It’s amazing how much “Remember Galileo!” is still used as a warning cry for those who dare question current scientific orthodoxy. And it’s amazing how much history has been replaced by mythology, meaning something everyone knows but doesn’t check to see if it’s true. A few salient facts are in order: Galileo was a life-long member […]
It seems that when science in the 19th century separated from philosophy and joined the university curriculum on its own that science came to be subject to the same pressures that other academic subjects deal with. That includes the pressure to conform. Why conformity? If you’re a knowledge institution, there are two things you don’t
Newton’s theory of gravity was superseded in the 20th century. Orthodox Popperians should therefore throw it on the dustbin of history. But Newton’s theory is not rejected because his laws are still valid within a limited range that is very useful. Similarly, we still speak of the sun rising and setting even though absolute geo-staticism has been
Reductionism goes beyond naturalism to say that biology is reducible to chemistry which is reducible to physics. The acid of reductionism turns fixed kinds into temporary kinds and differences in kind into differences in degree. The paradigmatic example of differences in kind is the periodic table of elements. This structure is fixed and unchangeable. But
The idea that science begins with hypotheses instead of data arose in the 19th century, first in the work of William Whewell, and was very influential on Charles Darwin. It is scientific orthodoxy today but is a flawed methodology. Here are three flaws: Positive bias: It’s virtually impossible to demonstrate a negative empirical conclusion because
Recall that mathematical induction has two requirements: a base case and an inductive step. Show that a statement is true for x=1 and show that if it is true for x=n, then it is true for x=n+1. The induction follows as a falling series of dominoes. Evolutionists try to do something similar. They show that evolution is true in
Scientism asserts the superiority of natural science over all other sciences, disciplines, or teachings. Mikael Stenmark proposed the expression scientific expansionism as a synonym for scientism. That’s a good suggestion because scientism is essentially a boundary-breaker. Scientism says that science is superior wherever it goes and it goes anywhere it wants. (That’s analogous to the word
Radical Orthodoxy is a movement (or ‘disposition’) among some theologians which attempts to articulate Christian orthodoxy in the context of post-modernist critiques of modernism, post-liberal critiques of liberalism, and post-secular critiques of secularism. They’re not creationists but they do make some similar points about creation, fall, and redemption contrary to naturalism. According to its best-known exponent, John Milbank, theology
Evolutionists are extreme “lumpers” as far as classification goes: there is only one kind of life (or stuff) and all differences are a matter of degree. The problem for science is that differences of kind cannot be demonstrated unless one first accepts some criteria for differentiating them, which evolutionists won’t do because it would lead to the
NEW YORK, 2024 JUL 14. President of the Nations Jack Lever gave his State of the World speech to the United Nations today. President Lever began by listing his accomplishments in the past year. These included making the United Nations’ currency, the Uno, the sovereign currency of every country. Switzerland, the last hold-out, turned over
