Scientific Investigation Quotes

When scientifically investigating the natural world, the only thing worse than a blind believer is a seeing denier.

We are fascinated, all of us, by the implacable otherness of others. And we wish to penetrate by hypothesis, by daydream, by scientific investigation those leaden walls that encase the human spirit, that define it and guard it and hold it forever inaccessible.

Now, the invention of the scientific method and science is, I'm sure we'll all agree, the most powerful intellectual idea, the most powerful framework for thinking and investigating and understanding and challenging the world around us that there is, and that it rests on the premise that any idea is there to be attacked and if it withstands the attack then it lives to fight another day and if it doesn't withstand the attack then down it goes. Religion doesn't seem to work like that; it has certain ideas at the heart of it which we call sacred or holy or whatever. That's an idea we're so familiar with, whether we subscribe to it or not, that it's kind of odd to think what it actually means, because really what it means is 'Here is an idea or a notion that you're not allowed to say anything bad about; you're just not. Why not? - because you're not!

No government has the right to decide on the truth of scientific principles, nor to prescribe in any way the character of the questions investigated. Neither may a government determine the aesthetic value of artistic creations, nor limit the forms of literacy or artistic expression. Nor should it pronounce on the validity of economic, historic, religious, or philosophical doctrines. Instead it has a duty to its citizens to maintain the freedom, to let those citizens contribute to the further adventure and the development of the human race.

When we speak of man, we have a conception of humanity as a whole, and before applying scientific methods to the investigation of his movement we must accept this as a physical fact. But can anyone doubt to-day that all the millions of individuals and all the innumerable types and characters constitute an entity, a unit? Though free to think and act, we are held together, like the stars in the firmament, with ties inseparable. These ties cannot be seen, but we can feel them. I cut myself in the finger, and it pains me: this finger is a part of me. I see a friend hurt, and it hurts me, too: my friend and I are one. And now I see stricken down an enemy, a lump of matter which, of all the lumps of matter in the universe, I care least for, and it still grieves me. Does this not prove that each of us is only part of a whole? For ages this idea has been proclaimed in the consummately wise teachings of religion, probably not alone as a means of insuring peace and harmony among men, but as a deeply founded truth. The Buddhist expresses it in one way, the Christian in another, but both say the same: We are all one. Metaphysical proofs are, however, not the only ones which we are able to bring forth in support of this idea. Science, too, recognizes this connectedness of separate individuals, though not quite in the same sense as it admits that the suns, planets, and moons of a constellation are one body, and there can be no doubt that it will be experimentally confirmed in times to come, when our means and methods for investigating psychical and other states and phenomena shall have been brought to great perfection. Still more: this one human being lives on and on. The individual is ephemeral, races and nations come and pass away, but man remains. Therein lies the profound difference between the individual and the whole.

...What I have denied and what my reason compels me to deny, is the existence of a Being throned above us as a god, directing our mundane affairs in detail, regarding us as individuals, punishing us, rewarding us as human judges might. When the churches learn to take this rational view of things, when they become true schools of ethics and stop teaching fables, they will be more effective than they are to-day... If they would turn all that ability to teaching this one thing – the fact that honesty is best, that selfishness and lies of any sort must surely fail to produce happiness – they would accomplish actual things. Religious faiths and creeds have greatly hampered our development. They have absorbed and wasted some fine intellects. That creeds are getting to be less and less important to the average mind with every passing year is a good sign, I think, although I do not wish to talk about what is commonly called theology. The criticisms which have been hurled at me have not worried me. A man cannot control his beliefs. If he is honest in his frank expression of them, that is all that can in justice be required of him. Professor Thomson and a thousand others do not in the least agree with me. His criticism of me, as I read it, charged that because I doubted the soul’s immortality, or ‘personality,’ as he called it, my mind must be abnormal, ‘pathological,’ in other, words, diseased... I try to say exactly what I honestly believe to be the truth, and more than that no man can do. I honestly believe that creedists have built up a mighty structure of inaccuracy, based, curiously, on those fundamental truths which I, with every honest man, must not alone admit but earnestly acclaim. I have been working on the same lines for many years. I have tried to go as far as possible toward the bottom of each subject I have studied. I have not reached my conclusions through study of traditions; I have reached them through the study of hard fact. I cannot see that unproved theories or sentiment should be permitted to have influence in the building of conviction upon matters so important. Science proves its theories or it rejects them. I have never seen the slightest scientific proof of the religious theories of heaven and hell, of future life for individuals, or of a personal God. I earnestly believe that I am right; I cannot help believing as I do... I cannot accept as final any theory which is not provable. The theories of the theologians cannot be proved. Proof, proof! That is what I always have been after; that is what my mind requires before it can accept a theory as fact. Some things are provable, some things disprovable, some things are doubtful. All the problems which perplex us, now, will, soon or late, be solved, and solved beyond a question through scientific investigation. The thing which most impresses me about theology is that it does not seem to be investigating. It seems to be asserting, merely, without actual study. ...Moral teaching is the thing we need most in this world, and many of these men could be great moral teachers if they would but give their whole time to it, and to scientific search for the rock-bottom truth, instead of wasting it upon expounding theories of theology which are not in the first place firmly based. What we need is search for fundamentals, not reiteration of traditions born in days when men knew even less than we do now. [Columbian Magazine interview]

I want to pause here and talk about this notion of consensus, and the rise of what has been called consensus science. I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had. Let's be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus. There is no such thing as consensus science. If it's consensus, it isn't science. If it's science, it isn't consensus. Period.

The value the world sets upon motives is often grossly unjust and inaccurate. Consider, for example, two of them: mere insatiable curiosity and the desire to do good. The latter is put high above the former, and yet it is the former that moves one of the most useful men the human race has yet produced: the scientific investigator. What actually urges him on is not some brummagem idea of Service, but a boundless, almost pathological thirst to penetrate the unknown, to uncover the secret, to find out what has not been found out before. His prototype is not the liberator releasing slaves, the good Samaritan lifting up the fallen, but a dog sniffing tremendously at an infinite series of rat-holes.

If I had stopped asking questions, that’s where I would have remained.

The fact that the scientific investigator works 50 percent of his time by nonrational means is, it seems, quite insufficiently recognized.

Would it not be strange if a universe without purpose accidentally created humans who are so obsessed with purpose? Sir John Templeton.

The best way to avoid abuses is for the populace in general to be scientifically literate, to understand the implications of such investigations. In exchange for freedom of inquiry, scientists are obliged to explain their work. If science is considered a closed priesthood, too difficult and arcane for the average person to understand, the dangers of abuse are greater. But if science is a topic of general interest and concern - if both its delights and its social consequences are discussed regularly and competently in the schools, the press, and at the dinner table - we have greatly improved our prospects for learning how the world really is and for improving both it and us.

The rules of scientific investigation always require us, when we enter the domains of conjecture, to adopt that hypothesis by which the greatest number of known facts and phenomena may be reconciled.

Cultivate an intellectual habit of subordinating one's opinions and wishes to objective evidence and a reverence for things as they really are.

I am all in favour of science and reason if they are scientific and reasonable. But I am against granting scientists and the materialist worldview an exemption from critical thinking and sceptical investigation. We need an enlightenment of the Enlightenment.17

The scientific investigator, in seeking an explanation for Mrs. Gunness’ unnatural crimes, would say that she was emotionally dead,” Munsterberg wrote.

The ultimate goal of Pythagorean and Platonic philosophy was assimilation to god through the cultivation of virtue and truth. It meant a return to the first principles reached through philosophical education (paideia) and recollection (anamnesis), scientific investigation, contemplation, and liturgy (or theurgic ascent), based on the ineffable symbols and sacramental rites.

When asked whether or not we are Marxists, our position is the same as that of a physicist, when asked if he is a “Newtonian” or of a biologist when asked if he is a “Pasteurian.” There are truths so evident, so much a part of the peoples’ knowledge, that it is now useless to debate them. One should be a “Marxist” with the same naturalness with which one is a “Newtonian” in physics or a “Pasteurian.” If new facts bring about new concepts, the latter will never take away that portion of truth possessed by those that have come before. Such is the case, for example, of “Einsteinian” relativity or of Planck’s quantum theory in relation to Newton’s discoveries. They take absolutely nothing away from the greatness of the learned Englishman. Thanks to Newton, physics was able to advance until it achieved new concepts of space. The learned Englishman was the necessary stepping-stone for that. Obviously, one can point to certain mistakes of Marx, as a thinker and as an investigator of the social doctrines and of the capitalist system in which he lived. We Latin Americans, for example, cannot agree with his interpretation of Bolivar, or with his and Engels’ analysis of the Mexicans, which accepted as fact certain theories of race or nationality that are unacceptable today. But the great men who discover brilliant truths live on despite their small faults and these faults serve only to show us they were human. That is to say, they were human beings who could make mistakes, even given the high level of consciousness achieved by these giants of human thought. This is why we recognize the essential truths of Marxism as part of humanity’s body of cultural and scientific knowledge. We accept it with the naturalness of something that requires no further argument.

I think the educational and psychological studies I mentioned are examples of what I would like to call cargo cult science. In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they’ve arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas—he’s the controller—and they wait for the airplanes to land. They’re doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn’t work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they’re missing something essential, because the planes don’t land.

While standardized tests can certainly be useful for scientifically investigating the mind and brain, and can greatly inform educational interventions, there’s no reason why educators or anyone else for that matter needs to compare the intelligence of one person to another based on a single dimension of human variation.

Our universe is a sorry little affair unless it has in it something for every age to investigate.

Christians often ask why God does not speak to them, as he is believed to have done in former days. When I hear such questions, it always makes me think of the rabbi who was asked how it could be that God often showed himself to people in the olden days while nowadays nobody ever sees him. The rabbi replied: "Nowadays there is now longer anybody who can bow low enough." This answer hits the nail on the head. We are so captivated by and entangled in our subjective consciousness that we have forgotten the age-old fact that God speaks chiefly through dreams and visions. The Buddhist discards the world of unconscious fantasies as useless illusions; the Christian puts his Church and his Bible between himself and his unconscious; and the rational intellectual does not yet know that his consciousness is not his total psyche. This ignorance persists today in spite of the fact that for more than 70 years the unconscious has been a basic scientific concept that is indispensable to any serious psychological investigation.

The scientific study of suffering inevitably raises questions of causation, and with these, issues of blame and responsibility. Historically, doctors have highlighted predisposing vulnerability factors for developing PTSD, at the expense of recognizing the reality of their patients' experiences… This search for predisposing factors probably had its origins in the need to deny that all people can be stressed beyond endurance, rather than in solid scientific data; until recently such data were simply not available… When the issue of causation becomes a legitimate area of investigation, one is inevitably confronted with issues of man's inhumanity to man, with carelessness and callousness, with abrogation of responsibility, with manipulation and with failures to protect.

There were no footmarks.' 'Meaning that you saw none?' 'I assure you, sir, that there were none.' 'My good Hopkins, I have investigated many crimes, but I have never yet seen one which was committed by a flying creature. As long as the criminal remains upon two legs so long must there be some indentation, some abrasion, some trifling displacement which can be detected by the scientific searcher.

There is no reason for a sound faith to be irrational. A useful faith should not be blind, but should be well aware of its grounds. A sound faith should be able to use scientific investigation to strengthen itself. it should be open to the spirit not to lock itself up in the letter. A nourishing, useful, healthful faith should be no obstacle to developing a science of death.

Apparently the age of romance was not dead, and there was common ground upon which the wildest imaginings of the novelist could meet the actual scientific investigations of the searcher for truth.

Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, 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, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. [Billions and Billions of Demons - JANUARY 9, 1997 ISSUE]

Science and faith are not at war. When scientific evidence and biblical teaching are correctly interpreted, they can and do support each other. I’d say to anyone who doubts that: investigate the evidence yourself.

It’s becoming clearer and clearer to me that this is materialistic philosophy masquerading as empirical science. The attitude is that life had to have developed this way because there’s no other materialistic explanation.

Orthodox Marxism, therefore, does not imply the uncritical acceptance of the results of Marx’s investigations. It is not the ‘belief’ in this or that thesis, nor the exegesis of a ‘sacred’ book. On the contrary, orthodoxy refers exclusively to method. It is the scientific conviction that dialectical materialism is the road to truth and that its methods can be developed, expanded and deepened only along the lines laid down by its founders. It is the conviction, moreover, that all attempts to surpass or ‘improve’ it have led and must lead to over-simplification, triviality and eclecticism.

But at the same time, there must never be the least hesitation in giving up a position the moment it is shown to be untenable. It is not going too far to say that the greatness of a scientific investigator does not rest on the fact of his having never made a mistake, but rather on his readiness to admit that he has done so, whenever the contrary evidence is cogent enough.

Think about it, Lee - we already know that intelligent minds produce finely tuned devices. Look at the space shuttle. Look at a television set. Look at an internal combustion engine. We see minds producing complex, precision machinery all the time. So the existence of a supermind - or God - as the explanation for the fine - tuning of the universe makes all sense in the world.

Just as the dignity of man is based on his freedom--to the extent that he may even say no to God--likewise, the dignity of a science is based on that unconditional freedom which guarantees its independent search for truth. And just as human freedom must include the freedom to say no, so the freedom of scientific investigation must face the risk that its results will turn out to contradict religious beliefs and convictions. Only a scientist who is ready to fight militantly for such an autonomy of thought may triumphantly live to see how the results of his research eventually fit, without contradictions, in the truths of his belief.

If it's true there's a beginning to the universe, as modern cosmologists now agree, then this implies a cause that transcends the universe. If the laws of physics are fine-tuned to permit life, as contemporary physicists are discovering, then perhaps there's a designer who fine-tuned them. If there's information in the cell, as molecular biology shows, then this suggests intelligent design. To get life going in the first place would have required biological information; the implications point beyond the material realm to a prior intelligent cause. -Stephen C Meyer, PHD

Scientific investigation, narrowly conceived, does not prove materialism. Rather, materialism arises from confusing two distinct moves: (1) the narrow scientific strategy of focusing on what is material and (2) the claim that the narrow focus is all that there is.

If there was one overriding element to Faraday's character, it was humility. His 'conviction of deficiency,' as he called it, stemmed in part from his deep religiosity and affected practically every facet of his life. Thus Faraday approached both his science and his everyday conduct unhampered by ego, envy, or negative emotion. In his work, he assumed the inevitability of error and failure; whenever possible, he harnessed these as guides toward further investigation. Faraday adhered to no particular school of scientific thought. Nor did he flinch when a favored hypothesis fell to the rigors of experiment.

No government has the right to decide on the truth of scientific principles, nor to prescribe in any way the character of the questions investigated. Neither may a government determine the aesthetic value of artistic creations, nor limit the forms of literary or artistic expression. Nor should it pronounce on the validity of economic, historic,

The Imagination merely enables us to wander into the darkness of the unknown where, by the dim light of the knowledge we carry, we may glimpse something that seems of interest. But when we bring it out and examine it more closely it usually proves to be only trash whose glitter had caught our attention. Imagination is at once the source of all hope and inspiration but also of frustration. To forget this is to court despair.

The indescribable pleasure—which pales the rest of life's joys—is abundant compensation for the investigator who endures the painful and persevering analytical work that precedes the appearance of the new truth, like the pain of childbirth. It is true to say that nothing for the scientific scholar is comparable to the things that he has discovered. Indeed, it would be difficult to find an investigator willing to exchange the paternity of a scientific conquest for all the gold on earth. And if there are some who look to science as a way of acquiring gold instead of applause from the learned, and the personal satisfaction associated with the very act of discovery, they have chosen the wrong profession.

What a wonderful stimulant it would be for the beginner if his instructor, instead of amazing and dismaying him with the sublimity of great past achievements, would reveal instead the origin of each scientific discovery, the series of errors and missteps that preceded it— information that, from a human perspective, is essential to an accurate explanation of the discovery. Skillful pedagogical tactics such as this would instill the conviction that the discoverer, along with being an illustrious person of great talent and resolve, was in the final analysis a human being just like everyone else.

