Ben Carson on science - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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By csmcmillion
#14606953
Ben Carson proves that you can be:

1. Totally ignorant about science, and get into med school:

"Just the way the Earth rotates on its axis, how far away it is from the sun. These are all very complex things. Gravity, where did it come from?” - Dr. Ben Carson

“I find the big bang, really quite fascinating. I mean, here you have all these highfalutin scientists and they’re saying it was this gigantic explosion and everything came into perfect order. Now these are the same scientists that go around touting the second law of thermodynamics, which is entropy, which says that things move toward a state of disorganization" - Dr. Ben Carson

[as a Psychology major, he didn't even take University Physics I&II, let alone Thermodynamics]

2. A total religious nut case, and still be an MD:

“I personally believe that this theory that Darwin came up with was something that was encouraged by the adversary [Satan].” - Dr. Ben Carson

http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronom ... ience.html
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By Godstud
#14606955
Just because he has a doctorate in psychology, does not mean he is qualified to talk about science that is unrelated to his field of expertise. Such is the case. He's probably quite smart at psychology.

Trying to mix religion with science always makes people look dumb.
#14606972
Carson is speaking to the unknowns in science, and the effort by some in the scientific community, usually atheists, to bash anyone that doesn't go along with their prevailing theories. I think that's a reasonable position, given that scientific propaganda is starting to sound more and more like a political narrative.

csmcmillion wrote:"Just the way the Earth rotates on its axis, how far away it is from the sun. These are all very complex things. Gravity, where did it come from?” - Dr. Ben Carson

You have a problem with that? Life is pretty complex, and generally runs counter to the Second Law. Nobody is trashing the Second Law anymore than people would characterize Newton as an idiot, because he didn't account for precession. Today's atheists just don't like anybody questioning them, as they seem to think that science makes them political authorities.

cscmcmillion wrote:“I find the big bang, really quite fascinating. I mean, here you have all these highfalutin scientists and they’re saying it was this gigantic explosion and everything came into perfect order. Now these are the same scientists that go around touting the second law of thermodynamics, which is entropy, which says that things move toward a state of disorganization" - Dr. Ben Carson

Right. If we believe Darwin, species continue to evolve and specialize. Science shows that DNA accrues information over time. In that case, order is increasing. Complexity is increasing. Not disorder; not chaos. Basically, we don't have all the forces accounted for and so there is room for a lot of speculation.

cscmcmillion wrote:2. A total religious nut case, and still be an MD:

Modern medicine started out of religion. Do you think otherwise?

Godstud wrote:Just because he has a doctorate in psychology, does not mean he is qualified to talk about science that is unrelated to his field of expertise. Such is the case. He's probably quite smart at psychology.

Trying to mix religion with science always makes people look dumb.

Carson had a distinguished career as a brain surgeon.
By mikema63
#14607033
the chaos of the entire system increases, not local chaos. The energy from the sun powers biological order and the energy the sun produces comes from its entropy which far outweighs the increase in order.
By Rich
#14607054
We need to put the boot into Monotheism (metaphorically), not try to create scientific dogmas and scientific priesthoods. The bible is nonsense. There isn't even a Bible, there's Jewish scriptures, Muslim scriptures, Mormon scriptures and Christian scriptures. But even amongst the Christians, they disagree on which books make up the Bible. Then there's different textual versions and then no one can agree on what the translation of these mean. Its utterly, utterly absurd.

Science is not dogma, so it can't be defended as dogma. All we can do is go on the attack relentlessly and mercilessly at every opportunity pointing out the contractions, implausibilities and absurdities of the Monotheist religions. The same also goes for Libertarianism. Much of the attacks on the scientific mainstream are motivated by Libertarianism. We need to attack the absurdities of Libertarianism
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By Potemkin
#14607059
Much of the attacks on the scientific mainstream are motivated by Libertarianism. We need to attack the absurdities of Libertarianism

Indeed. The Libertarians seem to be repelled by the 'collectivist' nature of scientific knowledge and scientific endeavour. They are like the character in Dostoyevsky's Notes From Underground who rebels against basic facts about the world in the name of some perverse kind of adolescent individualism:

Dostoyevsky wrote:I agree that two times two makes four is an excellent thing; but if we are dispensing praise, then two times two makes five is sometimes a most charming little thing as well.

#14607310
mikema63 wrote:the chaos of the entire system increases, not local chaos. The energy from the sun powers biological order and the energy the sun produces comes from its entropy which far outweighs the increase in order.

I don't speak for Carson, but I'm sure the rebuttal would include something like suns forming in the first place from a big bang. If chaos is increasing for the entire system from the point of the singularity, how would local order happen in the first place? It would seem that a sun would not form. In the case of our sun, and life on Earth, minor changes in solar irradiance, distance from Earth to sun, Earth's axis etc. would completely wipeout life on Earth. That humans are introspective enough to realize that is interesting.

Rich wrote:We need to put the boot into Monotheism (metaphorically), not try to create scientific dogmas and scientific priesthoods. The bible is nonsense.

It's fine to have religious differences with people. Science, however, couldn't care less whether you believe in it or not. It's not a religion to begin with. People who use science to trash religion often fail to realize that some of the world's greatest scientists were theists. Einstein, Newton, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, and on and on were theists, not atheists. They were also all monotheists.

