The trouble is deeper than just winning a political battle with dishonesty. That is a much bigger problem than we are willing to admit but we have kind of gone there. We accept dishonesty as a legitimate tactic in political debate. It is not a good choice because we end up with lousy government but it a choice society has made. What we are seeing here is the spread of that evil. That is what happens when you accept sin. You don't just pay the price and that is that. It grows. It infects more and more of life. Here we have dishonest politics infecting science.
Guttmacher surveys healthcare professionals “selected on the basis of their professional affiliation, training, experience and specialization on the subject.” (1) Who these people are remains unavailable, as do their qualifications (what counts as specialization?), as do the questions asked in the survey (and whether those questions contain any relative bias), thus rendering the survey unrepeatable — an issue for any scientist. But the Guttmacher Institute is resolute, well-funded, and undeterred by such trifles.Anyone who knows science can appreciate how twisting the question a bit and sampling only professionals that are strongly pro-choice can skew you results big time. You don't document that you do this. You just leave out exactly how you worded the questions and how you screened the participants. You document the good parts of the procedure and just fail to mention some things. We can only be sure they were dishonest in this case because their results were so far our of whack. Still the numbers were quoted as accurate by politicians in the abortion debate in Mexico. So they achieved their goal of twisting the debate with dishonest studies.
The ironic thing is that secular people sing the praises of science. Science is the wonderful thing. Religion is a medieval relic. But it is the secular people that corrupt science. When push comes to shove they don't want to follow scientific truth any more than they want to follow religious truth. They want to rationalize their behavior rather than honestly seek the truth.
Can science survive? I don't see how. It depends on the integrity of the scientist. That is precisely what is breaking down. What will prevent it from coming completely unraveled? The morals of society? They continue to degrade. Will political players want truth more than they want to push their ideology? Have you observed an election campaign lately? Will they respect science enough to not use political power to corrupt research? Remember we have created a political system where an honest politician cannot win. So what can we really expect? We give a bunch of liars a lot of power and see what happens.
Very good analysis. What hit me was,
ReplyDelete"When push comes to shove they don't want to follow scientific truth any more than they want to follow religious truth. They want to rationalize their behavior rather than honestly seek the truth."
Please keep up your insightful posts.
P.S. Would be great if you had a 'share button' for sharing on Twitter. :)
I'm sorry, I tried, but I just can't read this blog anymore. It's all biased speculation and gross generalizations. I can't even tell what scientific result you have a problem with here. A survey?
ReplyDeleteI messed this up badly. I meant to link to Marc's post and never did it. I will add the link but here it is
ReplyDeletehttp://www.patheos.com/blogs/badcatholic/2012/12/in-which-the-guttmacher-institute-continues-to-be-awful.html
Thadeus,
Thanks for the encouragement. I don't know about share buttons. I might have to investigate.
Grundy,
Sorry you find it biased. It is a bit ironic because I can't really answer your criticism because it is itself a gross generalization. By that I mean you did not provide any examples of what you mean.
I do agree that I think in broad terms and someone from another school of thought might have a hard time following. I try to be clear but I am sure I fail. I do think having people from another point of view point out what precisely does not make sense to them would be helpful. So I am sorry if your stop reading.
You have a tendency to assume what the entirety of large groups of diverse people are thinking. Sometimes the “people” are not well defined like when you say that people “get upset when tactics like this are used by their political opponents but it is really a feigned outrage. Really they are thinking to themselves how they can use similar tactics to win the next battle.“ How do you know it’s feigned? How do you know their motivations? Sometimes you do this with a more defined group like when you say that secular people “don't want to follow scientific truth any more than they want to follow religious truth. They want to rationalize their behavior rather than honestly seek the truth.” You aren’t even speaking for a group you belong to, you are speaking for a group previous posts show you completely misunderstand. You don’t even provide how you might know what one secular individual thinks much less all secular people. I can’t even figure out what you mean by this. Gravity is a scientific truth. Do secular people not follow that? Relativity, germ theory, anatomy, momentum? I’m pretty sure secular people accept all these truths while discarding most everything religions teach.
Delete“Can science survive? I don't see how.” What? Can objective observations survive? Can experimentation survive? Can systematic knowledge survive? I checked every definition for science I could find to make sense of how you might see it going away. I just don’t get it
And you should consider using "I" instead of "we" in your writing because it assumes your reader is likeminded. I had the same problem.
