reply to post by john_bmth
The scientfic community welcomes ideas supported by evidence, which is an approach this website could do with heeding. You only need to look at the
slow motion facepalm that is the perpeptual motion and e-cat threads to see people proclaiming and righteously defending psuedoscientific nonsense
completely and utterly devoid of evidence. Which of these two attitudes do you think it was that gave us the technological and medical advances we
enjoy today?
This is also incorrect, I would accept that this it the utopic view of science and what most would like to be the reality but reality and history does
not prove your optimistic outlook as valid.
Isaac Newton
Newton was a alchemist and a theologian those non-evidential based areas did not prevent him from making valid science (we could argue that had he not
spent time in those fields he would probably had been more useful). But as I stated science is made by scientists and as any other humans they are
bound by the societies that they inhabit, but the society that supports their work that most of the time has no immediate economic return.
Having said that I must agree that perpetual motion seems improbable and if we look on the problem seriously the issue is not in scientifically
pursue that field but on how society funds, even promotes and permits falsification of claims. Anyone can be a scientist it just suffices that the
scientific process is applied.
There is also a vary large difference between perpetual motion and things like the e-cat, they are based in very different sets of claims and so the
subjects just do not mix beyond the part regarding falsification of claims for profit that has nothing to do with science.
On should realize that there are no impossibles, lack of evidence does not by itself constitute a fact, the fact should be a prof regarding why there
are not evidences.
Which of these two attitudes do you think it was that gave us the technological and medical advances we enjoy today?
If you knew a bit the history of the scientific process (a class I had in university) it should become obvious that you know not what you are talking
about. Science evolved from pseudoscience, basically from pure philosophic thought. I would agree that science and the creation of the scientific
method has permitted to separate the fields but as I argued it does not immunize science against what I called cancers of society. (corruption,
religion, etc...)
I do not claim that a scientist can not be religious, but I certainly believe that certain sciences can be incompatible with religious
beliefs.
edit on 27-9-2012 by Panic2k11 because: clarification