Hi Steven!
SF> Mauna Loa (for you country boys, that's a big mountain on a
> tiny island that sits in the middle of a lake called the
> Pacific Ocean)
I'm still laughing! Thanks Steven, I must say I got quite a
chuckle out of that one. :-)
SF>The dust in your house has little or nothing to do with meteors.
Well, of course, using the dust in my attack was simply MY attempt
at a little levity, sorry. :-(
Any cosmic dust falling onto the earth would be distributed by the
four winds. If you read my original post, you would see that my
argument was about the moon.
And the main reason I brought this particular argument up was
because of a point made by Phillip Johnson in his book, DOT.
Specifically, chapter 12 of the paperback edition entitled:
"Science and Pseudoscience"
On page 147, Johnson is quoting Karl Popper:
"Once your eyes were thus opened you saw confirming instances
everywhere: the world was full of verifications of the theory.
WHATEVER HAPPENED ALWAYS CONFIRMED IT. Thus its truth
appeared manifest; and unbelievers were clearly people who did
not want to see the manifest truth; who refused to see it,
either because it was against their class interest, or because
of their repressions which were still 'un-analyzed' and crying
aloud for treatment.... A Marxist could not open a newspaper
without finding on every page confirming evidence for his
interpretation of history; not only in the news, but also in
its presentation-which revealed the class bias of the paper-
and especially or course in what the paper did not say. The
Freudian analysts emphasized that their theories were
constantly verified by their 'clinical observations.'"
(emphasis mine)
And on page 148, Johnson states:
"According to Popper, a theory with genuine explanatory power makes
RISKY predictions..." (emphasis his)
"Popper was impressed by the contrast between the methodology
of Marx or Freud on the one hand, and Albert Einstein on the
other. Einstein almost recklessly exposed his General Theory
of Relativity to falsification by PREDICTION THE OUTCOME OF
A DARING EXPERIMENT. If the outcome had been other than as
predicted, the theory would have been discredited. The
Freudians in contrast looked only for confirming examples, AND
MADE THEIR THEORY SO FLEXIBLE THAT EVERYTHING COUNTED AS
CONFIRMATION." (emphasis mine)
My point is that clearly science in the 1960's predicted that there
SHOULD be 30-something feet of dust on the moon, due to know influx
rates and the estimated age of the solar system.
Then Apollo (NASA) made a physical measurement and found it to be
much less.
Now science has conveniently re-evaluated their original
assumptions and found that -guess what- our calculations show
there really should only be 2.5 inches of dust on the moon, wow,
just what Apollo found, aren't we neat!
Page 149, DOT - "Popper put the essential point in a marvelous
aphorism: 'The wrong view of science betrays itself in the craving
to be right.'"
SF> Bad point Tony
No, it may in fact be a bad example, but I still believe it is a
good point.
That's all.
-Tony-