DeleteWhen I say "people" I don't mean all people. I mean some people. Same thing when I say "secular people" or any other qualifier. Now some people is a pretty weak statement. Generally when I say that I am thinking that this is pretty common but I am not trying to be precise. It is something I have seen enough times to assume it is common.
DeleteOften people are complex. Their thinking flows along lines that they don't really believe. (I know, there I go again with the "people" talk!). So sometimes the thought process I am critical of is one I have found myself in before. I am not condemning people or writing people off. I am just suggesting some people think a certain way and I am going to scrutinize it (I just changed the "we" to I in the last sentence!).
Secular people don't want to follow scientific truth any more than they want to follow religious truth. They want to rationalize their behavior rather than honestly seek the truth.
You aren’t even speaking for a group you belong to, you are speaking for a group previous posts show you completely misunderstand. You don’t even provide how you might know what one secular individual thinks much less all secular people. I can’t even figure out what you mean by this. Gravity is a scientific truth. Do secular people not follow that? Relativity, germ theory, anatomy, momentum? I’m pretty sure secular people accept all these truths while discarding most everything religions teach.
This is a good example. Rationalizing behavior rather than seeking truth is a pretty common human problem. We all see it in others but don't always agree when other point it out in ourselves.
What I am talking about is deliberately falsifying scientific data. This is in service of a moral argument. They want to justify abortion based on the fact that so many women are dying in botched illegal abortion. Except that isn't true. So they generate data in a fraudulent way to make it seem true.
So I find it ironic when secular people accuse Christians of not facing scientific facts in other contexts and then they pull stuff like this. Maybe I was a little harsh. I do find pro-abortion people becoming irrational in service of their cause. Not always the same people that I might interact with over AIDS. Still I see contradictions in what I understand is the common secular position. I point them out. I try to be charitable but I also want to communicate the irrationality of it.
So if I go around saying "Catholic people are pedophiles" you'd be okay with that because some Catholics are pedophiles, correct?
DeleteYou say "this is a good example" in regards to my response. A good example of what? How is it a good example?
So if I go around saying "Catholic people are pedophiles" you'd be okay with that because some Catholics are pedophiles, correct?
DeleteNo. You would have to be making the argument that Catholicism somehow is inherently associated with pedophilia. So if you said Catholic people don't eat meat on lenten Fridays that would be OK even though a majority of Catholics might not obey that fast.
You say "this is a good example" in regards to my response. A good example of what? How is it a good example?
I was saying it was a good example of me using "secular people" to talk about a stream of thought in man secular people. Nobody's thoughts are really that simple but we need to simply things to analyze them. People may or may not find it fair or useful. I suspect if you analyzed Catholic thinking I would find some of it fair and some of it not. Life is like that.
Catholic priests are associated with pedophilla more tightly than your assessment of the associations of secular people. So the blanket statement of Catholic priests are pedophiles should be fine.
DeleteThat is one opinion. I would argue that paedophilia is more or a problem for school teachers than it is for priests.
DeleteYou are free to say that category of people don't think that way at all. I would find it an interesting response. I normally try and use characterizations that are going to be uncontroversial. I like to know when I fail at that. I see that Thadeus did think that statement rang true with him. I am pretty sure he is Catholic but he has enough experience of atheists. He didn't think it was out of bounds.
I am not rejecting your complaint. I am thinking about how I can change the way I word things. It is hard to refer to classic atheist/ Christian argument threads just in passing without rehashing the whole thing. I do that a lot. I try and connect these threads. It is hard to find a charitable way to phrase it in a few words so people know what you are talking about and don't get offended.
So help me out. If you were just referring in passing to the "does celibacy cause paedophilia" debate what do you think would be a fair way to do it?
“Can science survive? I don't see how.” What? Can objective observations survive? Can experimentation survive? Can systematic knowledge survive? I checked every definition for science I could find to make sense of how you might see it going away. I just don’t get it
ReplyDeleteScience requires a lot of hard honest work. If scientists falsify research for politics or for money then what happens to science? That is already happening. As atheism takes hold one would expect the desire to acquire knowledge for the sake of knowledge will drop. Scientist will be more motivated by fame and fortune. Integrity for the sake if integrity won't be as common either. Shortcuts will get taken.
So science won't go away. It will be less and less a trustworthy source of truth. It will be come more and more another tool for the rich and powerful to brainwash the masses.
I'm interested in your definition of science.
