Discovery Institute: Science is Worthless

The Discoveroids — described in the Cast of Characters section of our Intro page — have just posted another anti-science rant by their latest star blogger, Denyse O’Leary. As we revealed in our last post about her inspiring work, The Copernican Principle, she’s a co-author of something titled The Spiritual Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Case for the Existence of the Soul (Amazon listing).

Denyse’s latest winner is But Surely We Can’t Conjure an Entire Advanced Extraterrestrial Civilization? It’s extremely bizarre, but that’s expected. Here are some excerpts, with bold font added by us and her links omitted:

Are doubts “anti-science”? Certainly, faith is urged on us as a duty. We read, “Finding planets outside our solar system that can sustain life should be made a top priority, say Australian astronomers,” because “Life, by managing its own environment, makes a planet habitable. It has produced adaptive features as a result of Darwinian evolution to live in colder and warmer environments.”

BWAHAHAHAHAHA! Denyse claims that “faith is urged on us as a duty” by those nasty scientists. And only the Discoveroids can save us from the evils of the scientists’ faith. We’re off to a great start! It gets better:

In 1961, astronomer Frank Drake proposed the Drake Equation to estimate the probability of life on other planets, with a view to finding intelligent life and advanced civilizations. With few hard numbers to plug in, the user can assign preferred values to estimate the probabilities.

Oh, the horror — the Drake equation is a way to quantify speculation that there may be life out there. And if there were such life, it would mean that the intelligent designer — blessed be he! — doesn’t particularly favor his wondrous creations here on Earth. This blasphemy must be suppressed! Or at least, the deranged prophets of science must be exposed as fools. That’s a task Denyse thinks she’s good at. Let’s read on:

His colleague, astronomy popularizer Carl Sagan (1934-1996), who likewise believed that we live in a crowded universe, riffed off the Copernican Principle in his sci-fi bestseller and 1997 extraterrestrials movie, Contact.

Gasp — Sagan wrote a science fiction novel! How horrible! What other atrocities has science committed? Denyse has more:

Absent evidence, speculations clash. Paleontologist Simon Conway Morris argues that aliens, if they exist, must be a lot like us. On the contrary, say others, they needn’t be like us at all. In any event, we may not be able to communicate with them. Fred Hoyle advanced the idea, in a novel, that they could be a black cloud of gas, floating through space. The Copernican principle rises above all such trivia by responding: They just must be out there.

In her obsession to show how foolish scientists are, Denyse cites another science fiction novel, this time from the 1950s — Fred Hoyle’s The Black Cloud. She goes on for a few more paragraphs with other “evidence,” and then says:

In this wilderness of unknowns, how do we decide what’s modern science and what’s modern folklore? Does ET vs. Bigfoot come down merely to the number and type of letters after one’s name?

We’re not at all certain what’s going on here, but it clearly demonstrates that the Discoveroids can’t distinguish science from fiction — or to be more specific, reality from fantasy. Denyse finishes her brilliant article like this:

In other science news —

Hold on a minute. A rant including references to two science fiction novels is “science news”? To the Discoveroids, so it would seem. Now let’s start that paragraph again:

In other science news, the Mars Rover still hasn’t detected methane (a possible indicator of life). …. Life is found everywhere we look on Earth but so far nowhere else. Meanwhile, the University of Georgia offers a course, “Extraterrestrial Intelligence: Where Are They,” to equip the student to “act as a main intellectual figure in any future ET dialogues they may have in the future.”

As always, the will to believe drives conjury. What happens when doubt sets in? Ah now, that would be telling …

[*Curmudgeon slowly shakes his head*] Okay, we’ve finished reading the thing, and we’re left wondering: What did she say?

We don’t even have a clue as to what Denyse was trying to say. It’s clear that her faith in the intelligent designer is fanatically opposed to life anywhere but on Earth. It’s also clear that she has utter contempt for scientists. We already knew that, otherwise the Discoveroids wouldn’t publish her writings. But as for her methodology (if that’s what it can be called), it seems to be — shall we say — somewhat deficient.

Copyright © 2013. The Sensuous Curmudgeon. All rights reserved.

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