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Re: [Pen-l] Jared Diamond and the New Yorker, part 2


On May 8, 2009, at 8:30 PM, Louis Proyect wrote:

I have no idea how you can describe "creationism" as science. You might as well describe astrology, numerology, pataphysics, astral projectionism and coffee enemas as science.

What is astrology doing in this list? Astrologers work on the basis of a definite theoretical structure to make predictive propositions about the human world of a sort that on the basis of their experience have been believed by people, over hundreds of generations, to be valid in practice.  Those propositions are definitely subject to rigorous empirical tests--which have, in fact, never been performed.  That astrology's theoretical structure finds no place among the theoretical structures of the "respectable" sciences in no way negates the fact that it is, in principle, scientific.  Empirical testing could invalidate--or (perish the thought) confirm it.


Shane Mage

This cosmos did none of gods or men make, but it
always was and is and shall be: an everlasting fire,
kindling in measures and going out in measures."

Herakleitos of Ephesos
 

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