The Religion of Anti-Science Fanaticism

[AgeOfEnlightenmentSCP]

If you believe "science" is already determined, and is merely about majority consensus, you are actually referring to religion.

If you believe a potential finding in scientific studies, or hypotheses presented by scientists are unquestionably true, you are actually talking beliefs.

If you believe in this concept of science above all else, and cannot consider criticism or permit this science to be challenged or questioned, then you are following dogma.

If you believe all people must follow this science without doubting or searching for more answers, you are demanding an act of faith.

If you believe that the amount of science you have at your hands right now is the ultimate knowledge, and that all people must be compelled through peer pressure or laws to follow this science, you are attempting to make our country a theocracy.

guggiedaly.blogspot.com/2015/05/the-religion-of-anti-science-fanaticism.html

[ArchietheDragon]

Love the title.

[Aman A.K.A. Ahamburger]

Makes me think of a couple things I read earlier this month.

From the Folks Who Brought You Camels and Lucky Strikes: "Consensus"<----Link

Spend some time with old issues of Time Magazine or Look circa 1950 and you'll find ad after ad touting the doctors who smoke Camels or Lucky Strikes ("More Doctors Smoke Camels than Any Other Cigarette"). The PR agencies surveyed the doctors, sometimes counting hundreds of thousands of them, then advised readers that such and such brand was "not irritating on the throat," was "soothing," and other euphemisms for scientific approval of what turned out to be a deadly product.

Most doctors smoked in those days. There was a kind of consensus that smoking was okay, especially if you bought a particular brand, one with filters, perhaps. That the incidence of lung and throat cancer was rocketing didn't register fully on medical practitioners for a long while. The connection with heart disease also was missed.

All those doctors testifying on behalf of cigarettes didn't matter to the truth, did it? The cigarette makers did not exactly announce a scientific consensus, but they implied it.

History tells repeatedly of scientific consensus or implications of same that were driven by self-interest, expedience, groupthink, or just plain ignorance.

Scientific Consensus? You've Got to Be Kidding, Right?<----Link

The truth is that Gregor Mendel discovered genetics with no help from evolution. Mendel published his theory about the same time that Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species, but Mendel did not accept Darwin's theory, and Darwin's followers ignored Mendel's theory for decades.

Here's an excerpt from a chapter titled "You'd Think Darwin Invented the Internet" in Jonathan Wells's book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design:

Augustinian monk Gregor Mendel found Darwin's theory unpersuasive. The data he collected led him to conclude that heredity involves the transmission of stable factors that determine an organism's traits. Although the factors can be mixed and matched during reproduction, they remain discrete and unchanging from one generation to the next. Darwin's view of heredity was quite different. He believed that every cell in an organism produces "gemmules" that transmit characteristics to the next generation in a blending process he called "pangenesis." The advantage of Darwin's view was that gemmules could be changed by external conditions, or by use and disuse, and thus account for evolutionary change. The disadvantage of Darwin's view was that it was false.

Mendel's theory of stable factors contradicted Darwin's theory of changeable gemmules. Thus, although Mendel's work was published in 1866, Darwinists totally ignored it for more than three decades. William Bateson, one of the scientists who "rediscovered" Mendelian genetics at the turn of the century, wrote that the cause for this lack of interest was "unquestionably to be found in that neglect of the experimental study of the problem of Species which supervened on the general acceptance of the Darwinian doctrines... The question, it was imagined, had been answered and the debate ended."

Even after 1900, Darwinists had little use for Mendel's theory. By the 1930s, however, the evidence had corroborated Mendelian genetics. Darwinists abandoned pangenesis and subsumed Mendelism in a "neo-Darwinian synthesis" that still dominates evolutionary biology.

In 1999, Darwinist Bruce Alberts claimed that Darwinism is "at the core of genetics." Yet Mendel had no need for Darwin's hypothesis. How can Darwinism, which contributed nothing to the origin of genetics and resisted it for half a century, now be at its core? It is Darwinism that needs genetics, not genetics that needs Darwinism

....

...Gregor Mendel was not part of the "scientific consensus" in his day. In fact, not even Charles Darwin became part of the "scientific consensus" until his theory was propped up by Mendelian genetics almost half a century later.