[OPE] science and scientology

Jerry,

If you are finding that you are starting to run into trouble with your
Talmudic religious-Marxist belief, it's not my problem, and I cannot help
you with it, except to say that eventually it gets in the way of scientific
inquiry. If I have referred to Marx's own text regularly, the main reason is
that Marxists systematically and habitually falsify the ideas of Marx and
Engels, and I can prove that. The consequence of that falsification is -
since people act on these cult ideas - that people's lives are ruined, and
that the possibility of scientific progress is ruined.

To my knowledge, researchers in theoretical physics do refer back to
Einstein, and certainly philosophers of science do. There are numerous
unresolved problems implied by Einstein's advances, such as e.g. the concept
of dark matter, a quantum theory of gravity, the creation of the mass of
subatomic particles, the unified theory etc. and researchers do refer back
to what Einstein and his colleagues thought about that, comparing it to what
will stand the test of logic and experimental fact nowadays. Researchers in
that field are conversant with all that.

To take an example from one of the problems I am working on myself, Elman R.
Service defined four "stages" in the social evolution of the state. Now,
whereas almost no scientific archaeologists, anthropologists and historians
nowadays actually believe that Elman's classificatory scheme is literally
true or literally applies - the evidence is in favour of the uneven and
combined development of world history, and not progress via an inevitable,
linear sequence of evolutionary stages - nevertheless the specialists
continue to refer to Elman Service, because, as it happens, his conceptual
distinctions marked out some very essential aspects in the formation of
society. I can prove that without any doubt, and you can verify it from
citations indexes. The same can be said for innumerable other fields of
inquiry. Of course, I am talking about a rapidly changing field susceptible
to fashion and ideological influences according to the concerns of the day.

In the philosophy and history of science, Copernicus and the Copernican
revolution are still being discussed, amongst other things because of their
importance for the processes of scientific discovery. Many scientific people
are moreover in the habit of studying great scholars in the history of their
discipline, in order to get more clues that can lead to success, and any
reputable scientist is at least conversant with the great original texts in
his own discipline or specialism. Scientists believe, that we may still be
able to learn things from Copernicus, even although science has moved on way
beyond what he could imagine.

But, as I said, this is very different from the ideological and theological
concerns of Marxist sciptures and scrolls, the main aim of which is to
allocate every aspect to reality to a prefabricated Marxist categorisation
of life, the universe and everything, and to prove how the categories can be
deduced from each other. As Popper mentioned, there is a difference between
the logic of discovery and the logic of justification, and the Marxists
primarily aim to justify their faith, not to discover anything new.

Jurriaan

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Received on Sun May 31 05:13:13 2009