Archive for September, 2015

Religion Masquerading as Science

Posted by Steven Bryant On September - 19 - 2015

Here is an interesting article where a group of people essentially want to stone people who do not hold their belief.

This has happened before.  Once, there was a man named Galileo, who believed that the planets orbited the Sun, not the Earth.  His view ran counter to the prevailing view of the day, which was that the planets orbited the Earth.  Because he held a dissenting view, he was placed under house arrest until his death.  While we may think that being jailed for holding a different scientific opinion is a historical footnote, some modern people and groups hold the exact same mentality.

Today, if you talk about climate change, you may strike an extremely emotional chord with some. Groups that support climate change want to prosecute those who believe something else.  Belief, while extremely important in religion, is not scientific. The very notion that people want to prosecute those with differing points of view is dangerous. If any group – whether a supporter or a dissenter, cannot defend a position on scientific grounds and instead has to resort to punishment to advance their ideas, they cannot be called scientists.  They go by another name: zealots.

In Disruptive: Rewriting the Rules of Physics, I not only challenging Einstein’s theory of relativity, I show why it is wrong and where Einstein made specific mistakes.  There is no ambiguity or room for “interpretation.”  This book challenges the prevailing view. If left to the people who authored this letter,  I would face arrest, prosecution, and punishment.

Are ideas so frail that they cannot withstand challenge? Should theories be elevated to the point where they are unquestioned laws?

No. Scientific theories and interpretations of data must be able to withstand any challenge and question.  We must never stifle ideas, even those that we disagree with.