George wrote:
wrote in message
oups.com...


As Carl Sagan (hmm, I can hear booing and hissing in the penut gallery)
said:

They laughed at Galileo, they laughed at Columbus, they laughed at
Einstein and they laughed at Bozo the Clown too.

I'll just point out that it was religious zealots who laughed at
Galileo, competetors for state funds who laughed at Columbus,
Nazis who laughed at Einstein, and people who recognize a clown
when they see one who laughed at Bozo.

The latter folks, I daresay are the same ones who laugh at
"Creation Science" when they see "Intelligent Design".

Disengage yourself from the argumentative mode and read as if to understand
the writer, versus spin an unrelated set of paragraphs.

Every scientist does, in spite of your contention, have a belief set that
colors their skepticism and even denial of others' explanations of reality.
The source may be religion in the traditional sense, environmentalism, love
or hate of technology in general, tradition, even "political correctness" -
makes not a difference. The point is, nobody individually, nor science as
an entity, starts tabula rasa in evaluating observations. Wouldn't get far
if they did, because science presumes rules govern the universe, and they
use the rules as much to rule out as to predict.

OK, agreed.

I trust you will also agree that science as an institution and
scientists as people recognize this phenomenum to be a flaw,
even if they are blind to when they themselves personally
are guilty of it.

Which is why a major effort is made in science to adopt protocols
that protect against, among other things, observer bias.

It is also why there is peer review and why an editor of a peer-
reviewed Journal can justify returning without further comment,
a paper that alleges or draws conclusions about divine intervetion.
That is a pretty clear indicator that the author has crossed
the line between objectivity and religious/political beliefs.


Thus my choice of quotations. With Einstein, it was a dislike of
probability, or perhaps just a love of cause and effect that made him
disparage Heisenberg. That, and the term "God" were the reason I used the
quote. Sorry you missed it. Thought it was appropriate.

Understood. And thank you for the opportunity to elaborate further.

Please correct me if I am wrong but I do not think that Einstein
published his famous remark in a paper in a peer-reviewd journal.
Nor, I daresay did Einstein oppose the publication of papers in
Quantum Physics. Absent his own contributions to Quantum Physics
he almost certainly would not have received the Nobel Prize.

I am quite confident that, if called upon to review a paper
invoking as a natural mechanism or drawing a conclusions as
to divine intervention he would have recommended against
publication.

No one is arguing that scientists should not believe in God or
even be outspoken or religous issues even as they relate, in
a philosophic sense, to their work. The argument is that
a scientist should not intermingle religious explanations
with natural law itself. Religion and science are close
philosophic neighbors. Good fences make good neighbors.

Einstein never proposed "God does not play dice" as a natural
law.

--

FF