https://www.thebrighterside.news/post/breakthrough-rocket-engine-could-accelerate-to-99-the-speed-of-light

Some people just don’t have a philosophical bent. Most scientists clearly don’t get it, though a few do. But they get by with it because we are taught to revere and defer to them. (I think one good development is that Fausti seems to have hurt that.)

I disagree. I’m well aware of C.S. Lewis’s books and his arguments, and of people who found him convincing. I have written about Lewis in this post. There are many comments there, too. My conclusion is that the vast majority of people convinced by his arguments were raised as Christians and are returning to the faith after some time away, and that Lewis’s arguments resonate with them for that reason and because they are emotionally ready to return.
_______

Totally misses the point, which Frederick saw. I was referring to Lewis’s own conversion. (Might also include his wife’s.)

Your immediate jump to “emotionally ready” is, frankly, what our culture teaches us to think. Oddly, people like Sagan are NEVER assumed to be emotionally tied to scientism. And they are.

And that’s a bad argument, anyway. One converted by argument was an Anglican theologian, now forgotten, named William Chillingworth. A very big part of his argument was that it really didn’t matter what was the role of a person’s feelings or motives. Once he’s stated his argument, it’s out there on its own, and should be analyzed solely on its merits. But we have been trained – and I’m afraid you’ve falling into this – to see religious people as somehow specially emotive in their beliefs. And its just not so. If you want to go there (and I don’t care for this) you will find that Bertrand Russell was himself the product of a long progressive lineage. Does that make him worthless as a thinker?

I’ve just been reading Waugh’s essays. He’s one who wasn’t; he also has an essay on Edith Stein, who wasn’t. This is just one of those bits of myth that is ingrained in our minds. A lot of learning is unlearning our assumptions.

“Argument” is another ambiguous word. Over the course of one’s life one may encounter thousands of “arguments” in books and articles, and one may find at some point that a new “argument” is closer to evidence or to one’s own experience than one’s old view. But an “argument” in the sense of a debate or an immediate personal exchange with someone of another opinion is extremely unlikely to change one’s opinion. There isn’t enough time for rumination and examining all of the evidence. That’s something one does by oneself, not at another’s command or urging.

My spouse has a rare genetic retinal disease. It was identified in her by a PhD researcher at OHSU Casey Eye Clinic. He went on to falsify research on the condition. The diagnosis is correct. The genetic test data are good, but he appeared to have falsified further research on the condition. Repeated, so you will understand.

He was fired, terminated, by OHSU and The Casey Eye Clinic.

Sometimes actions have consequences. You don’t know “all.” Science is hard.

I think your friend was able to consider the experience with the professor as a one-off. But once he’d been a doctor practicing for years, he’d relied on the CDC for many things and it was too threatening to see them as having been deceptive.

This person is also very much of the Dawkins-Sagan-et-al mind about “religion” vs “science.” I once had a long exchange with him in which I tried to get across the point I made above, that philosophical materialism is not the only point of view compatible with reason. His absolute imperviousness to the idea was exactly the sort of thing Sagan decries in those quotes. The combination of that and his reaction to the joke seems significant. Maybe that exaggerated reverence for science tending toward reverence for scientists is part of the reason “science is broken.”

Interesting how his own experience with blatant fraud wasn’t relevant to him in evaluating the CDC despite so much evidence that the CDC had been disastrously wrong.