The Mistrust of Science

[rug]

Photograph by Erik Jacobs / The New York Times / Redux

The following was delivered as the commencement address at the California Institute of Technology, on Friday, June 10th.

By Atul Gawande , JUNE 10, 2016
Atul Gawande, a surgeon and public-health researcher, became a New Yorker staff writer in 1998.

If this place has done its job—and I suspect it has—you’re all scientists now. Sorry, English and history graduates, even you are, too. Science is not a major or a career. It is a commitment to a systematic way of thinking, an allegiance to a way of building knowledge and explaining the universe through testing and factual observation. The thing is, that isn’t a normal way of thinking. It is unnatural and counterintuitive. It has to be learned. Scientific explanation stands in contrast to the wisdom of divinity and experience and common sense. Common sense once told us that the sun moves across the sky and that being out in the cold produced colds. But a scientific mind recognized that these intuitions were only hypotheses. They had to be tested.

When I came to college from my Ohio home town, the most intellectually unnerving thing I discovered was how wrong many of my assumptions were about how the world works—whether the natural or the human-made world. I looked to my professors and fellow-students to supply my replacement ideas. Then I returned home with some of those ideas and told my parents everything they’d got wrong (which they just loved). But, even then, I was just replacing one set of received beliefs for another. It took me a long time to recognize the particular mind-set that scientists have. The great physicist Edwin Hubble, speaking at Caltech’s commencement in 1938, said a scientist has “a healthy skepticism, suspended judgement, and disciplined imagination”—not only about other people’s ideas but also about his or her own. The scientist has an experimental mind, not a litigious one.

As a student, this seemed to me more than a way of thinking. It was a way of being—a weird way of being. You are supposed to have skepticism and imagination, but not too much. You are supposed to suspend judgment, yet exercise it. Ultimately, you hope to observe the world with an open mind, gathering facts and testing your predictions and expectations against them. Then you make up your mind and either affirm or reject the ideas at hand. But you also hope to accept that nothing is ever completely settled, that all knowledge is just probable knowledge. A contradictory piece of evidence can always emerge. Hubble said it best when he said, “The scientist explains the world by successive approximations.”

The scientific orientation has proved immensely powerful. It has allowed us to nearly double our lifespan during the past century, to increase our global abundance, and to deepen our understanding of the nature of the universe. Yet scientific knowledge is not necessarily trusted. Partly, that’s because it is incomplete. But even where the knowledge provided by science is overwhelming, people often resist it—sometimes outright deny it. Many people continue to believe, for instance, despite massive evidence to the contrary, that childhood vaccines cause autism (they do not); that people are safer owning a gun (they are not); that genetically modified crops are harmful (on balance, they have been beneficial); that climate change is not happening (it is).

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-mistrust-of-science

[Joe Chi Minh]

1. Complete bullsh*t. It was Judaeo-Christians and deists who

originated science as a purposeful, ongoing discipline. As far as the greatest innovative thinkers are concerned, they have a total monopoly.

In fact, there is not a single, major paradigm in physics that was originated by an atheist ? As Lord Kelvin asserted, the rest of science is stamp-collecting. Atheist scientists are willing corporate hirelings, holding back science in deference to their corporate funders. (Similar story with inventors. Who can match Tesla ?)

Major paradigms of the last century : Relativity - Einstein (deist), Quantum Mechanics - Planck, Big Bang - Lemaitre (Catholic priest).

The Chinese invented printing more than 2000 years ago. What happened after that ? The same thing that happened with the Mayan mathematicians and astronomers. Only Christendom anticipated rational laws underpinning Creation, because its devotees believed in a rational Law-giver, instead of undirected random chance - on an absurd scale, moreover.

[longship]

2. First, Einstein was a pantheist, not a deist.

As he stated so many, many times. Look up fucking Spinoza's God.

And BTW, nobody knows who were or were not atheists prior to the founding of the USA because proclaiming such would likely result in death, or imprisonment, in just about the rest of the world. Just look at what Spinoza endured!

The rest of your post is equally a lot of rubbish.

I am appalled. A lot of made up shit.

[rug]

10. Actually, qite a few scientists were theists before the founding of the USA.

Copernicus for one was a Third Order Dominican, a Canon of the diocese of Warmia and, while not ordained a priest, had received Minor Orders.