The scientific investigator, in seeking an explanation for Mrs. Gunness’ unnatural crimes, would say that she was em

A concern is that when members of groups are directly engaged in scientific investigation of their own history, people’s wish that certain things should be true often colors presentation of the findings.

My dad was a different person when he lectured: his eyes sparkled, his lips turned upward.... 'Think what it must have been like for Darwin, two hundred years ago. He took that voyage on the Beagle [1831] expecting to document the natural world and he stumbled across something impossible. A creature who could defy the laws of physics--straight out of the pages of mythology...In that one moment, the entire landscape of scientific investigation was drastically and irrevocably changed. The impossible became a widespread scientific reality, as omnipresent as gravity and in some cases, nearly as hard to see.

Those who are unacquainted with the details of scientific investigation have no idea of the amount of labour expended in the determination of those numbers on which important calculations or inferences depend. They have no idea of the patience shown by a Berzelius in determining atomic weights; by a Regnault in determining coefficients of expansion; or by a Joule in determining the mechanical equivalent of heat.

Adolf Hitler declared war in 1941. By 1942, Allen Dulles was moved to Switzerland for the purpose of rounding up and importing German scientific “specialists” to the United States. Two years before the war ended (or its fate was decided), the United States was making arrangements for Nazi scientists, arms experts, to come to our democracy (for which the boys were fighting and dying at that moment).12 From 1945 until 1952, the U.S. military brought over 642 alien “specialists” and their families from Nazi Germany. They were known collectively by the code-name “Paperclip.” German missile and rocket experts, munition makers, war experts were carefully selected and placed in aerospace programs and armament manufacturing.13

Defining philosophy as “an activity, attempting by means of discussion and reasoning, to make life happy,” he believed that happiness is gained through the achievement of moral self-sufficiency (autarkeia) and freedom from disturbance (ataraxia). The main obstacles to the goal of tranquillity of mind are our unnecessary fears and desires, and the only way to eliminate these is to study natural science. The most serious disturbances of all are fear of death, including fear of punishment after death, and fear of the gods. Scientific inquiry removes fear of death by showing that the mind and spirit are material and mortal, so that they cannot live on after we die: as Epicurus neatly and logically puts it: “Death…is nothing to us: when we exist, death is not present; and when death is present, we do not exist. Consequently it does not concern either the living or the dead, since for the living it is non-existent and the dead no longer exist” (Letter to Menoeceus 125). As for fear of the gods, that disappears when scientific investigation proves that the world was formed by a fortuitous concourse of atoms, that the gods live outside the world and have no inclination or power to intervene in its affairs, and that irregular phenomena such as lightning, thunder, volcanic eruptions, and earthquakes have natural causes and are not manifestations of divine anger. Every Epicurean would have agreed with Katisha in the Mikado when she sings: But to him who’s scientific There’s nothing that’s terrific In the falling of a flight of thunderbolts! So the study of natural science is the necessary means whereby the ethical end is attained. And that is its only justification: Epicurus is not interested in scientific knowledge for its own sake, as is clear from his statement that “if we were not disturbed by our suspicions concerning celestial phenomena, and by our fear that death concerns us, and also by our failure to understand the limits of pains and desires, we should have no need of natural science” (Principal Doctrines 11). Lucretius’ attitude is precisely the same as his master’s: all the scientific information in his poem is presented with the aim of removing the disturbances, especially fear of death and fear of the gods, that prevent the attainment of tranquillity of mind. It is very important for the reader of On the Nature of Things to bear this in mind all the time, particularly since the content of the work is predominantly scientific and no systematic exposition of Epicurean ethics is provided.25 Epicurus despised philosophers who do not make it their business to improve people’s moral condition: “Vain is the word of a philosopher by whom no human suffering is cured. For just as medicine is of no use if it fails to banish the diseases of the body, so philosophy is of no use if it fails to banish the suffering of the mind” (Usener fr. 221). It is evident that he would have condemned the majority of modern philosophers and scientists.

The most effective experimenters are usually those who give much thought to the problem beforehand and resolve it into crucial questions and then give much thought to designing experiments to answer the questions.

We don't have to invent wildly implausible stories: we have the joy and excitement of real scientific investigation and discovery to keep our imaginations in line. And in the end that is more exciting than fantasy.

For compulsions, according to a growing body of scientific evidence, are a response to anxiety. Suffused and overwhelmed by anxiety, we grab hold of any behavior that offers relief by providing even an illusion of control.

If the universe is created, then there must be reality beyond the universe...The Creator is the source of life and establishes its meaning and purpose....To study the origin and development of the universe is, in a sense, to investigate the basis for any meaning and purpose to life. Cosmology has deep theological and philosophical ramifications.

The core of traditional science’s derision of the paranormal field is that it’s filled with amateurs armed only with off-the-shelf equipment who do not adhere to the “scientific method” of research, which has been shaped and reshaped over the course of human history.

Since it might appear unusual that a bio-psychiatrist should work as an expert in the realm of non-living nature, I believe it will be helpful to give the following summary: My present work began in the realm of psychiatry and psychoanalysis, with natural scientific investigations of the energy at work in human emotions. This led to the discovery of the bio-energy in the living organism, termed organismic orgone energy; and further to the discovery of the same type of a basically physical orgone energy in the atmosphere. Orgonomy is not psychiatry, but the science of biophysics of the emotions, thus also including psychiatry, and physics in the realm of basic cosmic orgone energy. It is not mysticism, but natural scientific, experimental investigation, also of mystical emotions and experiences. Orgone energy is energy before matter (not after matter, as is atomic energy). It is studied by means of Geiger-Müller Counters and other physical instruments. It follows entirely new, hitherto unknown functional laws of nature, and not the well known mechanical laws of electricity, heat, or mechanics.

That is the idea that we all hope you have learned in studying science in school—we never explicitly say what this is, but just hope that you catch on by all the examples of scientific investigation. It is interesting, therefore, to bring it out now and speak of it explicitly. It’s a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty—a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you’re doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid—not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you’ve eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked—to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated. Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know them. You must do the best you can—if you know anything at all wrong, or possibly wrong—to explain it. If you make a theory, for example, and advertise it, or put it out, then you must also put down all the facts that disagree with it, as well as those that agree with it. There is also a more subtle problem. When you have put a lot of ideas together to make an elaborate theory, you want to make sure, when explaining what it fits, that those things it fits are not just the things that gave you the idea for the theory; but that the finished theory makes something else come out right, in addition. In summary, the idea is to try to give all of the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgment in one particular direction or another. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you’ve not fooled yourself, it’s easy not to fool other scientists... You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that.

So it is with time. Whenever we talk about it, we do so in terms of something lesser. We find or lose time, like a set of keys; we save and spend it, like money. Time creeps, crawls, flies, flees, flows, and stands still; it is abundant or scarce; it weighs on us with palpable heft.

I enjoyed the intellectual rigor and scientific challenge of death investigation. Everyone there, from new students to the most senior doctors, seemed happy, eager to learn, and professionally challenged. None of the medical examiners had cots in their offices. “There are no emergency autopsies,” another resident pointed out to me. “Your patients never complain. They don’t page you during dinner. And they’ll still be dead tomorrow.

Although we have no guarantee that the Copernican principle can guide us correctly in all scientific investigations, it provides a useful counterweight to our natural tendency to think of ourselves as special. Even more significant is that the principle has an excellent track record so far, leaving us humbled at every turn: Earth does not occupy the center of the solar system, nor does the solar system occupy the center of the Milky Way galaxy, nor the Milky Way galaxy the center of the universe. And in case you believe that the edge is a special place, we are not at the edge of anything, either.

Treating Abuse Today 3(4) pp. 26-33 TAT: No. I don't know anymore than you know they're not. But, I'm talking about boundaries and privacy here. As a therapist working with survivors, I have been harassed by people who claim to be affiliated with the false memory movement. Parents and other family members have called or written me insisting on talking with me about my patients' cases, despite my clearly indicating I can't because of professional confidentiality. I have had other parents and family members investigate me -- look into my professional background -- hoping to find something to discredit me to the patients I was seeing at the time because they disputed their memories. This isn't the kind of sober, scientific discourse you all claim you want.

Even if we have a reliable criterion for detecting design, and even if that criterion tells us that biological systems are designed, it seems that determining a biological system to be designed is akin to shrugging our shoulders and saying God did it. The fear is that admitting design as an explanation will stifle scientific inquiry, that scientists will stop investigating difficult problems because they have a sufficient explanation already. But design is not a science stopper. Indeed, design can foster inquiry where traditional evolutionary approaches obstruct it. Consider the term "junk DNA." Implicit in this term is the view that because the genome of an organism has been cobbled together through a long, undirected evolutionary process, the genome is a patchwork of which only limited portions are essential to the organism. Thus on an evolutionary view we expect a lot of useless DNA. If, on the other hand, organisms are designed, we expect DNA, as much as possible, to exhibit function. And indeed, the most recent findings suggest that designating DNA as "junk" merely cloaks our current lack of knowledge about function. For instance, in a recent issue of the Journal of Theoretical Biology, John Bodnar describes how "non-coding DNA in eukaryotic genomes encodes a language which programs organismal growth and development." Design encourages scientists to look for function where evolution discourages it. Or consider vestigial organs that later are found to have a function after all. Evolutionary biology texts often cite the human coccyx as a "vestigial structure" that hearkens back to vertebrate ancestors with tails. Yet if one looks at a recent edition of Gray’s Anatomy, one finds that the coccyx is a crucial point of contact with muscles that attach to the pelvic floor. The phrase "vestigial structure" often merely cloaks our current lack of knowledge about function. The human appendix, formerly thought to be vestigial, is now known to be a functioning component of the immune system.

Scientific "facts" are taught at a very early age and in the very same manner in which religious "facts" were taught only a century ago. There is no attempt to waken the critical abilities of the pupil so that he may be able to see things in perspective. At the universities the situation is even worse, for indoctrination is here carried out in a much more systematic manner. Criticism is not entirely absent. Society, for example, and its institutions, are criticised most severely and often most unfairly... But science is excepted from the criticism. In society at large the judgment of the scientist is received with the same reverence as the judgement of bishops and cardinals was accepted not too long ago. The move towards "demythologization," for example, is largely motivated by the wish to avoid any clash between Christianity and scientific ideas. If such a clash occurs, then science is certainly right and Christianity wrong. Pursue this investigation further and you will see that science has now become as oppressive as the ideologies it had once to fight. Do not be misled by the fact that today hardly anyone gets killed for joining a scientific heresy. This has nothing to do with science. It has something to do with the general quality of our civilization. Heretics in science are still made to suffer from the most severe sanctions this relatively tolerant civilization has to offer

If God so precisely and carefully and lovingly and amazingly constructed a mind-boggling habitat for His creatures, then it would be natural for Him to want them to explore it, to measure it, to investigate it, to appreciate it, to be inspired by it--and ultimately, and most importantly, to find Him through it.

Thus, by science I mean, first of all, a worldview giving primacy to reason and observation and a methodology aimed at acquiring accurate knowledge of the natural and social world. This methodology is characterized, above all else, by the critical spirit: namely, the commitment to the incessant testing of assertions through observations and/or experiments — the more stringent the tests, the better — and to revising or discarding those theories that fail the test. One corollary of the critical spirit is fallibilism: namely, the understanding that all our empirical knowledge is tentative, incomplete and open to revision in the light of new evidence or cogent new arguments (though, of course, the most well-established aspects of scientific knowledge are unlikely to be discarded entirely). . . . I stress that my use of the term 'science' is not limited to the natural sciences, but includes investigations aimed at acquiring accurate knowledge of factual matters relating to any aspect of the world by using rational empirical methods analogous to those employed in the natural sciences. (Please note the limitation to questions of fact. I intentionally exclude from my purview questions of ethics, aesthetics, ultimate purpose, and so forth.) Thus, 'science' (as I use the term) is routinely practiced not only by physicists, chemists and biologists, but also by historians, detectives, plumbers and indeed all human beings in (some aspects of) our daily lives. (Of course, the fact that we all practice science from time to time does not mean that we all practice it equally well, or that we practice it equally well in all areas of our lives.)

Then again, it'd taken more than two hundred years after the invention of the scientific method before any Muggle scientists had thought to systematically investigate which sentences a human four-year-old could or couldn't understand. The developmental psychology of linguistics could've been discovered in the eighteenth century, in principle, but no one had even thought to look until the twentieth. So you couldn't really blame the much smaller wizarding world for not investigating the Retrieval Charm.

My real life work was done at Atlanta for thirteen years, from my twenty-ninth to my forty-second birthday. They were years of great spiritual upturning, of the making and unmaking of ideals, of hard work and hard play. Here I found myself. I lost most of my mannerisms. I grew more broadly human, made my closest and most holy friendships, and studied human beings. I became widely-acquainted with the real condition of my people. I realized the terrific odds which faced them. At Wilberforce I was their captious critic. In Philadelphia I was their cold and scientific investigator, with microscope and probe. It took but a few years of Atlanta to bring me to hot and indignant defense. I saw the race-hatred of the whites as I had never dreamed of it before,—naked and unashamed! The faint discrimination of my hopes and intangible dislikes paled into nothing before this great, red monster of cruel oppression. I held back with more difficulty each day my mounting indignation against injustice and misrepresentation.

Humans never invented anything that goes as deep as scientific investigation into understanding why the world is the way it is, nor have we found any other way of seeking knowledge that gets it so consistently right. Doing science is also difficult and frustrating, and in many ways goes against the grain of our spontaneous ways of thinking.

Science proceeds by inference, rather than by the deduction of mathematical proof. A series of observations is accumulated, forcing the deeper question: What must be true if we are to explain what is observed? What "big picture" of reality offers the best fit to what is actually observed in our experience? American scientist and philosopher Charles S. Peirce used the term "abduction" to refer to the way in which scientists generate theories that might offer the best explanation of things. The method is now more often referred to as "inference to the best explanation." It is now widely agreed to be the philosophy of investigation of the world characteristic of the natural sciences.

This kind of scientific boldness is something the world could use more of. All too often, we’re hemmed in by our fears and our sense of propriety. Some subjects simply aren’t discussed, or aren’t taken seriously as topics of investigation. Sometimes that’s because we collectively feel they’re gross or embarrassing—like secretions. Or sex. Or dead bodies.

time is not a thing but a passage through things—not a noun but a verb.

Memorizing and regurgitating are not science. Real science is a constant investigation of the unknown.

Probably the student who is reflective and critical is at a disadvantage in accumulating information as compared with the student who accepts without question all he is told.

It is the care we bestow on apparently trifling, unatractive and very troublesome minutiae which determines the result.

Careful observation and a questioning attitude to findings are central to the scientific method of investigation, which underpins physics and all the sciences.

We have seen how it is originally language which works on the construction of concepts, a labor taken over in later ages by science. Just as the bee simultaneously constructs cells and fills them with honey, so science works unceasingly on this great columbarium of concepts, the graveyard of perceptions. It is always building new, higher stories and shoring up, cleaning, and renovating the old cells; above all, it takes pains to fill up this monstrously towering framework and to arrange therein the entire empirical world, which is to say, the anthropomorphic world. Whereas the man of action binds his life to reason and its concepts so that he will not be swept away and lost, the scientific investigator builds his hut right next to the tower of science so that he will be able to work on it and to find shelter for himself beneath those bulwarks which presently exist. And he requires shelter, for there are frightful powers which continuously break in upon him, powers which oppose scientific truth with completely different kinds of "truths" which bear on their shields the most varied sorts of emblems.

putting adroitly provocative questions to casual witnesses, bribing servants, listening at doors, seemed to him now to be precisely on a level with the deciphering of manuscripts, the weighing of evidence, the interpretation of old monuments—so many different methods of scientific investigation with a genuine intellectual value and legitimately employable in the search for truth.

