Science is Broken

[sean]

Originally Posted by DanaC

Pah! I love Dawkins. I find him fascinating and compelling.

Don't get me wrong. He's a genius.

And yeah, so is Trudeau!

Originally Posted by Elspode

There's too much of politics and profit involved for pure science to exist anymore. ...

I can understand anybody feeling that way, but I think it's a little pessimistic. I know a lot of scientists, and despite their constant struggle for funds, most manage to do real science and remain driven by curiosity rather than agenda.

[casimendocina]

Originally Posted by sean

On Intelligent Design, I also think there's a degree of fundamentalism in the atheist camp. I think Richard Dawkins might be an example.

While I don't disagree with Richard Dawkins' ideas related to science, I think he is as bad as the religious fundamentalists that he criticises in terms of intolerance and this makes me furious.

[DanaC]

He is fighting an uphill battle in which religion gets a free pass. Bear in mind he comes from a country in which all state schools must, by law, be 'run along broadly Christian principles' and in which religious studies are an obligatory part of the syllabus. At the same time, fewer and fewer children are electing to take sciences in their post-14 options. Meanwhile, along with the spread of evangelical Christianity (it is the only branch of Christianity which is growing in the UK) our government has handed the direct running of many of our secondary schools to 'external sponsors' the largest of which is the Church of England.

[sean]

Originally Posted by DanaC

...a country in which all state schools must, by law, be 'run along broadly Christian principles' and in which religious studies are an obligatory part of the syllabus. ...

I didn't know that.

[TheMercenary]

Originally Posted by DanaC

Pah! I love Dawkins. I find him fascinating and compelling.

Dawkins rocks. He has some of the best interviews I have seen.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vHZvjxdIx0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3E25j...layer_embedded

http://www.richarddawkins.net/forum/

[DanaC]

Originally Posted by sean

I didn't know that.

True tho. Of course it helps that the Church of England is a religious organisation based primarily on tea, jam and scones :P


@ Merc: that first one says the vid has been removed. Loved that second one.

As much as I have any heros, he's one of mine.....Dawkins, not Merc (sorry Merc:P)

[DanaC]

Also worth noting that our state-owned broadcaster (BBC) is under obligation to provide/show a certain amount of religious/spiritual broadcasting; this is meant to cater to a variety of religions but naturally in a broadly 'Christian' country this tends to be mostly Christian with some other stuff to balance it out.

My favourite radio station is BBC Radio4: Sunday mornings there are broadcast services, and 'spiritual messages' such as 'Thought for the Day' and spiritual programmes such as 'Something Understood'. I don't know for sure without a bunch of googling, but I believe science and nature come under the obligation to broadcast educational material. Religion and ethics gets its own separate obligation.

Our Head of State (Queenie) is also our 'Defender of the Faith.'

The House of Lords contains spiritual as well as temporal 'Lords' as it has done ever since it was conceived. This is an active branch of government.

We've had this discussion before, but it's always intrigued me that, whilst we have religion and in particular the Church of England fundamentally entwined in our State, we are nonetheless a peculiarly irreligious bunch. Yet in America, which has a separation of Church and State as a fundamental facet of their nation, is nonetheless a far more religious/spiritual country.

I would be interested to know if there is a country in existence in which science is given that much influence/power, or in which the scientific community is treated with as much inherent and legally sanctioned respect as is a religious body. I have yet to hear someone like Dawkins sound anywhere near as aggressive and shrill as some of the religious lobby. The two are not comparable: Christians who live in a country that is peculiarly theirs adopt the guise of a beleaguered and downtrodden people. Atheists who live in a country that is fundamentally hostile to their views are painted as extremists if they so much as raise their voice.

[xoxoxoBruce]

From

We urge the United States government to reject the global warming agreement that was written in Kyoto, Japan in December, 1997, and any other similar proposals. The proposed limits on greenhouse gases would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind.

There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.

This petition has been signed by over 31,000 American scientists.

[sean]

Earlier I posted a link to a discussion of the Rind et. al. controversy. This paper is a much better read in the context of this thread:

When Worlds Collide: Social Science, Politics, and the Rind et al. (1998) Child Sexual Abuse Meta-Analysis
Lilienfeld, Scott O., American Psychologist, Volume 57(3) March 2002 p176–188

One reason why I responded to Cloud's question on paedophilia is that issues that affect me deeply are routinely presented as fact free appeals to emotion and prejudice, even at the highest levels of discourse. I took the opportunity to relate some of my own perspectives and experience in the hope of balancing some perceptions here. As with the authors of these papers, I do not interpret the findings of Rind et. al. as legitimizing or condoning adult/child sex.

I found this comment by Lilienfeld interesting, not least in relation to another thread on this board.