Roger Bacon, one of the originators of the scientific method, was a Franciscan priest.

Pierre Gassendi. of lunar fame, was a priest for 38 years.

[Joe Chi Minh]

13. Now, you're starting with the Spinoza bullsh*t. Rather than the

Last edited Mon Jun 13, 2016, 04:53 PM - Edit history (1)

contentious interpretation of Spinoza's philosophy as classical pantheism, accept that it was a form of panentheism, whereby the creating spirit is distinct from its creation. This is in line with Einstein's copiously reiterated belief in a great Spirit that created and sustains the universe :

http://www.bethinking.org/god/did-einstein-believe-in-god

Moreover, he told Spinoza to take a hike, when he championed Intelligent Design so brilliantly :

“We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library, whose walls are covered to the ceiling with books in many different languages. The child knows that someone must have written those books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the the languages in which they are written. The child notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books, a mysterious order, which it does not comprehend but only dimly suspects.”

Immediately, after that, however, he expresses his fascination with Spinoza, though Spinoza seemed to see nature as a perpetual-motion machine, the activities of which are pre-ordained by his own nature, and are in no wise
purpose-driven or intelligent !

In any case, infinite regress has been mathematically proven by agnostic, Alexander Vilenkin, be false ; that the universe must have had a beginning, so neither scored too well there.

[longship]

18. No, one has to actually listen to Einstein to know what he means by Spinoza's god.

He very clearly means god as nature metaphor, not any creator god. This is in spite of what Spinoza meant.

Also, it is also rather clear that Spinoza did not believe in a creator god either.

So I believe that you are fairly wrong about that.

Sorry.

My best.

[AlbertCat]

28. The funny thing is....

...science was funded by the church at first so it could prove the "truth" of the church's assertions. When it clearly did not do that, but instead started showing how wrong the church was.... well, house arrest, tortured recants and the stake...

[DetlefK]

3. Oh boy.

The scientific method was not developed by mainstream-Christians. (I suggest the books of the historian Frances Yates on that.)

- The first step was a popularization of the concept of laws of nature, done by the esoteric and philosopher Ramon Llull in the 14th century. He was a Christian, but the concept of laws of nature totally contradicted the notion that God's will rules the universe. Instead, another layer was added between God and the rest. Look into the Bible: The concept of laws of nature does not exist in there. It's all God's will.

- The second step was a colossal dating-error. The "Corpus Hermeticum" was an esoteric book about magic, written ~200AD, combining elements from the religions of Ancient Egypt, Ancient Greece, Judaism and Christianity. The Corpus Hermeticum contained a fictious character, "Hermes Trismegistus", a stand-in for various gods.
A dating-error lead later scholars to believe that the Corpus Hermeticum was written during biblical times (around Moses) and that Hermes Trismegistus had been an actual priest and sorcerer. This means, the magic of Ancient Egypt was a proto-Christianity!
This lead to the birth of an occult Christianity in the Renaissance, when scholars mixed occult magic with christian beliefs. (The Church was not happy about this. Not. At. All. Giordano Bruno burned at the stake for this.)
In this occult Christianity, the scholars tried to uncover the magical laws of nature that govern the universe. By doing trial&error experiments.

The most important difference to the scientific method? Giving preference to the wisdom of the past. If that old book says one thing and your experiment says another thing, you did something wrong with your experiment.

- The third step was the development of mathematics by Newton and Descartes and later Leibniz. Qualitative research became quantitative research with actual numbers and calculations.



While it is true that the early researchers and "proto-scientists" were Christians in a general sense, their beliefs were in some cases fundamentally different from mainstream-Christianity. And I wouldn't give too much on the deist roots: That's what they had learned, that's the cultural world they grew up in, that's what all the old books taught them. The notion of "God" was a cultural thing, not necessarily one of religious belief.

For example: During the 18th century, materialistic explanations gradually replaced religious explanations in biology. These researchers had started out with religious explanations because that was what they were used to.


