here we go again

There’s an interesting set of articles on World Net Daily today. The first, God did speak the world into existence, tells of the theory of university student Samuel Hunt. Hunt has theorized that God’s Spirit, in the form of a magnetic field, covered the earth, which was a watery deep. Then His voice speaking, Let there be light, carried sonic waves into the liquid, producing light photons. Researchers have verified the phenomenon known as sonoluminesence: the production of light from bubbles when sound is passed through a liquid. There is some interesting reading about the reaction of Hunt’s professors to his questions and theories.

The second is a New York Times article concerning Marcus Ross, now a Ph.D who completed his thesis and received his doctoral degree in geoscience in December. Why the interest in this particular doctoral candidate? He is a young earth creationist who wrote his thesis from the framework of darwinian evolution and millions of years. Some folks are very upset that a creationist has received a doctoral degree by turning in a thesis from within the darwinian framework. The university says he did solid science to earn his degree. The National Center for Science Education is especially concerned that fundamentalists capitalize on “secular” degrees to “miseducate the public.”

I guess the panic is so deep because over 700 Ph.D. scientists worldwide (not including medical doctors, of which there are also many) have publicly and formally challenged the validity of darwinian evolution as a creative mechanism.

Now a debate is brewing whether a doctoral candidate’s religious beliefs should be made known, then considered, before deciding to confer a degree.

Now isn’t this screaming proof of the point I have been consistently making, that naturalism is an unproven belief system, and not science? The science presented by the doctoral candidate in his thesis cannot be faulted, therefore the degree is conferred. But the debate is among naturalists who are panicked that scienctists should hold to a philosophy other than naturalism. You can see throughout the article that there is a subtle attempt on the part of the naturalists (and the ignorant media) to define science itself as naturalism, which it most certainly is not.

Case in point:

But Dr. Scott, a former professor of physical anthropology at the University of Colorado, said in an interview that graduate admissions committees were entitled to consider the difficulties that would arise from admitting a doctoral candidate with views “so at variance with what we consider standard science.” She said such students “would require so much remedial instruction it would not be worth my time.”

That is not religious discrimination, she added, it is discrimination “on the basis of science.”

Dr. Dini, of Texas Tech, agreed. Scientists “ought to make certain the people they are conferring advanced degrees on understand the philosophy of science and are indeed philosophers of science,” he said. “That’s what Ph.D. stands for.”

Excellent suggestion, Dr. Dini. We cannot put that great idea into practice soon enough. Science would benefit greatly from scientists who understood the philosophy of science. And its distinction from the philosophy of naturalism.