Researchers scared to death of the anti-science lobby?
| February 21, 2012 | Posted by News under Climate change, Culture, News, Science |
Recently, we noted a Big Science meet where the AAAS 2012 participants strove to “Engage the Public” for better science (in this case, on climate change, but they have other lines as well).
It seemed clear to some of us that they could start by taking their own advice: Most participants who were asked to estimate the worldwide birth rate were way, way over the mark. Surely the rest of the world can be cut a little slack for not wanting those people in particular shouting down our ears that we need to get our facts right …. and meanwhile just let them run the show.
Now, in “Attacks paid for by big business are ‘driving science into a dark era’” ( The Guardian Observer, February 19, 2012), science editor Robin McKie opines, “Researchers attending one of the world’s major academic conferences ‘are scared to death of the anti-science lobby’ ”:
As Fedoroff pointed out, university and government researchers are hounded for arguing that rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are changing the climate. Their emails are hacked while Facebook campaigns call for their dismissal from their posts, calls that are often backed by rightwing politicians.
And, pardon the garden, but this sounds downright paranoid:
At the last Republican party debate in Florida, Rick Santorum insisted he should be the presidential nominee simply because he had cottoned on earlier than his rivals Newt Gingrich or Mitt Romney to the “hoax” of global warming.
Did he indeed? Santorum didn’t do at all well in Florida, so McKie might have been better off to pick an example that shows that people are clearly convinced by what they are hearing.
Except he is counting on his readership not to know the stats or think it was worth finding out.
Then he wonders why proles and plebs like us dare to doubt people like AAAS and him, in the age of the Internet – when anyone with online access can find this stuff out …
What’s worse is the way such writers assume that we are all stupid, and easily led by big businesses against our own inclination.
As in, “Don’t you know that Big Business just want to make lots of money off you?”
Well, yes, we know that. And Big Business isn’t alone. The Big Science guys want a lot of power over us, along with the money.
The rest of us need to listen carefully and determine which group is right about which things.
In a free country, that job goes with the territory. And if researchers are scared to death, it is us working stiffs they are scared of, really. 
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4 Responses to Researchers scared to death of the anti-science lobby?
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Forget anti-science. I think what they’re really afraid of is the general public seeing what’s inside cells; the microbiology. It makes the atheist/material zealots look like complete fraud. Forget about fighting the Blind Watchmaker zealots head to head. Just put out the facts of reality and let the chips fall where they may.
I find the ‘anti-science’ label, that is constantly attached to people of Theistic persuasion, to be especially ironic coming from the AAAS ‘science lobby’, which, I believe, is one of the ‘science’ organizations in America that is top heavy, and overly represented, with atheists. The reason I find it deeply ironic is that the atheistic worldview cannot even provide a rational grounding for the practice of science in the first place:
Notes to that effect:
Why should the human mind be able to comprehend reality so deeply?
Science and engineering, as foreign as it may sound to some people, was born out of a purely Judeo-Christian worldview. To be certain, other cultures, during the history of the world, have given fits and starts to science and engineering, but never did these foreign cultures bring science and engineering to a robust maturity through a sustained systematic development. It was only in the Judeo-Christian worldview, and in that worldview alone, that modern science was brought to the sustainable level of maturity that it has now reached. Several resources are available that document this seemingly mysterious, yet undeniable, fact of history. Here are a few.
Several more resources are easily available on the internet, and through Amazon, for those who would like to learn more about the Judeo-Christian founding of modern science and engineering. But the main thing I want to focus on in this article is on the particular question of ‘exactly why should it be that the Judeo-Christian worldview is so fruitful to science and engineering, whereas, in the other cultures in the history of the world, science and engineering were stillborn?’ I think Dr. Koons does an excellent job of summing up exactly why the Judeo-Christian worldview is so fruitful to modern science and engineering:
As well, Dr. Plantinga does a very good job in summing up exactly why the Judeo-Christian worldview is so fruitful to modern science and engineering here:
Here are some quotes reflecting that prevalent Judeo-Christian worldview present at the founding of modern science:
Even Albert Einstein, although he was certainly not thought of as a particularly religious person, reflects how the Judeo-Christian worldview influenced his overall view of reality in this following quote;
But a more mysterious question to this issue, is the fact that this seemingly foreign, even outrageously bold, proposition of the rational intelligibility of the universe, that could even be dared to be comprehended by mere human minds, should be so successful as a proposition of thought. For why should it be that mere human minds, human minds who happened to have the audacity to believe that their minds were, of all things, created in the image of the Being Who had created the entire universe, would be so successful as to establishing a solid foundation for modern science, unless this seemingly outlandish idea of being made in God’s image were actually true? In other words, why should science be so successful unless the seemingly outrageous propositions underlying the foundation of modern science were actually true? Dr. Meyer reflects on the success of that outrageous proposition here in this video:
Moreover, modern science has actually revealed that this outrageous proposition, (that the universe was created by a rational Mind, and that our mind is created in the image of that rational Mind, and that therefore we can comprehend the universe to a deep level), is confirmed on many levels by science. Here Eugene Wigner reflects on the effectiveness of mathematics for understanding reality:
Granville Sewell, Professor of Mathematics at the University of El Paso, reveals that mathematics actually governs reality, not just passively describes reality, here;
At the 4:00 minute mark of the preceding audio, Dr. Sewell comments on the ‘transcendent’ and ‘constant’ Schroedinger’s Equation which governs the basic actions of the universe;
i.e. the Materialistic Athiest is at a complete loss to explain why this should be so, whereas the Christian Theist ‘naturally’ presupposes such ‘transcendent’ control of our temporal, material, reality,,,
of note; ‘the Word’ is translated from the Greek word ‘Logos’. Logos happens to be the word from which we derive our modern word ‘Logic’.
