Hello everyone!

I wonder how many people have overthrown their indoctrination in pseudoscience in a way similar to yours: doing research with the inital expectation of finding support for it. Quite a few, I expect.Welcome to EvC, Aussie!___Edited by Archer Opterix, : revision.

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ArcherAll species are transitional.

You've surely noted the swagger creationists often display when they first arrive at EvC. They've imbibed the idea that 'God and I make a majority' so they burst into the saloon thinking they can whup any cowpoke in the place. Someone told them they're giants packing bazookas in a world of midgets squirting water pistols.Then comes the collision with reality. Always fun to watch. The confidence surely comes in part from the myth that science is 'really a religion.' This insistence (so bewildering to scientists) is crucial to fundamentalists. It creates the illusion of knowing.They don't understand science at all. To them it's an unknown--a blank surface. But they understand how their religion works and how explanations are crafted in it. To be told science is like that gives them a sense of sure footing. They don't really know the terrain.But blank surfaces are ideal for projecting.In saying 'scientists are like us' they assume a mirror image of their own fundamentalism with left and right inverted. They debate not with real scientists, but with the mirror image.What do they see when they look in the mirror? They tell you. It's a revealing picture.No sooner do they decide 'science is a religion' than they start describing all the things they understand religion to be. They see people deciding all answers a priori. They see people conducting research that isn't open-minded and honest. They see arrogance and materialism. They see people ignoring, suppressing, or even forging evidence. They see a theocracy that refuses to allow dissent.They are telling you how religions, in their experience, really do things. They disclose all the dirt about how fundamentalism works. Under normal curcumstances they would never ascribe these things to religious people. But let that religion go by another name and everything comes out. They point at the mirror and say 'You're a religion. We know what you're really doing!'

Give a man a mask, and he will tell you the truth.

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- Oscar Wilde

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ArcherAll species are transitional.

Good point. We've had opportunities here to watch fundamentalists try to put forward their own theories. And they certainly go about it as if science operated by the methods of religion.They think forming a theory is about inventing explanations. And you can see why. In Sunday School they stitched prootexts into a story and called it a doctrine. So in science they expect to stitch bits of data into a story and call it a theory. As soon as all the bits are assembled into a plausible story, mission accomplished. They have science!They expect their story to be as valid as yours because, like your theories, it is an explanation. They expect it to be more true than yours because, like their doctrines, it conforms to religious orthodoxy. And it is work, trying to explain a mountain of scientific data in a way most o fthe world does not. A coherent alternative story is not crafted in one afternoon.But even if they did this, they will have done no science yet. Scientists know no explanation can be called a theory until it demonstrates predictive power. Can we run tests? Can we predict findings?Over and over you see fundamentalists here creating 'theories' who never once think of this. It never occurs to them that any theory they invent should be called upon to predict anything.Why not? I think you hit it, RAZD. It's not necessary in religion. In religion the doctrine of the Trinity works because it explains all the prooftexts and meets the demands of orthodoxy. No one asks what tests to run on the Trinity or how to falsify the Trinity or how to predict what the Trinity will do next. Predictive power is not expected of a religious idea. So they don't expect it of their 'science.'___

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ArcherAll species are transitional.