Rich wrote:Science is not dogma, so it can't be defended as dogma.

Well it's getting used in exactly that way. Otherwise, there would be no point in trashing Carson in view of science. There was life before the Big Bang theory, which was laughed at when it was suggested. A lot of people liked the Big Bang theory, because of the biblical Book of Genesis. Today, if you question the Big Bang, you get trashed. The people who do the trashing are using science as dogma. They are every bit as religiously oriented as the people they chastise. They're just using a different dogma.

Rich wrote:All we can do is go on the attack relentlessly and mercilessly at every opportunity pointing out the contractions, implausibilities and absurdities of the Monotheist religions.

Literary device isn't meant to be submitted to a logic test. 99% of movies are rubbish by that standard. So we should join the Taliban and kill all actors and movie moguls if we're to take that seriously. We should burn all literature, kill all poets, etc. We should champion ISIS destroying the Roman Arch in Palmyra if we're to believe such things.

Rich wrote:The same also goes for Libertarianism.

Libertarianism is really not a threat, because humans are social animals not individualists.

Rich wrote:Much of the attacks on the scientific mainstream are motivated by Libertarianism.

By that, I suppose you mean attacks on global warming orthodoxy? That is a classic case of politics posing as science. Al Gore being rich has nothing to do with Al Gore having talent. He's a mediocre person by most estimates. However, the political system rewards those who set up fleecing systems and Al Gore has been rewarded for his efforts. He's so fearful of his own predictions of sea level rise that he bought a place in the St. Regis Hotel in San Francisco, whose lobby will be under water if Gore's predictions come true.

See, I come out of computer science. Most of the data handling from HadCRU is deeply flawed as any hardcore techie can tell you. That means the rest of it is flawed too. What's also flawed are the feedback models that create wild temperature ranges that are physical impossibilities. If you add CO2 to the atmosphere, you will get some warming up to a saturation point. The runaway greenhouse effect from CO2 is a fraud in my estimation.

Potemkin wrote:Indeed. The Libertarians seem to be repelled by the 'collectivist' nature of scientific knowledge and scientific endeavour.

An airplane doesn't fly because you believe it flies. Your beliefs are entirely irrelevant to science. People are not concerned about a collection of scientific theories. They are concerned about people who want to base trillion dollar economic decisions designed to line their pockets at tax payers expense on political theories purporting to be science. The "Normative Scenarios" of the TAR would suffice as an excellent example of something that is not positive analysis of the data, but rather "wishful" or normative scenarios of those doing the scaremongering. I've been arguing that point for since around 2000, and every single year the predictions from the UN panel have been proven wrong. That does not dissuade these people from attacking non-believers in their propaganda. That is interesting precisely as I've suggested, because science does not need you to believe in it. People trying to influence you to acquiesce to their policy proposals do need you to believe them. So we are not talking about science. We are talking about politics.

Case in point. Carson is both a medical doctor and a politician. Why trash Carson on science? The obvious answer is politics.
By oscar
#14607349
blackjack21 wrote:
See, I come out of computer science. Most of the data handling from HadCRU is deeply flawed as any hardcore techie can tell you. That means the rest of it is flawed too. What's also flawed are the feedback models that create wild temperature ranges that are physical impossibilities. If you add CO2 to the atmosphere, you will get some warming up to a saturation point. The runaway greenhouse effect from CO2 is a fraud in my estimation.




So we should believe the "estimation" of a Computer science person ill-qualified to evaluate the effects of rising atmospheric CO2 levels rather than the "estimations" of thousands of climatologists in their respective areas of expertise ?
By mikema63
#14607358
I don't speak for Carson, but I'm sure the rebuttal would include something like suns forming in the first place from a big bang. If chaos is increasing for the entire system from the point of the singularity, how would local order happen in the first place? It would seem that a sun would not form. In the case of our sun, and life on Earth, minor changes in solar irradiance, distance from Earth to sun, Earth's axis etc. would completely wipeout life on Earth. That humans are introspective enough to realize that is interesting.


Chaos and order don't work exactly the same way in the universe as it does in our day to day lives. Now I'm studying biology not physics so anyone can correct me if I miss something, but entropy is an inverse to energy. So if energy is coming out of something entropy is increasing, and if something absorbs energy entropy is decreasing. When something falls into a gravity well it releases energy.

All the particles spread out in the early universe at the big bang fell towards each other and formed stars under the force of gravity. The spread out particles had less entropy than the stars. Since stars are more interesting than amorphous clouds of particles we tend to think of stars as having more order than spread out particles, but this is a problem of our intuitions. Entropy is a thermodynamic function, and doesn't always adhere to our intuitions.

Similarly H2O has more entropy than hydrogen and oxygen gas.
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By KlassWar
#14607359
blackjack21 wrote:People who use science to trash religion often fail to realize that some of the world's greatest scientists were theists. Einstein, Newton, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, and on and on were theists, not atheists. They were also all monotheists.


Them scientists lived in an era where being openly atheistic could be hazardous to one's health. When religion lost most of its coercive power, most intelligent people stopped pretending to believe in it.
By mikema63
#14607361
It's also not really an argument. Any reasonable argument has to rest on it's own merits, not on who did or did not agree with it.
#14607385
Ben Carson is a Creationist, and therefore has excluded himself from the group of people who should be listened to about scientific matters.

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