Religion
In reply to the discussion: Too Simple to Be Wrong: Atheism's Bronze-Age Goat Herder Conceit [View all]Warpy
(111,237 posts)He came along at a point when many scientists were trying their best to make the research they were doing fit the stuff they learned in Sunday school, something that simply refuses to happen.
I dislike the article's conceit, especially calling atheists "brights." I know too many who are dumb as a box of hair and I know too many honest, rock headed scientists doing great work who are absolutely useless when they set foot anywhere outside their various fields.
However, Herschel's bias does seem to have limited him and caused him to toss out a few important things here and there because they utterly contradicted the bible. Scientists these days have a slightly easier since they've been allowed to think of all that stuff as allegory and myth, quaint but with little basis in reality.
Most of us have our blind spots and automatic cutoff points in our heads. Peer reviewal of all new data and conclusions have minimized some of the damage they've caused individual scientists.
It is, though, a more grown-up idea to consider the writings of all those biblical authors to be allegory, not fact. That's why science is advancing so very quickly these days, one serious cause of bias has been minimized.