Kristine
Posts: 3061
Joined: Sep. 2006
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| Quote | | In recent years, however, Hogan's preferred theories have tended towards those widely considered "fringe" or pseudoscientific. He is a serious proponent of Immanuel Velikovsky's version of catastrophism,[1] of Intelligent Design over Darwinism,[2] and of the theory that AIDS is caused by pharmaceutical use rather than HIV (see AIDS reappraisal).[3] |
| Quote | | Ideology increasingly drives science....Many areas of science in which the public is told there exists scientific consensus are in fact riven with controversy and poorly supported by evidence. In Kicking the Sacred Cow, James Hogan unmasks such pretentious. (Dembski) |
Oh, come on. This is the kind of thing that makes me mad. I don't believe for one second that Dembski denies the HIV-AIDS link (I think I read somewhere that his wife is a nurse?), but he's willing to praise this nutjob while simultaneously giving himself back-off room ("But I never explicitly said that I endorsed this or that" etc.) a la Jonathan Wells.
This level of cleverness just isn't displayed by everybody, and it angers me to see some well meaning people buy into pseudoscience that--okay, let me get this straight--isn't not unendorsed by an ID theorist who doesn't deny evolution but also isn't convinced that random mutation and natural selection completely describe the mechanisms of evolution in a different way than Eugenie Scott isn't convinced of same. (Got all that?)
Not everybody is this clever, okay? (My own head is swimming.) And some of us, who have contact with people who aren't necessarily abstract thinkers and who draw conclusions that these smart people who used big words are proving God and maybe also showing that HIV doesn't cause AIDS, get really frustrated trying to point out the intricacies of this shell game.
ID is the perpetual drawing of a frame, not a picture--a frame around a void! In the same way that rich people want socialism for themselves but capitalism for everyone else, IDers seem to think that they can always have sound science for themselves (even if they have to go to Singapore for medical treatments in the future after science education is gutted in this country) but magic spells and prayer for the rest of us. Is that what they're after? And why?
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Which came first: the shimmy, or the hip?
AtBC Poet Laureate
"I happen to think that this prerequisite criterion of empirical evidence is itself not empirical." - Clive
"Damn you. This means a trip to the library. Again." -- fnxtr
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