I have been lurking for a while but thought now would be a good time
to jump in.
Just to introduce myself, I am an environmental lawyer, but was an
exploration geologist for a major oil company before attending law school.
I recently joined ACG and ASA.
I am wondering whether anyone has floated the following response to PJ's
“materialist scientific establishment” argument. Much of the work in
paleoecology, stratigraphy, and micropaleontology in the latter half of the
20th century -- even that which we would call “pure” research -- was done
because of interest and $$ from the oil industry. Entire subfields, such as
sequence stratigraphy, probably wouldn't exist were it not for the oil
companies, and geology
and earth history would have been a much more obscure and arcane area of
study without their influence. Surely, the oil industry as a whole doesn't
have a philosophical agenda -- they just want to find oil. Paleontology,
and thus evolution, are subjects of great practical importance to oil
exploration. If the “materialist scientific establishment” got it all
wrong, wouldn't the oil industry be the first to pipe up? Is PJ suggesting
that Exxon and Shell have been duped by these clever atheists and the
“theistic evolutionists who support them,” to paraphrase PJ's letter to
Keith Miller?
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