Here is how Empirical science describes itself, and note, it does not classify itself as empirical science, but rather as science, the definition of which is examining reality: Science is open-ended and free, pursuing the evidence wherever it leads. Scientific conclusions are falsifiable (more on this later), open to further inquiry, and revised as new data emerge (contrast with column 23-05). Science is free of dogma, intolerance, censorship, and persecution.
Actually, empirical science is a closed project designed to protect incomes and grants, it is not open to any inquiry, it saves itself (i.e. protects itself against falsification at every point), it's not only not free of dogma, it is dogma, it is intolerant of any new ideas that disagree with its dogma, it practices censorship on a basis unknown since the middle ages of Western church domination and boy does it persecute anyone who endangers its rape of money from the public treasury.
Case in point, Stephen Meyer. Readers of these columns have met Mr. Meyers in column 30-05, but the issue is one covered in column 09-05 dealing with evolution. Mr. Meyers, holding a PhD from Cambridge, is the driving force behind Intelligent Design. I don't agree with the ID people, as noted in the column, but I certainly understand how clever they are. After all, the laws at the foundation of empirical science were made up by men who held a deep belief in a divine entity that created the laws. Just claiming that there are laws assumes a divinity. However, empirical science denies the existence of a divinity while claiming the existence of universal laws. Pretty stupid. The ID people are capitalizing on that stupidity, and doing a pretty good job of it.
Meyers wrote an article, "The Origin of Biological Information and the Higher Taxonomic Categories." The article deals with the Cambrian explosion of different forms of life appearing in the geologic record. I, of course, explain this in The Cooling Continuum as being the result of the environment cooling, with a corresponding lessening of gravity, causing extinctions for one form of life and opportunities for new forms of life. Meyers argues that the spontaneous generation of many life forms argues against Darwin's notion of evolution and demonstrates the existence of a higher power that produces the life. I take the position that it is characteristics that evolve, not species, and given the opportunity of environment, heat and gravity, the characteristics will produce a species that is compatible with the environment.
In the event, Meyers submitted his paper to the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, which is a scientific journal associated with the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History (a place where I spent many hours exploring exhibits until it became a politically correct project, although to tell the truth, on my last visit, which was a decade ago, they still had the offensive bare breasted cave dwelling women working away).
Now here's where it gets interesting. The editor, Rick Sternberg, with a couple of PhDs under his belt, forwarded Meyers' article to three peer reviewers. Column 23-05 reveals what I think of the peer review function, but these peer reviewers felt that with certain revisions, not related to ID, the article was an important contribution and should be published. Meyers made the revisions and Sternberg published the article.
The outrage in the empirical community was instantaneous. The American Association for the Advancement of Science, completely under the control of didactic idiots, condemned in its rag Science not the article mind you, but the fact that it was published. Sternberg immediately stepped down as editor, but that wasn't enough for these vicious vampires. He was tossed out of his office at the Smithsonian and cut off from the collections he used for research. In addition, he's being subjected to the old religious practice of shunning, with no one talking to him, eating lunch with him, saying hello, or even car pooling.
That, however, isn't the half of it. He was basically fired after his contract expired, the Smithsonian attempted NIH to fire him immediately, his political and religious beliefs were investigated, he was smeared by false allegations concerning both his professional and private life and, get this you McCarthy haters, he was pressured to reveal the names of the peer reviewers so they could also be retaliated against.
Does this recent (2003) witch hunt justify my description of the way empirical science operates? I think so. They are a pack of mindless attack dogs that have taken some stupidities thought up hundreds of years ago and turned them into a moneymaking machine, and they're not about to give up the luxurious lifestyles, the ego producing awards, that they're able to bilk out of a gullible public that thinks they are actually producing something.
Just how gullible are we?
This year, Roy Glauber received a Noble prize in physics for producing a mathematical structure that explained empirical science's ultimate stupidity, that light is both a wave and a particle. Self-referential awards are part and parcel of empirical science's scam, but this one was particularly interesting. It was widely reported that Glauber's insights led to a whole field of technological innovations. What were these innovations? Well, John Huth, the chairman of Harvard's physics department outlined them in detail. He said the mathematical structure opened a rich vein of gold that is being mined to this day.
Well, we know all about the gold.
He then went on to say, from the ultraprecise measurement of time (hmmm, let's see, we measuring time) to the accurate determination of the color emitted by molecules (oh, molecules emit color?) and someday to the invention of multi-dimensional holographic movies (can hardly wait), the mathematical constructs, now here's the real punch line, made modern optics possible.
How in the world does a mathematical structure produce modern optics?
Here empirical science is creating a self-referential award, and then claiming that some hocus pocus is at the basis of a specific technology won with great sweat over a period of years by simple trial and error. It's the classical trick of empirical science, take technology that was created in spite of its ironclad theories, make up some sort of mathematical hocus pocus that only a few can understand to explain it conceptually, then award the person that made up the mathematical hocus pocus with high honors, claiming that the hocus pocus led to the technology.
