Try reading Augustine’s “De Genesi ad Litteram” (the incomplete literal commentary on Genesis) – there’re a couple of English editions in print. Might even be on Googlebooks, or on something like ccel.org. Of course, from the point of view of astronomy etc Augustine is working with superseded models, but his knowledge of ancient Near Eastern literature was probably not much wider than yours, nor did he know Hebrew or much Greek. He comes up with all the same sort of questions you have

Incidentally NZ Skeptics are slowly getting skeptics in the pub things going – Canterbury has held a few this year and there is one coming in Auckland on the 10th September apparently.

If I say pseudoscience is not science then I immediately open up the opportunity for them to say that since it isn’t science then the scientific method doesn’t apply and they can make whatever claims they like and I can’t touch them. If I say they are doing bad science then I can demonstrate their failings and effectively make them do it properly – there is no escape. If they are included then they have to play by the rules. If they are excluded they can make up their own rules.

The same applies to creationism and ID – I frequently hear people saying that science doesn’t deal with god or morals or whatever – I say science does apply, it must apply. I want to be able to rigorously demonstrate why their explanations are poor matches to the observations rather than letting them falsely exclude science from the discourse.

Of course much pseudoscience is not science regardless of which definition we take. Coming up with a random idea and then touting that as truth regardless of observation is not science whichever way you define it and can easily be shown to be a poor way of doing things. Similarly distorting scientific findings to push forward an idea is not science either.

I want to encourage people to do better science by showing them where their attempt at science fails. I would much rather recognise and improve someone’s scientific skills than simply dismiss their ideas as not science and ignore them. The end result for the idea is the same but the former may well produce a new scientist, while the latter may well produce an enemy of science.

I also worry about dogmatism in science. There is a danger that the scientific method can become a dogmatic way of life rather than simply a well established method with the possibility of improvement (however small). From a tactical point of view there is also the danger that dismissing so-called non-science out of hand can lead to false claims of scientific dogmatism (and it often does).

Science today is under threat in the arena of public opinion. Whether it’s intelligent design, homeopathy, global warming denialism, or just postmodern solipsism, there are real people who really do want to undermine science.

I think we have a responsibility to state clearly where the boundaries are between science and non-science. Saying that psychics are practitioners of science, just not ‘good’ science, is like throwing in the towel. We might as well just erase the word science out of the dictionary, since it will no longer have any distinct meaning. The quantum mystics and the Scientologists will rejoice … and will immediately sign up for government funding. After all, it’s all science, right?

If you were in the court room for the Kitzmiller v. Dover case, who’s side would you be on? Would you be saying, “Well, ID isn’t really good science, but it *is* science, and so it’s appropriate to teach it in a science classroom,” or would you be saying, “No, ID is not science.”

I hope you see that I’m not making a big deal out of this just to be contrarian. This issue is very important in a real-world sense. I don’t think it would be helpful to muddy the waters by using such a broad definition of science such that children’s make-believe technically counts as ’science’, because it is matching observations with explanations, regardless of how useful those explanations are.

To boil it down to semantics: when I look at pseudoscience I think “they are doing science badly” rather than “they aren’t doing science”.