I've listened to a bunch of lectures on the history of science, and the the philosophy of science and what I got out of it was pretty astounding. Science is nowhere near what I thought it was cracked up to be.
In my experience Science is taught in schools as fearlessly pursuing the truth, shining the pure light of reason on the mysteries of the universe wherever that might lead. It's taught in an almost Whiggish fashion. If there are questions in a scientific theory everyone accepts that and they work towards the answer knowing that only the fact matter. That's not the way it is at all.
The first crack was when I first learned about Creation Science. I went to BYU, a well know LDS sponsered college. I got a degree in Mechanical Engineering. I always wondered in the back of my mind if I was being duped by not believing completly in Evolution. I mean I couldn't doubt my spirtual experiences, but did that spill over into Science? I of course thought yes. Then I joined a Christian Toastmasters group because it was suggested that I should by a sales job manager I had at the time. One presentation there was done by a PhD Physicist who worked at Sandia Laboratory and he gave a presentation on how Young Earth Creationism works with Einstien Relativity. I can't remember exactly what he said, and while I won't be suprised to find out that YEC is correct, I'm a little skepical about it. What I do remember is thinking that I'd never heard anything that this guy was talking about! Next day I was at the library checking out a book on Creation Science and what I read was astounding. They seemed to have very good arguments, or reinterpretaions of the evidence of Evolution. The idea in the back of my head that I was being duped was gone, I wasn't being duped by religion I was being misinformed by our education system.
That being said, I'm not against evolution being taught in schools, and would be upset if it wasn't. I read in book about LDS Scholars where they shared their testimonies, a biologist said that he sometimes found it strange that he worked in a field that had at it's foundation an idea, evolution, that he didn't necessarily believe in. That's all that I remember and I'm not sure what he meant. I would say that it's obvious that species evolve and I think that's what biology is based on. To me it's not obvious that species evolve into other species. However, I made sure that my kids knew that there were other interpretations to what they were learning in school.
That was my first crack that maybe science is not everything that it's cracked up to be. Over the years I'd read interesting things like that when the data by Miliken and the oil drop experiment, and Mendel's sweet pea data were examined with statistics it was discovered that the data was most likely faked. Oh well at least they were right, and everyone cheats a little I thought. I also read that Author Eddington was so sure that Einstien was right that he only showed the photos that proved that he was right, and ignored that ones that didn't by the logic that something must be wrong with them. Well Einstien was right, right? Well I then read a book called "Kicking the Sacred Cows" by James P. Hogan. Mr. Hogan was a very good science fiction writer that I'd discovered on the Baen Books site, and when I read the excerpt on the book I didn't think it sounded that interesting. Mr. Hogan sounded much like myself, with a few differences. One big difference is that he describes himself as agnostic. He had an engineering degree, and he bought into Evolution whole heartedly. He explained that in his early novels he'd written about evolution as a fact. Then one day he'd seen a book about Creationism or Intellegent Design, and he read it mostly with the idea to ridicule it. Well that didn't happen, he became convinced that Intellegent Design (ID) was correct. After that his novels pushed ID, so much so that when Earthlings discovered inhabited planets elsewhere in the Universe it was possible to interbreed with them. Reading "Kicking the Sacred Cow" was eye opening about just how unscientific science is. One of the funny things about this is that Mr. Hogan points out that people who say that ID is just an in for Creationism don't know what they're talking about. Mr. Hogan doesn't accept the Bible, and there are people from other religious faiths who accept ID and obviously don't accept the Bible. Most people who say that about ID is just Creationism are just trying to discredit it.
Some of the things that Mr. Hogan wrote about I'd known about agreed with. Others I'd never heard of before and was surprised to be reading the stuff. The most embarrising thing about the book was the information on Immanual Velikovsky, who wrote "Worlds in Collision". Someone had asked me what I thought about him at church and I'd just looked around the web and decided that he was a crackpot because that was the accepted account. After reading the book I started reading a little more deeply around the web and decided that maybe he had some good ideas after all. I don't know that I agree with all of them but I don't dismiss them all now like I used to. Pretty much everything that was said in Mr. Hogan's book I now agree with.
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