@Setanta,
How do you know his intentions? Is that a real scientific insight of yours?
I haven't followed all the nuances of this discussion, but I do know there is stuff out there in the public discorse, on both sides of the debate that appears to be the real subtext in this dialogue, that is labelled as science, but which involves very significant departures from the accepted norms for verifiable, fact-based scientific investigation and therorizing. How one labels the two is not of much interest to me, but one could indeed call them real or false science or real and defective or any number of other combinations, The point is that rational distinctions can indeed be made in specific cases. Broad generalizations become far more difficult and one can argue about them endlessly.
Human history and indeed the history of science itself reveals many occasions on which individual scientists and groups of them advocated many things in a most "unscientific" way, based on currently accepted norms. Nothing remarkable there in that scientists are human beings and subject to the frailties and errors that afflict us all. It's also possible that many of these things involved questions that cannot definately be answered by science, either then, now, or, perhaps in some cases, ever.
Lord Kelvin (Willian Thompson) famously denounced the early Scottish gerologists who, in the mid 19th century, first speculaterd that, based on their fossil findings, the earth was billions of years old, and not the many thousands then assumed. His reasoning (he was a thermodynamicist) that the sun could not possibly sustain its energy for such a period by any (then) known source. His fault (and error) was that, even then, enough was known to doubt that Newtonian physics was a lasting and complete description of the universe.
