Book Burning

[Thorne]

Belief in "science" only can result in the same blind devotion to a particular adherent's views as any religion.

One of the problems with the English language is that there are different ways to interpret belief. You can "believe" something is true, even without evidence. Or you can "believe" something is true BECAUSE of the evidence. In religions belief tends to be absolute ("there is a god, and he is good") despite the lack of evidence. (However, check into the status of Limbo and Purgatory: they've changed what they believe about them, haven't they?) In science belief tends to be more tentative (this theory explains how gravity works, and all the evidence to date agrees with it, so we believe this theory is accurate). The difference is that, should evidence come along which contradicts that theory it will have to be modified or discarded to account for that new evidence. In religion, where we have no evidence to begin with, any evidence which contradicts the belief system is automatically wrong.

So when I say I believe in evolution, I'm really saying that, as far as I can understand it, the evidence FOR evolution is strong, and scientists I have come to trust can explain the processes of evolution far better than I can. However, if someone should come up with clear evidence that humanity was created by a supernatural being 6000 years ago, and have clear evidence to explain away all the evidence FOR evolution, AND that evidence can be seen, measured and tested by other scientists, who come up with the same results, then I would have to change my position. Saying "God did it because the Bible says he did it, and the Bible is the inerrant word of God because God tells us it is, in the Bible" is NOT evidence.

The Anthropomorphic Global Warming crowd has blindly fallen in behind a group of "researchers" using primarily computer models to "prove" agw. Why? Follow the money.

And I counter that by saying, follow the money to those who are denying AGW, or even denying global warming itself. You'll find they have far more to gain from denying AGW than those "researchers" who are studying it.

And those computer models don't necessarily prove AGW. They take the available data and show us what is happening, and they use available information to predict where the current trends are going. Those researchers themselves will tell you it is not an exact science, by any means. But many different programs, using many different sets of data, are all pointing in the same direction. And it is not just a single group of researchers, but many different groups, studying many different areas of climate science, all coming up with similar results. And it has become very clear that there is a very strong correlation between rising global temperatures and rising levels of greenhouse pollutants from human activity. It is the study of how those greenhouse gases work, and the amounts of them we are dumping into the atmosphere, which suggests very strongly that the correlation is indicative of causation. It's like doing an autopsy on a man who has been shot in the head and finding out that he had a massive heart attack at about the time of death, and that he was also in the end stages of lung cancer. What really killed him?