Squinting at Science. II

Wow. That went over like a lead balloon. I posted that comment to the blog and hrmf. The point was that the main implication of the article is wrong because preformationism was a rather large tent of most of biology at that time. Implying that it was therefore it was just this one guy, who looked through his microscope, and decided that it really was little people, and found some connection to the Bible to back him up but he was "amazingly" rebuffed by science. Is a pretty huge error in the history of science. He was a scientist, a professor, and a biologist, and a pretty good one at that, and the theory was the scientific theory of the time.

Well apparently I'm a pointless nitpicker who is just looking for a fight, and who hasn't read the authors other work, and am obsessed with a throwaway line from my post. In response, I noted that I'd eagerly accept surrender rather than a fight. I read his other suggested work, and my main point still stands.

He wrote a paper on Methodological Naturalism a year or so back, which was pretty so-so and suffers from a number of clear errors but also suffers pretty seriously with regard to the history of science. In that he thinks about as much of ancient science as Stark does. His main point in the paper is that allowing for supernaturalism is what causes science to not work and once you get rid of that science takes off like a bat out of hell. He's clearly wrong throughout and a proper understanding of the history of science would correct him. The father of anatomy Herophilus did a lot of really good work trying to answer religious questions. He did live vivesections on animal brains to find out what parts of the brain controlled what to answer the question "where is the soul?" So I go through all this trouble to address what is clearly an odd claim that the dirt obvious mistakes in the article would suddenly vanish if I read some 20-page paper on a different subject.

Arg! And I don't just say that because it's Talk Like a Pirate Day, I mean it, arg... what a pain in the ass.