncritical eagerness to accept any result described as scientific. In this case, the term is a counterargument to appeals to scientific authority.
To refer to "the belief that the methods of natural science, or the categories and things recognized in natural science, form the only proper elements in any philosophical or other inquiry,"[20] or that "science, and only science, describes the world as it is in itself, independent of perspective"[15] with a concomitant "elimination of the psychological dimensions of experience."[23][24]

The term is also used to highlight the possible dangers of lapses towards excessive reductionism in all fields of human knowledge.[25][26][27]

For sociologists in the tradition of Max Weber, such as Jürgen Habermas, the concept of scientism relates significantly to the philosophy of positivism, but also to the cultural rationalization of the modern West.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientism

I'm also talking about the foundations of human knowledge.

Foundationalism is theories of knowledge resting justified belief upon some secure foundation of certainty.[1] Its main rival is coherentism, whereby a body of knowledge, not requiring a secure foundation, can be established by the interlocking strength of its components, like a puzzle solved without prior certainty that each small region was solved correctly.[1]

Identifying the other options to be either circular reasoning or infinite regress, thus the regress problem, Aristotle found the clear winner to be foundationalism, which posits basic beliefs underpinning others.[2] Descartes, the most famed foundationalist, discovered a foundation in the fact of his own existence and the "clear and distinct" ideas of reason,[1][2] whereas Locke saw foundation in experience. A foundation reflects differing epistemological emphases—empiricists emphasizing experience, rationalists emphasizing reason—but may blend both.[1]

In the 1930s, debate over foundationalism revived.[2] Whereas Schlick viewed scientific knowledge like a pyramid where a special class of statements does not require verification through other beliefs and serves as a foundation, Neurath argued that scientific knowledge lacks an ultimate foundation and acts like a raft.[2] In the 1950s, foundationalism fell into decline largely via Quine,[2] whose ontological relativity found any belief networked to one's beliefs on all of reality, while auxiliary beliefs somewhere in the vast network are readily modified to protect desired beliefs.

Classically, foundationalism had posited infallibility of basic beliefs and deductive reasoning between beliefs—a strong foundationalism.[2] Since about 1975, weak foundationalism emerged.[2] Thus, recent foundationalists have variously allowed fallible basic beliefs, and inductive reasoning between them, either by enumerative induction or by inference to the best explanation.[2] And whereas internalists require cognitive access to justificatory means, externalists find justification without such access. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundationalism

But I suspect that you already understood that.

When I make an attempt at levity, you view that as a weakness in my argument, and assume that I don't know how computers and other machines work. But that is not my point.

how convenient. but i don't understand. surely the whole point is that if God gave the initial advice then nothing needs to be changed? after all, he understands exactly how everything works.

In certain philosophies that's how it works. God is like a watchmaker who builds creation, sets it moving, and then is largely hands off. Some people believe that God gave inspiration to the writers of the scriptures and then never contacted man again. They might cite the last verses of Revelations to their case:

For I testify unto every man that heareth the words of the prophecy of this book, If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book

Though opponents of that theory could argue either that the writer of Revelations had no authority to write a period to divine revelation, or that his words only applied to the Bible, or were warnings against false prophets. But if you are a follower of Islam you think that Mohammad was the final prophet and there was one last book, ditto Joseph Smith and the Mormons. And it doesn't even apply to the Jews who don't believe in the New Testament or followers of other faiths like Hinduism.Still others believe in continuous revelation, that the scriptures never stopped, that there are more prophets all the time. It just depends which philosophy or religion you subscribe to.

It's a rather complicated point in Theology. There exists the idea that the Bible is complete with everything we need to understand inside of it, but that our human limitations keep us from fully understanding the hidden meanings. That as time goes by we are meant to find new interpretations to old questions and improve our knowledge of the book through continued study, just like evolution. He supplies the ingredients, sets up some ground rules for them to interact, and then they become ever more complex. We began as fish, then reptiles, mammals, and then from apes we became fully human. If you understand evolution surely you could understand how interpretation of the Bible could improve without changing the original document. Our religion evolves like our biology.

The other way of looking at it is that God is perfect, but his messengers aren't. Their word is inspired but they are limited by how much of God's word they can understand. The concepts and phrases they use to describe their revelations and prophecies are of their time, and only through understanding what their words and ideas meant to the original creators of the documents can we properly interpret them. The Supreme Court does this with the Constitution all of the time. Do you believe the Constitution should be interpreted as the founding fathers interpreted it, as a modern man should interpret it, as tradition has interpreted it, or do you subscribe to the belief that they were limited men of their time who could not have foreseen modern events? Same thing.

what you are describing sounds like people continually adopting discoveries about how everything works simply to avoid looking like they don't chat to the big guy upstairs who knows exactly how everything works.

I'm sure that happens from time to time as well. But if you try and think of the Bible as a Christian's constitution and maybe the pope and bishops as the executive and supreme court, and new interpretations as amendments, then you might have a working model for how the system works, at least in Judeo-Christian religions. The Supreme Court doesn't claim to have a telephone to George Washington but we accept their judgements about abortion and stem cells.

[Poetaster]

Both science and religion are mere footnotes to the broader subject philosophy. And philosophy allows no arrogance, only rational and mature discussion.

[mal4mac]

... philosophy allows no arrogance, only rational and mature discussion.

I agree. Mortal Terror seems to think that pouring the contents of wikipedia, and another forum, into a thread is rational discussion. It isn't.

[YesNo]

I thought mortalterror presented his positions clearly and rationally.

When atheists use the word "rational" I assume they don't know what they are talking about, but are simply employing a rhetorical technique to try to discredit someone else without having to engage in any real argument. It just makes them look irrational.

Regarding the topic of science and religion, I agree with Alvin Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism, that the real conflict is between science and "naturalism". Naturalism is a reductive materialism that I suspect, in spite of what Thomas Nagel hopes (Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False), is the only reasonable (rational) ground for atheism. Any conflict between science and theistic religion is superficial and easily resolved.

So, my position is essentially that atheists are the ones who have a real problem with science.

I also think the culture underlying science would do well to avoid naturalism because its restrictive and largely refuted metaphysics is a ball and chain on modern science.

[Poetaster]

I was taking so side, merely after 33 pages, this topic does not seem to have a conclusion, and neither side are going to settle agreed because both have agendas and philosophies reinforcing both attitudes. I'm an atheist, but I cannot help (for it would be intellectually dishonest to say otherwise) that theists have philosophies that are thought out and make sense from their perspective.

It isn't about Science vs Religion, both are used to horrible ends. Both 'groups' should admit that ultimately we do not really know a lot at all. If we did know there would be no need for debate. If anyone doesn't at least admit that, they are not worth paying attention to. After that admitting, the debate can become more mature and constructive.