Most intellectual training focuses on analytical skills. Whether in literary criticism or scientific investigation, the academic mind is best at taking things apart. The complementary arts of integration are far less well developed. This problem is at the core of human ecology. As with any interdisciplinary pursuit, it is the bridging across disparate ways of knowing that is the constant challenge.

As a result of its investigation, the NIH said that to qualify for funding, all proposals for research on human subjects had to be approved by review boards—independent bodies made up of professionals and laypeople of diverse races, classes, and backgrounds—to ensure that they met the NIH’s ethics requirements, including detailed informed consent. Scientists said medical research was doomed. In a letter to the editor of Science, one of them warned, “When we are prevented from attempting seemingly innocuous studies of cancer behavior in humans … we may mark 1966 as the year in which all medical progress ceased.” Later that year, a Harvard anesthesiologist named Henry Beecher published a study in the New England Journal of Medicine showing that Southam’s research was only one of hundreds of similarly unethical studies. Beecher published a detailed list of the twenty-two worst offenders, including researchers who’d injected children with hepatitis and others who’d poisoned patients under anesthesia using carbon dioxide. Southam’s study was included as example number 17. Despite scientists’ fears, the ethical crackdown didn’t slow scientific progress. In fact, research flourished. And much of it involved HeLa. 18

The camps also became sites of scientific investigation, as the anthropologist Eugen Fischer, later a leading ‘racial hygienist’ under the Third Reich, descended on the town of Rehoboth to study its mixed-race inhabitants (he called them the ‘Rehoboth bastards’). He and his colleagues obtained skulls for craniometric studies of different races; up to three hundred of them eventually found their way to Germany.

The nay-sayers insist loudly that they're "climate sceptics", but this is a calculated misnomer – scientific scepticism is the method of investigating whether a particular hypothesis is supported by the evidence. Climate sceptics, by contrast, persist in ignoring empirical evidence that renders their position untenable. This isn't scepticism, it's unadulterated denialism, the very antithesis of critical thought.

Academic “units” (that is, departments) are seen as “revenue centers”; the ones that can’t pull their weight—much of the liberal arts—are slated for downsizing or outright elimination. Science is king, but not just any science; basic research is suffering, too. The holy grail is technology transfer: scientific investigation, often sponsored directly by corporations, that is capable of being parlayed into profit.

My mind was spinning from the symmetry of this equation I suddenly faced: magical on one side, scientific on the other, a dark pulsing myth and an acceptable reality.... The explanations were like two sides of the same coin, and the side that I favored revealed something essential about the person I was. Prior to investigating Ashley, with little hesitation I'd have believed the side most others would, the side that was logical, rational, exact. But now, much to my own shock, like a man who suddenly realized he was no longer a person he recognized, that other impossible, illogical, mad side still had a very firm grip on me.

IN MANY respects the research worker resembles the pioneer. He explores the frontiers of knowledge and requires many of the same attributes: enterprise and initiative, readiness to face difficulties and overcome them with his own resourcefulness and ingenuity, perseverance, a spirit of adventure, a certain dissatisfaction with well-known territory and prevailing ideas, and an eagerness to try his own judgment. Probably

You can't ever know the difference between a temporal dilation and a temporal contraction. All you can ask is a relative question: which felt longer? We don't ever know which is the 'normal' one. ~David Eagleman

The blackest chapter in the history of this State will be the Indian guardianship over these estates,” an Osage leader said, adding, “There has been millions—not thousands—but millions of dollars of many of the Osages dissipated and spent by the guardians themselves.” This so-called Indian business, as White discovered, was an elaborate criminal operation, in which various sectors of society were complicit. The crooked guardians and administrators of Osage estates were typically among the most prominent white citizens: businessmen and ranchers and lawyers and politicians. So were the lawmen and prosecutors and judges who facilitated and concealed the swindling (and, sometimes, acted as guardians and administrators themselves). In 1924, the Indian Rights Association, which defended the interests of indigenous communities, conducted an investigation into what it described as “an orgy of graft and exploitation.” The group documented how rich Indians in Oklahoma were being “shamelessly and openly robbed in a scientific and ruthless manner” and how guardianships were “the plums to be distributed to the faithful friends of the judges as a reward for their support at the polls.” Judges were known to say to citizens, “You vote for me, and I will see that you get a good guardianship.” A white woman married to an Osage man described to a reporter how the locals would plot: “A group of traders and lawyers sprung up who selected certain Indians as their prey. They owned all the officials…. These men had an understanding with each other. They cold-bloodedly said, ‘You take So-and-So, So-and-So and So-and-So and I’ll take these.’ They selected Indians who had full headrights and large farms.

The conceptions of life and the world which we call 'philosophical' are a product of two factors: one, inherited religious and ethical conceptions; the other, the sort of investigation which may be called 'scientific

It’s not in keeping with the scientific model to investigate a purportedly haunted location with the intent to prove that ghosts exist. The paranormal researcher should remain neutral and unbiased throughout the investigation and let the data prove a definitive conclusion, whether that’s the one they wanted or not. They should walk into an investigation thinking, “I will document what happens and then examine the data for conclusions.

Q. Would you repeat, Dr. Seldon, your thoughts concerning the future of Trantor? A. I have said, and I say again, that Trantor will lie in ruins within the next three centuries. Q. You do not consider your statement a disloyal one? A. No, sir. Scientific truth is beyond loyalty and disloyalty." Q. You are sure that your statement represents scientific truth? A. I am. Q. On what basis? A. On the basis of the mathematics of psychohistory. Q. Can you prove that this mathematics is valid? A. Only to another mathematician. Q. ( with a smile) Your claim then is that your truth is of so esoteric a nature that it is beyond the understanding of a plain man. It seems to me that truth should be clearer than that, less mysterious, more open to the mind. A. It presents no difficulties to some minds. The physics of energy transfer, which we know as thermodynamics, has been clear and true through all the history of man since the mythical ages, yet there may be people present who would find it impossible to design a power engine. People of high intelligence, too. I doubt if the learned Commissioners— At this point, one of the Commissioners leaned toward the Advocate. His words were not heard but the hissing of the voice carried a certain asperity. The Advocate flushed and interrupted Seldon. Q. We are not here to listen to speeches, Dr. Seldon. Let us assume that you have made your point. Let me suggest to you that your predictions of disaster might be intended to destroy public confidence in the Imperial Government for purposes of your own! A. That is not so. Q. Let me suggest that you intend to claim that a period of time preceding the so-called ruin of Trantor will be filled with unrest of various types. A. That is correct. Q. And that by the mere prediction thereof, you hope to bring it about, and to have then an army of a hundred thousand available. A. In the first place, that is not so. And if it were, investigation will show you that barely ten thousand are men of military age, and none of these has training in arms. Q. Are you acting as an agent for another? A. I am not in the pay of any man, Mr. Advocate. Q. You are entirely disinterested? You are serving science? A. I am.

PREFACE Cosmology is the study of the universe as a whole, including its birth and perhaps its ultimate fate. Not surprisingly, it has undergone many transformations in its slow, painful evolution, an evolution often overshadowed by religious dogma and superstition. The first revolution in cosmology was ushered in by the introduction of the telescope in the 1600s. With the aid of the telescope, Galileo Galilei, building on the work of the great astronomers Nicolaus Copernicus and Johannes Kepler, was able to open up the splendor of the heavens for the first time to serious scientific investigation. The advancement of this first stage of cosmology culminated in the work of Isaac Newton, who finally laid down the fundamental laws governing the motion of the celestial bodies. Instead of magic and mysticism, the laws of heavenly bodies were now seen to be subject to forces that were computable and reproducible. A second revolution in cosmology was initiated by the introduction of the great telescopes of the twentieth century, such as the one at Mount Wilson with its huge 100-inch reflecting mirror. In the 1920s, astronomer Edwin Hubble used this giant telescope to overturn centuries of dogma, which stated that the universe was static and eternal, by demonstrating that the galaxies in the heavens are moving away

The skeptic community doesn’t take the time to develop theories or take action to disprove the existence of spirits. They choose a passive approach of disbelief instead of scientific inquiry, which I would like to see change.

Scientism proposes that scientific investigation is nothing more than the accumulation of ‘facts’. The question thus arises: what actually are ‘facts’? They are not simply existing there, waiting for scientific investigation. Only a little phenomenological reflection reveals that they show themselves as facts because of the construction of, or at least the correlation with, what is usually called mind. Mind thus is a fundamental fact. It is psychology that reveals this truth.

No language thus restricted to reporting a world fully known in advance can produce mere neutral and objective reports on "the given." Philosophical investigation has not yet provided even a hint of what a language able to do that would be like.

Our sense of time's passage is rooted not in one region of the brain but results from the combined working of memory, attention, emotion, and other cerebral activities that can't be singularly localized, Time in the brain, like time outside it, is a collective activity.

The conflict between science and religion has a single and simple cause. It is the designation as religiously canonical of any conception of the material world open to scientific investigation....As a matter of fact, most of the dogmatic religions have exhibited a perverse talent for taking the wrong side on the most important concepts of the material universe, from the structure of the solar system to the origin of man. The result has been constant turmoil for many centuries, and the turmoil will continue as long as religious canons prejudge scientific questions.

I am now convinced that we have recently become possessed of experimental evidence of the discrete or grained nature of matter, which the atomic hypothesis sought in vain for hundreds and thousands of years. The isolation and counting of gaseous ions, on the one hand, which have crowned with success the long and brilliant researches of J.J. Thomson, and, on the other, agreement of the Brownian movement with the requirements of the kinetic hypothesis, established by many investigators and most conclusively by J. Perrin, justify the most cautious scientist in now speaking of the experimental proof of the atomic nature of matter, The atomic hypothesis is thus raised to the position of a scientifically well-founded theory, and can claim a place in a text-book intended for use as an introduction to the present state of our knowledge of General Chemistry.

To test this theory, I sent this picture to my mother and asked her what she thought had happened. She immediately replied,2 “The kid knocked over the vase and the cat is investigating.” She cleverly rejected alternate hypotheses, including: The cat knocked over the vase. The cat jumped out of the vase at the kid. The kid was being chased by the cat and tried to climb up the dresser with a rope to escape. There’s a wild cat in the house, and someone threw a vase at it. The cat was mummified in the vase, but arose when the kid touched it with a magic rope. The rope holding the vase broke and the cat is trying to put it back together. The vase exploded, attracting a child and a cat. The child put on the hat for protection from future explosions. The kid and cat are running around trying to catch a snake. The kid finally caught it and tied a knot in it.

collapsed.” The scientific words overhead evaporated, and were replaced by images of Islamic religious texts. “Revelation replaced investigation. And to this day, the Islamic scientific world is still trying to recover.” Edmond paused. “Of course, the Christian scientific world did not fare any better.” Paintings of the astronomers Copernicus, Galileo, and Bruno appeared on the ceiling. “The Church’s systematic murder, imprisonment, and denunciation of some of history’s most brilliant scientific minds delayed human progress by at least a century. Fortunately, today, with

Many people today acquiesce in the widespread myth, devised in the late 19th century, of an epic battle between ‘scientists’ and ‘religionists’. Despite the unfortunate fact that some members of both parties perpetuate the myth by their actions today, this ‘conflict’ model has been rejected by every modern historian of science; it does not portray the historical situation. During the 16th and 17th centuries and during the Middle Ages, there was not a camp of ‘scientists’ struggling to break free of the repression of ‘religionists’; such separate camps simply did not exist as such. Popular tales of repression and conflict are at best oversimplified or exaggerated, and at worst folkloristic fabrications (see Chapter 3 on Galileo). Rather, the investigators of nature were themselves religious people, and many ecclesiastics were themselves investigators of nature.

Dr. Julian Huxley, famous English biologist and director of UNESCO, recently stated that Western scientists should “learn the Oriental techniques” for entering the trance state and for control of breathing. “What happens? How is it possible?” he said. An Associated Press dispatch from London, dated Aug. 21, 1948, reported: “Dr. Huxley told the new World Federation for Mental Health it might well look into the mystic lore of the East. If this lore could be investigated scientifically, he advised mental specialists, ‘then I think an immense step forward could be made in your field.

Some readers may find it a curious or even unscientific endeavour to craft a criminological model of organised abuse based on the testimony of survivors. One of the standard objections to qualitative research is that participants may lie or fantasise in interview, it has been suggested that adults who report severe child sexual abuse are particularly prone to such confabulation. Whilst all forms of research, whether qualitative or quantitative, may be impacted upon by memory error or false reporting. there is no evidence that qualitative research is particularly vulnerable to this, nor is there any evidence that a fantasy— or lie—prone individual would be particularly likely to volunteer for research into child sexual abuse. Research has consistently found that child abuse histories, including severe and sadistic abuse, are accurate and can be corroborated (Ross 2009, Otnow et al. 1997, Chu et al. 1999). Survivors of child abuse may struggle with amnesia and other forms of memory disturbance but the notion that they are particularly prone to suggestion and confabulation has yet to find a scientific basis. It is interesting to note that questions about the veracity of eyewitness evidence appear to be asked far more frequently in relation to sexual abuse and rape than in relation to other crimes. The research on which this book is based has been conducted with an ethical commitment to taking the lives and voices of survivors of organised abuse seriously.

The entire destiny of modern linguistics is in fact determined by Saussure's inaugural act through which he separates the ‘external’ elements of linguistics from the ‘internal’ elements, and, by reserving the title of linguistics for the latter, excludes from it all the investigations which establish a relationship between language and anthropology, the political history of those who speak it, or even the geography of the domain where it is spoken, because all of these things add nothing to a knowledge of language taken in itself. Given that it sprang from the autonomy attributed to language in relation to its social conditions of production, reproduction and use, structural linguistics could not become the dominant social science without exercising an ideological effect, by bestowing the appearance of scientificity on the naturalization of the products of history, that is, on symbolic objects.

Emotions frequently contaminate the data. Physicist and Nobel laureate Werner Heisenberg said, “What we observe is not nature itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning.” Scientific inquiry must be unbiased to generate objective and reliable data. Since paranormal researchers generally believe in the afterlife already (especially when investigating the spirit of a departed loved one), they are frequently not as objective as they should be. Too many researchers have already reached a conclusion before they start an investigation and do their best to skew their findings in the direction of that conclusion.

It is the responsibility of all of us to invest time and effort in uncovering our biases and in verifying our sources of information. As noted in earlier chapters, we cannot investigate everything ourselves. But precisely because of that, we need at least to investigate carefully our favourite sources of information – be they a newspaper, a website, a TV network or a person. In Chapter 20 we will explore in far greater depth how to avoid brainwashing and how to distinguish reality from fiction. Here I would like to offer two simple rules of thumb. First, if you want reliable information – pay good money for it. If you get your news for free, you might well be the product. Suppose a shady billionaire offered you the following deal: ‘I will pay you $30 a month, and in exchange, you will allow me to brainwash you for an hour every day, installing in your mind whichever political and commercial biases I want.’ Would you take the deal? Few sane people would. So the shady billionaire offers a slightly different deal: ‘You will allow me to brainwash you for one hour every day, and in exchange, I will not charge you anything for this service. The second rule of thumb is that if some issue seems exceptionally important to you, make the effort to read the relevant scientific literature. And by scientific literature I mean peer-reviewed articles, books published by well-known academic publishers, and the writings of professors from reputable institutions. Science obviously has its limitations, and it has got many things wrong in the past. Nevertheless, the scientific community has been our most reliable source of knowledge for centuries. If you think that the scientific community is wrong about something, that’s certainly possible, but at least know the scientific theories you are rejecting, and provide some empirical evidence to support your claim.

