fm quoted-
Quote: I'm going to describe to you how Nature is - and if you don't like it, that's going to get in the way of your understanding it.
I have scrupulously avoided describing some important aspects of Nature for this precise reason. I am well aware that-
Quote: A little screen comes down
because I have seen it do so even when tangentially alluding to these aspects of Nature in polite company.And on EVERY occasion.
In fact it is a big screen in thickness as well as in length and breadth. And made of lead.
When I have confined myself to the milder end of the spectrum and offered a cursory scientific description of some of the processes taking place in a fancy restaurant on St Valentine's night I have been greeted with outraged indignation and been ostracised for my erudition. This explains the select company I keep in the pub and why our little group is avoided like the plague. Our reputation has been carried forth by those who have dipped a toe in our waters.
From such considerations it is quite easy to deduce that most scientific methodologists are indeed picking and choosing the grounds on which they make their intellectual stand and are thus "half-baked". This phrase means that they have been cooked over a low light rather than with a blow torch at three inches as I have. It is almost unnecessary to add that the grounds they do choose to stand upon is that which shows them in the best possible light.
Quote:[A scientific theory] describes Nature as absurd from the point of view of common sense.
Quite- and the role of religious belief is to referee the difficulty because without it the absurdities rise to the top. The mullahs and the ayathollas may well be crazy men but who knows what would be happening without them. A theologian, a proper one I mean, deduces from a study of unacceptable science the way forward for society and then offers other methods of achieving this without divulging the scientific principles on which his notions are based. And society is an alliance of sub societies having different ways forward depending upon economic circumstances, such as production of the budget or eating of it, tradition and geographical conditions combined with Nature's blessing of general all round greed and selfishness.
Subsidarity is an important ingredient of the glue which hold sub-societies together in a larger whole and it is best expressed, so far, by the ballot box. Judge Jones,in Dover, failed to give due weight to the fact that the school board had been elected. To dispute the bare fact of that on the grounds that they employed questionable tactics to get elected is quite a dangerous precedent as it could leave us leaderless if the argument was taken into wider fields. To dispute it on the grounds that chiclids blood clotting mechanisms behave in certain ways is to head into serious absurdity.
