Or to put it another way, in the marketplace of ideas, competition is a good thing, and unfair barriers to the same leads to poorer products for the consumer, and laziness amongst the monopolists. I see plenty of evidence for those phenomena.
>>Or to put it another way, in the marketplace of ideas, competition is a good thing, and unfair barriers to the same leads to poorer products for the consumer, and laziness amongst the monopolists. I see plenty of evidence for those phenomena.<<
Creationism is NOT a “competing idea” any more than astrology is a “competing idea” to astronomy.
It meets exactly zero scientific criteria.
It may have some currency in a philosophical/theological arena, but that isn’t where the so-called “debate” is occurring.
Neither creationism nor ID are science. To suggest they are is to purposely misrepresent science and the scientific method.
This takes it our of the “arena of ideas” and into the “arena of fraud.”
Precisely, if more debate was allowed to occur withing what should be the free market of scientific ideas, the origins/historical sciences would benefit just as much as as any other scientific enterprise...that is, so long as the debate is not declared “over” by those who have an agenda that has as its object something other than the truth!
So scientists should adopt Madison Avenue advertising tactics to get their theories accepted?
Markets have winners and losers. Propping up an obvious loser is not profitable. And there isn't a TARP big enough to prop up this loser.
We've already seen creationists trampling all over biology, astronomy, cosmology, physics, geology, and history. Now you guys are going after economics, too? Geez. Whoops, I meant "Chaz." The lack of buggywhips on the market is not due to barriers to entry. It's due to everyone else seeing the utility of the automobile.
What the simple-minded fail to understand is that market competition, AKA the popularity contest, works with material goods because there is no universal truth about which is the best car, or the best television set, or the best hamburger.
In areas where there is a universal truth, the truth is not determined by a popularity contest or a majority vote. O.J. Simpson was found not guilty because his high-priced lawyers succeeded in making the idea of his innocence more popular than the idea of his guilt among the jury. But that doesn’t change the fact that O.J. Simpson is guilty of murder. If 51% of scientists say that humans are causing the earth to warm and cap-and-trade is the only thing that can save us, that won’t make it so. If 51% of Americans say that the earth is 6000 years old, that won’t make it so either.
Anyway, these fools who are pimping young-earth creationism don’t want it to compete in a free marketplace of ideas, they want a theocratic government to ram it down our throats by force of law, while banning any competing theories. That doesn’t sound very free-market to me.
Why do young-earth creationists call themselves scientists when everything they do is completely anti-scientific? Their main argument is, “God says I’m right and anyone who disagrees is going to hell.” Yeah, really scientific.