So far from a political ideology being the quasi-divine parent of political activity, it turns out to be its earthly stepchild. Instead of an independently premeditated scheme of ends to be pursued, it is a system of ideas abstracted from the manner in which people have been accustomed to go about the business of attending to the arrangements of their societies. The pedigree of every political ideology shows it to be the creature, not of premeditation in advance of political activity, but of meditation upon a manner of politics. In short, political activity comes first and a political ideology follows after; and the understanding of politics we are investigating has the disadvantage of being, in the strict sense, preposterous. Let us consider the matter first in relation to scientific hypothesis, which I have taken to play a role in scientific activity in some respects similar to that of an ideology in politics. If a scientific hypothesis were a self-generated bright idea which owed nothing to scientific activity, then empiricism governed by hypothesis could be considered to compose a self-contained manner of activity; but this certainly is not its character. The truth is that only a man who is already a scientist can formulate a scientific hypothesis; that is, an hypothesis is not an independent invention capable of guiding scientific inquiry, but a dependent supposition which arises as an abstraction from within already existing scientific activity. Moreover, even when the specific hypothesis has in this manner been formulated, it is inoperative as a guide to research without constant reference to the traditions of scientific inquiry from which it was abstracted. The concrete situation does not appear until the specific hypothesis, which is the occasion of empiricism being set to work, is recognized as itself the creature of owing how to conduct a scientific inquiry. Or consider the example of cookery. It might be supposed that an ignorant man, some edible materials, and a cookery book compose together the necessities of a self-moved (or concrete) activity called cooking. But nothing is further from the truth. The cookery book is not an independently generated beginning from which cooking can spring; it is nothing more than an abstract of somebody's knowledge of how to cook: it is the stepchild, not the parent of the activity. The book, in its tum, may help to set a man on to dressing a dinner, but if it were his sole guide he could never, in fact, begin: the book speaks only to those who know already the kind of thing to expect from it and consequently bow to interpret it. Now, just as a cookery book presupposes somebody who knows how to cook, and its use presupposes somebody who already knows how to use it, and just as a scientific hypothesis springs from a knowledge of how to conduct a scientific investigation and separated from that knowledge is powerless to set empiricism profitably to work, so a political ideology must be understood, not as an independently premeditated beginning for political activity, but as knowledge (abstract and generalized) of a concrete manner of attending to the arrangements of a society. The catechism which sets out the purposes to be pursued merely abridges a concrete manner of behaviour in which those purposes are already hidden. It does not exist in advance of political activity, and by itself it is always an insufficient guide. Political enterprises, the ends to be pursued, the arrangements to be established (all the normal ingredients of a political ideology), cannot be premeditated in advance of a manner of attending to the arrangements of a society; what we do, and moreover what we want to do, is the creature of how we are accustomed to conduct our affairs. Indeed, it often reflects no more than a dis­covered ability to do something which is then translated into an authority to do it.

Biology taught me that a field undergoing development should be investigated always from the viewpoint of its past development. Who today would study anatomy without embryology? In exactly the same way epistemology without historical and comparative investigations is no more than an empty play on words or an epistemology of the imagination.

Geographic profiling is a specialized criminal investigative technique—perhaps more useful and scientific than behavioral profiling, which is arguably closer to an art than a science—whereby the key locations in a linked crime series are analyzed for the purpose of determining the likely anchor points (home, work, etc.) of a serial offender.

My confidence in venturing into science lies in my basic belief that as in science so in Buddhism, understanding the nature of reality is pursued by means of critical investigation: if scientific analysis were conclusively to demonstrate certain claims in Buddhism to be false, then we must accept the findings of science and abandon those claims.

The necessity of the experimental method in scientific investigation of the third-person properties of matter and energy has been recognised since Galileo. The intellectual achievements of physical science, as traditionally conceived, are widely celebrated. By contrast, experimental investigation of the great majority of intrinsic, first-person properties of matter and energy is stigmatised and even criminalised. States of sentience as different as waking from dreaming consciousness are outlawed. Instead of Nobel laureates, research grants and lavish institutional funding, an empirically-driven exploration of the first-person properties of matter and energy plays out mainly within the scientific counterculture.

The scientific method relies on repeatable experimentation to verify or deny data. Spirits of the departed are intelligent beings that don’t always display a predictable pattern of behavior. They come and go at their leisure and have always proven to be elusive and inconsistent, maybe because they are frequently unaware of their state (deceased) and environment (the location and year).

Indeed, he [Augustine] wrote, what we call three tenses are only one. Past, present, and future don't exist per se; they are all present in the mind - in our current memory of past events, in our current attention to the present, and in our current expectation of what's to come. "There are three tenses or times: the present of past things, the present of present things, and the present of future things".

Whereas in its developments up to the present psychology has dealt chiefly with psychic processes in the light of physical causation, the future task of psychology will be the investigation of their spiritual determinants. But the natural history of the mind is no further advanced today than was natural science in the thirteenth century. We have only begun to take scientific note of our spiritual experiences.

Simply use your favourite search engine to investigate these two questions: `What scientific research has been done to prove that vaccines are really safe?' and `What scientific research has been done to prove that vaccines are effective?'. (Phrase your questions in any way you like, of course. I don't want you to feel that I'm leading you in any particular direction. And check the source of whatever you find.)

Writing of Charles Darwin, his son said: " Everybody notices as a fact an exception when it is striking and frequent, but he had a special instinct for arresting an exception. A point apparently slight and unconnected with his present work is passed over by many a man almost unconsciously with some half considered explanation, which is in fact no explanation. It was just these things that he seized on to make a start from.

It seems as though a happy dispensation from my scientific guiding star allowed me to discover this error myself. But let younger investigators be warned by this example, as they strive impatiently to publish their results after long years of frustration. Let them test their findings doubly and trebly before they regard any interpretation as certain. For often nature reaches her goal by another path, where man cannot see his way

Diffusion investigations show that most individuals do not evaluate an innovation on the basis of scientific studies of its consequences, although such objective evaluations are not entirely irrelevant, especially to the very first individuals who adopt. Instead, most people depend mainly upon a subjective evaluation of an innovation that is conveyed to them from other individuals like themselves who have previously adopted the innovation

The idea of considering the infinitely large not only in the form of the unlimitedly increasing magnitude and in the closely related form of convergent infinite series...but to also fix it mathematically by numbers in the definite form of the completed infinite was logically forced upon me, almost against my will since it was contrary to traditions which I had come to cherish in the course of many years of scientific effort and investigations.

The Buddhist discards the world of unconscious fantasies as useless illusions; the Christian puts his Church and his Bible between himself and the unconscious; and the rational intellectual does not yet know that his consciousness is not his total psyche. This ignorance persists today in spite of the fact that for more than 70 years the unconscious has been a basic scientific concept that is indisputable to any serious psychological investigation.

Gradually and reluctantly, however, I realized that the wrath directed at elitism has less to do with money than with populist, egalitarian scorn for the very kinds of intellectual distinction-making I hold most dear: respect and even deference toward leadership and position; esteem for accomplishment, especially when achieved through long labor and rigorous education; reverence for heritage, particularly in history, philosophy, and culture; commitment to rationalism and scientific investigation; upholding of objective standards; most important, the willingness to assert unyieldingly that one idea, contribution or attainment is better than another. The worst aspect of what gets called “political correctness” these days is the erosion of the intellectual confidence needed to sort out, and rank, competing values. It used to be that intellectual debate centered on the results of such assessment.

Science certainly is not the static statement of universal laws we all hear about in elementary school. Nor is it a set of arbitrary rules. Science is an evolving body of knowledge. Many of the ideas we are currently investigating will prove to be wrong or incomplete. Scientific descriptions certainly change as we cross the boundaries that circumscribe what we know and venture into more remote territory where we can glimpse hints of the deeper truths beyond.

doubled your odds of getting pancreatic cancer.89 What about people who eat chicken? The largest study to ever address that question is the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC) study, which followed 477,000 people for about a decade. The researchers found a 72 percent increased risk of pancreatic cancer for every fifty grams of chicken consumed daily.90 And that’s not much meat, under two ounces—just about a quarter of a chicken breast.

In sum, the fruition of 50 years of research, and several hundred million dollars in government funds, has given us the following picture of sub-atomic matter. All matter consists of quarks and leptons, which interact by exchanging different types of quanta, described by the Maxwell and Yang-Mills fields. In one sentence, we have captured the essence of the past century of frustrating investigation into the subatomic realm, From this simple picture one can derive, from pure mathematics alone, all the myriad and baffling properties of matter. (Although it all seems so easy now, Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg, one of the creators of the Standard Model, once reflected on how tortuous the 50-year journey to discover the model had been. He wrote, "There's a long tradition of theoretical physics, which by no means affected everyone but certainly affected me, that said the strong interactions [were] too complicated for the human mind.")

At a makeshift training school in New York, agents were indoctrinated in the new regulations and methods. (Hoover later turned the program into a full-fledged academy at Quantico, Virginia.) Agents were increasingly trained in what Hoover hailed as “scientific policing,” such as fingerprint and ballistics techniques. And they were taught formal rules of evidence gathering, in order to avoid cases being dropped or stalled, as had happened with the first Osage investigation.

As a method however, the *method of ontology* is nothing but the sequence of the steps involved in the approach to Being as such and the elaboration of its structures. We call this method of ontology *phenomenology*. In more precise language, phenomenological investigation is explicit effort applied to the method of ontology. However, such endeavors, their success or failure, depend primarily, in accordance with our discussion, on how far phenomenology has assured for itself the object of philosophy―how far, in accordance with its own principle, it is unbiased enough in the face of what the things themselves demand. We cannot now enter any further into the essential and fundamental constituent parts of this method. In fact, we have applied it constantly. What we would have to do would be merely to go over the course already pursued, but now with explicit reflection on it. But what is most essential is first of all to have traversed the whole path once, so as, for one thing, to learn to wonder scientifically about the mystery of things and, for another, to banish all illusions, which settle down and nest with particular stubbornness precisely in philosophy. There is no such thing as *the one* phenomenology, and if there could be such a thing it would never become anything like a philosophical technique. For implicit in the essential nature of all genuine method as a path toward the disclosure of objects is the tendency to order itself always toward that which it itself discloses. When a method is genuine and provides access to the objects, it is precisely then that the progress made by following it and the growing originality of the disclosure will cause the very method that was used to become necessarily obsolete. The only thing that is truly new in science and in philosophy is the genuine questioning and struggle with things which is at the service of this questioning." ―from_The Basic Problems of Phenomenology_

The Restoration did not so much restore as replace. In restoring the monarchy with King Charles II, it replaced Cromwell's Commonwealth and its Puritan ethos with an almost powerless monarch whose tastes had been formed in France. It replaced the power of the monarchy with the power of a parliamentary system - which was to develop into the two parties, Whigs and Tories - with most of the executive power in the hands of the Prime Minister. Both parties benefited from a system which encouraged social stability rather than opposition. Above all, in systems of thought, the Restoration replaced the probing, exploring, risk-taking intellectual values of the Renaissance. It relied on reason and on facts rather than on speculation. So, in the decades between 1660 and 1700, the basis was set for the growth of a new kind of society. This society was Protestant (apart from the brief reign of the Catholic King James II, 1685-88), middle class, and unthreatened by any repetition of the huge and traumatic upheavals of the first part of the seventeenth century. It is symptomatic that the overthrow of James II in 1688 was called The 'Glorious' or 'Bloodless' Revolution. The 'fever in the blood' which the Renaissance had allowed was now to be contained, subject to reason, and kept under control. With only the brief outburst of Jacobin revolutionary sentiment at the time of the Romantic poets, this was to be the political context in the United Kingdom for two centuries or more. In this context, the concentration of society was on commerce, on respectability, and on institutions. The 'genius of the nation' led to the founding of the Royal Society in 1662 - 'for the improving of Natural Knowledge'. The Royal Society represents the trend towards the institutionalisation of scientific investigation and research in this period. The other highly significant institution, one which was to have considerably more importance in the future, was the Bank of England, founded in 1694.

Normal science, the activity in which most scientists inevitably spend almost all their time, is predicated on the assumption that the scientific community knows what the world is like... [It] often suppresses fundamental novelties because they are necessarily subversive of its basic commitments. Nevertheless, so long as those commitments retain an element of the arbitrary, the very nature of normal research ensures that the novelty shall not be suppressed for very long... [N]ormal science repeatedly goes astray. And when it does—when, that is, the profession can no longer evade anomalies that subvert the existing tradition of scientific practice—then begin the extraordinary investigations that lead the profession at last to a new set of commitments, a new basis for the practice of science. The extraordinary episodes in which that shift of professional commitments occurs are the ones known in this essay as scientific revolutions. They are the tradition-shattering complements to the tradition-bound activity of normal science.

The Scientific Revolution (1500s–1600s) The Scientific Revolution was an extension of the Renaissance-era shift from finding truth in religion to finding truth in logical reasoning and the Reformation’s drive to question authority and think for oneself. These factors led to the development of the scientific method, which improved humanity’s understanding of the world, establishing protocols by which scientific discoveries could be investigated and proven and ushering in many discoveries that raised living standards.

No government has the right to decide on the truth of scientific principles, nor to prescribe in any way the character of the questions investigated. Neither may a government determine the aesthetic value of artistic creations, nor limit the forms of literary or artistic expression. Nor should it pronounce on the validity of economic, historic, religious, or philosophical doctrines. Instead it has a duty to its citizens to maintain the freedom, to let those citizens contribute to the further adventure and the development of the human race. Thank you.

It caused my opposition to any ideologies—Marxist, Fascist, National Socialist, what you will—because they were incompatible with science in the rational sense of critical analysis. I again refer back to Max Weber as the great thinker who brought that problem to my attention; and I still maintain today that nobody who is an ideologist can be a competent social scientist." It is extremely difficult to engage in a critical discussion of National Socialist ideas, as I found out when I gave my semester course on “Hitler and the Germans” in 1964 in Munich, because in National Socialist and related documents we are still further below the level on which rational argument is possible than in the case of Hegel and Marx. In order to deal with rhetoric of this type, one must first develop a philosophy of language, going into the problems of symbolization on the basis of the philosophers’ experience of humanity and of the perversion of such symbols on the vulgarian level by people who are utterly unable to read a philosopher’s work. A person on this level—which I characterize as the vulgarian and, so far as it becomes socially relevant, as the ochlocratic level—again, is not admissible to the position of a partner in discussion but can only be an object of scientific research. Because of this attitude I have been called every conceivable name by partisans of this or that ideology. I have in my files documents labeling me a Communist, a Fascist, a National Socialist, an old liberal, a new liberal, a Jew, a Catholic, a Protestant, a Platonist, a neo-Augustinian, a Thomist, and of course a Hegelian—not to forget that I was supposedly strongly influenced by Huey Long. This list I consider of some importance, because the various characterizations of course always name the pet bête noire of the respective critic and give, therefore, a very good picture of the intellectual destruction and corruption that characterize the contemporary academic world. Understandably, I have never answered such criticisms; critics of this type can become objects of inquiry, but they cannot be partners in a discussion. Anybody with an informed and reflective mind who lives in the twentieth century since the end of the First World War, as I did, finds himself hemmed in, if not oppressed, from all sides by a flood of ideological language—meaning thereby language symbols that pretend to be concepts but in fact are unanalyzed topoi or topics. Moreover, anybody who is exposed to this dominant climate of opinion has to cope with the problem that language is a social phenomenon. He cannot deal with the users of ideological language as partners in a discussion, but he has to make them the object of investigation. There is no community of language with the representatives of the dominant ideologies.

Half a century ago Ostwald (1910) distinguished classicists and romanticists among the scientific investigators: the former being inclined to design schemes and to use consistently the deductions from working hypotheses; the latter being more fit for intuitive discoveries of functional relations between phenomena and therefore more able to open up new fields of study. Examples of both character types are Werner and Hutton. Werner was a real classicist. At the end of the eighteenth century he postulated the theory of “neptunism,” according to which all rocks including granites, were deposited in primeval seas. It was an artificial scheme, but, as a classification system, it worked quite satisfactorily at the time. Hutton, his contemporary and opponent, was more a romanticist. His concept of 'plutonism' supposed continually recurrent circuits of matter, which like gigantic paddle wheels raise material from various depths of the earth and carry it off again. This is a very flexible system which opens the mind to accept the possible occurrence in the course of time of a great variety of interrelated plutonic and tectonic processes.

