Duped?

From: Scott Wendorf (wendorf@hotmail.com)
Date: Tue Jan 04 2000 - 12:41:36 EST

  • Next message: Kamilla Ludwig: "Re: PJ and AIDS"

    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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