Science bashing - What is it?

[edwest2]

In order for a respectful dialogue to occur, I’m looking for some concrete information.

1. Define science bashing.
2. What particular area of science is most impacted? I’d prefer not to discuss banned topics like evolution but see no harm in having it listed.
3. Articles or books that define it.
4. Has it increased or decreased in the last 10 years? If so, why? Articles or book references would be helpful.
5. What is the practical effect(s) or outcome of science bashing?

Peace,
Ed

 

[Linusthe2nd]

In order for a respectful dialogue to occur, I’m looking for some concrete information.

1. Define science bashing.
2. What particular area of science is most impacted? I’d prefer not to discuss banned topics like evolution but see no harm in having it listed.
3. Articles or books that define it.
4. Has it increased or decreased in the last 10 years? If so, why? Articles or book references would be helpful.
5. What is the practical effect(s) or outcome of science bashing?

Peace,
Ed

Don’t think I ever heard of it Ed. Linus2nd

 

[bzkoss236]

Can you explain a little more about the context in which you heard about this?

 

[seakelp]

In order for a respectful dialogue to occur, I’m looking for some concrete information.

Fair enough.

1. Define science bashing.

I’d have a hard time nailing down an exact definition. I think the attitude that results in “science bashing” would be one that is hostile towards science. What does that mean? Hard to say, but “I know it when I see it,” as J. Frankfurter once said. But one characteristic might be, misconstruing what a scientific “theory” is (it’s not just “a theory” - that word has a different, more technical meaning in science).

Let me think about this more, though, it’s an interesting command.

1. What particular area of science is most impacted? I’d prefer not to discuss banned topics like evolution but see no harm in having it listed.

Biology and maybe physics. Mostly biology. I’d throw in the “debate” about whether climate change is occurring.

1. Articles or books that define it.

What’s “it”?

1. Has it increased or decreased in the last 10 years? If so, why? Articles or book references would be helpful.

I’m assuming “it” = science bashing? I don’t know. Like I was saying in the other thread, I’d also be interested in seeing some measures of how this has been playing out.

1. What is the practical effect(s) or outcome of science bashing?

Good question. I’d list a few things, just sort of off the top of my head:

1. Parents that may be suspicious of / hostile towards science education in their children’s classroom.
2. A culture of ignorance.
3. Effects on the political process - people may choose to ignore or outright deny significant ecological or biological realities (I’m thinking with an eye towards climate change).

I only took a single course on the philosophy of science in college, but I’d love to hear from people who have more familiarity with these questions.

 

[edwest2]

Can you explain a little more about the context in which you heard about this?

Sure. It comes in various forms via accusations like:

Anti-knowledge.

Anti-science.

Anti-education.

Some people choose, based on their own research, that, for example, climate change is not happening. In the meantime, I’d like to point out that different countries, including the United States, will decide - not the people - what do, if anything.

The more some people oppose the idea, then, as a group, they are accused of bashing science.

Peace,
Ed

 

[Aloysium]

are you referring to: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientism ?

 

[georget]

Sure. It comes in various forms via accusations like:

Anti-knowledge.

Anti-science.

Anti-education.

Some people choose, based on their own research, that, for example, climate change is not happening. In the meantime, I’d like to point out that different countries, including the United States, will decide - not the people - what do, if anything.

The more some people oppose the idea, then, as a group, they are accused of bashing science.

Peace,
Ed

Right! An accusation tossed at anyone who disagrees with the prevailing so called scientfic truth’s.

 

[edwest2]

Right! An accusation tossed at anyone who disagrees with the prevailing so called scientfic truth’s.

That’s right.

Peace,
Ed

 

[Wowbagger]

Right! An accusation tossed at anyone who disagrees with the prevailing so called scientfic truth’s.

Nope! You can be accused of science-bashing for agreeing with prevailing, well-established, scientific truths. For example:

ME: Hooray! North Dakota just passed a Personhood Amendment! (They totally did, too.)

HIM: And the war on women continues. You people are terrible.

ME: War on women? The real war on women is the one the abortionists are waging against women in the womb. Six hundred thousand women were murdered last year by abortion.

HIM: They’re not humans. They’re pre-humans. Most are fetuses. Some are just fertilized eggs.

