Sunday, June 26, 2011

How to be Anti-Science

This is an essay on the anti-science movement of the 1960s and 1970s.

7 comments:

Morrison said...

How dare you question Science.

And technology is completely under control.

Various proofs of this are:

1. The Fukishima power plant disaster was quickly resolved.

2. Nuclear weapons are completely under control and present no danger, from accident or anything else.

3, Medical mistakes which killed over 100,000 people in the United States alone last year have, I was told on another thread, killed almost no one this year.

4. Drug studies, which have previously been farmed out to other counties like India and been subject to rampant fraud, are now completely accurate...barring a mistake here and there.

5. Fraud in Science has virtually been eliminated.

Atheists who know have assured me of all those things, and, as was deomonstrated yesterday, atheists have high moral standards and almost never lie.

What more could you ask for?

Papalinton said...

Re No 3 : But there is a devout christian who is in charge of the NIH

Anonymous said...

So? The NIH does not control all the doctors and hospitals who makes mistakes.

And that would still leave atheists on the hook for 1., 2.,4., and 5 as you apparently recognize.

As to the Moral Standards of atheists, methinks the poster is joking.

A Theist

B. Prokop said...

"Science" is a completely neutral, amoral player in this world. What counts is how people use what they learn from it. Like everything else we human beings touch, our record here is hopelessly mixed. Scientific and technological advances have beyond debate improved the lives of billions of people in billions of ways. But these same advances have brought us the carnage of industrialized war, the modern police state and loss of privacy, and an impending environmental catastrophe that threatens to undo all the material progress we have ever accomplished.

Possibly the best treatment of the moral dimensions of man's interactions with science is the science fiction novel "A Canticle for Leibowitz" by Arthur M. Miller, Jr. I urge everyone to read it.

B. Prokop said...

Sorry, everyone. This post is just so I can see how my new profile picture looks.

Anonymous said...

The idea that Science is completely neutral has long been known to be inaccurate, since the role of the observer in making observations affects the observations themselves.

A Theist

B. Prokop said...

Theist: You are re-stating what I wrote. The science is neutral. The human being is not.

I think we are in agreement here, just stating it differently.