Recently, we reported that the Dave Coppedge – JPL case has been sent to jury trial. Cassini (Saturn) mission specialist Coppedge was apparently fired for handing out ID vids like Privileged Planet (on fine-tuning) to fellow employees. There doesn’t appear to have been a house rule in the matter, and when asked to desist, we are told that he did. We aren’t aware that employees complained. But no doubt the evidence in these and other matters will be set before the jury, now that there will be one.
The heart of the matter, in the UD News desk’s view, is JPL’s description of its Origins program:
How did we get here? How did stars and galaxies form? Are there other planets like the Earth? Do other planets have conditions suitable for the development of life? Might there be planets around nearby stars where some form of life has taken hold? These questions have intrigued humanity for thousands of years. Astronomers approach these fundamental questions by looking far into the Universe, back toward the beginning of time, to see galaxies forming, or by looking very close to home, searching for planetary systems like our own around nearby stars.
NASA’s Origins Program will launch a series of missions to help us answer these age-old astronomical questions. .
So Coppedge’s interests aligned with corporate goals. Ah, but … and this is a too-familiar situation: Tax-supported science gets taken over by new atheist viewpoints, according which any explanation is acceptable except fine-tuning or design. No matter how ridiculous. Anyone who looks at current cosmology, as accurately represented by New Scientist, will soon see that.
Why is that rule in place? Because the new approach has been productive? If you go by the hunt for ET, origin of life, and the long-running, conflicting episodes in the soap opera of human evolution, the new approach has not been productive at all.
It does not need to be productive, just entrenched. As long as one’s research is not out of kilter with the ideology, it needn’t be very good at all. That’s safe because serious challenges are rarely allowed.
Some will respond by citing statistics to show that new atheists are rare in the population. That’s true, but misses the point: If the “moderate majority” accommodates a value system, and its adherents want power, they may find it easy to get. This repeatedly enacted scenario has been called the myth of the moderate majority, the idea that, somehow, if the majority doesn’t approve of something – like new atheism as the default position of cosmology – it won’t happen.
Sorry: A determined minority in power can impose its views and values – however destructive – and only the most concerted effort on the part of citizens disarms and disables them. One would have thought that Stalin and Hitler demonstrated that well enough, but people constantly need reminding.
Occasionally, someone objects, “But so-and-so, a devout Methodist who attends church, supports the no-discussion rule. And he is held up as a role model by ‘Scientists for Jesus’!” Clearly, the objector is unfamiliar with the well-documented role of the fifth column in these situations – the people who, in every practical way, assist the goal while claiming to disapprove of it.
Dave Coppedge is a Christian too, as it happens, and unless we miss our guess, “Scientists for Jesus” members would dump on him – privately or even publicly – for riling the tax-supported atheist consensus. Their goal hope to win the right for Christians to believe evidence-based claims about the universe in private while going along with the nonsense in public. A paltry goal but their own.
You can get more information here, including the particulars of people you can write to if you think the matter of interest.
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