Challenge Easily Met

Jerry Coyne asserts:

Show me a scientist who clings to the mantle of a religion-like authority, who makes pronouncements about what is true without trying to test them,

Does this guy live in some type of bubble?

Challenge easily met. I’ll show you one:

I suppose we could cite his claims of science showing God’s existence to be extremely improbable without having done a single test to show this, but let’s go with something in the news.

Dawkins clings to the mantle of religion-like authority and claims that raising a child in a religious tradition is worse that sexually abusing the child. He has been making this pronouncement for TEN years now. And how many times, in the last TEN years, has he tried to test his pronouncement? Zero. Zilch. Nada.

[It’s actually worse than that, as TFBW summarizes]

Back to Coyne:

and I’ll show you a bad scientist, one doomed to being discredited.

Oh, really? Dawkins has been celebrated as a great scientist, especially by people like Jerry Coyne.

So Coyne’s claim has been disproven. Dawkins is a scientist who clings to the mantle of a religion-like authority, who makes pronouncements about what is true without trying to test them, and yet he is NOT viewed as a bad scientist, one doomed to being discredited.

Coyne also adds:

The whole enterprise of science, as Gee should know very well, is based on argument and doubt and on scientists trying to show each other to be wrong.

Okay, since Dawkins has been making his pronouncement for TEN years, please provide a list of scientists who have been trying to show he is wrong. Let’s get it started:

1. _______________________

Hello? Anyone? Anyone?

Well, we know Jerry Coyne’s name won’t be on that list. Anyone else?