So what is it, Shadows? Is it good or evil, or what?' Dr. Malone rubbed her face and turned her cheeks red again. 'Everything about this is embarrassing,' she said. 'D’you know how embarrassing it is to mention good and evil in a scientific laboratory? Have you any idea? One of the reasons I became a scientist was not to have to think about that kind of thing.' 'You got to think about it,' said Lyra severely. 'You can’t investigate Shadows, Dust, whatever it is, without thinking about that kind of thing, good and evil and such. And it said you got to, remember. You can’t refuse.

The congressional investigation found that Cooney and others at CEQ made 181 edits to a strategic plan for the U.S. Climate Change Science Program with the effect of “exaggerating or emphasizing scientific uncertainties related to global warming.” They made 113 more edits that “deemphasized or diminished the importance of the human role in global warming.” As Dickenson reports, after the 2002 fiasco with EPA’s adverse report, “Cooney wielded a heavier pen when editing official reports on global warming. Not content obscuring science with uncertainty, he began to rewrite the science itself.

We know that man is a conditioned being. We know that he is affected by a change of conditions. If he is ignorant he is superstitious; this is natural. If his brain is developed—if he perceives clearly that all things are naturally produced, he ceases to be superstitious, and becomes scientific. He is not a saint, but a savant—not a priest, but a philosopher. He does not worship, he works; he investigates; he thinks; he takes advantage, through intelligence, of the forces of nature. He is no longer the victim of appearances, the dupe of his own ignorance, and the persecutor of his fellow-men.

Primitive man, living in communities of restricted extent, providing for his needs by his own production or by direct co-operation, limiting his spiritual interests to personal experience or to simple tradition, surveys and controls the material of his existence more easily and completely than the man of higher culture. In the latter case life rests upon a thousand presuppositions which the individual can never trace back to their origins, and verify; but which he must accept upon faith and belief. In a much wider degree than people are accustomed to realize, modern civilized life—from the economic system which is constantly becoming more and more a credit-economy, to the pursuit of science, in which the majority of investigators must use countless results obtained by others, and not directly subject to verification—depends upon faith in the honor of others. We rest our most serious decisions upon a complicated system of conceptions, the majority of which presuppose confidence that we have not been deceived. Hence prevarication in modern circumstances becomes something much more devastating, something placing the foundations of life much more in jeopardy, than was earlier the case.

Only years later—as an investigative journalist writing about poor scientific research—did I realize that I had committed statistical malpractice in one section of the thesis that earned me a master’s degree from Columbia University. Like many a grad student, I had a big database and hit a computer button to run a common statistical analysis, never having been taught to think deeply (or at all) about how that statistical analysis even worked. The stat program spit out a number summarily deemed “statistically significant.” Unfortunately, it was almost certainly a false positive, because I did not understand the limitations of the statistical test in the context in which I applied it. Nor did the scientists who reviewed the work. As statistician Doug Altman put it, “Everyone is so busy doing research they don’t have time to stop and think about the way they’re doing it.” I rushed into extremely specialized scientific research without having learned scientific reasoning. (And then I was rewarded for it, with a master’s degree, which made for a very wicked learning environment.) As backward as it sounds, I only began to think broadly about how science should work years after I left it.

One of the legitimate tasks of philosophy is to investigate the limits of even the best developed and most successful forms of contemporary scientific knowledge. It may be frustrating to acknowledge, but we are simply at the point in the history of human thought at which we find ourselves, and our successors will make discoveries and develop forms of understanding of which we have not dreamt. Humans are addicted to the hope for a final reckoning, but intellectual humility requires that we resist the temptation to assume that tools of the kind we now have are in principle sufficient to understand the universe as a whole.

First, as a branch of the United Nations, the IPCC is itself an intensely political and not a scientific body. As its chairman, Dr Rajendra Pachauri observed in an interview with the Guardian newspaper: We are an intergovernmental body and we do what the governments of the world want us to do. If the governments decide we should do things differently and come up with a vastly different set of products we would be at their beck and call.10 To boot, the IPCC charter requires that the organisation investigates not climate change in the round, but solely global warming caused by human greenhouse emissions, a blinkered approach that consistently damages all IPCC pronouncements.

Zen can be seen as having a special kind of structure with basic demands that are structural demands and therefore open to scientific investigation—and the more it can seem to have a definite character to be grasped and “understood.” When Zen is studied in this way, it is seen in the context of Chinese and Japanese history. It is seen as a product of the meeting of speculative Indian Buddhism with practical Chinese Taoism and even Confucianism. It is seen in the light of the culture of the T’ang dynasty, and the teachings of various “houses.” It is related to other cultural movements. It is studied in its passage into Japan and its integration into Japanese civilization. And then a great deal of things about Zen come to seem important, even essential. The Zendo or meditation hall. The Zazen sitting. The study of the Koan. The costume. The lotus seat. The bows. The visits to the Roshi and the Roshi’s technique for determining whether one has attained Kensho or Satori, and helping one to do this. Zen, seen in this light, can then be set up against other religious structures—for instance that of Catholicism, with its sacraments, its liturgy, its mental prayer (now no longer practised by many), its devotions, its laws, its theology, its Bible; its cathedrals and convents; its priesthood and its hierarchical organization; its Councils and Encyclicals.

On the whole, scientific methods are at least as important results of investigation as any other results, for the scientific spirit is based upon a knowledge of method, and if the methods were lost, all the results of science could not prevent the renewed prevalence of superstition and absurdity. Clever people may learn as much as they like of the results of science, but one still notices in their conversation, and especially in the hypotheses they make, that they lack the scientific spirit; they have not the instinctive distrust of the devious courses of thinking which, in consequence of long training, has taken root in the soul of every scientific man. It is enough for them to find any kind of hypothesis on a subject, they are then all on fire for it, and imagine the matter is thereby settled. To have an opinion is with them equivalent to immediately becoming fanatical for it, and finally taking it to heart as a conviction. In the case of an unexplained matter they become heated for the first idea that comes into their head which has any resemblance to an explanation—a course from which the worst results constantly follow, especially in the field of politics. On that account everybody should nowadays have become thoroughly acquainted with at least one science, for then surely he knows what is meant by method, and how necessary is the extremest carefulness.

The part played by deduction in science is greater than Bacon supposed. Often, when a hypothesis has to be tested, there is a long deductive journey from the hypothesis to some consequence that can be tested by observation. Usually the deduction is mathematical, and in this respect Bacon underestimated the importance of mathematics in scientific investigation. The problem of induction by simple enumeration remains unsolved to this day. Bacon was quite right in rejecting simple enumeration where the details of scientific investigation are concerned, for in dealing with details we may assume general laws on the basis of which, so long as they are taken as valid, more or less cogent methods can be built up. John Stuart Mill framed four canons of inductive method, which can be usefully employed so long as the law of causality is assumed; but this law itself, he had to confess, is to be accepted solely on the basis of induction by simple enumeration. The thing that is achieved by the theoretical organization of science is the collection of all subordinate inductions into a few that are very comprehensive—perhaps only one. Such comprehensive inductions are confirmed by so many instances that it is thought legitimate to accept, as regards them, an induction by simple enumeration. This situation is profoundly unsatisfactory, but neither Bacon nor any of his successors have found a way out of it.

The outlook of the typical scientific discoverer has perhaps the smallest dose of individualism. When he arrives at a new theory, he does so solely because it seems right to him; he does not bow to authority, for, if he did, he would continue to accept the theories of his predecessors. At the same time, his appeal is to generally received canons of truth, and he hopes to persuade other men, not by his authority, but by arguments which are convincing to them as individuals. In science, any clash between the individual and society is in essence transitory, since men of science, broadly speaking, all accept the same intellectual standards, and therefore debate and investigation usually produce agreement in the end.

The fact that at first glance a theory appears reasonable should not lead us hastily to accept it, and to attempt to twist the Bible into harmony with it. In a thousand ways we have proved the Bible, and know beyond peradventure that it contains a superhuman wisdom which makes its statements unerring. We should remember, too, that while scientific research is to be commended, and its suggestions considered, yet its conclusions are by no means infallible. And what wonder that it has proven its own theories false a thousand times, when we remember that the true scientist is merely a student attempting, under many unfavorable circumstances, and struggling against almost insurmountable difficulties, to learn from the great Book of Nature the history and destiny of man and his home. We would not, then, either oppose or hinder scientific investigation; but in hearing suggestions from students of the Book of Nature, let us carefully compare their deductions, which have so often proved in part or wholly erroneous, with the Book of Divine Revelation, and prove or disprove the teachings of scientists by 'the law and the testimony. If they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no light in them' (Isa 8:20). And accurate knowledge of both books will prove them to be harmonious; but until we have such knowledge, God's Revelation must take precedence, and must be the standard among the children of God, by which the supposed findings of fallible fellow-men shall be judged.

Though faith is above reason, there can never be any real discrepancy be-tween faith and reason. Since the same God who reveals mysteries and infuses faith has bestowed the light 283 of reason on the human mind, God cannot deny himself, nor can truth ever contradict truth.”37 “Consequently, methodical research in all branches of knowledge, provided it is carried out in a truly scientific manner and does not override moral laws, can never conflict with the faith, because the things of 2293 the world and the things of faith derive from the same God. The humble and persevering investigator of the secrets of nature is being led, as it were, by the hand of God in spite of himself, for it is God, the conserver of all things, who made them what they are.”38

Greenhouse gases, like carbon dioxide, absorb infrared energy and help warm the planet. So they're absolutely crucial. The problem is that their concentration in the atmosphere needs to be regulated as the sun slowly brightens. Otherwise, the Earth would not be able to stabilize its surface temperature, which would be disastrous. Plate tectonics cycles fragments of the Earth's crust -- including limestone, which is made up of calcium, carbon dioxide, and oxygen atoms -- down into the mantle. There, the planet's internal heat releases the carbon dioxide, which is then continually vented to the atmosphere through volcanoes. It's quite an elaborate process, but the end result is a kind of thermostat that keeps the greenhouse gases in balance and our surface temperature under control. --Guillermo Gonzalez, Ph.D. (astronomer & physicist)

The laws of physics, which govern the behaviour of atoms and the movements of the stars, govern also the conduct of rational beings. And yet: Being is still enchanted for us; in a hundred Places it remains a source - a play of pure Powers, which touches no one, who does not kneel and wonder. Words still go softly forth towards the unsayable. And music, always new, from palpitating stones Builds in useless space its godly home. [Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus, n] This enchantment — revealed to us in the constant intimation of sacred things — belongs, not to the world of physical science, but to the Lebenswelt, which we ourselves construct through our collusive actions. The 'scientific realist' sees only a disenchanted world; and what he sees is real. But within reality we also make our home, and in doing so we provide the meaning that is lacking from the world of science.

In 1604, at the height of his scientific career, Galileo argued that for a rectilinear motion in which speed increases proportionally to distance covered, the law of motion should be just that (x = ct^2) which he had discovered in the investigation of falling bodies. Between 1695 and 1700 not a single one of the monthly issues of Leipzig’s Acta Eruditorum was published without articles of Leibniz, the Bernoulli brothers or the Marquis de l'Hôpital treating, with notation only slightly different from that which we use today, the most varied problems of differential calculus, integral calculus and the calculus of variations. Thus in the space of almost precisely one century infinitesimal calculus or, as we now call it in English, The Calculus, the calculating tool par excellence, had been forged; and nearly three centuries of constant use have not completely dulled this incomparable instrument.

All inquiries carry with them some element of risk. There is no guarantee that the universe will conform to our predispositions. But I do not see how we can deal with the universe—both the outside and the inside universe—without studying it. The best way to avoid abuses is for the populace in general to be scientifically literate, to understand the implications of such investigations. In exchange for freedom of inquiry, scientists are obliged to explain their work. If science is considered a closed priesthood, too difficult and arcane for the average person to understand, the dangers of abuse are greater. But if science is a topic of general interest and concern—if both its delights and its social consequences are discussed regularly and competently in the schools, the press, and at the dinner table—we have greatly improved our prospects for learning how the world really is and for improving both it and us.

Not all minds can hold science so easily. Most of what you can find inside various minds have no or weak connection with science; they are only values. If your mind takes any idea for guaranteed before its empirical investigation, or if you cannot criticize or make any assumption that your hypothesis related to it can be false, as well as true, it means you don’t do science, your mind rather shares some ideological, historical, religious or ethical values. No politics, ethics, history, religion, etc. is a science in strict sense of term. All of them engage in manipulation of brains in different ways. That is why any strong political, ethical, historical, religious bias would make your so-called ‘scientific mind’ weak. Although it is true that not all questions can be answered using scientific approaches, the formation of values inside your mind should substantially be up to you — your critical thinking and doubting intuition.

Among the clay tablets brought back by Rassam from Ashurbanipal's library, were fragments of the Babylonian story of the Deluge. These, as translated by George Smith, aroused immense interest, which led to the desire that search be made for the missing fragments. The explorers of the Heroic Period had uncovered palaces, bas-reliefs, and statues, but had given the insignificant tablets secondary consideration. From the library chamber of Ashurbanipal's palace Rassam had extracted only those tablets which could be conveniently reached. With the power to read attained meanwhile, the tablets had become fully as important as the sculptures, if not more so. George Smith's expedition indicated, therefore, that the Modern Scientific Period of excavation had begun. Its end is not yet in sight, since its goal is the investigation of all feasible localities in the Mesopotamian valley, with the purpose of throwing all available light upon the history and life of these ancient peoples.

Richard Lewontin is amazingly candid about this fact. In the New York Review of Books he makes this stunning admission: Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs . . . in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.4

For members of a particular religious community, the sense of obligation takes a specific form when it comes to their commitment to each other. In the movie Shall We Dance?, Richard Gere plays a bored middle-aged attorney who surreptitiously takes up ballroom dancing. His wife, played by Susan Sarandon, becomes suspicious at his renewed energy and vitality. She hires a private detective, who discovers the dance studio and reports the news. She decides to let her husband continue dancing undisturbed. In the scene where she meets the private detective in a bar to pay his fee and end the investigation, they linger over a drink and discuss why people marry in the first place. The detective, whose countless investigations into infidelity have rendered him cynical about marriage, suggests that the desire to marry has something to do with hormones and passing fancy. She disagrees. The reason we marry, she insists, is that “we need a witness to our lives. There’s a billion people on the planet. . . . I mean, what does any one life really mean? But in a marriage, you’re promising to care about everything. The good things, the bad things, the terrible things, the mundane things . . . all of it, all of the time, every day. You’re saying ‘Your life will not go unnoticed because I will notice it. Your life will not go un-witnessed because I will be your witness.’ ” The sacramental bond that unites two people in a marriage or committed relationship is known as a covenant. A covenant—the word means mutual agreement—is a promise to bear witness to the life of another: the good things, the bad things, the terrible things, the mundane things. At its heart, the relationship among members of a religious community is covenantal as well. As with marriage, the relationship also includes other dimensions, such as friendship and perhaps financial and/or legal partnership. But the defining commitment that members of a religious community make to each other arises from their calling—their covenantal duty—to bear witness to each other’s lives: the lives they now lead and the lives they hope to lead in the future, and the world they now occupy and the world they hope to occupy in the future.

As much as the scientific community currently enthralled with mindfulness would like to set aside the ethical component of the Buddhist tradition to focus their studies on the technology of meditation, we can see from this Abhidhamma treatment of the subject that true mindfulness is deeply and inextricably embedded in the notion of wholesomeness. Although the brain science has yet to discover why, this tradition nonetheless declares, based entirely on its phenomenological investigations, that when the mind is engaged in an act of harming it is not capable of mindfulness. There can be heightened attention, concentration, and energy when a sniper takes a bead on his target, for example, but as long as the intention is situated in a context of taking life, it will always be under the sway of hatred, delusion, wrong view (ditthi, 19), or some other of the unwholesome factors. Just as a tree removed from the forest is no longer a tree but a piece of lumber, so also the caring attentiveness of mindfulness, extracted from its matrix of wholesome co-arising factors, degenerates into mere attention.

