Hey hey hey!! How much does religion affect MIT?

tech_fan
Wed, 19 Dec 2007 10:49:10 +0000

Jessie – you spent a lot of time around professional scientists in college; how many times did you hear this definition of science or any other discussion of the scientific method?

Depending on the class/scientist, anywhere from none to quite a lot.



Really? I wasn’t trying to be glib – that would be real news to me. One might have predicted that after all the talk about “the scientific method” in high school, MIT and other science schools might have a whole class about what this is, but I barely heard the words. Do you think that the professors who did talk about these things were sensitive to the flaws in definitions of science based on things like falsifiability, or did they have the impression that these issues were all nicely worked out?



Glad to know that you have so much respect for my positions and rhetorical ability. Anyway, do you think I don’t know about the Discovery Institute, about the cottage industry of people trying to defend ID based on objective criteria? Dembski, Behe, etc?



I think you DO know about this industry but don’t have enough respect for it. The fact that they are funded by an interest group to which you have objections does not entail that they are unskilled or that the arguments they make are always wrong. The great danger is that the scientific community will get glib about the ways it defends it work and its authority. Don’t you agree that no matter how misguided these people are, science shouldn’t be defended with overly simplistic theories of science?



Design != intelligent design. Intelligent design implies capacity to plan.

Would your objection be withdrawn if they took out that word and admitted that planning ability is beyond their ability to diagnose at this point?



I will also echo Mollie’s comment that challenges to evolution, while often advanced these days by ID proponents, are not ID, they’re just challenges to evolution (e.g. Behe’s argument of irreducible complexity).



Whence arises your conviction that work aimed at disproving a reigning scientific theory without a comprehensive alternative hypothesis is not scientific? If a group sets up a huge array of telescopes to test whether a certain phenomenon predicted by quantum gravity theory occurs, and they find that, though the instruments are sensitive enough to detect it if it did occur, the phenomenon is not observed, are they not doing science? Is their project merely a challenge to quantum gravity and hence to be dismissed (and not taught in science classes if it finds only negative results)? What is the theory of science that justifies this view? It would certainly be new to me.