And we buy it, hook, line and sinker.
Moving on to falsification, this was a Karl Popper test I described in column 25-05. Popper was trying to explain why Freud's theories were not the same as Einstein's theory, which he greatly admired. He said Einstein's theory was a valid scientific theory because it could be proven to be wrong while Freud's theories were like chameleons, they could just be changed to fit the circumstances. Empirical science as a whole hasn't been too warm to Popper, perhaps because none of its basic tenants can be proved, and in fact, like Freud, they simply evolve to fit the circumstances, a process empirical science calls saving the theory.
The first great chameleon change occurred when it was found Newton's proof for mass/gravity didn't work anywhere in the solar system. Newton's use of size to predict orbits simply didn't work, and thus the proposition that gravity was a property of and proportional to matter was never proven. Empirical science simply turned it around, saying, well, we know Newton was right, he was just not using the formula correctly. Instead of matter predicting orbits, we can use orbits to predict matter, something, of course, which could never be verified and thus, in Popper's term, something that could not be falsified.
The Darwinists did adopt Popper, strangely enough, immediately proving it was not a science by demonstrating that the theory of evolution wasn't falsifiable. Darwin predicted that we would never see evolution in the geologic record, but by the 20th Century, that's all we saw, with populations of species suddenly appearing ( the subject of Meyers article). To save the theory, Harvard's Gould said, well, hey, it's the result of punctuated equilibrium, where species evolved out of sight then exploded into sight. After proving that evolution wasn't falsifiable, every time someone challenged evolution, Gould's favorite saying was, where's the falsification. Thus, when Sternberg published Meyer's article, he was told he shouldn't have published an article criticizing evolution because the AAAS, whose letters might well stand for the American Association for the Advancement of Stupidity instead of science, had proclaimed that Intelligent Design was "unscientific by definition." The definition it is unscientific by, of course, is that no reputable scientist disagrees with it.
Which is further demonstration that it is a belief and therefore part of an empirical science that is a religion. Evolution is not open to development simply because the species part of it is totally ingrained in the empirical religion. Despite all the evidence that developed in the 20th Century that indicates evolution is actually the evolution and transmission of characteristics, empirical science holds to its basic belief established by a guy that didn't even know about heredity.
Although empirical science illustrates its religious nature in every field of its endeavor, from the ice ages, to uniformitarianism, to the wave/particle nature of light, I find it quite amusing in the field of archaeology, starting with the great pyramid. Anyone visiting the pyramids will be amazed at the size of the blocks put together into the pyramids, but there is an even greater mystery. Apparently the pyramids were built on older ruins because they sit among quarried and fitted slabs of rock that are simply huge. An interesting feature of these slabs is, they can be found all over the world, from South American, and Mexico, to the Arab peninsula. They are sometimes found under seven or eight later layers of cities built on top of them. They are, by any consideration, old, very, very old, and appearing all over the world, they appear to be the product of a civilization that was old, very, very old.
So the natural conclusion would be, there was an ancient civilization at one time and that civilization was wiped out by the flood described in over 600 stories from societies all over the world. But not to the religion of empirical science. Empirical science is a religion simply because its goal was to replace the religion that existed in 17th Century Europe. Thus, if the bible had a story in it, that story could not be given credence. One of the stories in the bible is the story of the flood that wiped out civilization on Earth. The new religion of empirical science couldn't credit that story, so when not only similar ruins started showing up, but massive evidence for the flood started showing up, it had to scramble to come up with some dogma.
The evidence for the flood became the today unexplainable ice age, the history of humanity became one of cave dwellers emerging after the ice age, and the remains of the ancient civilization became the artifacts of local groupings of these cave dwellers who somehow performed feats beyond our ability today, but did so in identical fashion independently from one another.
The goal of all religion is to keep its adherents ignorant, and empirical science is succeeding in keeping us ignorant, claiming credit in the meantime for the strokes of genius that, by defying its tenets, actually produce useful technology.
Addendum: On August 5, 2005, the U.S. Office of Special Counsel found that all of the charges Sternberg claimed had merit. There was a big "but" however, and it's a "but" that allows empirical science to persecute away to its heartless content. The Special Counsel concluded that while the Smithsonian was in violation of a number of things, including the 1st Amendment, it had no power to tell the Smithsonian what or what not to do, so all the complaining is for naught. How's that as an example of supreme religious authority? Untouchable!
Peter Bros is the author of the 9 volume Copernican Series and is President of The Far Museum of Dallas, an actual history museum, which will house its collection of 50,000 rare Eastern Mediterranean manuscripts and artifacts together with actual history displays and tours in a full-sized replica of the Egyptian Temple at Dendera to be built in the Dallas Ft. Worth area. Email:peterbros@therealskeptic.com