Given the scientific investigation, the only causal machine in human existence, in the ultimate end, is the brain, which seems to be mainly out of control: The sensation, perception and imagination of the external world are automatically determined by the interpretation of input signals receiving through sense organs; making a choice and decision are automatically realized on the base of this interpretation, which, In later period, regulate the behavior patterns in a social environment. The only causal and interpretation machine, as described above, the brain is thought to be automatically shaped by various external factors, such as genetic programming that determines the design of a brain – various proportions among the various circuits in such a way that if your brain devotes more space for aggression and anxiety centre, for example, then it is very high probability that you are a ‘wild beast’ inside. As you cannot pick out your brain when you are born, because at least the genetic inheritance is out of your control, it is nearly impossible for you to avoid the very fact that your internal world is so. Maybe, your inner wildness doesn’t reveal itself in the everyday world, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that you have conscious control over it. Because of being hidden mainly in your unconsciousness, even your conscious mind can be unaware of the very fact of its existence. From scientific perspective, it can be stated, in this case, that the censor system of your brain is quite active to make sufficiently well-considered selection among desires that unintentionally emerge in aggression and anxiety circuits, and to hide most of them, which involve an extreme violence and destruction, in hidden consciousness in order to protect the ‘perfect’ image of your personality in social system, or simply to avoid to be punished on the grounds of these implausible, unfavorable desires in that system. If this is so, where is your freedom – free choice? Doesn’t it seem that the naked truth is that your brain, instead of you, makes a choice, decides, controls, regulates of almost everything in your life, leaving for you a room for being just a ‘perfect’ bio-social robot that lives in his or her illusion of free will?

Knowledge of revelation cannot interfere with ordinary knowledge. Likewise, ordinary knowledge cannot interfere with knowledge of revelation. There is no scientific theory which is more favorable to the truth of revelation than any other theory. It is disastrous for theology if theologians prefer one scientific view to others on theological grounds. And it was humiliating for theology when theologians were afraid of new theories for religious reasons, trying to resist them as long as possible, and finally giving in when resistance had become impossible. This ill-conceived resistance of theologians from the time of Galileo to the time of Darwin was one of the causes of the split between religion and secular culture in the past centuries. The same situation prevails with regard to historical research. Theologians need not be afraid of any historical conjecture, for revealed truth lies in a dimension where it can neither be confirmed nor negated by historiography. Therefore, theologians should not prefer some results of historical research to others on theological grounds, and they should not resist results which finally have to be accepted if scientific honesty is not to be destroyed, even if they seem to undermine the knowledge of revelation. Historical investigations should neither comfort nor worry theologians. Knowledge of revelation, although it is mediated primarily through historical events, does not imply factual assertions, and it is therefore not exposed to critical analysis by historical research. Its truth is to be judged by criteria which lie within the dimension of revelatory knowledge. Psychology, including depth psychology, psychosomatics, and social psychology, is equally unable to interfere with knowledge of revelation. There are many insights into the nature of man in revelation. But all of them refer to the relation of man to what concerns him ultimately, to the ground and meaning of his being. There is no revealed psychology just as there is no revealed historiography or revealed physics. It is not the task of theology to protect the truth of revelation by attacking Freudian doctrines of libido, repression, and sublimation on religious grounds or by defending a Jungian doctrine of man in the name of revelatory knowledge.

It is significant that Gnostic philosophy found its continuation in alchemy.29 “Mater Alchimia” is one of the mothers of modern science, and modern science has given us an unparalleled knowledge of the “dark” side of matter. It has also penetrated into the secrets of physiology and evolution, and made the very roots of life itself an object of investigation. In this way the human mind has sunk deep into the sublunary world of matter, thus repeating the Gnostic myth of the Nous, who, beholding his reflection in the depths below, plunged down and was swallowed in the embrace of Physis. The climax of this development was marked in the eighteenth century by the French Revolution, in the nineteenth century by scientific materialism, and in the twentieth century by political and social “realism,” which has turned the wheel of history back a full two thousand years and seen the recrudescence of the despotism, the lack of individual rights, the cruelty, indignity, and slavery of the pre-Christian world, whose “labour problem” was solved by the “ergastulum” (convict-camp). The “transvaluation of all values” is being enacted before our eyes.

Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh have promised to continue to fund efforts to prove the convicted men’s innocence, including more scientific “evidence testing and further investigation which will hopefully lead to the unmasking of the actual killer.”246 Because the West Memphis Three were released before the evidentiary hearing could be held, the new evidence already gathered was never given its day in court. This evidence, in addition to the evidence that Misskelley’s confession was false, now constitutes the bulk of the West Memphis Three’s case for exoneration. Despite all of the new scientific evidence, which wholly discredits the Salem Witch Trial–like “evidence” used to convict them, Echols, Baldwin, and Misskelley remain convicted murderers today. They are free of their prison cells, yet they remain imprisoned by their legal status as convicted murderers. Jason Baldwin once said, “I know one thing, and that is how long is too long to keep an innocent person in prison: one minute! One minute is too long to deny an innocent person his freedom.”247 When they were finally released, on August 19, 2011, eighteen years and seventy-eight days after they were arrested, Echols, Baldwin, and Misskelley had each

It is one of the contradictions of our time that science, which is the source of power, and more particularly of governmental power, depends for its advancement upon an essentially anarchic state of mind in the investigator. The scientific state of mind is neither sceptical nor dogmatic. The sceptic holds that the truth is undiscoverable, while the dogmatist holds that it is already discovered. The man of science holds that the truth is discoverable though not discovered, at any rate in the matters which he is investigating. But even to say that the truth is discoverable is to say rather more than the genuine man of science believes, since he does not conceive his discoveries as final and absolute, but as approximations subject to future correction. Absence of finality is of the essence of the scientific spirit. The beliefs of the man of science are therefore tentative and undogmatic. But in so far as they result from his own researches, they are personal, not social. They depend, that is to say, upon what he himself has ascertained by observation and inference, not upon what society considers it prudent for the good citizen to believe. This conflict between the scientific spirit and the governmental use of science is likely ultimately to bring scientific progress to a standstill, since scientific technique will be increasingly used to instil orthodoxy and credulity.

Conviction is the belief that in some point of knowledge one possesses absolute truth. Such a belief presumes, then, that absolute truths exist; likewise, that the perfect methods for arriving at them have been found; finally, that every man who has convictions makes use of these perfect methods. All three assertions prove at once that the man of convictions is not the man of scientific thinking; he stands before us still in the age of theoretical innocence, a child, however grownup he might be otherwise. But throughout thousands of years, people have lived in such childlike assumptions, and from out of them mankind’s mightiest sources of power have flowed. The countless people who sacrificed themselves for their convictions thought they were doing it for absolute truth. All of them were wrong: probably no man has ever sacrificed himself for truth… It is not the struggle of opinions that has made history so violent, but rather the struggle of belief in opinions, that is, the struggle of convictions. If only all those people who thought so highly of their conviction, who sacrificed all sorts of things to it and spared neither their honor, body nor life in its service, had devoted only half of their strength to investigating by what right they clung to this or that conviction, how they had arrived at it, then how peaceable the history of mankind would appear! How much more would be known!

[THE DAILY BREATH] Blaise Pascal, the famous mathematician, once said: "To those who wish to see, God gives them sufficient light. To those who doesn't wish to see, God gives them sufficient darkness." Seeing the Truth is a choice. Listening to my words is a choice. Healing is a choice. If want scientific evidence about the existence of God, there is a wealth of data to support it. Dr. Jeffrey Long, M.D. used the best scientific techniques available today to study more than 4,000 people who had near-death experiences and found themselves face to face with our Heavenly Father. Read the book "God and the Afterlife" and you will find it. If you want scientific evidence about Jesus being the Son of God, Lee Strobel, an atheist investigative journalist discovered it. Read the book "The Case for Christ" and you will find it. If you want scientific evidence about Jesus still healing today, study the ministries of Dr. Charles Ndifon, T.L. Osborn, Kathryn Kuhlman among others, and you will find it. But most importantly, if you want to fill the emptiness within you, and experience the perfect love, mercy and forgiveness, if you want to live in the peace of our Heavenly Father, give your body, your mind and your heart to Christ. Give your life to Jesus. The empty place you feel in your heart is reserved only for the spirit of Christ and nothing from this world will fill it. Look up to heaven, behold Jesus and Live.

Although Dyatlov, Shift Foreman Akimov, and Senior Reactor Control Engineer Toptunov had violated some operating regulations, they were ignorant of the deadly failing of the RBMK-1000 that meant that insertion of the control rods, instead of shutting down the reactor at the end of the test, could initiate a runaway chain reaction. Every one of the investigators behind the report now agreed that the fatal power surge that destroyed the reactor had begun with the entry of the rods into its core. ‘Thus the Chrnobyl accident comes within the standard pattern of most severe accidents in the world. It begins with an accumulation of small breaches of the regulations. … These produce a set of undesirable properties and occurrences that, when taken separately, do not seem to be particularly dangerous, but finally an initiating event occurs that, in this particular case, was the subjective actions of the personnel that allowed the potentially destructive and dangerous qualities of the reactor to be released.’ IAEA experts revealed at last the true magnitude of the technical cover-up surrounding the causes of the disaster: the long history of previous RBMK accidents, the dangerous design of the reactor, its instability, and the way its operators had been misled about its behavior. In dense scientific detail, it described the inherent problems of the positive void coefficient and the fatal consequences of the control rod ‘tip’ effect. (pp. 347-348)

Hoover wanted the new investigation to be a showcase for his bureau, which he had continued to restructure. To counter the sordid image created by Burns and the old school of venal detectives, Hoover adopted the approach of Progressive thinkers who advocated for ruthlessly efficient systems of management. These systems were modeled on the theories of Frederick Winslow Taylor, an industrial engineer, who argued that companies should be run “scientifically,” with each worker’s task minutely analyzed and quantified. Applying these methods to government, Progressives sought to end the tradition of crooked party bosses packing government agencies, including law enforcement, with patrons and hacks. Instead, a new class of technocratic civil servants would manage burgeoning bureaucracies, in the manner of Herbert Hoover—“ the Great Engineer”—who had become a hero for administering humanitarian relief efforts so expeditiously during World War I. As the historian Richard Gid Powers has noted, J. Edgar Hoover found in Progressivism an approach that reflected his own obsession with organization and social control. What’s more, here was a way for Hoover, a deskbound functionary, to cast himself as a dashing figure—a crusader for the modern scientific age. The fact that he didn’t fire a gun only burnished his image. Reporters noted that the “days of ‘old sleuth’ are over” and that Hoover had “scrapped the old ‘gum shoe, dark lantern and false moustache’ traditions of the Bureau of Investigation and substituted business methods of procedure.” One article said, “He plays golf. Whoever could picture Old Sleuth doing that?

What he finds at once is that every theory of the origin of the universe drives us into inconceivabilities. The atheist tries to think of a self-existent world, uncaused and without beginning; but we cannot conceive of anything beginningless or uncaused. The theist merely puts back the difficulty by a step; and to the theologian who says, “God made the world,” the child’s unanswerable query comes, “Who made God?” All ultimate religious ideas are logically inconceivable. All ultimate scientific ideas are equally beyond rational conception. What is matter? We reduce it to atoms, and then find ourselves forced to divide the atom as we had divided the molecule; we are driven into the dilemma that matter is infinitely divisible,—which is inconceivable; or that there is a limit to its divisibility,—which also is inconceivable. So with the divisibility of space and time; both of these are ultimately irrational ideas. Motion is wrapped in a triple obscurity, since it involves matter changing, in time, its position in space. When we analyze matter resolutely we find nothing at last but force—a force impressed upon our organs of sense, or a force resisting our organs of action; and who shall tell us what force is? Turn from physics to psychology, and we come upon mind and consciousness: and here are greater puzzles than before. “Ultimate scientific ideas,” then, “are all representations of realities that cannot be comprehended... In all directions the scientist’s investigations bring him face to face with an insoluble enigma; and he ever more clearly perceives it to be an insoluble enigma. He learns at once the greatness and the littleness of the human intellect—its power in dealing with all that comes within the range of experience, its impotence in dealing with all that transcends experience. He, more than any other, truly knows that in its ultimate nature nothing can be known.”305 The only honest philosophy, to use Huxley’s word, is agnosticism.

Many people today acquiesce in the widespread myth, devised in the late 19th century, of an epic battle between ‘scientists’ and ‘religionists’. Despite de unfortunate fact that some members of both parties perpetuate the myth by their actions today, this ‘conflict’ model has been rejected by every modern historian of science; it does not portray the historical situation. During the 16th and 17th centuries and during the Middle Ages, there was not a camp of ‘scientists’ struggling to break free of the repression of ‘religionists’; such separate camps simply did not exist as such. Popular tales of repression and conflict are at best oversimplified or exaggerated, and at worst folkloristic fabrications. Rather, the investigators of nature were themselves religious people, and many ecclesiastics were themselves investigators of nature. The connection between theological and scientific study rested in part upon the idea of the Two Books. Enunciated by St. Augustine and other early Christian writers, the concept states that God reveals Himself to human beings in two different ways – by inspiring the sacred writers to pen the Book of Scripture, and by creating the world, the Book of Nature. The world around us, no less than the Bible, is a divine message intended to be read; the perceptive reader can learn much about the Creator by studying the creation. This idea, deeply ingrained in orthodox Christianity, means that the study of the world can itself be a religious act. Robert Boyle, for example, considered his scientific inquiries to be a type of religious devotion (and thus particularly appropriate to do on Sundays) that heightens the natural philosopher’s knowledge and awareness of God through the contemplation of His creation. He described the natural philosopher as a ‘priest of nature’ whose duty it was to expound and interpret the messages written in the Book of Nature, and to gather together and give voice to all creation’s silent praise of its Creator.

In 1942, Merton set out four scientific values, now known as the ‘Mertonian Norms’. None of them have snappy names, but all of them are good aspirations for scientists. First, universalism: scientific knowledge is scientific knowledge, no matter who comes up with it – so long as their methods for finding that knowledge are sound. The race, sex, age, gender, sexuality, income, social background, nationality, popularity, or any other status of a scientist should have no bearing on how their factual claims are assessed. You also can’t judge someone’s research based on what a pleasant or unpleasant person they are – which should come as a relief for some of my more disagreeable colleagues. Second, and relatedly, disinterestedness: scientists aren’t in it for the money, for political or ideological reasons, or to enhance their own ego or reputation (or the reputation of their university, country, or anything else). They’re in it to advance our understanding of the universe by discovering things and making things – full stop.20 As Charles Darwin once wrote, a scientist ‘ought to have no wishes, no affections, – a mere heart of stone.’ The next two norms remind us of the social nature of science. The third is communality: scientists should share knowledge with each other. This principle underlies the whole idea of publishing your results in a journal for others to see – we’re all in this together; we have to know the details of other scientists’ work so that we can assess and build on it. Lastly, there’s organised scepticism: nothing is sacred, and a scientific claim should never be accepted at face value. We should suspend judgement on any given finding until we’ve properly checked all the data and methodology. The most obvious embodiment of the norm of organised scepticism is peer review itself. 20. Robert K. Merton, ‘The Normative Structure of Science’ (1942), The Sociology of Science: Empirical and Theoretical Investigations (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1973): pp. 267–278.

