Re: [asa] What causes students to move from faith?

Moorad wrote:

> According to your views, one ought to dispense altogether of the
> notion
> of historical sciences and refer to all as experimental science.
> Therefore, experimental science tells us definitely that O.J. Simpson
> did it and history has nothing to say about it.
>

I recall reading in Science about 1 year ago, some statistics
and analysis on how well forensic science works in court
prosecution. There actually was a significant number of
false positives. However, the analysis attributed this more
to (1) lack of training of the individuals (I recall them saying
that many do not even possess a Bachelor's degree), (2) the
ethos within the judicial system where, for example, the
prosecution is looking for their man in person X, and are
determined to find him there. So failures are more attributed
to ignorance, lack of adequate training, politics, and inadequate
critical analysis, not failure of the techniques themselves.

In making the distinction between chemistry or physics with
history, we should respect history as a "hard to do" science.

But it's not like a whole group of experimental scientists can never
be wrong either. Consensus is only a helpful guide, but usually
right.

To unsubscribe, send a message to majordomo@calvin.edu with
"unsubscribe asa" (no quotes) as the body of the message.
Received on Tue Sep 12 10:38:12 2006