ReplyDelete"As atheism takes hold one would expect the desire to acquire knowledge for the sake of knowledge will drop." Again, this is what I'm talking about. One wouldn't expect this. You would expect this.
I'm interested in your definition of science.
ReplyDeleteI probably use the term in a few ways. Here I mean what scientists do day after day. Designing experiments and doing experiments to acquire knowledge. This involves money. It involves very smart people working very hard for not all that much money.
As atheism takes hold one would expect the desire to acquire knowledge for the sake of knowledge will drop.
Again, this is what I'm talking about. One wouldn't expect this. You would expect this.
I think all reasonable people should expect this. Religion matters. When you say knowledge of the world is knowledge of God and as such is something we should be doing because man's proper end is to know God and to love God and to serve Him forever. That causes people to work very hard at science and to seek the truth with great energy. People like that are not so easy to corrupt.
Now if we make the mistake of replacing Christianity with atheism then all that disappears. There is just no reason for anyone to care about truth or honesty or hard work or anything like that. We are already seeing it. Is it such a stretch to expect to see more of it? We seem to want to stay on this atheism train until it crashes. It would be ironic if science is one of the first things to go down in flames when atheism wins.
Why would you think that atheism makes people less curious and more lazy? I would say the opposite.
ReplyDeleteBut where does the curiosity and the energy for finding the truth comes from? That comes prior to one becoming atheist. Those are laudable virtues but they don't flow logically from the atheist view. They are embedded in the secular culture. Why? At least in part because the culture is still Christian. So the best parts of atheism come from Christianity. So if you kill Christianity you kill them too. Maybe not in yourself but in future generations.
DeleteAtheists don’t think they already know the origins of the universe and the reason for being, if any. They have less certain knowledge about topics of interest then theists claim to have, so it is more reasonable that they would seek the answers they don’t already have, especially when discovery has provided rewards time and time again. Why would a deity be needed to motivate someone to work towards making life easier and more fullfilling? If I believed that the purpose of this life was simply to be judged by a higher power, I’d have little motivation to learn to do anything but be good in the eyes of said higher power.
DeleteIf anything, seeking truth and working hard is better explained as a secular tradition.
You think so? I don't see why an atheist would want to work hard at making other people's lives more fulfilling. It is not even clear that any fulfillment is possible in an atheist system. So why not just pursue wine, women and song? Not saying all atheists do that. I just don't see how the motivation not to do that comes from atheism. It comes from values smuggled in from a Christian culture we were raised in. One that is getting less Christian all the time.
DeleteI think so and I explained why I think so. Humanity accomplished a lot before Jesus came around...that is very good proof I'm right.
DeleteHumanity accomplished a lot before Jesus came around
DeleteI thought you didn't like the barbarism from Old Testament times? Now you are OK with going back there? Of course technology has made man more powerful either for good or for evil. So if we go there the body count will be much greater as we have already seen in the 20th century.
If atheism was true there would be no way to avoid such a fate. The good news is it is not true. The blood of the martyrs will be the seed of a renewed church.
Are you moving to a moral argument now because you can no longer defend the argument that Christianity is needed for curiosity and hard work? I don't mind, but I'd like an acknowledgment that you were wrong before moving on.
ReplyDeletePeople do need drive for hard work. I don't think Christianity is the only thing that can provide that drive. If people need to work hard to survive they will work hard. But what about people who don't need to? What if they can provide for themselves quite nicely with very little effort? What would push such a person to excel? Why would they make a huge effort and take risks? I don't see a reason in atheism.
DeleteConsider that may be a lack of imagination on your part. I can't trust you in this debate any longer. The better my points the more the goal posts move.
DeleteA lack of imagination? If there is something I have failed to imagine then you just have to mention it. I do think that some religions squelch science. That is why Europe advanced scientifically so much quicker than the rest of the world. There is not enough data to say whether atheism will support science. Atheism has not survived long enough anywhere to say. You really need to have it become dominant for more than a century to tell for sure. It was getting close in Russia. The early returns were not good. Even then you have communism going on at the same time it is hard to know what causes what.
DeleteIn the absence of hard data we can only analyze a religion based on what it believes and try and figure out if there is enough there to motivate people. Atheism seems quite simple to analyze. No meaning. No morals. No afterlife implications. If I have analyzed it all wrong let me know.
BTW, none of this proves which religion is true. A religion could be a terrible motivator and still be true. Another religion could highly motivated and very moral people and still be false. Catholicism claims both. That it is both the best religion and the true religion.