'Science' Versus Homeopathy

Over at the Times Online Eureka Zone blog, guest poster Martin Robbins has put up his piece The Homeopaths Strike Back which, far from being a pro or even neutral piece on the subject of homeopathy is an out an out hatchet job. It'd've been more honest if he'd crowingly titled it The Homeopaths Strike Out.

Setting aside the issue of his flippance over the homeopaths' own differences in opinion over the number of shakes required, (which might be a clue to the effect detected by Madeleine Ennis, namely the more shakes the greater the quantum entanglement), I'd like to turn the whole thing on its head and make another point.

Why do various scientists - and countless hordes of Science's camp followers - expend so much time and energy going after those interested in various paranormal and New Age subjects?

It can't be because they're convinced if only they tell adherents of such subjects how it's all a load of nonsense somehow that'll make them go, "Oh, no! Really? Why didn't somebody tell me before now? God, I've wasted so much of my life! I feel such an idiot..." because they've been saying it for centuries and the penny still hasn't dropped.

In fact, if anything, scientifically discredited phenomena like the stones dropping out of the sky reported by ignorant peasants, mega waves reported by yarn spinning old sea dogs, red and green flashes of light above thunder storms reported by aeroplane pilots with brains pickled by alcohol, not to mention showers of fish, ball lightning, continents that fit into each other, etc., have all been subsequently embraced.

Is it then because their scientific creativity's abandoned them, or they can't get a grant to pursue the research they really want to do?

Is it because they think everybody but them's idiots and they must keep repeating their message until they finally get it into our thick skulls?

I don't know.

What I DO know is I'd love to be able to snap my fingers and make the source of all this 'scientific' obsessiveness - homeopathy, astrology, religion, Bigfoot, alien abduction, UFOs, Nessie, ghosts, New Agery in general, etc. - vanish off the face of the earth.

Because then I could do a Felix the Cat and roll about the floor in side-splitting laughter as all The Professor types turned on each other in the scientific blood bath that'd inevitably result the moment that happened.

Look at what's going on over Global Warming - that's only a pale shadow of the innumerable internecine controversies bubbling under the surface of ALL the sciences.

Look at the recent big propaganda push to re-establish the idea the dinosaurs were wiped out by a giant meteorite - maybe they were. But that wasn't Science - that was one set of scientists going over the head of another set of scientists disagreeing with them to make sure the unwashed masses unquestioningly believe THEIR assertions, not unlike a larger, richer, more powerful, influential, and media astute political party using all their resources to knock out a smaller potential political competitor before they can gain more ground.

And the laugh of it's just like people no longer unquestioningly trust their political leaders, the more scientists descend into the gutter of politics and media manipulation, the more people distrust scientists.

In short, for all some scientists and supposedly scientific types mock and even attack the likes of homeopathy, they NEED New Age and paranormal subjects as buffers to prevent them from turning on each other, because far from scientists being the noble detached objective placidly contemplative aloof selfless types some imagine, they're as nutty, cracked, obsessive, greedy, selfish, self-concerned, petty, ambition, image conscious and downright deceptive as all the rest of us.