Rind et al. distinguished between utilitarian (consequentialist) ethics, viz., ethics based exclusively on the consequences of an action, and deontological (intuitionist) ethics, viz., ethics based on deep-seated beliefs concerning an action's wrongfulness irrespective of its consequences (see Hacking, 1995). Rind et al. explicitly endorsed a deontological view of CSA by maintaining that CSA is morally incorrect even if it does not invariably (or even typically) produce long-term harm. Indeed, in the final sentence of their article, they pointed out that “the current findings are relevant to moral and legal positions only to the extent that these positions are based on the presumption of psychological harm” (Rind et al., 1998, p. 47).

I think Dawkins' determination to locate his critique of religion in scientific terms of reference is closely allied to a defence of consequentialist as opposed to deontological ethics, because he explicitly rejects the role of personal and social belief in reasoning about the world. For example, Kant's metaphysics may not be explicitly religious but it is a transcendental idealism of a kind incompatible with Dawkins realism. Interestingly, Dawkins has also expressed his impatience with exaggerated claims concerning the intrinsic harmfulness of paedophilia.

My own view is that personal and social beliefs and subjective realities exist and are part of the world, and therefore can't be discounted on realist grounds. That is also the basis on which I accept taboos around sexual activity with children. This is a relativist position, contingent on the accident of my social environment. Therefore if I were living in a society that strongly favoured child sacrifice, I expect I would have to defer to that as well...

...or would I?

[classicman]

re:Bruce's link - I found this part interesting as well.

The United States is very close to adopting an international agreement that would ration the use of energy and of technologies that depend upon coal, oil, and natural gas and some other organic compounds.

This treaty is, in our opinion, based upon flawed ideas. Research data on climate change do not show that human use of hydrocarbons is harmful. To the contrary, there is good evidence that increased atmospheric carbon dioxide is environmentally helpful.

[monster]

.

[piercehawkeye45]

Of course adding CO2 to the air can be considered environmentally friendly. The short term CO2 cycle on Earth is that plants suck up the CO2 from the atmosphere and store it. Then, when these plants die (or transferred to other animals which eventually die), the resulting decay will release the carbon back into the atmosphere. Since CO2 is needed for plants to grow, it would be somewhat analogous to saying that more food on the planet can be considered human friendly. No shit.

Of course that report may be considering something different but since it is so vague, I must assume the most basic reason.

Also, it is easy to try to disprove "mainstream" ideas because usually mainstream ideas are not entirely correct but just close enough for everyone to understand the concept. For example, from the Science is Broken site....

For example, while no one denies that humans add carbon dioxide to the air at a rate of 3%, while other sources, such as decay, add at a rate of 97%, the human addition supposedly accumulated to 30% of the total. Why didn't the other sources accumulate also, which would keep the human contribution at 3%?

I am not sure where these statistics are from but this probably has to do with the short term and long term carbon cycles. Decay (assuming the stat is correct) accounts for 97% of the added CO2 but since decay comes from plants that have already taken CO2 out of the air to grow, the overall increase in CO2 is zero.

Humans, on the other hand, take carbon out of the ground, which would be considered the long term carbon cycle because the process from air carbon to coal carbon back to air carbon takes millions of years.

Implicitly, the natural sources maintain a fixed state, while the human influence does something different. It's like nature created a full bucket, and humans over-fill it.

There is no such fixed state in nature. Nature cannot tell the difference between the carbon dioxide which humans add and the carbon dioxide which decay adds. Nature is not locked into a fixed quantity which will not tolerate additions to it.

http://nov55.com/logic.html

No legitimate scientist would EVER say that we are in a fixed state. The Earth is constantly changing and many different fluctuations occur ranging from the temperature rise and fall between day and night to the million year long continent cycle. But, Earth is constantly in an equilibrium. That is a fact because equilibrium is always necessary.

But the problem is that the Earth is extremely nihilistic. It won't care if 95% of the species get wiped out because they will inevitably be replaced by new ones. That means, if Earth's conditions are changed enough, then the new equilibrium could produce an environment that is greatly hurtful to human existence.

That being said, the human increase in carbon from the ground to the air could cause a change in the equilibrium, which could be hurtful to humans.


Note: I am not using that as an argument for human caused global warming but just showing how many logic holes are present in that web site. Many of them just "disprove" statements that are not necessarily held by the scientific community. Essentially, a strawman.

[Scriveyn]

Originally Posted by DanaC

... that the Church of England is a religious organisation based primarily on tea, jam and scones :P ...

Ok, where can I sign up?

(On second thought, I'll bake my own scones.)

[xoxoxoBruce]

Originally Posted by piercehawkeye45

Many of them just "disprove" statements that are not necessarily held by the scientific community. Essentially, a strawman.

No, not a strawman. Disproving statements that have been fed to the public, through the media, by the greenies. Shit, even advertisements are full of carbon footprint/global warming reminders. If you repeat a lie often enough...

[skysidhe]

Originally Posted by casimendocina

While I don't disagree with Richard Dawkins' ideas related to science, I think he is as bad as the religious fundamentalists that he criticises in terms of intolerance and this makes me furious.

I was just going to say the same thing!

He is a fanatic in the other extreme and that is a fact.