Newton - materialist
Descartes - materialist
Leibniz - Christian
Alessandro Volta - Catholic
Leonhard Euler - Christian
Henri Poincaré - atheist
James Clerk Maxwell - pantheist
Joseph-Louis Lagrange - agnostic
William Rowan Hamilton - unknown
Konrad Zuse - atheist
Erwin Schrödinger - atheist
Paul Dirac - atheist
Wolfgang Pauli - deist
Nicolai Tesla - non-religious
Alan Turing - atheist
John von Neumann - agnostic
Richard Feynman - atheist



And, the Chinese invented gun-powder, battleships so large that european ships look like toys, a bureaucratic system to rule a vast empire with merciless efficiency...
You shouldn't pin it down to religion: The whole chinese culture is geared towards harmony and not criticizing people. (Even nowadays it's considered absolutely rude for one chinese scientist to tell another chinese scientist that he made an error.)

[rug]

4. I presume you're not asserting that atheism is a prerequisite for science.

Or that one cannot be both a theist and a scientist.

[DetlefK]

6. No.

Science is a method of gaining knowledge, not a world-view. Theism and atheism are world-views, not methods.

The knowledge derived from science points towards materialistic world-views, but science cannot deliver the absolute accuracy that both theism and atheism proclaim. We don't know and we will never know with 100% confidence. That's why I'm an agnostic.

Science is a very powerful method with a fantastic track-record, but the concept of "God" is outside of the philosophical framework underpinning science. For example, the concept of an experiment being repeatable does not apply to God, because he's unique and can change between experiments.
Science can neither prove nor disprove God, because the attributes assigned to him render the scientific method useless in his specific case.

I wonder, if there is a more reliable method of gaining knowledge and making accurate predictions than the scientific method.

[immoderate]

31. Atheists don't claim absolute knowledge. Are you 'agnostic' about Leprechauns?

Do you have a god? If you can't say yes, you are an atheist. By definition. (At least one of them. Theist lexicographers try to apply some parity that doesn't exist.)

--imm

[Joe Chi Minh]

14. Two massive fails there, so truly, your psot cannot be

taken seriously :

Newton was what today would be called a religious 'nut', so obsessed was he with formulating his own, somewhat eccentric, biblical exegesis and theology. Indeed, he ended up despising physics. He's mocked today for his participation in the belief that was widespread in his day, at least tentative, in alchemy, although it was no more a gratuitous conjecture than phlogiston. In any case his achievements in mathematics and physics are unassailable.

Likewise, like so many of the greatest sceintists in that age of faith, Galileo was not merely a Sunday Christian, but a so ardent a believer that only the power of his father in their society prevented his becoming a priest. His quarrel with the pope, was actually with a cardinal, with whom he had a stormy relationship concerning physics. The whole saga has been misrepresented. Of course, the Church would in no wise have been irreproachable throughout most of its history, which is why Francis is so busy now. But Galileo's religious fervour was never in question, and he died the convinced Christian he'd lived.

As for Tesla, again, your post is totally wrong. Tesla is well known to have been an extraordinarily devout Christian. Indeed, some of his remarks sound to me of a curiously fundamentalist hue. But if he said he found many of his answers to scientific problems in the Bible, who are we to doubt him. Parenthetically, Arno Penzias, co-discoverer with Robert Wilson of the background radiation from the Big Bang, stated :

http://www.bethinking.org/god/did-einstein-believe-in-god

Pascal, another Christian mystic, was not responsible for a new paradigm but was no back number in Maths, either, independently discovering the first so many theorems of Euclidian geometry as a schoolchild. Likewise, Kurt Godel was a major paradigm-shifter with his Incompleteness Theorem, and a firm, if somewhat timid, believer of the Lutheran Church.

[DetlefK]

21. Oh, come on. One could as well make an argument that "white people" invented science.

Of course Newton, Galilei and Pascal were religious. Everybody was religious back then. This was a cultural thing. NOT being religious was absolutely outrageous and ridiculous.

You shouldn't confuse the culture and thinking back then with the thinking of nowadays. Our current approach to science/technology/knowledge is that new things are better than old things.
But up until approximately 17th/18th century, the mindset was that old knowledge is better than new knowledge. The european culture back then was based on an underlying cultural meme from Ancient Europe that the present is merely a poor and imperfect copy of a golden, wise and glorious past.

The mindset was that older sources are more accurate and believable than new sources. That's one reason (in addition to religion) why the Bible was considered so infallible: It was fucking old!
For the same reason, the esoteric "Corpus Hermeticum" became a major driving-power in research and culture because it had been misdated to be many millennia old.
One of the major scholars of the Renaissance (either Ficino or Mirandola, I forgot) had open doubts about all this occult magic described in the Corpus Hermeticum and the rituals how to invoke spirits and daemons, because he was a devout Christian. But he nevertheless continued his work in this area because the "Corpus Hermeticum" was thought to be old and the old sources are always right. So he made up an explanation that there is good magic, related to planets and angels, and evil magic, related to stars and daemons, (this split does not exist in the Corpus Hermeticum) and he had an excuse to continue doing research on good magic.