In this following video, Dr. Richards and Dr. Gonzalez reveal that the universe is ‘suspiciously set up’ for scientific discovery:
This following video is in the same line of thought as the preceding videos:
But, as impressive, suspicious, and persuasive, as the preceding ‘hints’ are that the universe was created by the Mind of God and can be understood by the mind of man, since we are made in God’s image, the deepest correlation, of our mind to the Mind of God, finds its most concrete proof of correlation from looking at consciousness itself through the lens of quantum mechanics. There are many famous quotes that throw a little light on just how surprised people are when the first encounter quantum mechanics. Here are a few.
And indeed, the reason why quantum theory has looked so ‘silly’, to so many top scientists, is that consciousness is found to be integral, even central, in many of the experiments of quantum mechanics. This following quote nicely sums up exactly why consciousness would throw someone, who is used to thinking of reality in materialistic terms, for a complete loop, after looking at some of the experiments of quantum mechanics:
Moreover, because of the postulated correlation of our mind to the Mind of God within Theism,,,
,,,we can then develop a very strong argument for God from ‘consciousness’, and even provide strong empirical proof for that argument from quantum mechanics:
Here is the empirical proof for the argument;
Here is the key experiment that led Wigner to his Nobel Prize winning work on quantum symmetries:
i.e. In the experiment the ‘world’ (i.e. the universe) does not have a ‘privileged center’. Yet strangely, the conscious observer does exhibit a ‘privileged center’. This is since the ‘matrix’, which determines which vector will be used to describe the particle in the experiment, is ‘observer-centric’ in its origination! Thus explaining Wigner’s dramatic statement, “It was not possible to formulate the laws (of quantum theory) in a fully consistent way without reference to consciousness.”
Further notes;
More detailed notes are in the first part of this paper here:
Thus, as audacious as this proposition is, the proposition that God created the universe, and that we are made in the image of God, and that we therefore can rationally understand, and comprehend, the universe to a deep level, has stunning confirmation for its validity on many levels of science. Moreover, on the other hand, the counter proposition that this universe was not created by God, and that we are not made in God’s image, and that there is no particular reason why we should comprehend reality, has some very strong arguments against it. In fact these arguments are so strong that they have rendered the atheistic position completely absurd. The following references reveal the bankruptcy of the atheistic mindset as to explaining why we should comprehend reality so deeply:
,,,This following site is a easy to use, and understand, interactive website that takes the user through what is termed ‘Presuppositional apologetics’. The website clearly shows that our use of the laws of logic, mathematics, science and morality cannot be accounted for unless we believe in a God who guarantees our perceptions and reasoning are trustworthy in the first place.
Further notes;
Last power point of preceding video states:
Atheistic materialism simply dissolves into absurdity when pushed to extremes and certainly offers no guarantee to us for believing our perceptions and reasoning within science are trustworthy in the first place. This absurdity extends all the way into Darwin’s evolutionary theory itself:
The following interview is sadly comical as a evolutionary psychologist realizes that neo-Darwinism can offer no guarantee that our faculties of reasoning will correspond to the truth, not even for the truth he is giving in the interview, (which begs the question of how was he able to come to that particular truthful realization, in the first place, if neo-Darwinian evolution were actually true?);
Here a Darwinian Psychologist has a moment of honesty facing the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness;
Moreover, even if Atheists could justify ‘doing science’, instead of plagiarizing Judeo-Christian presuppositions and claiming them as their own, the ‘predictive power’ of atheism/materialism, as a ‘scientific theory’, renders the same conclusion as the preceding analysis that atheism/materialism is false, even to the point of being a ‘pseudo-science’ along the lines of being very similar to, of all things, Tarot cards or palm reading: