10. There are several
reasons for so many falling all over themselves to extol, to praise.....dare I say 'worship' the 'science' of SWAG....'scientific wild ass guess' kind of science....such as these:
The Mulitiverse Theory
String theory
The Higgs boson
The universe created out of nothing.
a. There are more working 'scientists' today than ever before...and they
all need to put food on the table. Scientists they may be, but they are a variety of entrepreneur....they need employment, grants, stipends, etc. You get same by publishing 'research,' by thinking up avenues to investigate that haven't been investigated to death.
The irony is that many claim to be anti-capitalism.
Probability or even possibility of the investigation is secondary.
b. Then there are lots of folks who
claim to recognize the genius behind those fake/absurd endeavors. The further from reality and experience, the better. They need the claim to impress others, to appear informed, deeply knowledgeable...au fait.
There's that word for it:
"sci·o·lism A pretentious attitude of scholarship; superficial knowledgeability."
sciolism - definition of sciolism by The Free Dictionary
c.
And one more motivation....the least reputable one: the need to find a way to explain the creation of the universe, and how it works, without reference to a Creator. The scientists in this group are largely
atheist and, if not redundant, Marxist, a political view requiring atheism.
- Astrophysicist Fred Hoyle advanced the following after studying the resonances of carbon during nucleosynthesis. “The universe,” he concluded, “looks like a put-up job.” An atheist, Hoyle did not care to consider who might have put the job up, and when pressed, he took refuge in the hypothesis that aliens were the cause. In this master stroke he was joined later by DNA-discoverer, Francis Crick. When aliens are dropped from the argument, there remains a very intriguing question: Why do the constants and parameters of theoretical physics obey such tight constraints?
- Physicist Leonard Susskind wrote “If, for some unforeseen reason, the landscape turns out to be inconsistent — maybe for mathematical reasons, or because it disagrees with observation — I am pretty sure that physicists will go on searching for natural explanations of the world. But I have to say that if that happens, as things stand now we will be in a very awkward position. Without any explanation of nature’s fine-tunings we will be hard pressed to answer the ID [intelligent design] critics. One might argue that the hope that a mathematically unique solution will emerge is as faith-based as ID.”
As I stated earlier.
- And some will let the 'cat out of the bag,' admitting that any craziness will do, no matter how preposterous,......
“We take the side of science in spite of the
patent absurdity of some of its constructs,” the geneticist Richard Lewontin remarked equably in
The New York Review of Books, “in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of
the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories.” We are to put up with science’s unsubstantiated just-so stories because, Lewontin explains, “
we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door!”
His words, not mine.
Here's hoping that some day, in the near future, science will re-discover science.