Science is beginning to sound like the medieval church, actually. We are now moving on from keening to caterwauling. But nobody working on the inside can actually do anything about it.
Philosophy
C. S. Lewis and the limits of science
He saw science as a limited language.
John West on C. S. Lewis and science
Klinghoffer: Dr. West reminds listeners of an insight of Lewis’s that doesn’t get the attention it deserves, perhaps because it comes in the Epilogue of the last book Lewis completed, the fascinating The Discarded Image.
Following the science seen as “impossible and stupid”
Eugyippus: “During the pandemic, Germany closed schools on a wider scale and for a longer duration than most other places in the civilised world. “
Is the real problem with science education today lack of support for the Consensus?
The trouble is, the context of the article is an attack on a teacher who doubts the COVID orthodoxy. We would want to avoid the weeds for sure but in principle it is reasonable to doubt the COVID orthodoxy.
What blocks new ideas in science?
Clancy: Wang, Veuglers, and Stephan, create a new category for “highly” novel papers, which cite a pair of journals that have never been cited together in the past, and also are not even in the same neighborhood. Here, we mean journals that are not well “connected” by some other pair of journals.
Francis Schaeffer’s “line of despair” model of our civilisation’s intellectual history:
We can adapt Francis Schaeffer’s themes, looking back to the Christian Synthesis of the heritage of Jerusalem, Greece and Rome, and the onward flow of ideas and cultural agendas since Paul of Tarsus: Schaeffer thought that once there was an upper/lower storey approach that in effect gave up on solving the problem of the one Read More…
How the COVID pandemic showed that evidence-based medicine is — at present — an illusion
Malone: The release into the public domain of previously confidential pharmaceutical industry documents has given the medical community valuable insight into the degree to which industry sponsored clinical trials are misrepresented. Until this problem is corrected, evidence based medicine will remain an illusion.
David Berlinski, the bad boy philosopher who doubts Darwinism, is back
From the Intro: He and Wesley [Smith] discuss the philosophy of mathematics, the corruption of science, and the causes of the ongoing devolution of Western society.
What a radical idea! Make science worthy of trust… ?
Warren: The “science is settled” trope is stretched much too far (and not just with COVID), and it costs credibility.
What makes a law of nature a “law,” exactly?
Philosopher Marc Lange: Laws of nature can explain why something failed to happen by revealing that it cannot happen – that it is impossible. If so, there can’t really be “laws” of evolution unless we can show that no other outcome is possible.
Neil Thomas on Darwinism’s place in the Victorian culture wars
Anyone familiar with popular science writing on evolution will see what Thomas means here. Darwinism is introduced as a hypothesis/theory but then treated as a dogma/article of faith — and (this is emotionally very important) a way of segregating the Smart People from the Yobs and Yayhoos. Appeals to science-based analysis fall on deaf ears because the dogma has become what “science” now means.
A pharma science prof explains how to “confront anti-science”
No. The question isn’t whether science is a good thing but whether the current establishment is in fact focused on science or on maintaining/regaining control through pronouncements about “science” and edicts stemming from those pronouncements. One needn’t look far to see examples of the latter. And what to do about that is the discussion we need to have.
What “Trust the Science” does with massive amounts of data: Withholds it!
West goes on to point out other instances. The big question is, has secretiveness, deception, and a resulting hunger for authoritarian rule based on “science” has become a way of life in the upper echelons of a high-tech society? And then the biggest questions looms: What to do about it? At one time, it was just Darwin gibber in the schools and such-like stuff. Now it is getting more serious.
Claim: Intelligent design theory is a science stopper
Cornelius Hunter takes it on. Incidentally, the fact that this promissory materialism, for which Darwinism is the origin story, is all hype and no hope never means anything. A fresh batch of media will bring up the same worn themes. And it’s as close to science as large numbers of educated mediocrities ever want to get.