Michael Kochin makes an excellent proposal but misses the history entirely and treats all the standard consensus positions as real. Kochin is mostly echoing an earlier book by Paul Feyerabend. He says that in the 1700s western culture decided to separate church from state, but didn’t anticipate the later replacement of church by Science. He goes through several ways to accomplish the separation.
Big miss: In fact the PURPOSE of the 1700s “freedom fighters” was EXACTLY to replace God by Science. The replacement was official in France, unofficial elsewhere, but the result is the same. Priests have been replaced by Tenured Scientists as the official arbiters of all government policy.
Smaller miss:
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What then, is the corresponding defense of the separation of science and state in terms of human flourishing—of freeing society from scientific rule to enable us to live free scientific lives? And how can we support such a position without endorsing absurdities like equal time, funding, and public influence for “flat earthers”?
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Equal time and equal funding were NOT part of the original church-state separation. The purpose of separation was to prevent government from funding ANY religion. Later tricks like tax exemptions arose when governments decided to favor one religion over another without technically breaking the rule.
Weird miss:
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In fact, in almost every actual public controversy there are scientists on both sides. There are no flat-earth astronomers and perhaps there never were any—but there aren’t really any flat-earth advocates either. However, there are anti-vaccination scientists, 9-11 truther scientists, global-warming denier scientists, and even pro-Covid lockdown scientists.
= = = = = END KOCHIN.
The loaded words are shibboleths telling us which side he’s on.
He’s correct about flat earth. Nobody who dealt with sailing or navigation EVER thought the world was flat. The modern flatearthers are Agents Provocateurs.
BUT: Pro-lockdowners are rare?
Either the author is loony or this was a typo-like error.
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The simple solution to both problems is to avoid funding ANY religion or ANY science. Government should build common infrastructure, protect necessary work like farming from the thieves of Wall Street, control crime, and defend the country from attack. That’s all. (Protecting real business from Wall Street is really a subset of controlling crime, but I wanted to bring it out specifically.)
I’ve been making the case for eliminating grants and tenure forever. My father taught me the sins of tenure in 1959 and I’ve seen them over and over during 40 years in and around academia.
Polistra's Mill 