Further to “Why Deepak Chopra is hated but Max Planck can’t be, I am adding a question to my list:
Why is the same sort of talk “woo” if Deepak Chopra or Rupert Sheldrake say it, but not if Max Planck or James Jeans (the universe is “nearer to a great thought than a great machine”) say it? How did so much come to depend on personality? Not personality? Okay then, on what, exactly?
The others are:
1. Why is Earth a mediocre planet from which we can predict habitability and life”, but Mars isn’t?
2. Why is it “science” to believe in ET, but non- or anti-science to believe in Bigfoot?
3. Why did faith, otherwise derided, suddenly become so important to science when ET entered the picture?
To see why the dead hand of materialism is bad for science, we must start asking questions like these—they would not immediately occur to a materialist but they are perfectly reasonable, and may contribute to the beginnings of solutions to otherwise insoluble problems. – O’Leary for News