re: #750 formercorpsman

Empirical science isn’t a belief system; it’s what can be known in the basis of scientific evidence. Your attempt at equivocation is noted and rejected, with good and sufficient cause.

Salamantis, I think his post had some merit.

You rightfully note science not having a belief component. But to simply dismiss his argument is not true.

Tarheel has made a comparison, as the philosophical extremes in which the purveyors of either side of the coin can be obnoxious, and place their boot upon the neck of society. He was not making the argument of a belief system per se.

Millions of dead Orthodox peasantry might take exception to this.

The Illusion of Design
By Richard Dawkins
naturalhistorymag.com

Some have said that Hitler founded his political philosophy on Darwinism. This is nonsense: doctrines of racial superiority in no way follow from natural selection, properly understood. Nevertheless, a good case can be made that a society run on Darwinian lines would be a very disagreeable society in which to live. But, yet again, the unpleasantness of a proposition has no bearing on its truth.

Huxley, George C. Williams, and other evolutionists have opposed Darwinism as a political and moral doctrine just as passionately as they have advocated its scientific truth. I count myself in that company. Science needs to understand natural selection as a force in nature, the better to oppose it as a normative force in politics. Darwin himself expressed dismay at the callousness of natural selection: “What a book a Devil’s Chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low & horridly cruel works of nature!”