Galileo's big sin was to doubt the geocentric model of the universe. (I don't remember whether the egyptian or chaldean model was en vogue back then.) This model came from a source from a golden past and was therefore infallible. AND this model fitted to the descriptions in the Bible.
As I said, doubting the wisdom of the past was considered madness and folly.
And while a mere believer has no qualms making compromises between what he believes and what he sees, the Church CANNOT compromise.

"Oh, all the big thinkers were religious! It must have been their religion!"
So what? All the big thinkers were white. With the same confidence, one can claim:
"Oh, all the big thinkers were white! It must have been their white skin-color!"



And even for 20th century researchers, of course some of them were religious. Christianity is everywhere in our culture, our language, our metaphors, our imagery, our philosophy. How could these people NOT think about God when thinking about the universe???

[Joe Chi Minh]

24. "Oh, all the big thinkers were religious! It must have been their religion!" So

what? All the big thinkers were white. With the same confidence, one can claim:
"Oh, all the big thinkers were white! It must have been their white skin-color!"
----------------
What a dumb argument !!!!! Strange to relate, to your ears, anyway, evidently, there is an absolutely seminal connection between 'thinking' and 'religion'. If you cannot think (whether intelligently or foolishly) you cannot espouse, you cannot 'choose' a religion. You see, we believe that rationality and the faculty of reasoning that begets it, do not EVER arise from RANDOM CHANCE.

Your skin can can be black, white or brindle (my own 'touch of the tar-brush'), and it will have no relevance to the exercise of the intelligence and the will, whatsoever. Is that really such an imponderable puzzle ?

Seriously, though, you evidently have reading-comprehension difficulties. Look what you wrote here :

'Of course Newton, Galilei and Pascal were religious. Everybody was religious back then. This was a cultural thing. NOT being religious was absolutely outrageous and ridiculous.'

I made it perfectly clear that Newton, Galileo and Pascal were not just routine, 'Sunday only' Christians, in keeping with the Christendom of the time, but extraordinarily devout Christians, what atheists would deem fanatical Christians, 'nuts'.

Back to grade school for you. But, you problem, alas, is your soul (your memory, WILL and understanding), so I'm not sure even that would help you.

[immoderate]

32. Confirmation bias.

What's the connection? What part of their science stems from religion?

--imm

[muriel_volestrangler]

5. You seem to have read a different article

You're so eager to defend "Judaeo-Christians" (has anyone ever been called a 'Judaeo-Christian'? An individual follows either Judaism or Christianity, not both) and deists. None of those groups are mentioned in the article. There is one mention of 'religious groups' for challenging evolution. This is undoubtedly the main reason for denying evolution. But the article also blames industry groups for climate skepticism. It's not having a go at religion. Indeed, it's more about the claims that vaccines are dangerous than anything else.

Maybe you've been misled by the posting of this in the Religion group. It's another mistake by the thread starter - he puts things in this group which aren't really about religion. At least this one does use the word 'religious' once.

[rug]

8. Did you miss this?

Scientific explanation stands in contrast to the wisdom of divinity and experience and common sense.

And this?

To defend those beliefs, few dismiss the authority of science. They dismiss the authority of the scientific community. People don’t argue back by claiming divine authority anymore. They argue back by claiming to have the truer scientific authority. It can make matters incredibly confusing.

Granted, there's no cartoon included or a murder mentioned, but, trust me, religion is involved.

[muriel_volestrangler]

11. 'divinity and experience and common sense'. It's not attacking experience or common sense, either

He was just saying that scientific explanation often does not end up agreeing with the explanations we are first given. Your second quote is saying it's not about religion - "people don’t argue back by claiming divine authority anymore".

[Joe Chi Minh]

15. I tend to scan posts too quickly. There is a

very close tie-up between Judaism and Christianity, indeed Judaism can be said to have sprung from the womb of Christianity. So, I use the elision of the two as a shorthand for both with an overlap between them. I believe the Torah is our Pentateuch, and the latter is very much a part of our Bible.

