Blogs for Bush: The White House Of The Blogosphere: The Death of Science

"It was, after all, science and its enthusiasts which fell for the Piltdown Man, Haekel's embryos, eugenics, Population Bomb, ALAR, etc, etc, etc. So many bogus theories, dressed up as science, and greeted by the believers in science as the be-all and end-all of existence. After a while, it was bound to errode the foundations of science - and now it has. Science is now so intertwined with myth and political gamesmanship that whatever judgements are pronounced under the cover of science are immediately suspect - everyone who hears such things wonders when some future science will completely refute what is held as rock-solid science today."


Creationist bashing gets boring after a while, which is why I haven't engaged in it for a time - really it's like shouting at people with their fingers in their ears and chanting "I can't hear you". But anyway I've just thought of a new corollary:

History is not based on genuine empirical evidence (of the sort that say, Charles's Law is) but rather on subjective attempts to string together a few axiomatic principles of the nature of the human condition such as those presented by Mr. ***, and pre-conceived notions of past occurences into a full-blown narrative of the past. In the process a lot of bad logic goes into the works eg the circularity of relying on documentary and archaeological evidence (especially dating artefacts by means of the decoration of pottery shards), or the deliberate ignorance of the documentary record that doesn't fit into the theory (eg Fairy tales, The Book of Gilgamesh, The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, The Donation of Constantine, The Book of Mormon, The Hitler Diaries), or all sorts of chicanery in an attempt to produce "proof" that Alexander the Great reached India.

The patchy "evidence" of the historical record doesn't really "prove" the veracity of the historical narrative, all it proves is that at a certain period of time a certain artefact of this sort existed (in many cases it proves even less than that, i.e. all those fanciful reconstructions of "life in the Egyptian Old Kingdom" etc are great works of fiction and art in many cases). This is empirical evidence all right, but of a conjectural variety and not "logical" in the true sense of the word that we use. To artfully paint the "historical links" between documents and artefacts is very creative and imaginative indeed, but it is not logical, any more than *** were to buried with Gibbons, this would provide "proof" for alien visitors in the future that 17 centuries ago a great empire fell.