Kristine
Posts: 3061
Joined: Sep. 2006
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Let's see if my comment appears.
| Quote | Scientists do not "start with the assumption that there is no God." Scientists start with the assumption that what is observed, tested, and can be repeated is true. There may be other things that are true, but science measures physical phenomena just as accounting counts dollar amounts.
Accounting isn't supposed to be about art, and science is not supposed to be about the supernatural. It is not a metaphysics. Science can neither prove nor disprove God's existence. Science is about facts.
Peer-review is not infallible? Well, nothing is infallible, and certainly throughout history nothing has proved more changeable than the "unchanging truths of the Bible." These change with the wind. Everything they told us about "scientific evidence for God" in church has dropped off the map in favor of intelligent design and whatnot. Well, soon that will drop off the map too, in favor of the newest creationist fad.
Science is cumulative, but creationists are always starting from scratch. That's a pretty good indication of which one works.
You may as well argue that an accountant checking another accountant's figures is infallible and flawed, and prejudiced because it didn't assume God. You may as well argue that taking your car to the shop is atheistic, because the shop isn't going to invoke God but instead go at your car with a lot of materialist wrenches. You may as well boycott all the medicines and surgical techniques that evolutionary biology has given you.
All those people who were initially rejected by their peers persevered and were ultimately accepted <i>precisely because</i> their peers found flaws in their work and suggested changes. It is unlikely that these same people would have had their names attached to their revolutionary concepts had they not been forced to endure the rigors of peer review. Likely, someone else would have come up with idea (science abounds with stories of simultaneous discovery) and presented it in a manner that needed less correction, making that person, rather than Mayer, the formulator of the First Law.
I am not aware that Mayer or any other scientist whose discovery met with initial skepticism ever became bitter about peer review. Only creationists whine about peer review, because that is the tribute that superstition pays to genius. One thing for sure, creationists will continue to have decades of failure to look forward to. I notice that creationists never cite the work of earlier creationists, but only appropriate the quotes of legitimate scientists for their own purposes!
Why isn't "creationist research" cumulative, like science?
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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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