New Scientist Admits: Liberals Are Biased And Deluded

Image courtesy of Becker1999, Creative Commons (CC BY 2.0).



Joel Kontinen

New Scientist has admitted that liberals are “just as deluded as everybody else.”

Reporting on several recent studies, NS concludes that liberals are anything but open-minded.

Research published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology suggests that like anybody else they were so “averse to listening to opposing viewpoints on hot-button issues, such as same-sex marriage [that]…they were willing to give up the chance to win money just to avoid the unpleasantness of hearing an opinion they disliked.”

The NS article uses expressions like 'the Regressive Left' and admits that American university culture is toxic and intolerant, thanks to "liberals".

NS also discloses that people who regard themselves as progressives and vote for Democrats, do not necessarily embrace science – even though they might march for it:

“Consider Seattle, a city that voted 87 per cent for Hillary Clinton and is proudly one of the most progressive … in the US. A warm embrace of scientific reality doesn’t come with the territory: Seattle isn’t terribly fond of biotechnology, rejecting GMOs and even vaccines. Rwanda’s childhood polio vaccination rate is higher than Seattle’s. As for other vaccines, including MMR, only five US states have higher exemption rates than Washington State.”

We welcome the opportunity to agree with NS’ conclusions, as this doesn’t happen too often. (Here’s one noticeable exception.)

Recent weeks have provided us with empirical proof of how closed-minded liberals really are.

Bill Nye, for instance, would rather suck than explore the merits in alternatives to his godless worldview.

This is probably also true of men like Lawrence Krauss and Richard Dawkins.

Source:

Berezow, Alex. 2017. Liberals are no strangers to confirmation bias after all. New Scientist (28 April).

Lawrence Krauss Writes a Godless Bible of Sorts

The Messier 101 (M101) galaxy. Image courtesy of ESA/Hubble, Creative Commons (CC BY 3.0).



Joel Kontinen

It is not often that the journal Nature uses the epithet 'fundamental science', but recently it did. This memorable occasion was ushered in by the publication of Lawrence M. Krauss’ book The Greatest Story Ever Told ... So Far (Simon & Schuster, 2017).

Krauss, a theoretical physicist who is known for his outspoken atheism, attempts to use the Bible’s outline to give his own view of the development of cosmology.

He divides his timeline into three parts, 'Genesis', 'Exodus' and 'Revelation'.

Genesis begins with Sir Isaac Newton’s discoveries. It seems that even Krauss cannot deny the contributions of Bible-believing scientists like Newton (1642–1727), Michael Faraday (1791–1867) and James Clerk Maxwell (1831–1879).

Exodus follows next:

“ 'Genesis' ends in the mid-1930s, with the discovery of the neutrino and short-range weak force. It is silly for Krauss to analogize this period to the part of the Bible in which the Jews are enslaved in Egypt, but that's the flavour of this book.”

And then it’s time for Revelation, which, oddly enough, coincides with entering the Promised Land:

“'Revelation' comes with the development in the 1970s of the standard model of particle physics, which describes all known particles and three of the four known forces. Krauss dubs it ‘perhaps the greatest theoretical edifice yet created by human minds’. He calls what came next the attaining of the ‘Promised Land’ (mixing the biblical structure). Krauss also likens the discovery of the model to the allegory of the cave in Plato's Republic, in which humans are captivated by shadows and illusions, but philosophers can become aware of the 'forms' underlying existence. For Krauss, it is scientists who go ‘outside our cave of shadows to glimpse the otherwise hidden reality beneath the surface’. ”

But this golden age has more than its fair share of unsurmountable difficulties.

Nature’s reviewer Robert P. Crease does not think much of the book. He says it uses sloppy analogies. He ends by saying:

“Krauss clearly thinks that his story deserves to displace the classics of the humanities. His book reveals why it can't.”

Bill Nye famously played down the significance of humans by saying: “I suck.” Krauss has a similar message: We’re accidents.

If this is the best atheism can give humanity, then it is a very dismal option indeed.

Source:

Grease, Robert P. 2017. Physics: Revelations of fundamental science. Nature 544, 34. (6 April).