Why Science is More like Religious Belief

Some time ago on the Australian ABC a program on mental illness examined the concept of delusions. The program started off with obvious delusions: a person who thought he had no internal organs, then moved on the more esoteric delusions, for instance people who think they have been abducted by aliens. This gave rise to the issue of what constitutes a delusion, and the answer the researchers came up with was that something is a delusion if it cannot be backed up with evidence.

What constitutes evidence, and the basis of science, is so little understood that it could be said that the woolly thinking that people have on this issue constitutes a bigger danger than any terrorist. If we take the research in the example I gave, someone who believes in God, in spirits or the afterlife is deluded. (One might ask if someone who believes in black holes would be considered deluded, as one has never been seen.) It may only be a matter of time before such people are given drugs or ECT �for their own good'. People use such terms as �scientific evidence' and �unscientific' without having any understanding of what science is.

A few weeks ago there was an article in the Melbourne Age about an Irish company Steorn that had announced it had built a machine that could produce over unity energy, in other words it produced more energy then was put into it. A professor of physics in an interview stated that such a claim overthrew 2000 years of science and if he was to investigate such a machine it would only be to show how it didn't do what it claimed to do.