ME: Yeah, fetuses are human. “Fertilized egg” is an oxymoron; the process of fertilization destroys the human ovum, as well as the human spermatozoa. It is replaced with a zygote, which is – biologically speaking – a new organism, a child of his or her mother or father, and a member of the human species from the moment of conception.

HIM: Science says human life doesn’t begin until well after that point.

ME: No, it doesn’t. It never has. That’s a myth perpetrated by your side to maintain the central lie of abortion, just as 1850s slaveholders needed to perpetrate the myth of Negro inferiority in order to maintain the central lie of slavery. Read your ninth-grade biology textbook.

HIM: Science-bashing, faux-news spewing, ignoramus! Stop trying to fit your government inside my uterus!

ME: You don’t have a uterus.

HIM: YOU’RE PROVING MY POINT!!! ragequit

OR:

HIM: Oh, thank goodness! The American Pediatrics Association just finally approved gay marriage! They say it’s good for kids.

ME: Yeah. Shame they couldn’t find any actual good scientific evidence to back their claim up.

HIM: What are you talking about? There were sixty footnotes!

ME: Yes, about a half-dozen of which purported to show that same-sex couples raise kids just as well as opposite-sex couples. And those half-dozen were plagued by small sample sizes, convenience sampling, short study terms, and a lack of comparative measurement against opposite-sex parents.

HIM: You’re just looking for any way to tear down gays and gay love.

ME: I couldn’t care less about “gay love”; that’s something for them and their Creator to work out, plus, lesbians are hot. I’m just repeating what Loren Marks said in his peer-reviewed study published in Social Science Research last year.

HIM: He probably has an axe to grind. Wasn’t that the journal that published that Regnerus anti-gay bigot trash junk science?

ME: Yeah, the New Family Structures Survey was none of those things, which you’d know if you’d read the study instead of Scott Rose’s hate speech about it. But back to Marks’ paper: funny thing is, the Pediatricians acknowledge near the end of their paper all the problems Marks points out. They admit that we don’t really know much about same-sex parenting, and that we don’t really know how to find out more. They explain away Regnerus’s findings – which they do correctly acknowledge and characterize – so fast it’s like they stole something. They just ignore these two major contrary papers, which, combined, just took out their central evidence, and move on to conclude that same-sex parenting is great.

HIM: But they did conclude same-sex parenting is great.

ME: Yeah.

HIM: And they’re scientists.

ME: So’re Marks and Regnerus.

HIM: You hate science!!!

I’ve had both these conversations. In fact, I’ve had both these conversations this week.

Science-bashing is questioning whatever “facts” liberals choose to believe, whether or not they have anything whatsoever to do with science, scientific evidence, or the scientific method.

 

[OxygenMan]

I read once about a muslim professor who became a fundamentalist and started rejecting traditional scientific ideas about things. He started to say that he thought the stars were hundreds of warring djinn in the skies.

 

[Ion]

For the fifth point I think I can give an example:
I do not recall the exact details anyway they can be found on the internet, but there was discovered a dinosaur somewhere in arizona i think, and because they could not move it by helicopter they broke the legs. They evaluated the age of the skeleton at 65 million years, yet in the broken bones they found soft tissue and blood. The researcher was ecstatic, she found dinosaur blood after 65 million of years…Hello, 65.000.000 years …isnt that to much a little?

 

[bzkoss236]

For the fifth point I think I can give an example:
I do not recall the exact details anyway they can be found on the internet, but there was discovered a dinosaur somewhere in arizona i think, and because they could not move it by helicopter they broke the legs. They evaluated the age of the skeleton at 65 million years, yet in the broken bones they found soft tissue and blood. The researcher was ecstatic, she found dinosaur blood after 65 million of years…Hello, 65.000.000 years …isnt that to much a little?

Are you suggesting that the dinosaur was more recent? Don’t you know how a body (human, animal, or otherwise) can be kept quite well in nature given certain circumstances? Besides, it’s not like it was a lot of blood, it was likely just traces and not like it was bleeding.

 

[Ion]

Are you suggesting that the dinosaur was more recent? Don’t you know how a body (human, animal, or otherwise) can be kept quite well in nature given certain circumstances? Besides, it’s not like it was a lot of blood, it was likely just traces and not like it was bleeding.

