Vash
Member
critics of evolution get alot of ridicule from people with a mindset not too different from the mindset that condemned Galileo. the scientific community at that time attacked him because his ideas threatened the entire framework through which they viewed the world.
a similar situation exists today with evolution. discussion of other theories and/or weaknesess of evolution are simply not tolerated. true cause of the debate: worldviews in conflict.
facts dont always speak for themselves. they're interpreted according to a framework. the framework used to interprete facts is inevitably affected by prior philosophical beliefs about the existence or non-existence of a creator.
so its not about biased religious creationists versus objective scientific evolutionists. its about the biases of religions versus the biases of the religion of secular humanism resulting in different interpretations of the same scientific data.
nobodys perfect, and scientists are people too. a mistake scientists have been known to make is to ignore or rule out data which do not support a hypothesis. ideally, the experimenter is open to the possibility that the hypothesis is correct or incorrect. sometimes, however, a scientist may have a strong belief that the hypothesis is true (or false), or feels internal or external pressure to get a specific result. in that case, there may be a psychological tendency to find "something wrong" with data which do not support the scientists expectations, while data which do agree with those expectations may not be checked as carefully.
if honest mistakes were all we had to worry about that would be one thing. but we also have to worry about the possibility of outright fraud. do a search on the net for evolution fraud or science fraud. see how many hits you get. The most widely published evolution fraud was committed in China in 1999. http://www.trueorigin.org/ng_ap01.asp
a similar situation exists today with evolution. discussion of other theories and/or weaknesess of evolution are simply not tolerated. true cause of the debate: worldviews in conflict.
facts dont always speak for themselves. they're interpreted according to a framework. the framework used to interprete facts is inevitably affected by prior philosophical beliefs about the existence or non-existence of a creator.
so its not about biased religious creationists versus objective scientific evolutionists. its about the biases of religions versus the biases of the religion of secular humanism resulting in different interpretations of the same scientific data.
nobodys perfect, and scientists are people too. a mistake scientists have been known to make is to ignore or rule out data which do not support a hypothesis. ideally, the experimenter is open to the possibility that the hypothesis is correct or incorrect. sometimes, however, a scientist may have a strong belief that the hypothesis is true (or false), or feels internal or external pressure to get a specific result. in that case, there may be a psychological tendency to find "something wrong" with data which do not support the scientists expectations, while data which do agree with those expectations may not be checked as carefully.
if honest mistakes were all we had to worry about that would be one thing. but we also have to worry about the possibility of outright fraud. do a search on the net for evolution fraud or science fraud. see how many hits you get. The most widely published evolution fraud was committed in China in 1999. http://www.trueorigin.org/ng_ap01.asp
http://www.boundless.org/2000/departments/isms/a0000288.html
