[WikiEN-l] Creationism and pseudoscience

[Fastfission]

I don't think it's our place to debate the merits of such
classification. Then it will be Creation biologists say, "Look, we can
falsify this! Now can we not be pseudoscience?" and then someone over
here saying, "Nyaahh, I don't buy it."

That's original research in my book. Hence I think it is better to
say, "The majority of the mainstream scientific community considers
creation science to be pseudoscience." And perhaps explain why.

That way, we don't have to rely on individual Wikipedian assessments
of evidence, philosophy, etc. And it's also not *our* problem.
Somebody complains, "But I don't think it is pseudoscience!" then we
carefully say, "Well, that's great, but as you can see, it's not about
what you and I think, it's about the scientific community writ at
large."

As for Tom Cruise, he's not part of the mainstream scientific
community. It can easily be noted on the [[Scientology]] page that
they consider psychiatry to be pseudoscientific, but this is not a
view shared by the mainstream medical community at all.

By making this about large community opinions -- which are not so
impossible to source as one might at first think -- rather than
individual evaluations, we punt the entire problem into a different
domain of expertise. Which is where it should be in the first place.

How, you might ask, do we measure these things? For creation science,
it is easy to cite large numbers of influential and well-regarded
scientists who have classified as such (Stephen J. Gould is an easy
one -- an expert in his field, universally regarded by scientists as a
good spokesman for science on this question, etc.). For psychiatry,
the fact that many major universities offer programs in psychiatry is
a pretty good indication of its status in the academic medical
community.

It only becomes contentious if we try to debate *why* Harvard and MIT
have programs in evolutionary biology and not creationism and programs
in psychiatry and debate whether or not *we think* they have such for
good reasons.

FF 

On 7/1/05, Leif Knutsen <vyer at earthlink.net> wrote:
> I think that if a field of inquiry, or a theory if you will, is to be called "pseudoscience," then it has to be explained by what criteria it is distinct from "real" science or protoscience.  And then the rebuttal from those who believe it is real science must be presented as well.
> 
> The argument for creationism (which I don't buy) is that the fossil record and other physical evidence leaves unanswered questions in the "theory" of evolution.  Hence, they argue, you can't reject creationism as a valid form of scientific inquiry.  The fallacy is that if one explanation doesn't explain everything, then all other explanations are equally valid.
> 
> I think it is important to have an article about pseudoscience, but it would be more interesting and readable, and less contentious, if we omitted examples altogether.  Tom Cruise recently characterized psychiatry as a "pseudoscience" and would undoubtedly list it as an example here.  There'd be a big argument, and the article wouldn't improve much.
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