The problem with science is naturalism
Curious article Is scientific research flawed? on the AIG website. The author, Callie Joubert, is identified only by name and has no bio. The article correctly enumerates some of the problems with science, particularly medicine, and blames conflict of interest, competition, and so on – the usual suspects.
The author also notes two papers in physics, the Bicep2 experiment in Antarctica and the “superluminal neutrinos at the Swiss-Italian border.” Both papers apparently had drawn erroneous conclusions and were retracted. The author fails to note the significance of the fact that the papers were retracted – that when science makes a mistake it admits that mistake and tries to correct itself.
Nevertheless, the article is not half bad until it gets to this point:
There is another “background assumption that almost all practitioners in the biomedical sciences agree upon and that is naturalism.” Naturalism is problematic because human problems are often reconceptualized and subsequently described in terms that are consistent with the evolution story but otherwise in conflict with alternative perspectives.
And:
[Scientists] refuse to accept that the scientific method is only one source of truth among others. What need serious reevaluation are the naturalistic materialist and the biological reductionist worldview that dominates the academia; it is a wholly misguided conceptual framework for the articulation and explanation of human origins, personal and interpersonal problems, and how it [sic] may be rectified.
I want to make two brief points: This article outlines some serious problems with Big Science and makes a great deal more sense than any of the material I have read on AIG to date. It fails to stress that the problems have been discovered by the scientists themselves, and the scientists are trying to correct the problems. Unfortunately, the article is to some extent an ad hominem attack, in that the problems of Big Science, while very real, have absolutely nothing to do with science’s adherence to naturalism, which I take to be the main point.
The author is in good company, but I also object to his or her use of reductionism as an epithet; reductionism is what scientists do when they discover that gas laws can be reduced to molecular physics, molecular physics can be reduced to atomic physics, atomic physics can be reduced to nuclear physics, and so on. Reductionism is not a dirty word, or at least it ought not to be.
Finally, I will be more impressed by articles like this one when I see creationists finding problems with their own thinking and working to correct them. Or even correct problems that others point out.