Meme stuff

Obedience to religious dogma is required by all who serve any religion - isn't that true?

The only thing a scientist is required to observe is the facts relating to their particular field of study. Maybe some are better at doing that objectively than others but let's not pretend there's any equivalence between the two vocations?

And you don't think scientific paradigms can become dogma???

"scientific paradigms can become dogma" - care to illustrate with an example?

Geocentricism!

Darwinian gradualism--accepted for over 100 years (and still taught in science classes) despite lack of confirming evidence

The reigning paradigm of abiogenesis taught as if it were scientific fact! It is very much 'sacred' *dogma*.  Sure, you can criticize it as a scientist and acknowledge the lack of evidence, but if you suggest it actually might not be true--well, that would be "heresy."

Even within science, there is still a lot of politics, even with the peer review process. It's still high quality, but far from perfect and prone to corruption like anything humans touch.

*I think it's more a fact of human nature. People have a tendency to swing from one extreme to the other. Thus, for example, Charles Lyell's uniformitarianism replaced Noah's Flood as the prevailing paradigm of geology. But because of this swung to such an extreme anti-catastrophism position that for almost half a century geologists refused to accept Bretz' geological evidence for the great Ice Age Floods, because of entrenched paradigms. 

There's the quite part out loud. 

What's "Geocentricism"?

'Geocentrism' was a part of Catholic orthodoxy for centuries before it had to be abandoned in favour of Heliocentrism at the close of the 16th. century.

Individual scientists may well cling to their cherished theories and persuade others to do the same for relatively short periods but the accumulation of data invariably forces change. What would be troubling is if physicists refused to acknowledge relativity and clung instead to the Newtonian model of gravity.

In the world of religion sacred cows are revered but in that of science they sooner or later get shot!

We shouldn't be at all concerned with Aristotle because he died in 322 BC in ancient Greece and I'm not aware of any contemporary opposition to his model of the heavens - it was the conventional and common sense model of his time. However, even by the 16th. century there was mounting evidence that the geocentric model was flawed.

But back to Galileo and the Catholic church...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_affair#:~:text=Responding%20to%20mounting%20controversy%20over,until%20his%20death%20in%201642.

"In 1610, Galileo published his Sidereus Nuncius (Starry Messenger), describing the observations that he had made with his new, much stronger telescope, amongst them, the Galilean moons of Jupiter. With these observations and additional observations that followed, such as the phases of Venus, he promoted the heliocentric theory of Nicolaus Copernicus published in De revolutionibus orbium coelestium in 1543. Galileo's discoveries were met with opposition within the Catholic Church, and in 1616 the Inquisition declared heliocentrism to be "formally heretical." Galileo went on to propose a theory of tides in 1616, and of comets in 1619; he argued that the tides were evidence for the motion of the Earth.

In 1632 Galileo published his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, which defended heliocentrism, and was immensely popular. Responding to mounting controversy over theology, astronomy and philosophy, the Roman Inquisition tried Galileo in 1633, found him "vehemently suspect of heresy", and sentenced him to house arrest where he remained until his death in 1642.[2] At that point, heliocentric books were banned and Galileo was ordered to abstain from holding, teaching or defending heliocentric ideas after the trial.[3] Originally Pope Urban VIII had been a patron to Galileo and had given him permission to publish on the Copernican theory as long as he treated it as a hypothesis, but after the publication in 1632, the patronage was broken off"

"Galileo's contributions caused difficulties for theologians and natural philosophers of the time, as they contradicted scientific and philosophical ideas based on those of Aristotle and Ptolemy and closely associated with the Catholic Church. In particular, Galileo's observations of the phases of Venus, which showed it to circle the Sun, and the observation of moons orbiting Jupiter, contradicted the geocentric model of Ptolemy, which was backed and accepted by the Roman Catholic Church,[8][9] and supported the Copernican model advanced by Galileo"

