Catholic theologians are experts in what the Roman Catholic Church believes. If you claim that the RCC isn’t really trinitarian, then “bullshit, look at what all the Catholic theologians say” is a perfectly good response.
They claim (or at least let’s suppose arguendo that they do) to be experts on the actual facts about God. It turns out they’re wrong about that. So … is their situation nicely parallel to that of climate scientists?
Why, no. Look at all the people in the world who claim to be God-experts and have studied long and hard, got fancy credentials, etc. That includes the Catholic theologians. It also includes the Protestant theologians (who are almost all also trinitarian but disagree about a bunch of other important things). And it includes Islamic scholars, who are very decidedly not trinitarians. It includes Hindu religious experts, whose views are more different still. By any reasonable criterion it also includes philosophers specializing in philosophy of religion, whose views are very diverse.
This is very much not the same as the situation with climate science. (And not only because the term “climate science” has been somehow coopted; there aren’t university departments doing heretical climate science and using a different name for it, so far as I can tell.)
Eric Raymond’s list of “warning signs” is pretty bullshitty. One warning sign with his warning signs: he prefaces it with a brief list of past alleged junk-science panics, and at least some of the things he lists are definitely not junk science and he only has the luxury of pretending they are because governments listened to the scientists and did something about the things they were warning about. It’s amusing that he lists “Past purveyers of junk science do not change their spots” among his signs, incidentally, because to a great extent the organizations (and in some cases the people) supporting global warming skepticism are the same ones that argued that smoking doesn’t cause cancer. Why? Because their opinions are on sale to the highest corporate bidder.
Catholic theologians are experts in what the Roman Catholic Church believes. If you claim that the RCC isn’t really trinitarian, then “bullshit, look at what all the Catholic theologians say” is a perfectly good response.
They claim (or at least let’s suppose arguendo that they do) to be experts on the actual facts about God. It turns out they’re wrong about that. So … is their situation nicely parallel to that of climate scientists?
Why, no. Look at all the people in the world who claim to be God-experts and have studied long and hard, got fancy credentials, etc. That includes the Catholic theologians. It also includes the Protestant theologians (who are almost all also trinitarian but disagree about a bunch of other important things). And it includes Islamic scholars, who are very decidedly not trinitarians. It includes Hindu religious experts, whose views are more different still. By any reasonable criterion it also includes philosophers specializing in philosophy of religion, whose views are very diverse.
This is very much not the same as the situation with climate science. (And not only because the term “climate science” has been somehow coopted; there aren’t university departments doing heretical climate science and using a different name for it, so far as I can tell.)
Eric Raymond’s list of “warning signs” is pretty bullshitty. One warning sign with his warning signs: he prefaces it with a brief list of past alleged junk-science panics, and at least some of the things he lists are definitely not junk science and he only has the luxury of pretending they are because governments listened to the scientists and did something about the things they were warning about. It’s amusing that he lists “Past purveyers of junk science do not change their spots” among his signs, incidentally, because to a great extent the organizations (and in some cases the people) supporting global warming skepticism are the same ones that argued that smoking doesn’t cause cancer. Why? Because their opinions are on sale to the highest corporate bidder.