News you won't see in controlled mainstream media.

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Thanks Russ for this insight. This is just the kind of thing that should be made more public, as it betrays some common misconceptions of science, scientific knowledge, scientific theory and fact.

This is the fault of people that do not understand science, as science does not claim to have any theories that scientists regard as absolute truths.

Which applies to all theories in all sciences, there are no "favorites" or special cases: all theories are tentative explanations of reality, the best explanations we know at any given time, and tested against the evidence of reality, but alway liable to be invalidated. Just as Newton's theory of gravity has been invalidated (and it was called a "law" in earlier times too).

Unfortunately, your author here equivocates between the fact of gravity, and the theory of how it behaves. Nobody doubts the fact of gravity, but there are people that think our current explanation, relativity, is not sufficient to explain all the evidence without requiring some patches.

This equivocation is a logical error that someone who is a "Professor of Philosophy and Scientific History" should know better than to make, especially in a book. This lowers my opinion of Dr. Steven L. Goldman, and possibly of Lehigh University ... if I didn't already know that Behe is another professor and what they say about him.

Well ... we can't all be perfect all the time ...

Basically all we see is a common failure to understand science, and the fact that all science theories are tentative explanations. We should blame our educational facilities for this failure, and hold them to a higher scientific standard than this.

The other failure -- and what is NOT mentioned by your Dr. Goldman either -- however, is to understand that scientific knowledge is cumulative.

For instance Newton's theory of gravity is now known to be one of those theories that Goldman was talking about, now considered to be "false" - superseded by relativity - however, we can also use Newton's theory for most instances because it's explanation is close enough for most purposes.

This is because theories explain all known evidence, and are only falsified when some new evidence contradicts the theory. When this happens we need a new theory that explains the new evidence AND all the previous evidence. Relativity does this, as when you apply the boundary conditions where we find Newton's theory of practical use we also find that relativity can be reduced to Newton's theory -- thus it explains all the evidence that Newton's theory explains, in essentially the same way.

I would expect that 99% of the theories in all sciences today that are in fact shown to be invalidated by 2100 will be similar to this condition, where the theory can still be used in limited applications, just like Newton's "Law" of gravity.

Enjoy.

...Except in the school textbooks.

And why is this shameless promotion of evolution-cultism everywhere in the educational system?

Because it subverts the public acquisition of Bible prophecy, which reveals those who cause most of the real terror in this world.

The Bar Code and the Mark of the Beast




Wrong again.

His statement is perfectly in context (you read it out of context, as you have many of the links you provide, which are fanciful speculation).

His statement is illustrating how people "forget" that theories are theories and blindly accept without using critical thinking. (It is a social commentary, not a scientific one.)

Um... This is the point of the entire statement.

What did you miss?

Unfortunately, your mis-reading of this article caused your entire post to be irrelevant.


"Paleontologists [fossil experts] have paid an exorbitant price for Darwin's argument. We fancy ourselves as the only true students of life's history, yet to preserve our favored account of evolution by natural selection we view our data as so bad that we almost never see the very process we profess to study."

—Steven Jay Gould, The Panda's Thumb (1982), pp. 181-182 [Harvard professor and the leading evolutionary spokesman of the latter half of the twentieth century].

I love it........

Thanks Russ,

So maybe we should have textbooks written by scientists in the field the textbooks cover write the textbooks instead of having non-scientist editors catering to public pressure? I agree.

Do you know that when scientists have reviewed textbooks that their changes are usually not incorporated by the editors?

Humorous, Russ. Here's a fuller quote:

Can you show how I cut out the context? Can you show that the "it" that is not doubted is the theory of how gravity operates instead of the fact of gravity?

Can you also tell me why it's called the "theory of gravity" if it is assumed to be absolute truth?

You may be able to comfort yourself with blanket hand waving statements in order to avoid the actual issue, but it certainly is not going to convince me that you have said anything valid.

And if you noticed, I agreed with this - that common people without a good understanding of science misunderstand that scientific theories are all tentative explanations based on the best information available to date, and that any new evidence can falsify the theory.

Scientists understand this, so improving the level of science in our schools should be a good way to alleviate this common misunderstanding, yes?

So I guess that my agreement with much of his argument means his whole book is irrelevant. Curious argument Russ.

The only place I disagree with him is where he uses a logical fallacy, so this means that you think the only relevant argument is one that employs logical fallacies. Curious argument Russ.

Enjoy.

Hi Jeanie, glad to see you're still around.