Above all, we should not let ourselves forget precisely what method is and what it is not. A method, at least in the sciences, is a systematic set of limitations and constraints voluntarily assumed by a researcher in order to concentrate his or her investigations upon a strictly defined aspect of or approach to a clearly delineated object. As such, it allows one to see further and more perspicuously in one particular instance and in one particular way, but only because one has first consented to confine oneself to a narrow portion of the visible spectrum, so to speak. Moreover, while a given method may grant one a glimpse of truths that would remain otherwise obscure, that method is not itself a truth. This is crucial to understand. A method, considered in itself, may even in some ultimate sense be “false” as an explanation of things and yet still be probative as an instrument of investigation; some things are more easily seen through a red filter, but to go through life wearing rose-colored spectacles is not to see things as they truly are. When one forgets the distinction between method and truth, one becomes foolishly prone to respond to any question that cannot be answered from the vantage of one’s particular methodological perch by dismissing it as nonsensical, or by issuing a promissory note guaranteeing a solution to the problem at some juncture in the remote future, or by simply distorting the question into one that looks like the kind one really can answer after all. Whenever modern scientific method is corrupted in this fashion the results are especially unfortunate. In such cases, an admirably severe discipline of interpretive and theoretical restraint has been transformed into its perfect and irrepressibly wanton opposite: what began as a principled refusal of metaphysical speculation, for the sake of specific empirical inquiries, has now been mistaken for a comprehensive knowledge of the metaphysical shape of reality; the art of humble questioning has been mistaken for the sure possession of ultimate conclusions.

Blaming therapy, social work and other caring professions for the confabulation of testimony of 'satanic ritual abuse' legitimated a programme of political and social action designed to contest the gains made by the women's movement and the child protection movement. In efforts to characterise social workers and therapists as hysterical zealots, 'satanic ritual abuse' was, quite literally, 'made fun of': it became the subject of scorn and ridicule as interest groups sought to discredit testimony of sexual abuse as a whole. The groundswell of support that such efforts gained amongst journalists, academics and the public suggests that the pleasures of disbelief found resonance far beyond the confines of social movements for people accused of sexual abuse. These pleasures were legitimised by a pseudo-scientific vocabulary of 'false memories' and 'moral panic' but as Daly (1999:219-20) points out 'the ultimate goal of ideology is to present itself in neutral, value-free terms as the very horizon of objectivity and to dismiss challenges to its order as the "merely ideological"'. The media spotlight has moved on and social movements for people accused of sexual abuse have lost considerable momentum. However, their rhetoric continues to reverberate throughout the echo chamber of online and 'old' media. Intimations of collusion between feminists and Christians in the concoction of 'satanic ritual abuse' continue to mobilise 'progressive' as well as 'conservative' sympathies for men accused of serious sexual offences and against the needs of victimised women and children. This chapter argues that, underlying the invocation of often contradictory rationalising tropes (ranging from calls for more scientific 'objectivity' in sexual abuse investigations to emotional descriptions of 'happy families' rent asunder by false allegations) is a collective and largely unarticulated pleasure; the catharthic release of sentiments and views about children and women that had otherwise become shameful in the aftermath of second wave feminism. It seems that, behind the veneer of public concern about child sexual abuse, traditional views about the incredibility of women's and children's testimony persist. 'Satanic ritual abuse has served as a lens through which these views have been rearticulated and reasserted at the very time that evidence of widespread and serious child sexual abuse has been consolidating. p60

On the whole, scientific methods are at least as important results of investigation as any other results, for the scientific spirit is based upon a knowledge of method, and if the methods were lost, all the results of science could not prevent the renewed prevalence of superstition and absurdity. Clever people may learn as much as they like of the results of science, but one still notices in their conversation, and especially in the hypotheses they make, that they lack the scientific spirit; they have not the instinctive distrust of the devious courses of thinking which, in consequence of long training, has taken root in the soul of every scientific man. It is enough for them to find any kind of hypothesis on a subject, they are then all on fire for it, and imagine the matter is thereby settled. To have an opinion is with them equivalent to immediately becoming fanatical for it, and finally taking it to heart as a conviction. In the case of an unexplained matter they become heated for the first idea that comes into their head which has any resemblance to an explanation—a course from which the worst results constantly follow, especially in the field of politics. On that account everybody should nowadays have become thoroughly acquainted with at least one science, for then surely he knows what is meant by method, and how necessary is the extremest carefulness. To women in particular this advice is to be given at present; as to those who are irretrievably the victims of all hypotheses, especially when these have the appearance of being witty, attractive, enlivening, and invigorating. Indeed, on close inspection one sees that by far the greater number of educated people still desire convictions from a thinker and nothing but convictions, and that only a small minority want certainty. The former want to be forcibly carried away in order thereby to obtain an increase of strength; the latter few have the real interest which disregards personal advantages and the increase of strength also. The former class, who greatly predominate, are always reckoned upon when the thinker comports himself and labels himself as a genius, and thus views himself as a higher being to whom authority belongs. In so far as genius of this kind upholds the ardour of convictions, and arouses distrust of the cautious and modest spirit of science, it is an enemy of truth, however much it may think itself the wooer thereof.

We have learned in the course of this investigation that the libido which builds up religious structures regresses in the last analysis to the mother, and thus represents the real bond through which we are connected with our origins. When the Church Fathers derive the word religio from religare (to reconnect, link back), they could at least have appealed to this psychological fact in support of their view.71 As we have seen, this regressive libido conceals itself in countless symbols of the most heterogeneous nature, some masculine and some feminine—differences of sex are at bottom secondary and not nearly so important psychologically as would appear at first sight. The essence and motive force of the sacrificial drama consist in an unconscious transformation of energy, of which the ego becomes aware in much the same way as sailors are made aware of a volcanic upheaval under the sea. Of course, when we consider the beauty and sublimity of the whole conception of sacrifice and its solemn ritual, it must be admitted that a psychological formulation has a shockingly sobering effect. The dramatic concreteness of the sacrificial act is reduced to a barren abstraction, and the flourishing life of the figures is flattened into two-dimensionality. Scientific understanding is bound, unfortunately, to have regrettable effects—on one side; on the other side abstraction makes for a deepened understanding of the phenomena in question. Thus we come to realize that the figures in the mythical drama possess qualities that are interchangeable, because they do not have the same “existential” meaning as the concrete figures of the physical world. The latter suffer tragedy, perhaps, in the real sense, whereas the others merely enact it against the subjective backcloth of introspective consciousness. The boldest speculations of the human mind concerning the nature of the phenomenal world, namely that the wheeling stars and the whole course of human history are but the phantasmagoria of a divine dream, become, when applied to the inner drama, a scientific probability. The essential thing in the mythical drama is not the concreteness of the figures, nor is it important what sort of an animal is sacrificed or what sort of god it represents; what alone is important is that an act of sacrifice takes place, that a process of transformation is going on in the unconscious whose dynamism, whose contents and whose subject are themselves unknown but become visible indirectly to the conscious mind by stimulating the imaginative material at its disposal, clothing themselves in it like the dancers who clothe themselves in the skins of animals or the priests in the skins of their human victims.

Although some scientists questioned the validity of these studies, others went along willingly. People from a wide range of disciplines were recruited, including psychics, physicists, and computer scientists, to investigate a variety of unorthodox projects: experimenting with mind-altering drugs such as LSD, asking psychics to locate the position of Soviet submarines patrolling the deep oceans, etc. In one sad incident, a U.S. Army scientist was secretly given LSD. According to some reports, he became so violently disoriented that he committed suicide by jumping out a window. Most of these experiments were justified on the grounds that the Soviets were already ahead of us in terms of mind control. The U.S. Senate was briefed in another secret report that the Soviets were experimenting with beaming microwave radiation directly into the brains of test subjects. Rather than denouncing the act, the United States saw “great potential for development into a system for disorienting or disrupting the behavior pattern of military or diplomatic personnel.” The U.S. Army even claimed that it might be able to beam entire words and speeches into the minds of the enemy: “One decoy and deception concept … is to remotely create noise in the heads of personnel by exposing them to low power, pulsed microwaves.… By proper choice of pulse characteristics, intelligible speech may be created.… Thus, it may be possible to ‘talk’ to selected adversaries in a fashion that would be most disturbing to them,” the report said. Unfortunately, none of these experiments was peer-reviewed, so millions of taxpayer dollars were spent on projects like this one, which most likely violated the laws of physics, since the human brain cannot receive microwave radiation and, more important, does not have the ability to decode microwave messages. Dr. Steve Rose, a biologist at the Open University, has called this far-fetched scheme a “neuro-scientific impossibility.” But for all the millions of dollars spent on these “black projects,” apparently not a single piece of reliable science emerged. The use of mind-altering drugs did, in fact, create disorientation and even panic among the subjects who were tested, but the Pentagon failed to accomplish the key goal: control of the conscious mind of another person. Also, according to psychologist Robert Jay Lifton, brainwashing by the communists had little long-term effect. Most of the American troops who denounced the United States during the Korean War reverted back to their normal personalities soon after being released. In addition, studies done on people who have been brainwashed by certain cults also show that they revert back to their normal personality after leaving the cult. So it seems that, in the long run, one’s basic personality is not affected by brainwashing.

During these uninterrupted peregrinations of mine from place to place, and almost continuous and intense reflection about this, I at last formed a preliminary plan in my mind.   Liquidating all my affairs and mobilizing all my material and other possibilities, I began to collect all kinds of written literature and oral information, still surviving among certain Asiatic peoples, about that branch of science, which was highly developed in ancient times and called " Mehkeness ", a name signifying the " taking away-of-responsibility ", and of which contemporary civilisation knows but an insignificant portion under the name of " hypnotism ", while all the literature extant upon the subject was already as familiar to me as my own five fingers.   Collecting all I could, I went to a certain Dervish monastery, situated likewise in Central Asia and where I had already stayed before, and, settling down there, I devoted myself wholly to the study of the material in my possession.   After two years of thorough theoretical study of this branch of science, when it became necessary to verify practically certain indispensable details, not as yet sufficiently elucidated by me in theory, of the mechanism of the functioning of man's subconscious sphere, I began to give myself out to be a " healer " of all kinds of vices and to apply the results of my theoretical studies to them, affording them at the same time, of course, real relief.   This continued to be my exclusive preoccupation and manifestation for four or five years in accordance with the essential oath imposed by my task, which consisted in rendering conscientious aid to sufferers, in never using my knowledge and practical power in that domain of science except for the sake of my investigations, and never for personal or egotistical ends, I not only arrived at unprecedented practical results without equal in our day, but also elucidated almost everything necessary for me.   In a short time, I discovered many details which might contribute to the solution of the same cardinal question, as well as many secondary facts, the existence of which I had scarcely suspected.   At the same time, I also became convinced that the greater number of minor details necessary for the final elucidation of this question must be sought not only in the sphere of man's subconscious mentation, but in various aspects of the manifestations in his state of waking consciousness.   After establishing this definitely, thoughts again began from time to time to " swarm " in my mind, as they had done years ago, sometimes automatically, sometimes directed by my consciousness,—thoughts as to the means of adapting myself now to the conditions of ordinary life about me with a view to elucidating finally and infallibly this question, which obviously had become a lasting and inseparable part of my Being.   This time my reflections, which recurred periodically during the two years of my wanderings on the continents of Asia, Europe and Africa, resulted in a decision to make use of my exceptional, for the modern man, knowledge of the so-called " supernatural sciences ", as well as of my skill in producing different " tricks " in the domain of these so-called " sciences ", and to give myself out to be, in these pseudo-scientific domains, a so-called " professor-instructor ".

Scientific Naturalism Just what is scientific naturalism (hereafter, naturalism)? Succinctly put, it is the view that the spatio-temporal universe of physical objects, properties, events, and processes that are well established by scientific forms of investigation is all there is, was, or ever will be.

that arguments like yours cannot establish whether the first cause was, or is, alive or conscious—‘and,’ he says, ‘an inanimate, unconscious god is of little use to theism.’ 29 He has a point there, doesn’t he?” “No, I don’t think so,” said Craig. “One of the most remarkable features of the kalam argument is that it gives us more than just a transcendent cause of the universe. It also implies a personal Creator.” “How so?” Craig leaned back into his chair. “There are two types of explanations—scientific and personal,” he began, adopting a more professorial tone. “Scientific explanations explain a phenomenon in terms of certain initial conditions and natural laws, which explain how those initial conditions evolved to produce the phenomenon under consideration. By contrast, personal explanations explain things by means of an agent and that agent’s volition or will.” I interrupted to ask Craig for an illustration. He obliged me by saying: “Imagine you walked into the kitchen and saw the kettle boiling on the stove. You ask, ‘Why is the kettle boiling?’ Your wife might say, ‘Well, because the kinetic energy of the flame is conducted by the metal bottom of the kettle to the water, causing the water molecules to vibrate faster and faster until they’re thrown off in the form of steam.’ That would be a scientific explanation. Or she might say, ‘I put it on to make a cup of tea.’ That would be a personal explanation. Both are legitimate, but they explain the phenomenon in different ways.” So far, so good. “But how does this relate to cosmology?” “You see, there cannot be a scientific explanation of the first state of the universe. Since it’s the first state, it simply cannot be explained in terms of earlier

Many readers responded, among them Marcel Proust, who took delight in the question. “I think that life would suddenly seem wonderful to us if we were threatened to die as you say,” he wrote. “Just think of how many projects, travels, love affairs, studies, it—our life—hides from us, made invisible by our laziness which, certain of a future, delays them incessantly.” His point being, how unfortunate that it takes being aware of an ending

In 2002 the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention produced a 497-page document named Toxicological Profile for DDT, DDE and DDD. In 2006 the World Health Organization finally finished reviewing all the scientific investigations and, just like the CDC, classified DDT as “mildly harmful” to humans, stating that it had more health benefits than drawbacks in many situations.

The alleged complexity, depth, and obscurity of these questions is part of the illusion propagated by the system of ideological control, which aims to make the issues seem remote from the general population and to persuade them of their incapacity to organize their own affairs or to understand the social world in which they live without the tutelage of intermediaries. For that reason alone one should be careful not to link the analysis of social issues with scientific topics which, for their part, do require special training and techniques, and thus a special intellectual frame of reference, before they can be seriously investigated.

Educators often refer to communication skills as rhetorical skills. Scholars focus on both oral and written rhetoric. Oral skills are often taught through speech and debate classes, and are sometimes called forensics. Forensics, derived from the Latin word “forum,”as in court of law, actually means pertaining to legal proceedings or argumentation. Popular television shows have changed the meaning to something related exclusively to scientific investigation, as by a forensic pathologist. The term is actually much broader, as forensics implies researching an idea and then comparing it to things known by the audience in order to persuade them to one side of an argument or the other. Hence, the term “rhetoric”is closely tied to the idea of oral, documented, or physical evidence explained to the appropriate audience.

We need to admit that we can't get through even the challenges of today--much less the problems that lie ahead--without some outside intervention.

We need to change the ways in which we talk about humanity and the environment and in order to do so, we need to change the way in which we think about them, not an easy task given that we use language to think and our languages make us conceive the environment as detached. A possible way out to help us approach problems, without being drawn back by the mental models that fail us, is Systems Dynamics (Meadows 2008; Sterman 2012). Unfortunately, Sterman explains, most efforts made by individuals and institutions to enhance sustainability are directed at the symptoms and not at the causes and systems (any system) will respond to any change introduced with what is known as ‘policy resistance’, that is the existing system will tend to react to change in ways that we had not intended when we first designed the intervention (a few examples are road-building programs designed to reduce congestion that ends up increasing traffic or antibiotics that stimulate the evolution of drug-resistant pathogens—for a longer list and further explanation see Sterman 2012, 24). Systems Dynamics allows us to calculate scientifically the way in which a complex system will react to change and to account beforehand for what we usually describe as ‘side-effects’. Side effects, Sterman argues, ‘are not a feature of reality but a sign that the boundaries of our mental models are too narrow, our time horizons too short’ (24). As Gonella et al. (2019) explain: ”As long as we consider the geobiosphere as a sub-system (a resources provider) of the human-made economic system, any attempt to fix environmental and social problems by keeping the business as usual, i.e., the mantra of economic growth, will fail. The reality tells us the reverse: geobiosphere is not a sub-system of the economy, economy is a sub-system of geobiosphere. As systems thinkers know, trying to keep alive at any cost the operation of a sub-system will give rise to a re-arrangement of the super-system – the geobiosphere – that will self-reorganize to absorb and make ineffective our attempt, then continuing its own way.” (Gonella et al. 2019)

The IPCC leadership has purposely avoided what is a fundamental tenet of scientific investigation: testing alternative hypotheses.

