Plus ça change,...

British Establishment honours author for services to anti-Catholic bigotry and revisionist history.

Creation Myths

Over at Just Thomism, James Chastek has a nice post on scientific creation myth - in the sense of the stories that scientists tell themselves about the creation of the discipline and how it has apparently finally put paid to religious mythology as a source of truth. As he points out:

"Science in the popular imagination is idealized (science cannot explain everything or solve all our problems now, but just give it time!); and only its successes are seen as integral to it (i.e. vaccinations, space travel, and computers are seen as the direct and proper work of science while Hiroshima, Tuskegee, Mustard gas, scientific eugenics and sterilization programs, Josef Mengele, climate change, industrial pollution, etc. are never seen as the necessary products of “science”). IOW, this is obviously not a scientific view of science but one that makes it into an exalted, inerrant  messiah that will set everything right if we only give it our total devotion.  Ultimately, it’s not that we want to destroy creation myths with science but that we want to replace an ancient creation myth with a modern one."


This seems to me to be spot on. Anyone familiar with the history of the Galileo controversy cannot fail to appreciate how powerful the scientific creation myth has now become. despite being pretty much completely rejected by both historians and philosophers of science, it is nevertheless deeply embedded in the subconscious of almost all working scientists despite clear and historically compelling arguments to the contrary. (See the comments to this post on Geocentrism and the Galileo Affair by Thony Christie at The Renaissance Mathematicus for a hilarious example of this.) 

Hypatia and the Flight from Reality

Mike Flynn returns to one of his favorite topics and systematically takes apart the entry on Hypatia on the (so-called) RationalWiki. Again, it is rather like shooting fish in a barrel as the demolition is so comprehensive that it is clear that the poor individual, or group of individuals, who wrote the article had no understanding of any of the methods of historical analysis, such as, for example, the use of primary sources. It's a simple rehash of the anti-historical myths about the war between science and religion that produced the recent film Agora, which itself was the subject of a comprehensive analysis by Tim O'Neill on his old blog.

The post has a useful link to the TOF's previous writing on this matter in his Aulde Blogge.

More Modern Myths about Galileo

Thony Christie takes apart the recent paean to Galileo by Adam Gopnik that was published in the New Yorker.

The Galileo Farce

I despise Guardian writers even more than I despise Guardian readers who are a pretty moronic bunch (just see the comments here). I can't stand the smug, pseudo-intellectual, self-satisfaction that comes from the uncritical assumption that you are on "the right side of history" so that little things like facts and "the truth" don't matter.
A case in point is the lazy so-called journalism evident, this time, in the Science blog, which is torn to pieces with typical gusto by Thony Christie and Mike Flynn.