Lysenkoism is a great example in two ways: One, it was shoehorned into scientific orthodoxy by a State which adhered to a non-evidence-based-belief-system (NEBBS; like my acronym? I’m sick of Sovietism and Naziism being labeled as atheistic - they didn’t have room for a God, but they certainly were NEBBSs). But, yes, it ended up “in books”. Two, there is some evidence today for certain acquired characteristics being inherited.
Within the limited framework of a signalling system built into the system, if so. Biasing signals applied on top of base capability ranges.
Science never insists it has the ultimate perfect answer; it’s always just our best current understanding, subject to refinement as more data comes in. It is unlikely that major points will be reversed (and I would argue that in this case they aren’t), but lower-order effects and nonlinearities in ranges outside those previously tested and so on are not especially surprising.
(There was a line in Shockwave Rider speculating upon a refinement to evolutionary theory which, in that fictional universe, explained why the Lysenkoists might have fooled themselves. I’m inclined to count these proposals as being of that form. They don’t validate Lysenko’s theories nor refute the current understanding of evolution, they just add some subtleties.)
“Everyone should believe something. I believe I’ll have a drink.”
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I see. Why is “faith” so important in the Christian religion?
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democrats who are anti-GMO, anti-vaccinators, believe in crystals or homeopathy.So you think those that don't perhaps share your views on the certainty of the safety and efficacy of all GMO's in all its forms and implications are in line with those who are into homeopathy, magic crystals and the anti-vaccination bunch? You forgot climate change deniers. Those of us you don't agree with on GMO's are also just like climate change deniers, right?
I mean, if you’re going to go vapid, go all the way.
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You should read up on recursion… Of course some crazier groups believe that kind of math leads to set theory, which has the evil magic of Cantor and Gödel… While Gödel was a theist, he makes it rather hard to have faith in an all-knowing anything.
I have sympathy for that view, but it’s one step away from the atheist version of a no true Scotsman argument. Anyone who claims they are Christian is a Christian (therefore Nazis were Christian, even if they had very little to do with historical Christian belief). On the other hand, atheists who go off the rails in large numbers are pushed into the ‘basically a religion’ camp. I’d say that Sovietism particularly had some strong atheistic roots and was more or less an atheistic movement, but atheism isn’t defined by a particular belief system and can take many forms without incriminating atheism as a whole (whatever that whole would be). On the other hand, it is to some degree possible to claim that Naziism wasn’t a valid part of Christianity, even if they adopted some Christian forms and even if some Christians went along with it (through fear, self-preservation, being convinced, whatever), in the same way that we can say that North Korea isn’t a democratic country even if it says so in the name and Dennis Rodman thinks that Kim Jong Un is cool (providing that we can agree that Christianity and Democracy are more than just a flag to stand under, but have principles that are followed to a greater or lesser extent in different cases).
Why not just call non-empiricists non-empiricists and assholes like Nazis assholes? I think a good dose of realizing that you, and people like you, are capable of terrible things is not bad for keeping oneself morally upright.
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That completely ignores the huge number of Libertarians/Alex Jones types who are “anti” most of the things you mentioned. The anti-vaxxer, flouride etc. folks combine the worst of paranoid, right wing, anti-government types as well as the most clueless of hippy/new agey “liberal” types. Much in the way that conspiracy paranoia draws folks from all over the political spectrum as well.
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I agree that Kahan tries to cherry pick his numbers and that the most important numbers paint a much different conclusion then he was trying to draw. Shame on him.
Cherry picking your data to support a preconceived conclusion is a clear indicator of an anti-science bias.
Obviously there are some stupid people and religious people in both parties, which account for the anti-evolution numbers on both sides, but the percentage discrepancy is no small number. The large numbers are a sad indicator of scientific education in america.
Interesting statistic about Scientists themselves:
Percentage of Scientists Who Are Republican: 6%
Percentage of Scientists Who Are Democrat: 55%
Even more interesting statistics, greater then 99% of scientists believe in evolution:
When you take all these things together, you can draw several clear conclusions:
- Scientists Overwhelmingly Agree About Evolution
- Even The Majority of Republican Scientists believe in Evolution
- The Majority of people who do not believe in Evolution are either seriously lacking in scientific education, or have a religious bias that influences them to not believe in science, or both.
