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This summer, I asked mommy to get me Richard Dawkins' the God Delusion which I've only now started having time to read. It's really interesting and well-written so far. But fortunately, saving me from getting a too one-sided, dogmatic, atheist picture of reality, some christian fundamentalists decided to bless me with their christian student magazine. The hot centerfold article is a criticism of naturalism by Tapio Puolimatka, who's a professor of pedagogy and docent of practical philosophy. I am often annoyed when people make long, unintelligible expositions to support their view of something so I'll try to just list some of the useless points made by the good professor:

- He claims that science dogmatically excludes other explanatory models and compare their descriptive power objectively. The paragraph doesn't make it clear what these other hypotheses would be, but since the article is in a christian magazine and tries to criticize atheism and naturalism we may assume that he's talking about the God Hypothesis. The stumbling block for this is that a hypothesis involving something that doesn't follow any Rules cannot be scientifically explored.

- It's also silly that people like Professor Puolitie are trying to act like they are the radical thinkers these days (In an Expelled Ben Stein way). He's playing the "Big Science is dogmatic"-card. This seems to completely ignore the fact that their medieval world view was the only accepted view for about one and a half millennia. And that science has had to work hard to build up this natural world view.

- The combination of these two is also expressed in the statement (again similar to Expelled) that scientists are afraid of publishing results that go against the natural world view. But of course science isn't afraid of anything. It's just that science cannot work with hypotheses or objects that cannot be said to follow any rules.

It's sad that people at universities are engaged in this kind of bad thinking.