Re: Bias in Science, Part 2

Randy Isaac wrote:

> Let us pretend that we are peer-reviewers of Baumgardner's paper. I'm not
> an expert in the field, haven't taken a lot of time to do the analysis, nor
> have I consulted with the author so this must be viewed as a high-level
> first-pass perspective rather than an in-depth, definitive assessment.
>

I fully agree with your analysis [deleted to shorten the
post], but let me play the
devil's advocate for a moment. Most of us on this list
are down right fed up and tired of creationism
masquerading as science, so I can certainly feel some cheap
satisfaction in seeing this kind of tripe thoroughly
thrashed.

But it might be useful to give some thought to the following
questions:

(1) Let's just say for sake of argument that the creationists
are right (as you know, I don't believe they are, but let's
just suppose that they are right). In what way would the paper
be different if the reported discrepancy revealed actually
is a serious flaw in our well established model?

(2) Suppose that someone in our own ranks that we all respect
and care about is promoting nonsense. First, what is our
typical response and second, what do we say when we find
after considerable reflection that we really cannot agree?

I don't think these are minor points either. There are times that
other scientists we really do respect, are wrong. Sometimes
very wrong. Likewise, we ourselves can be very wrong as well.
A problem as prosaic as creationist writing seems to almost insure
automatically that it is wrong, but we must also be careful not to
reject everything simply because it is different and does not
test every imaginable avenue.

By Grace alone we proceed,
Wayne
 
Received on Tue May 31 11:39:19 2005