Kahan claims that lack of a belief in evolution is not an indicator of being anti-science is complete hogwash. The opposite of the data. As is the claim that there isn’t a large divide between the two parties. Clearly one shouldn’t write about “scientific literacy” if they can’t even interpret such basic data correctly, imho.
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“For example, “something some scientist says” could very well be a well-supported scientific finding and “something sufficiently well established that the relevant field puts it in textbooks and regards it as the foundational explanation for many other phenomena” could be false pseudo-scientific results.”
Of course, but the apparent equivalence your statement establishes between those two scenarios is absurd. Every scientist is wrong many times throughout his or her career, while whole fields outputting pseudo-scientific BS as foundational are maybe once-in-a-generation events.
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Not ignoring. When it comes to “who has irrational views/beliefs that hasn’t been backed up by science” the answer is, “pretty much everyone”.
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I haven’t seen GMO concerns backed up by anything showing a real threat. I’ve seen unsubstantiated worry backed with the general mistrust of large corporations. YMMV.
I guess I would see a similarity between GMO and global warming skeptics (not deniers), and that both issues have people for and against them that have an opinion one way or another without a full understanding.
A healthy mistrust, or “wait and see” stand when it somes to multinationals is not unreasonable given their miserable track records and attention to profits at any cost to life or environment. That’s not the same as thinking the government is controlling you through the water supply, or that your crystal will cure your flu. None of these really has much to do with Evolution and it’s very long record of study.
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I still think this essay is as good a explanation as any.
How did God get Started
An excerpt…
Faith seems to answer reason’s “second-order” quality with one of its own, as the research of Tufts University philosopher Daniel Dennett suggests. Dennett, whose 2006 bestseller Breaking the Spell put him in company with less temperate so-called “new atheists” such as Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens, emphasizes the way that believers from all the monotheistic religions tend to rate any religious belief as better than none, even if it goes against their own belief. My exclusivity may rule out your God, in other words, but even your God is better than no God at all. Dennett calls this phenomenon “belief in belief”—the idea that religious belief itself is a positive good, whatever its specific content. So while the tradition of rational inquiry involves explanation about explanation, the tradition of exclusive monotheism involves belief about belief. If reason is second-order explanation, faith is second-order belief. And the key concept in faith seems to be the assurance that nature’s regularity is illusory—precisely how being less important than the assurance itself. That’s the opposite of the case with explanation, which is, of course, all about “precisely how.” From this perspective, the phrase “secular explanation” begins to seem suspiciously redundant. Explanation and secularism may actually take in the same territory.
The US may have exported Creation Science into Turkey.
Having known my share of working scientists and rabbis I wouldn’t put money on that 
Christianity is a belief, a faith. Science is more of a practice; it works whether one believes it or not.
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I’ve personally gathered plenty of data that confirm QM and thermodynamics. I’ve gathered data I wouldn’t have been able to get without relativity. The processor in the computer you wrote that post on would not work, and would not be possible to design, if QM, relativity, classical electrodynamics, and statistical thermodynamics were not all incredibly accurate predictors of physical reality. (Yes, I do personally use all of those theories (relativity not directly, though it will probably come directly in to play in some of the machinery involved within a few years) to work on making smaller computer chips.)
The fact that someone else is standing by their opinion with the same persistence as you’re standing by your own, is not them “throwing a tantrum” or needing “to chill”. You have definitively made your definition and point about “faith” understood, but it is nevertheless a kind of cherry-picking and while not incorrect it doesn’t invalidate the distinctions between faith/belief/acceptance/pick-your-synonym of religious vs. scientific principles that Nonentity is arguing in return.
The primary distinction being that scientific principles are experimentally repeatable, whereas religious ones are not. The fact that any individual person doesn’t bother to repeat the experiment themselves doesn’t entirely invalidate the fact that they could, and that multiple people already have and confirmed. It’s a question of degree (how much “faith” is required between religious and scientific beliefs) and also of recourse - can you decide to attempt to gather the same evidence yourself if push came to shove or can’t you? For that last bit, religion = no. Science = yes.
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