Further to “Naturalism only ever really had one strong idea: Ban ideas,” the new British school guidelines enshrining naturalism reminded me of something—by being the exact opposite. And I couldn’t really remember at first what it was.
Then I did: My old high school science teacher! He used to say, “Science is a verb.” He would have had no use for all this because, to him, science was the experiments a scientist does, and the information that results from them.
With him, every class was a lab or preparation for one. We learned what science was by doing it. (Today, he once told me, he wouldn’t even be allowed to teach that way. Too dangerous, they say.)
I don’t know what he thinks about evolution, but I bet he wouldn’t set much store by a science that lacks a subject (extraterrestrials, subhumans, etc.), about which you can’t do any experiments (evolutionary psychology, crackpot cosmology), that cuts the ground out from under the idea that we can really know anything (the latest nonsense about how the human mind doesn’t really exist).
The biggest problem with the new British science standards is that they would allow for all types of naturalist nonsense—and create barriers to critiquing it. Wonder who benefits from that?
See also: The Science Fictions series at your fingertips (cosmology).
The Science Fictions series at your fingertips (origin of life)
The Science Fictions series at your fingertips (human evolution)
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