Thursday, October 6, 2011

Being Skeptical of Science is being a good Scientist

This rather interesting posting about modern politics, religion, and science comes close, but rather misses the bulls-eye of the target. Yes, it's true that some politicians seem to feel the best way to protect religion is to be skeptical of scientific claims until they are proven beyond any shadow of doubt. And it's doubly true that every rational religion requires several centuries worth of scientific evidence before they will allow science to affect doctrine. But what everybody is missing is that being skeptical about science, IS science. Skepticism is the scientific method at ti's best, requiring strong evidence to change the model of the universe as we know it, before we act upon new theories we need experimentation to prove whether or not the experiment is true. And thus we should praise the skeptical politician who say, believes in theistic evolution (the idea that God uses the radiation of the sun and natural elements to mandate experimental mutations in species, then uses the familiar concept of survival of the fittest to weed out bad experiments). Or who, noticing that we've now passed the tipping point for melting tundra releasing greenhouse gases, declares the whole AGW vs NGCC climate debate moot (in that, even if AGW caused it, it's now too late to stop NGCC, so we'd better stop arguing and figure out how to roll with the punches that Natural Global Chaotic Climate Change is going to throw at us anyway).

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Oustside The Asylum by Ted Seeber is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at http://outsidetheaustisticasylum.blogspot.com.