CORRECTION: There IS A Big Problem With Many Religious “Scientists”

Last updated on: December 23, 2010 at 6:22 pm by Jeffrey L. Falick

CORRECTION: There IS A Big Problem With Many Religious “Scientists” 2010-12-23T18:22:00-05:00 Jeffrey L. Falick

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Yesterday I posted “Can An Astronomer Have Faith In The Bible?” It seems that in my naivete regarding the qualifications of certain religious scientists, I may have missed a very serious problem with these people. A reader, cipher, has better acquainted me with this issue.

I am an admirer of science and I’m a literate enough layperson, but I had no idea of the unbelievable subversion of real science that’s taking place these days and how some universities are complicit. It seems that there are other Gaskells out there, earning doctorates in a variety of scientific fields, only to throw out everything they’ve learned in favor of their faith in mythology.

Here’s a few links that cipher sent me to the popular site Pharyngula (the site’s linked to the right) to show you what I mean. In the first link, PZ Myers directly addresses the Gaskell case and makes the crucial point that:

I wouldn’t be at all surprised that Gaskell was exceptionally competent in the very narrow domain of his astronomical work, but faculty don’t get hired to do only one thing, and Gaskell himself is quite clear that he isn’t going to confine himself to talking only about his field…and unfortunately, it’s also clear that he was a confused and ignorant boob about all the other subjects he was happy to lecture about.

When I solely addressed his narrow competency in my previous post, I did not take all of this into account. Myers is 100% correct. In fact, I should have been more insulted by Gaskell’s crappy assertions about the bible than I was. I guess I’ve just gotten too used to that kind of misrepresentation.

In a post from 2009, cipher provided his own first-hand account of what happens when creationists receive these doctorates. He attended a lecture by Nathaniel Jeanson who took his Harvard Ph.D. and went to work for the Institute for Creation Research:

…[I]t was an hour-long spectacle of misinformation, half-truths and what appeared to be deliberate obfuscation. Most of this (probably all of it) you’ve heard before. He began by contrasting Evolutionary Theory and Creationism. Evolution, he said, admits only naturalistic explanations, discounts eyewitness testimony (i.e., the Bible) and insists upon uniformitarianism. Naturally, he sees these as weaknesses.

The bible is not eyewitness testimony to anything, much less creation. This was from the Q & A:

A young woman noted that he had no problem questioning the opinions of scientists, but that he seemed unwilling to question the Bible, which was written by poorly educated men 2,500 – 3,000 years ago. He replied that he’d studied the Bible extensively, had found it to be reliable and consistent, and that when he’d thought he’d found an inconsistency, it turned out to be the result of his own “wrong thinking….”

Anybody can twist the bible to mean anything. Only a scholarly critical textual approach, enhanced by verifiable archeological findings, can yield up any sense from the various texts called the bible. They came into being over a very long time, they frequently contradict each other, they are as political as they are religious (since the two were the same) and they reflect in every single way the world view of the Iron and Bronze Ages. Just as we would expect from such a collection.

Last Passover I had seder with another rabbi, not even Orthodox, who tried to show me how Genesis wonderfully foreshadowed scientific discoveries. I asked him if this included plants and light appearing before the sun. That shut him down fairly quick and this guy knows his bible.

I’m starting to realize that rabbis like him are relying on “professors” like Jeanson and Gaskell for their ridiculous interpretations of the bible. The fake scientists and the religious leaders feed on each other’s hokum.

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