As iron sharpens iron,
one person sharpens another. (Proverbs 27:17)
“[S]ound science is based on evidence and not climate scaremongering. … doesn’t work by consensus… tests theories and predictions against observations of the real world…doesn’t intimidate dissenters, manipulate data, attack critics, or play lackey to politics.”
“The researchers believe no bird would have such a long tail. But other studies, such as one published in EvoDevo in 2014, state that long-tailed birds with up to 23 vertebrae once existed.” WORLD
“In a recent edition of the journal Environment and Behavior, Rice University sociologist Elaine Howard Ecklund and her colleagues write that while religious views drive Americans’ rejection of evolution, skepticism about climate change is more a function of political views and lack of confidence in the work of scientists.” RNS
“In the March 16, 2016, issue of Forbes astrophysicist Ethan Siegel’s article The Next Great Global Warming ‘Hiatus’ is Coming!
“…not only is philosophy not dead, but without it, science itself is impossible. Philosophy tells us not only whywe do science—it gives us the assumptions that undergird the scientific method.” Bill Nye the Philosophy Shy
(A follow up to Scientism Isn’t Science)
Naturalism is defined by Stewart Goetz & Charles Taliaferro in this way:
Naturalism—very roughly—may be defined as the philosophy that everything that exists is a part of nature and that there is no reality beyond or outside of nature. (Naturalism, 6)
Something being “a part of nature” is here meant to exclude the supernatural. Naturalism then is opposed to supernaturalism. It is seeing all things as natural and nothing as being supernatural. It is this view of the world which informs scientism, and it is this same view which informs modern scientific procedure. Although it is important to say that the procedure does not lead every scientist to embrace scientism (the belief that all questions about reality can be scientifically determined), scientism certainly needs the procedure. This procedure is what is called “methodological naturalism” (MN).
These remarks stem from some interchanges I had with some believers about methodological naturalism.
“[E]ven if carbon emissions did increase the global temperature slightly, measures to reduce emissions would not be worth the sacrifice.”
Discussion