"Jesuit astronomers, experts both in Church teachings, science, and in natural philosophy, were at first skeptical and hostile to the new ideas; however, within a year or two the availability of good telescopes enabled them to repeat the observations. In 1611, Galileo visited the Collegium Romanum in Rome, where the Jesuit astronomers by that time had repeated his observations. Christoph Grienberger, one of the Jesuit scholars on the faculty, sympathized with Galileo's theories, but was asked to defend the Aristotelian viewpoint by Claudio Acquaviva, the Father General of the Jesuits. Not all of Galileo's claims were completely accepted: Christopher Clavius, the most distinguished astronomer of his age, never was reconciled to the idea of mountains on the Moon, and outside the collegium many still disputed the reality of the observations. In a letter to Kepler of August 1610,[11] Galileo complained that some of the philosophers who opposed his discoveries had refused even to look through a telescope"

his letter to Kepler:-

"My dear Kepler, I wish that we might laugh at the remarkable stupidity of the common herd. What do you have to say about the principal philosophers of this academy who are filled with the stubbornness of an asp and do not want to look at either the planets, the moon or the telescope, even though I have freely and deliberately offered them the opportunity a thousand times? Truly, just as the asp stops its ears, so do these philosophers shut their eyes to the light of truth"

Perhaps it's that letter that created the apocryphal remark about his being condemned as a heretic while his accusers refused to so much as look through his telescope? But given the facts I think it's an excusable piece of paraphrasing.

This paragraph goes directly to the issue of mounting scientific evidence versus religious dogma..

"One of the first suggestions of heresy that Galileo had to deal with came in 1613 from a professor of philosophy, poet and specialist in Greek literature, Cosimo Boscaglia.[19][20] In conversation with Galileo's patron Cosimo II de' Medici and Cosimo's mother Christina of Lorraine, Boscaglia said that the telescopic discoveries were valid, but that the motion of the Earth was obviously contrary to Scripture:

Dr. Boscaglia had talked to Madame [Christina] for a while, and though he conceded all the things you have discovered in the sky, he said that the motion of the Earth was incredible and could not be, particularly since Holy Scripture obviously was contrary to such motion"

It's a long article and worth reading but more than once in documentaries on the life of Galileo it's been stated that the church authorities were so intent on silencing his views on Heliocentrism that he was shown the instruments of torture by the Inquisition!

I don't believe it's unreasonable to describe that as religious terrorism.

Is that just a random thought that popped into your mind? What on earth does it have to do with the historical tension between the orthodox church, 'scriptural truth' and science?

 Aristotle may have been long ago but still carried great weight.

"In particular, Galileo's observations of the phases of Venus, which showed it to circle the Sun, and the observation of moons orbiting Jupiter, contradicted the geocentric model of Ptolemy"--Well that's not true. Tycho Brahe's modifications of Ptolemy could accommodate this under a geocentric model

Galileo challenged the Church and made enemies (including of a pope who originally supported him). 

But it still wasn't a case of the Church rejecting or denying science. The Church supported the accepted scientific view of the day. Galileo didn't have sufficient scientific evidence for the Church to even deny it, nor were most scientists of the day even convinced by Galileo. 

The whole Church rejected-science and reason narrative is a myth

The church accepted the model of the heavens that scripture appeared to describe, so much so that the church wasn't prepared to tolerate Galileo even publishing his opinions.

The orthodox church didn't act against Galileo because they thought his science was poor, they accused him of heresy and threatened him with the instruments of torture!

A hard fact.

As a species we're riddled with a host of genetic and physiological problems more suggestive of evolutionary development than any 'design'.

One particular evolutionary adaptation - bipedalism. This causes the pelvis to narrow which in females results in all manner of birthing problems that our close ape cousins simply don't experience.

And that's not to delve into issues such as back-pain and other skeletal effects, the result of bearing our weight on just two limbs.

And yet most German Shepherds need to be put down because of bad hips. I've never seen them walking around on two legs. Maybe your assumptions are flawed?

Let's not get into the physical problems of dogs because as highly bred (/inbred) varieties of wild dog species, they are not representative.

The fact is, our species started walking upright some three to four million years ago. No other species of ape does so.

6,600 years ago.

Out of curiosity if you saw a paper written with 8000 words and a couple were misspell would that negative the possibility that there was an author? A great design can still degrade over time it part of the natural order of things. 

How is it you point to things that you don’t think are perfect and dismiss design while ignoring the functionality and complex specifics in life and accept mindlessness?