No. He didn't put it in the wrong thread. Atheists tend to be more religious than us in the sense that they believe in God so strongly. True it's only when they speak about him very bitterly as setting us a very poor example, what with letting suffering happen. A disgrace in their eyes. And this does no good to their consciences hence the need to rail against Christianity, whether overtly or slyly, by a false arrogation of science as their own creation and preserve ; when nothing could be further from the truth.

The discovery of quantum mechanics really upset the apple-cart for them, since it rejoices in so many paradoxes - what Christians call Mysteries. The very idea that their reason should not be able to plumb paradoxes is so anathema to them that they usualy try to get round it by calling them 'counter-intuitive' ! Well, if you need to rely on your intuition to understand that our analytical reason does not allow waves to be simultaneously particles, you're in a bad way. So, basically, true atheist scientists are parasites, making their living off the backs of people who always believed there was more to matter than meets the eye - never mind spirit, which doesn't lend itself very well to testing under laboratory conditions.

[muriel_volestrangler]

17. "True atheist scientists are parasites". You get that from a speech about science and vaccines

by a surgeon, that doesn't mention religion, God, or atheism, or, indeed, quantum mechanics.

Have you actually read the speech? Have you anything to say about it?

[Joe Chi Minh]

19. No. I was simply 'getting on my high horse' about this business. What

little I evidently gleaned from the thread header was enough to set me off. I've seen to many people eulogies of science as a creation of atheists. The other day, I even saw an article in an online religious periodical talking in awed tones of someone being a 'man of science', as if that meant he had 'the goods', the real 'goods'. Nothing could pull the wool over his eyes. A more perjured crowd you couldn't wish to meet than scientists, but why would they break ranks with their totalitarian, atheist culture, to make a scientific point, when they would very seriously risk losing their tenure ; never mind that it would likely be on some trumped up nonsense.

But now you've set me straight, Muriel, I must read the post properly. He must be a good man if he's exposing those vaccines.

Well, it seems I even got that wrong about the vaccines. It seems a shame that he can place such trust in vacciens and frankenfoods. I fear despite that wonderful lead-up, and it was a wonderful expression of at least generic wisdom, he has a kind of tunnel vision, whereby the findings of Monsanto's scientists and Gate's interest in vaccines don't set major alarm bells ringing, and wonder how voluminous the literature he's read from the opposing camps, and has considered the likely relative levels of integrity of the opposing camps.

[Joe Chi Minh]

23. No. I did not get that from matey's speech about science and vaccines.

You don't have to be Einstein to realise that atheists have an a priori horror of the notion that anything in this universe or elsewhere could not be understood by reasoning. Never mind that paradoxes such as space-time and wave-particle duality are proliferating t an increasing rate, and can only be accepted 'as is', and used by physicists as staging-posts, springboards to further discoveries by the same use of reason that discovered them to be counter-rational.

Here is a bizarre admission of the abysmal lack of integrity of intellectual materialist 'scientists', by Richard Lewontin :
http://creation.com/amazing-admission-lewontin-quote

Of course, atheist prefer to talk in terms of counter-intuitiveness, which is insane, and reduces the speaker to an imbecile. Do you need your intuition to tell you that, on the basis of the superficial, worldly analytical intelligence, something being simultaneously a wave and a particle makes no sense (is counter-rational) ? Just like their a priori repudiation of the Big Bang, the 'fine-tuning of the universe, etc, etc.

Here is another quote from Robert Jastrow :

"There is a strange ring of feeling and emotion in these reactions [of scientists to evidence that the universe had a sudden beginning]. They come from the heart whereas you would expect the judgments to come from the brain. Why? I think part of the answer is that scientists cannot bear the thought of a natural phenomenon which cannot be explained, even with unlimited time and money. There is a kind of religion in science; it is the religion of a person who believes there is order and harmony in the Universe. Every event can be explained in a rational way as the product of some previous event; every effect must have its cause, there is no First Cause. … This religious faith of the scientist is violated by the discovery that the world had a beginning under conditions in which the known laws of physics are not valid, and as a product of forces or circumstances we cannot discover. When that happens, the scientist has lost control. If he really examined the implications, he would be traumatized."

