Wednesday, June 4, 2008

Fear of Science?

I hope that the folks that commented over at MonkeyTrials do follow back over here. I'd like to continue the conversation without creating any problems for Scott.

Those folks think that I am afraid of science, probably because I "don't understand it". And they think that it seems to be useless to refer to non-entities such as knowledge and wisdom. And probably other off-the-cuff characterizations that I don't recall right now. This is based on my comments concerning the hate flow out of PZ Myers. By using science as a cover, PZ promotes a hateful form of Atheism. There is usually much more of the latter on his blog than the former, although recent posts have not been so onerous. I'm afraid that my sarcasm was ill-written. What I said was that if PZ represents science, then science is a fearful thing. Probably I should have been more clear: When a person of any discipline advocates hate, it reflects proportionally on his other advocacies as well. It's a judgement thing.

Urging tolerance for PZ seems odd considering the intolerance PZ shows to non-believers in the PZ-worldview.

To assume that someone is not familiar with science goes directly to prejudicial thought processes. If you can not recognize any limitations to empiricism or forensics, then you probably do not know much about science yourself. And if you think that literature, art and philosophy are subdisciplines of science, well... we need to talk. So let's do that. Let's talk.

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