But there’s something else to consider. When a crime is committed by some unknown person or persons, investigators will ask themselves, “Who benefits from this?” Cui bono is the Latin phrase – “to whom the good?” We can ask something similar about dubious scientific claims — “what belief or belief system is supported by these results?”
My emphasis. The article is a short read, and crosses paths with some of the common topics here.
Strange blog. I note that it has also hosted posts on ID Creationism by the horribly gullible Robert Shedinger (to one of which this particular blogger responded). I suppose that Lutheranism is a big tent.
This essay needs a lot of editing help. Yikes. Not enough coherence among the ideas.
But my face when I read this. Even I’ve never had an idea that crazy. I think.
Velikovsky argued that biblical stories of events associated with the Exodus (plagues, Red Sea crossing, Sinai theophany) and the conquest of Canaan (the sun “standing still”) were explained by the encounters with Venus. He also appealed to records and myths of the Egyptians and other countries, though the dating was off. Ancient records had to be altered, which Velikovsky would do in Ages in Chaos [7]and other books.
We can’t experiment on stars either but in a sense nature has done billions of those experiments for us.
We don’t have to “experiment on” something for it to be science. A much better line to draw is testing hypotheses that predict observations we don’t yet have in hand. This works just as well if the observations are produced by events that happened in the past as it does if the events happen in the future.
Ah, you missed the glory days when the internet was young and Velikovskian cranks roamed free. Well, one in particular, Ted Holden, he of ‘flying feral chickens’ and the ‘felt effect of gravity’ fame.