Maybe 64000000, but 65000000 is t0000 much

 

[rtechie]

Nope! You can be accused of science-bashing for agreeing with prevailing, well-established, scientific truths.

Objections to abortion rights aren’t based on science, they’re based on religion. Purely. That’s why Catholics, and not, say, American Atheists, are at the forefront of the anti-abortion movement. I’ve never met or even heard of an atheist that was “pro-life”.

Note that there is a difference between the positions, “I believe that abortion is wrong and I will not seek one and discourage others from doing so.” which is a pro-CHOICE position and “I think we should put doctors who perform abortions and women who get abortions in prison.” which is the “pro-LIFE” position.

 

[Stillness]

Objections to abortion rights aren’t based on science, they’re based on religion. Purely. That’s why Catholics, and not, say, American Atheists, are at the forefront of the anti-abortion movement. I’ve never met or even heard of an atheist that was “pro-life”.

Note that there is a difference between the positions, “I believe that abortion is wrong and I will not seek one and discourage others from doing so.” which is a pro-CHOICE position and “I think we should put doctors who perform abortions and women who get abortions in prison.” which is the “pro-LIFE” position.

Abortion opposition is usually based on the idea that the fetus is a living thing, which doesn’t necessarily require religion. That the fetus is alive is scientifically indisputable.

 

[bzkoss236]

Objections to abortion rights aren’t based on science, they’re based on religion. Purely. That’s why Catholics, and not, say, American Atheists, are at the forefront of the anti-abortion movement. I’ve never met or even heard of an atheist that was “pro-life”.

Note that there is a difference between the positions, “I believe that abortion is wrong and I will not seek one and discourage others from doing so.” which is a pro-CHOICE position and “I think we should put doctors who perform abortions and women who get abortions in prison.” which is the “pro-LIFE” position.

Then explain to me why are there also quite a number of pro-life atheists?

 

[edwest2]

Nope! You can be accused of science-bashing for agreeing with prevailing, well-established, scientific truths. For example:

OR:

I’ve had both these conversations. In fact, I’ve had both these conversations this week.

Science-bashing is questioning whatever “facts” liberals choose to believe, whether or not they have anything whatsoever to do with science, scientific evidence, or the scientific method.

Thank you. Great examples. It’s a series of great examples because liberals can find scientists who agree with their worldview and misuse their position to lie.

1. A human embryo is a human being. Ask any Embryologist.
2. “Keep your beliefs off my body!” And did you get pregnant by yourself? Was the man in another room when it happened?
3. Reproductive rights! Abortion. How about self-control? 100% guaranteed to prevent pregnancy and all STDs.
4. Gay behavior is OK. If you say so, but there is no evidence that the APA used years of scientific research to support that conclusion.
5. Transgendered was a disorder yesterday, but not a disorder today. Hmmm… the APA seems to be at non-work again.

ncregister.com/daily-news/psychiatrys-new-normal-transgendered-persons?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NCRegisterDailyBlog+National+Catholic+Register

1. Heard of “minor attracted persons”? They were pedophiles for a long time but they hope the APA will cooperate with them.

americansfortruth.com/2011/08/25/firsthand-report-on-b4u-act-conference-for-minor-attracted-persons-aims-at-normalizing-pedophilia/

Ed

 

[wynnejj]

I don’t know if this counts, but the other day some student said to me “E=mc**2” and I beat the poo out of him. What is it with this “bashing” description to describe a different viewpoint? What is it with this propensity for rhetoric violence? Where are the political correctness police when you need them?

 

[wynnejj]

If one goes to Wikipedia, it doesn’t warrant an entry. If one googles the term, it seems to be substring of the term “science bashing creationists”. Wikipedia references the term once in an article about Leonard R. Brand, creationist, in a statement coined(?) by Martin Lockley, evolutionist.

 

[Charlemagne_II]

Science and technology together deserve some credit and some bashing, just as the Catholic Church deserves some credit and some bashing now and then. Nobody is exempt from bashing. The main bash against science I would offer is that through an arsenal of nuclear weapons science has delivered into our hands the means by which to annihilate the human race and many other life forms along with it.

Hopefully the arrogance of science will be tempered by the humility of wisdom.