Cronic said:
And here is why ad homs don't work in science folks! What if we knew as a fact that Charles Darwin was a Satan worshiper or Satan himself with a dark and sinnister agenda. What then?
bevets said:
My point was not 'Evolutionism is false because Darwin was a 'Satan worshiper'' I was responding to the OP characterization that Darwin was a divinity student and the implication that evolutionism has nothing to do with attacks on Christianity. Darwin's motives are relevant.
Scientists sometimes deceive themselves into thinking that philosophical ideas are only, at best, decorations or parasitic commentaries on the hard, objective triumphs of science, and that they themselves are immune to the confusions that philosophers devote their lives to dissolving. But there is no such thing as philosophy-free science; there is only science whose philosophical baggage is taken on board without examination. ~ Daniel Dennett
I suspect there is a lot of intellectual dishonesty on this issue. Consider the following fantasy: the National Academy of Sciences publishes a position paper on science and religion stating that modern science leads directly to atheism. What would happen to its funding? To any federal funding of science? Every member of the Congress of the United States of America, even the two current members who are unaffiliated with any organized religion, profess to be deeply religious. I suspect that scientific leaders tread very warily on the issue of the religious implications of science for fear of jeopardizing the funding for scientific research. And I think that many scientist feel some sympathy with the need for moral education and recognize the role that religion plays in this endeavor. These rationalizations are politic but intellectually dishonest. ~ William Provine
GoSeminoles! said:
Motives are irrelevant in science. All that matters is data.
Do you concede that Darwin had a problem with Christianity?
In scientific controversies, there is rarely any argument about facts. It is rather their interpretation that is controversial. ~ Ernst Mayr
Facts do not "speak for themselves"; they are read in the light of theory. Creative thought, in science as much as in the arts, is the motor of changing opinion. ~ Stephen Jay Gould
But our ways of learning about the world are strongly influenced by the social preconceptions and biased modes of thinking that each scientist must apply to any problem. The stereotype of a fully rational and objective 'scientific method,' with individual scientists as logical (and interchangeable) robots, is self-serving mythology. ~ Stephen Jay Gould
There can be no observations without an immense apparatus of preexisting theory. Before sense experiences become "observations" we need a theoretical question, and what counts as a relevant observation depends upon a theoretical frame into which it is to be placed. Repeatable observations that do not fit into an existing frame have a way of disappearing from view, and the experiments that produced them are not revisited. ~ Richard Lewontin
It is, in fact, a common fantasy, promulgated mostly by the scientific profession itself, that in the search for objective truth, data dictate conclusions. If this were the case, then each scientist faced with the same data would necessarily reach the same conclusion. But as we've seen earlier and will see again and again, frequently this does not happen. Data are just as often molded to fit preferred conclusions. ~ Roger Lewin
bevets said:
OJ Simpson may tell you 'everything you want to know' about where he was the night Nicole died, but it is still reasonable to suspect that he has motives for leaving out important details.
GoSeminoles! said:
Would a sincere, altruistic scientist advocating a flat earth be correct because his motives are pure? Of course not.
I never claimed that motives guarantee results. They have a significant effect. How many times have evolutionists complained about the doctrinal statements from ICR or AIG and insisted that this leads to bad science? These same people turn a blind eye to the metaphysical beliefs of Darwin.