Quantum mechanics, upon which 70 % of modern industry is said to depend, would not even have been discovered, nor ever would be. That is why they are hypocrites and parasites. They are forced to accept the mysterious antithesis of the classical, mechanistic physics of yore, to earn their daily bread.

[muriel_volestrangler]

25. Most of that post is nonsense, and just an excuse to throw insults like 'imbecile' around

You don't know what 'a priori' means, so I suggest you find out before using it again.

"Quantum mechanics, upon which 70 % of modern industry is said to depend, would not even have been discovered, nor ever would be."

"Would not even have been discovered" ... if what? Einstein was instrumental in it, and it's well known he wasn't religious. Those who did formulate it did not do so because of religion. They did it because of the results of observations and experiments. Who is it you are damning as "hypocrites and parasites", then?

[Joe Chi Minh]

20. 'The great physicist Edwin Hubble, speaking at Caltech’s commencement in 1938,

said a scientist has “a healthy skepticism, suspended judgement, and disciplined imagination”—not only about other people’s ideas but also about his or her own. The scientist has an experimental mind, not a litigious one.'

Love that wonderfully epigrammatic, last sentence. Reminds me, too, of Niels Bohr's whole attitude, most concisely expressed perhaps when he remarked that everything that he said should be taken to be a question, not a statement.

[edhopper]

7. It was called The Enlightenment

and it was a movement by people who thought Christianity was bullshit.

[rug]

9. Tell that to muriel. He's under the impression this has nothing to do with religion.

[Igel]

12. Many did.

But they often had older presuppositions.

Moreover, the Enlightenment followed the Age of Discovery and was a consequence of it. Much of the "scientific method" worldview was hashed out prior to the Enlightenment. They just liked to claim that they invented it, and their supporters like to think so, too. Galileo, Newton, Hooke, and others in the 1600s and early 1700s had not an unreasonable view of things.

It's also unnecessary to expect perfection in a worldview. One can hold contrary opinions: I knew a PhD in evolutionary biology who was a young-Earth creationist and didn't want his advisor to know. (In vino veritas. Or "in cervesia veritas," as the case more accurately was.) He regarded the scientific method as a heuristic, which is precisely what it is. Also a materials scientist working on new materials for deep-sea sensors, who'd been in the field for many a year since getting his PhD, but who was an old-Earth creationist.

You can accept a worldview for one purpose and hold a contrary one for something else. We all do it. I posted earlier to a thread where the mother of a bad kid got nothing but condemnation for raising a bad kid, but where I had to point out that if the bad kid had been killed in the execution of a murder and was saying her kid was bad, most of us would be full of empathy and denounce most of those who said, "She had it coming, and she's really responsible for that murder victim's and her own kid's deaths." Or we're quick to defend Muslims when one Muslim does something wrong, but fast to point out how horrible Xianity is when a Xian does something just as wrong. We're inconsistent. That's how we are.

By the way, Newton's prediction for the end of the world is 2060. He was a goofball genius, or a genius goofball. Can't separate them out.

[Joe Chi Minh]

22. And what an epic misnomer it was. With the daily exposure

of so-called Evolution as total bull-sh*t, they make great bookends.

Ex-NASA 'wheel', Robert Jastrow's prediction unfurling before our very eyes - now with the final nail in Evolution's coffin in the form of the discovery that matter ultimately reduces to information ; not binary but quaternary.

"For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountain of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries."

However, the Cambrian Explosion had already put paid to it for all but the corporate-hireling 'bitter-enders', still emerging, blinking, into the sunlight, from the jungle canopy, decades after losing the war :

[edhopper]

26. "so-called Evolution"

thanks for playing, I don't try to talk to creationist.

[Joe Chi Minh]

29. My pleasure. Very civiliised of you. And practical. I don't usually argue.

Just say my piece, and then it's out of my hands.

[Joe Chi Minh]

16. You don't have to be a 'new earth' scientist to entertain reasonable

fears of the totalitarian vengefulness of the large corporations, who fund most of modern scentific research, in Academe, as well as industry. Moloch forbid that the large corporations should be subjected to any constraints arising from ethical considerations.

http://www.uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/a-world-famous-chemist-tells-the-truth-theres-no-scientist-alive-today-who-understands-macroevolution/

[Joe Chi Minh]

27. Page 6 of this linked article is particularly interesting :

http://y-jesus.com/more/scc-science-christianity-compatible/

[HuckleB]

30. Kick!