Current science; fraudulent thinking (Introduction)

by David Turell , Wednesday, May 13, 2015, 01:18 (3482 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID (QUOTE) "To avoid the circular fallacy, logic dictates that the cause of nature must be supernatural. That, right there, logically falsifies scientism but it also establishes the requirement that the supernatural must be taken into account in humanity's pursuit of answers, 
 
> dhw: Until this paragraph, I thought the articles were spot on. I would also say we have no way of knowing how far science can take us along the path of knowledge, and much of so-called science contains as many just-so stories as religion. But to claim that the cause of nature must be supernatural and therefore God exists and therefore science (presumably the writer means atheistic scientists) turns a blind eye to God is just about as fallaciously circular as you can get!-I suspect you did not read the preceding paragraphs where he set up his argument:-http://www.agnosticweb.com/index.php?mode=posting&id=18691&back=entry-"First, distinguished philosopher of science, Philip Kitcher, argues that the notion of a scientific “theory of everything' ‘is an absurd fantasy'. The claim that science is the best and only trustworthy way to discover truth is, itself, not a scientific claim, but a philosophical claim. Thus, scientism is self-refuting from the outset, as the Skeptic's Dictionary and many others have pointed out-"A much more serious consequence of scientism is that it has had a significant, corrupting influence on 21st century science.-"Example One: Good science reveals that nature, composed of space, time, matter and energy, had a beginning. Scientism requires a natural explanation for the origin of nature, a logically impossible task. One cannot provide a natural explanation for the origin of nature without assuming the existence of nature in that ‘natural' explanation; a circular fallacy. The result is a variety of arcane string, M-brane, and multiverse theories that have been conflated with science but are now being exposed as fantasy and a threat to the integrity of physics. (my bold)-[ Interpretation: you can't get something from nothing]-"Example Two: A few years ago I was visiting with a razor-minded, atheist professor of biology at one of Canada's top-ranked universities. In the course of our conversation, he expressed great frustration over how rampant creative story-telling has become in the field of evolutionary biology, to fill in for what he believes is the colossal failure of neo-Darwinian theory to explain the large scale disparity of life. Nevertheless, motivated by scientism/atheism, Darwinism is the only game in town so the lack of empirical data and an increasing number of serious problems with the Darwinian account are compensated for by creative story-telling and a profound lack of critical thinking, as Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini point out."-I have referred to Fodor and P-P before.