Wesley R. Elsberry
Posts: 4991
Joined: May 2002
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I think that, for the benefit of the lurkers again, I should mention that science is not endlessly open to every idea that has ever been hatched. In complete ignorance, one may not know which of an infinite number of propositions actually describes the universe we experience. But that experience starts cutting out swaths of counter-factual assertions. For example, any claim that requires that "humans use a methane metabolism" is just wrong, and it is easy to see that any assertion that we must be "open" to the possibility that the claim is true is not just mistaken, but wrong-headed. Science famously cannot go directly to a claim that some concept is true, but it can decide, with the same confidence we hold in the observations that provide the pertinent evidence, that some concept is false. Without this characteristic of science, we would forever be arguing over whether phlogiston or thermodynamics was the better explanation, when we know now that phlogiston is wrong and will not be making a comeback.
Intelligent design creationism advocates are famous for offering new definitions of science, definitions that are carefully constructed to permit and protect theistic explanations within science. The permitting occurs by phrasing that science is comprised of logical explanations of natural phenomena, while dumping any reference to the need for those explanations to be testable in light of the evidence.
The protecting gets less attention, but it is related to how this comment started off. That occurs by having the new definitions of science dismiss any idea that science can actually decide any issue. That's right, the practice of science, under the new definition, doesn't actually change the state of our knowledge. Everything that was a proposition worthy of consideration yesterday is still just that way today, and will continue to be so forever. In this bizarro world, scientists can hold opinions about which explanations they prefer, but in the end these are merely alternative interpretations of observations, none of them privileged in any way over any other.
Of course, this benevolent attitude toward hopeless nonsense only lasts so long as it is a preferred piece of hopeless nonsense being considered. And therein lies the brilliance of Bobby Henderson's "Flying Spaghetti Monster" meme, whereby the utter hypocrisy of the Kansas State Board of Education was laid bare for the world to see. By asking Kansas to give equal time and deference to Flying Spaghetti Monsterism in Kansas classrooms, Henderson gave the world the chance to see various conservative antievolution board members go through a variety of histrionics where they sought to exclude Henderson's idea as "silly" while insisting that science had no right to proclaim judgment on their own notions. One member asked that a teacher's display of a Flying Spaghetti Monster drawing be removed from a classroom door; the administration backed the teacher, and the drawing stayed in place.
To sum up, the scientific attitude is that we can actually learn things through experience that cause us to prefer explanations that are consistent with the evidence and (here's the part antievolutionists hate) treat the explanations that are contradicted by the evidence as wrong, not merely out of favor or a matter of personal interpretation. Consider it another way in which you can identify the next morph of antievolution; they have to try to gut science in order to make science safe for their untestable, unaccountable, and narrow sectarian views.
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"You can't teach an old dogma new tricks." - Dorothy Parker
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