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How To Make Science Popular Again?
Ars Technica has an interesting look at the recent book Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, a collaboration between Chris Mooney, writer and author of The Republican War on Science, and scientist Sheril Kirshenbaum. While it seems the book's substance is somewhat lacking it raises an interesting point; how can science be better integrated with mainstream culture for greater understanding and acceptance? "We must all rally toward a single goal: without sacrificing the growth of knowledge or scientific innovation, we must invest in a sweeping project to make science relevant to the whole of America's citizenry. We recognize there are many heroes out there already toiling toward this end and launching promising initiatives, ranging from the Year of Science to the World Science Festival to ScienceDebate. But what we need — and currently lack — is the systematic acceptance of the idea that these actions are integral parts of the job description of scientists themselves. Not just their delegates, or surrogates, in the media or the classrooms."
Dawkins, in his book "The Blind Watchmaker", makes the assumption that random processes are blind. Then, like Hawking, he concludes that since god isn't needed, god doesn't exist.
Knuth, in his book, "Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About", says: "Indeed, computer scientists have proved that certain important computational tasks can be done much more efficiently with random numbers than they could possibly ever be done by any deterministic procedure. Many of today's best computational algorithms, like methods for searching the Internet, are based on randomization."
So we have two scientists, one who says that randomness is evidence of atheism; while another implies that randomness can be evidence of design.
One of you prove it, scientifically, or shut up -- at least as far as "science says" when it says no such thing.