it bears repeating

A friend left a comment in response to a previous post on Creationism. He was angling toward a valid point, that arrogance of beliefs is dangerous - even for scientists. I disagreed with some of the things he wrote, and posted a response which sums up what I think on the subject. As usual, I'm not trying to spare anyone's feelings, but If you read closely, I'm not trying to offend, either. > Don't take this the wrong way, but the Scientific Method is the only real path towards truth in the entire world. Because it's the only one that inherently cares about what happens in the world. > > They are not simply "writing off" Creationism because they're arrogant - they're writing it off because it flies in the face of ALL EVIDENCE KNOWN TO MANKIND. There is not ONE scrap of observable, measurable, reproducible, or in any way acceptable evidence of the validity of Creationism AT ALL. None. If this was a court of law, the case would be thrown out with prejudice. > > Yet now people are trying to get "Intelligent" Design introduced into schools because the REAL WORLD doesn't fit into their belief system. So instead of changing their belief system, like any RATIONAL being, they are trying to CHANGE REALITY, which is just plain silly. > > I don't mean to offend anyone's religious sensibility, but to live in the 21st century, in the most advanced civilization of all time, and to hear people I respect say things like "We still don't know how the brain works," It makes me sad. We know. We might not know every detail. But we know the basics. > > Just like I don't know every aspect of how a combustion engine works, but I know it's not by a magical genie trapped in each piston. We'll find out new things in the brain. But we won't find a soul. And we won't find ESP. And we won't find crop circles. > > But if they do ever find something spectacular, something unforeseen - so you know who will be first to change their belief system? The Scientists - because THAT is how Science works. > > And by the way - the response to Galileo's ideas - that was from the CHURCH. What i left out was a response to his comment "I think it is equally arrogant for mainstream science/media to simply write-off any non-accepted answer as incorrect/stupid." As if there was such a thing as "mainstream science/media." The Scientific community is a huge, distributed, decentralized, worldwide collection of PEERS evaluating new ideas in a vast collection of fields and subfields of human thought. There is no Pope of Science. There is no Vatican City. There are no Churches. All you need is evidence. Then, your peers will review your work, and others will try and reproduce and build off of it. It is the ultimate Open Source system. Good ideas are kept around only after passing rigorous validation that can sometimes last decades. So any idea that is "non-accepted" is one that doesn't match observable phenomena. I.e., the real world. As with any community, there are politics, but the decentralized nature of it guards against corruption. The distributed nature of it mitigates human error. These people don't do it for glory, but for, **ostensibly**, the benefit of all mankind and its knowledge. A very heroic enterprise. Dedicating your life to seeing how a wombat masturbates so some old guy can eventually cure his EDS is pretty damned selfless. Now his comment about the media being bad carries a ton of weight. Their search for antagonistic soundbites may eventually cause the end of the world. But don't confuse reporters who cover science with scientists. And just because "mainstream media" doesn't give equal time to Creationism doesn't mean they should - if the idea doesn't hold water, it shouldn't even get to the hoi polloi. It should go in the drawer with the Flat Earth theory and "The earth is the center of the universe." Just because 1 million people believe in reincarnation, CNN, that doesn't make it true. ---