Bacon’s curiosity makes him sound amazingly modern, and in many ways he was. But his writings look back as much as they look forward, and the figure to whom he owes his greatest debt is without doubt Aristotle, whom he discovered through his admiration for Grosseteste.5 Aristotle’s works unlocked for Bacon a world of scientific investigation, above all a method of exploring the wonders of nature and understanding its underlying principles

Measurements are the easy part of scientific investigation; figuring out what those measurements mean in terms of how nature works is the hard part.

Galileo was right, and the Church in this case abused its disciplinary power. As Pope John Paul II admitted in 1992: “This led them [the theologians who condemned Galileo] unduly to transpose into the realm of the doctrine of the faith, a question which in fact pertained to scientific investigation.” Such acknowledgments, however, didn’t come for almost four centuries.

Sheep and Goats One way of independently checking the results suggested by the hypnosis studies is to examine another form of suggestion, one that is in some ways stronger than conventional hypnotic induction. These are the subtle suggestions induced in us by our culture, our personal experiences, and the beliefs we learned from parents and schools. Together, culture, experience, and beliefs are potent shapers of our sense of reality. They are, in effect, hidden persuaders, powerful reinforcers of our sense of what is real. Our deep beliefs determine what we view as logically reasonable and what we consider to be morally and ethically self-evident. As we’ll explore in more detail in chapter 14, the hidden “hypnosis” of belief actually determines to a greater degree than is commonly known what we can consciously perceive. The hypnosis experiments showed that a slight tweaking of these beliefs resulted in a different performance. Thus, we would expect that people who accept the existence of ESP—for reasons of culture, experience, or belief—will score higher, on average, than people who do not. This turns out to be one of the most consistent experimental effects in psi research. It was whimsically dubbed the “sheep-goat” effect by psychologist Gertrude Schmeidler, who in 1943 proposed that one reason that confirmed skeptics do not report psi experiences is because they subconsciously avoid them.37 People who do report such experiences Schmeidler called the “sheep,” and the skeptics she called the “goats.” These studies typically had people fill in a questionnaire asking about their degree of belief in ESP and about any psi experiences they may have had. On the basis of their responses, participants were classified as either sheep or goats. All participants then took a standardized psi test, like an ESP card test, after which the results of the sheep and goats were compared. The idea was that the performance of the sheep would be significantly better than that of the goats. In 1993, psychologist Tony Lawrence from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, reported a meta-analysis of all sheep-goat forced-choice experiments conducted between 1943 and 1993. Lawrence found seventy-three published reports by thirty-seven different investigators, involving more than 685,000 guesses produced by forty-five hundred participants. The overall results were strongly in favor of the sheep-goat effect, with believers performing better than disbelievers with odds greater than a trillion to one.

In addition, telepathy lent itself to controlled laboratory investigation, whereas survival research did not. It was eventually discovered that psi performance in telepathy tests did not diminish when there was no “sender.” It also proved to be nearly impossible to create a test for “pure” telepathy that could not also be explained as clairvoyance. So most researchers began to focus on clairvoyance. It may seem odd that it took any time at all to go from systematic research on survival phenomena, to telepathy research, and then to clairvoyance, before it was realized that the fundamental issue in all cases was the nature of psi perception. But this just illustrates how difficult this topic is to study. Some researchers made these leaps in short order. Others took years. Collectively it took about a half-century to come to what we now see as a “reasonable” approach. Fifty years from now, entirely new “reasonable” ideas may have evolved.

Die-Face Analysis In the 1930s, J. B. Rhine and his colleagues recognized and took into account the possibility that some dice studies may have been flawed because the probabilities of die faces are not equal. With some dice, it is slightly more likely that one will roll a 6 face than a 1 face because the die faces are marked by scooping out bits of material. The 6 face, for example, has six scoops removed from the surface of that side of the die, so it has slightly less mass than the other die faces. On any random toss, that tiny difference in mass will make the 6 slightly more likely to land face up, followed in decreasing probability by the 5, 4, 3, 2, and 1 faces. Thus, an experiment that relied exclusively upon the 6 face as the target may have been flawed because, unless there were also control tosses with no mental intention applied, we could not tell whether above-chance results were due to a mind-matter interaction or to the slightly higher probability of rolling a 6. To see whether this bias was present in these dice studies, we sifted out all reports for which the published data allowed us to calculate the effective hit rate separately for each of the six die faces used under experimental and control conditions. In fact, the suspected biases were found, as shown in figure 8.3. The hit rates for both experimental and control tosses tended to increase from die faces 1 to 6. However, most of the experimental hit rates were also larger than the corresponding control hit rates, suggested some thing interesting beyond the artifacts caused by die-face biases. For example, for die face 6 the experimental condition was significantly larger than the control with odds against chance of five thousand to one. Figure 8.3. Relationship between die face and hit rates for experimental and control conditions. The error bars are 65 percent confidence intervals. Because of the evidence that the die faces were slightly biased, we examined a subset of studies that controlled for these dice biases—studies using design protocols where die faces were equally distributed among the six targets. We referred to such studies as the “balanced-protocol subset.” Sixty-nine experiments met the balanced-protocol criteria. Our examination of those experiments resulted in three notable points: there was still highly significant evidence for mind-matter interaction, with odds against chance of greater than a trillion to one; the effects were constant across different measures of experimental quality; and the selective-reporting “file drawer” required a twenty-to-one ratio of unretrieved, nonsignificant studies for each observed study. Thus chance, quality, and selective reporting could not explain away the results. Dice Conclusions Our meta-analysis findings led us to conclude that a genuine mind-matter interaction did exist with experiments testing tossed dice. The effect had been successfully replicated in more than a hundred experiments by more than fifty investigators for more than a half-century.

Invariably every scientific investigation begins with an observation.

Everyone is now so eager to see the government "reveal" this long-awaited information that no one questions the reality of the basic facts and the political motivations that could inspire a manipulation of those facts. Trying to outsmart the CIA and the Pentagon has become such a national pastime that lawsuits against federal agencies under the Freedom of Information Act have begun to accumulate. All that has been shown so far is that these agencies were involved – often covertly – in many aspects of the UFO problem. I suspect that they are still involved. Discovering the secret of the UFO propulsion mechanism could be such a military breakthrough that any research project connected with it would enjoy the highest level of classification. But these UFO enthusiasts who are so anxious to expose the government have not reflected that they may be playing into the hands of a more sophisticated coverup of the real situation. Because of their eagerness to believe any indication that the authorities already possess the proof of UFO reality, many enthusiasts provide an ideal conduit for anyone wishing to spread the extraterrestrial gospel. The purpose of such an exercise need not be complex or strategically important. It could be something as mundane as a political diversion, or a test of the reliability of information channels under simulated crisis conditions, or a decoy for paramilitary operations. None of these rumors is likely to lead us any closer to a solution that can only be obtained by careful, intelligent, and perhaps tedious scientific research. The truth is that the UFOs may not be spacecraft at all. And the government may simply be hiding the fact that, in spite of the billions of dollars spent on air defense, it has no more clues to the nature of the phenomenon today than it did in the forties when it began its investigations.

Of the food factors investigated, the only one found to have a consistent and significant association with a longer lifespan across the board was intake of legumes, whether it was Swedes eating their brown beans and peas, Japanese eating their soy, or Greeks eating their lentils, chickpeas, and white beans. The researchers identified an 8 percent reduction in risk of death for every 20 g increase in legumes consumed each day,2404 which is just about two tablespoons’ worth.2405

Christianity isn't anti-science, but it is anti-scientism. Scientism is the belief that science is the only way to know anything. But there are many things we know without the benefit of science at all, like logical and mathematical truths (which precede scientific investigations), metaphysical truths (which determine if the external world is real), moral and ethical truths (which set boundaries for our behavior), aesthetic truths (like determining beauty), and historical truths. Christians believe that science can tell us many important things but not all of the important things.

Knowledge and adjudication of methods of investigation (whether epistemological, metaphysical, or valuative) are the result of loops of reflectiveness that – in a multi-agent system – construct the grounds for objective knowledge through intersubjective judgements. Simply put, evaluations rely on what people think, what they do, how they do it, and how they communicate it to others. These evaluations are dependent on the epistemic capabilities of individuals and are multiply instantiated within systems of practice.

For example, Keith Stanovich’s psychology textbook lists paranormal phenomena as “telepathy, clairvoyance, psychokinesis, precognition, reincarnation, biorhythms, astral projection, pyramid power, plant communication, and psychic surgery” (page 186).118 All these items are perfectly amenable to scientific inquiry, but so far only a few have been systematically investigated. Education may benefit by teaching students to avoid knee-jerk negative reactions to topics just because they seem peculiar and instead to evaluate what the evidence actually says. If there’s no body of systematic scientific evidence to rely upon (e.g., for the viability of “pyramid power”), then we can’t say much about that topic yet. But when there is evidence (as with several classes of psychic phenomena), then students should learn how to evaluate it. Professors often give lip service to the importance of teaching critical thinking skills, but in practice most of that lip is arrogant and dismissive. Another reason that the paranormal gets a bad rap is that professors are unaware of the evidence because their professors, and their professors before them, kept repeating that there wasn’t anything worth paying attention to.120 When something is repeated often enough, the lie takes on a life of its own. Political propagandists and advertising agencies have long capitalized on this fact.

The principle of scientific inquiry should not be limited to merely the practical or the possible," explained Sighter. "Only by investigating the unlikely and the unthought-of is the sum total of knowledge advanced.

In 1900, Max Planck, a critic of Boltzmann’s science for nearly two decades, published papers that hinted at a change of heart. Even more unexpectedly he seemed to be saying that Boltzmann’s statistical methods might have relevance far beyond thermodynamics. This reluctant conversion was forced upon Planck by the advent of a new technology—the electric light bulb. In these electric current flows through a filament, warming it and making it glow. This focused scientific minds on investigating the precise relationship between heat and light.

After the eight-month investigation, Amanda and Raffaele were put on trial and convicted a year later. Their appeal took two more years. (Trials in Italy are notoriously slow.) The court of appeals, in a full jury trial, found them innocent of murder in 2011 and severely criticized the evidence against them as being nonexistent, scientifically flawed, and erroneous. They were released after spending 1,427 days in prison, and Amanda flew home to America. But Italy has no double-jeopardy clause in its constitution, and prosecutors are allowed to appeal acquittals. Mignini appealed the verdict to the Corte Suprema di Cassazione. On March 26, 2013, the Court of Cassation vacated the acquittal and ordered a new trial. That new trial took place in late 2013.

[Kandel is quoting John Eccles] I learned from [Karl] Popper what for me is the essence of scientific investigation - how to be speculative and imaginative in the creation of hypotheses, and then to challenge them with the utmost rigor, both by utilizing all existing knowledge and by mounting the most searching experimental attacks. In fact I learned from him even to rejoice in the refutation of a cherished hypothesis, because that too is a scientific achievement and because much has been learned by the refutation. Through my association with Popper I experienced a great liberation in escaping from the rigid conventions that are generally held with respect to scientific research. . . . When one is liberated from these restrictive dogmas, scientific investigation becomes an exciting adventure opening up new visions; and this attitude has, I think, been reflected in my own scientific life since that time.

Journalists fill very different social roles than those of scientists, and the press serves different roles than those of scientific institutions. Scientists and research institutions have motivations for communicating with the public that only partly overlap with those of journalists. From a scientist’s perspective, the function of media ought to be to disseminate scientific results accurately and in proportion to the strength of the evidence they have produced… Journalists, on the other hand, work to avoid the appearance of working for a “special interest.” The news media aim to entertain; warn of dangers and failures; and report, explain, or comment on events. Preventing disease is not one of these goals… Although desiring to only present factual information, a journalist with a deadline to deliver a story before the publication of a newspaper or the airing of television program may simply not have enough time to “get it right” because they interviewed the wrong people, missed important features, or were not able to follow up on sources. Long-form investigative journalism, such as Deer’s investigation of Wakefield’s conflicts of interest, can slowly fill these gaps.

There has now been a lot of scientific investigation into this, and there’s a broad scientific consensus that if you sleep less, your attention will likely suffer.

It is a mental world we live in, not a physical one at all. The physical is merely an extension of the mental, and an imperfect extension at that. Everything we see, hear, and feel is not a hard and inescapable fact at all, but only the imperfect revelation to the senses of an idea held in mind. Preoccupation with sensory experience has focused attention on effects instead of causes, has led scientific investigation down a blind alley where everything grows smaller into infinity or larger into infinity and walls us off from the secrets that lie behind life. It is not the planets and stars, the elements and winds, or even the existence of life itself that is the miracle that demands our attention. It is consciousness.

There is a perhaps understandable reluctance to come to grips scientifically with the problem of race differences in intelligence—to come to grips with it, that is to say, in the same way the scientists would approach the investigation of any other phenomenon. This reluctance is manifested in a variety of ‘symptoms’ found in most writings and discussions of the psychology of race differences. These symptoms include a tendency to remain on the remotest fringes of the subject, to sidestep central questions, and to blur the issues and tolerate a degree of vagueness in definitions, concepts and inferences that would be unseemly in any other realm of scientific discourse. Many writers express an unwarranted degree of skepticism about reasonably well-established quantitative methods and measurements. They deny or belittle facts already generally accepted—accepted, that is, when brought to bear on inferences outside the realm of race differences—and they demand practically impossible criteria of certainty before even seriously proposing or investigating genetic hypotheses, as contrasted with with extremely uncritical attitudes towards purely environmental hypotheses. There is often a failure to distinguish clearly between scientifically answerable aspects of the question and the moral, political and social policy issues; there is tendency to beat dead horses and set up straw men on what is represented, or misrepresented I should say, as the genetic side of the argument. We see appeals to the notion that the topic is either too unimportant to be worthy of scientific curiosity, or is too complex, or too difficult, or that it will be forever impossible for any kind of research to be feasible, or that answers to key questions are fundamentally ‘unknowable’ in any scientifically accepted sense. Finally, we often see complete denial of intelligence and race as realities, or as quantifiable attributes, or as variables capable of being related to one another. In short, there is an altogether ostrich-like dismissal of the subject.

As the number of studies increases (...) the investigator is then prompted to examine the anomalous study to find out in what crucial conditions it differs from other studies yielding contrary results. Scientific investigation is the analysis of variables, not just a box score tallying how may studies are pro or con some conclusion.

This book is designed to expose once and for all those criminally responsible for the bioweapon known as SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.

University of North Carolina, Ralph S. Baric had already successfully used reverse genetics10 to generate a chimeric11 (Gain-of-Function) coronavirus. He not only published12 this research funded by the NIH (grant numbers AI23946, GM63228, and

In 2002 following the SARS-CoV-1 outbreak in China, Dr. Shi Zhengli, a.k.a. Shi Zhengli-Li, and colleagues at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) began investigating how SARS-CoV-1 was transmitted.

It is certainly not the task of the history researcher to use moral standards. He should tell us how things were on the basis of an objective scientific investigation. We do not demand to know what he thinks about them according to his subjective moral outlook. ‘Moral standards’ are caught up, involved in a continuous transformation, and for the living generation to impose on former generations its changing standards of today, is like measuring the geological strata against the flying sand of the dunes. Schlosser, Gervinus and Ranke, and Janssen – each of them has a different moral standard, each has his own class morals, and even more faithfully than the times they depict, they reflect in their works the classes they speak for.