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In which I announce my rejection of all scientific principles

In which I announce my rejection of all scientific principles

Last updated on: February 5, 2019 at 5:18 pm by Dan Peterson

In which I announce my rejection of all scientific principles 2019-02-05T17:18:21-07:00 Dan Peterson

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Obviously false, because it’s not in the Bible. (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

An extremely zealous anti-theist who typically comments many times each day on this blog insists that belief in God and in the continuation of personal life after death entails the rejection of every scientific principle, and that one must, accordingly, choose either theism or science. (He is, himself, no scientist. How surprising!)

I’ve told him more times than I can count or remember that he’s wrong. I’ve pointed to numerous examples of prominent scientists (including more than a few Nobel laureates) who are theists, presumably because they don’t realize that religious faith is utterly incompatible with a commitment to science.

But it’s been completely in vain. He knows better.

So I hereby throw in the towel. I reject all of the basic principles of science.

For instance, I hereby publicly announce my repudiation of Newton’s 2nd Law, F=ma, which means that the force (F) acting on an object is equal to the mass (m) of the object times its acceleration (a) — or, in other words, that the more mass an object has, the more force is needed to accelerate it. And the greater the force, the greater the object’s acceleration. Why do I reject Newton’s 2nd Law? That’s simple. I reject it because I believe the Book of Mormon to be inspired scripture.

I also repudiate the idea of gravity. Why? Easy! I denounce it because I believe that there is a God.

And the silly notion that germs cause disease? How absurd! After all, I believe in life after death, so the germ theory can’t be correct, any more than water can be made up of hydrogen and oxygen. (Instead, I propose a compound of carbon atoms and bleu cheese crumbles.)

And because I believe that Jesus rose from the grave, I denounce as utterly and completely false any notion that Avogadro’s number is 6.023 × 1023. Rather, I suggest 12. Or maybe 42.

I think that these sorts of admissions may be what my zealously anti-theist correspondent has in mind. I hope that he’s satisfied!

***

I find this entirely plausible. After all, I’m aware of entire sectors of the Internet that appear to be controlled by malignant extraterrestrials, and they must have arrived here somehow:

“Harvard prof doesn’t back down from claims that alien spacecraft may be zipping past Jupiter orbit”

On a more serious note: I may be missing something, but Professor Loeb merely seems to me to be entertaining a hypothesis. And why not? It likely won’t prove to be the correct one, but I’m a bit amused by what seems, at first glance, to be sheer dogmatic rejection on the part of some of his critics. Shouldn’t an open mind, a willingness to consider various possibilities on the basis of evidence, be one of the fundamental elements in science?

***

Other worlds:

“Titan’s oddly thick atmosphere may come from cooked organic compounds: Saturn’s moon is one of the best places to look for life in the solar system”

“A space rock collision may explain how this exoplanet was born: Convincing evidence for such collisions outside the solar system is rare”

***

If you’re not really concerned about weird life forms hovering above your head, though, maybe the strange creatures below your feet will catch your attention:

“Study finds bedrock is teeming with microorganisms protecting water quality”

***

This may help to account for me:

“New Star Map Reveals the Milky Way Is Warped”

***

If true, this counterintuitive but quite plausible idea has enormous implications in many areas, including public policy:

“The World Might Actually Run Out of People”

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