> Glad you asked. In fact, it was Dawkins who asserted in his
>paper that people who believe in religion are "infected with a virus"
>whereas the man of science is a rational creature who put that
>ridiculous non-rational disease aiside.
He said that because religions are typically packaged with
a "faith" meme that actively discourages adherents from
looking for evidence. Can you see why that might be a
bad thing?
>My point, and that of the authors of "Betrayers of the Truth", is
>that all disciplines are made up of people and subject to the same
>sorts of fallacies that people as humans bring to their trade.
>Dawkings goes no further than the church house door in his
>criticisms, which is what I was attempting to take him to task for.
Are you claiming that all disciplines are equally susceptible
to those fallacies?
>Ideal #1: When scientists make an assertion, you pretty much believe it is true
>because you have this notion of peer-review, replication, and the
>structure of science keeping it all neat and clean (i.e., did he not
>follow the Scientific Method?)
That is not an ideal of science. You are never to take a scientist's
word on anything unless she can back it up with evidence and reasoning.
>Ideal#2: Science is an objective enterprise, devoid of human emotion,
>greed, etc. and the Scientist is in it for the love of the truth:
I agree that anyone that believes this is true must be naive.
But who are we talking about here? Anyone on this list?
>I am just saying that the ideals are extremely hard to meet and
>sometimes impossible given the constraints placed on scientists who
>are human beings. Therefore, realize that most scientific data
>cannot be objective.
OK, say we realize it. Now what?
>Realize also, as the authors point out, that this field is not the
>keeper of the keys of rationality. There are other fields and other
>desciplines in which the truth is being pursued. They, too, use
>rationality in their search.
I like to think we are doing that right here.
>Realize that "science" is an ideal and that we need to rethink how
>well it's so-called built in safeguards actually work. If we do
>that, I think we can approach Science with a healthy skepticism and
>not become infected with the virus that leads us to believe that
>the descipline of science is somehow above the rest of intellectual
>enterprises. It is not.
I agree (I think), we need more skepticism, more critical thinking,
more rationality.
-- David McFadzean david@lucifer.com Memetic Engineer http://www.lucifer.com/~david/ Church of Virus http://www.lucifer.com/virus/