In science, a person who sets out to find evidence that Einstein was wrong, and succeeds, will have managed a great accomplishment, and while in the short term he will face a great deal of challenge, in the long term his theory will be reviewed and tested, challenged, and ultimately, if experiment bears it out, it will replace the existing dogma. Yes, it often takes a generation for a new scientific theory to take control of the mainstream, but this is a good thing. It is right that when a claim is unusual, it be examined rigorously and skeptically before it is embraced.

Compare this, however, to what would happen if some scholar decided to write a paper demonstrating that, for example, the pope was wrong about something. Or a paper arguing against a claim made in the bible. In religion, arguing against authority is simply impossible – no one would be reading the paper, testing its claims against those of the pope, and making thier decision based on the evidence. In a generation, the challenger would be, at best, forgotten. The only way religion is ‘reformed’ at all is by schism.

Ultimately, science is based on the idea that human understanding of the universe is perfectable in principle. Religion is based on the idea that it is perfect.

That being said, though, it is still the case that evolution is the only account of life that is evidentially-backed—and it is backed HUGELY, as you know. And there is no reason for this aside from the evidence. There is plenty of funding for people who want to disprove evolution. Despite this, the best that any of these anti-evolution people have come up with is Intelligent Design Creationism—a joke of a theory that depends on arguments from ignorance and willful ignorance of evolutionary biology.

Behaviourism may actually be a case in accordance with scientist-priestism. I’m not saying that it is, but it may well be. Behaviourism is now described as “the dark ages of the Cognitive Sciences”. I don’t know the entire history of it, though. I’m not sure why they were so against internal representations—other than saying that because we can’t see it, it’s not scientific. Actually, if I recall correctly, one of the reasons for the upholding of strict behaviourism was because a number of psychologists were trying to gain the respect of the other sciences. One way of doing this, they thought, was to focus more on materialism than on the airy-fairy mind. Behaviourism was knocked down by strong evidence for the need to posit internal representation, such as that by Chomsky who showed that linguistic grammars are rife with internal structure and cannot be learned in an unstructured empiricist manner.

Bill: Wow. Yes, I am closed-minded and blindly-enamored with science. Yes, that’s what I am. I’m sorry that my unwillingness to hold beliefs without evidence does not conform to your liking. What are these strong arguments against my views? What are the “smart” readings of the Bible? Where are these “mountains of scholarship that confirms it (the Bible) as being historically accurate”? Rather than being mountains, it appears more like a prairie land with the occasional hill being created by a house of cards that is taken down by the softest of sneezes.
And I like how you criticize science by comparing it to religion—it’s like you have an implicit understanding, though you won’t admit it, that religion is full of dogmatic anti-intellectual shit.

A large quantity of funding for various projects comes from private corporations, research that is bad for a company maybe denied publication or funding could be stopped, this creates a situation where it maybe necessary for a research to skew their results.

It has been documented and reported that a proportion of research paper contain false information, usually in the numbers obtained from the data, this is done to help skew the results so that they suit the hypothesis, obviously large changes are not necessarily made but there is a presence. Along with the point, as I am sure you will point out paper must be peer reviewed, which is true, but a reviewer is not going to know the results or expected results, they will be involved in the field and have an idea and understand of the procedures but will not be an expert on the experiment they are reviewing.

And now to the Science-Priest, these will be the most esteemed scientists in any of the many different fields, they hold a lot of power and influence, what they say will be taken as gospel till proved wrong. Of course most things are eventually proved wrong but there influence last for some time. Take for example the Behaviourists, as the predominate theory of the time those ‘Priests’ essentially prevented any research that went against it from even being conducted. The influence can still be found, look at research into animal emotions, which has only come back into favour in the last 10 years or so, it was held back by the Behaviourist-Priests.

My point being, just like a church where the people at the top control the information that goes out to the peons the scientific community and its Priest control the studies and funding that is possible. Of course there is a lot more to this but I’ll stop here. Evolution theory is no exception, look at how string theory has changed phyisics.

I agree that some atheists are resistant to evidence against atheism. When I encourage people to detach themselves from their beliefs (as such attachment is potentially dangerous in that it is a potential source of vulnerability, anxiety, dogmaticism, narrow-mindedness and social problems) as I often do on this blog, atheists are also in mind.

so why do they?