What’s a Tarheel?

The Lord said, “These people claim to worship me, but their words are meaningless, and their hearts are somewhere else. Their religion is nothing but human rules and traditions, which they have simply memorized. So I will startle them with one unexpected blow after another. Those who are wise will turn out to be fools, and all their cleverness will be useless.”

(Isaiah 29:13-14) GNT

In the fall of 1990 we began the graduate program in Plant Biology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. On our first day we were shown around Coker Hall by a senior graduate student, Victor Albert.

Victor was passionately expressing the high degree of philosophical rigor that those in the program were applying to plant systematics. He talked about heuristic algorithms, parsimony and the powerful computers (circa 1990!) being used in phylogenetic analysis. He talked about how character states have to be coded in the data matrix with no A priori assumptions. He was animated, excited, this was the cutting edge. The idea was that the entire process of DNA-based systematics was free from any personal bias because there were no assumptions in it.

I asked him, playing the devil’s advocate:

• Matty: Haven’t you assumed that plants evolved?
• Victor: We don’t talk about that here.

He said this with such a stern glare that we kept our mouth shut about the issue. It illustrates the point which we’re making that the popular science narrative of godless existence (SciPop) is paradigm-dependent. At the end of the day it doesn’t make any difference how rigorous your philosophy is, you made a choice of paradigm and that’s the only context in which the philosophy is valid.

The big problem is that no one has ever proven the paradigm.

Things didn’t work out for us as expected at UNC-CH because life took one of its turns. It must be said, though, that we got an excellent education and we were trained in the philosophical construction of the scientific method so well that it’s possible for us to demonstrate that it’s a farce.

Archaeopteris and Duke University – Navigation

Section	Title	Scripture
1	Archaeopteris and Duke University	Jeremiah 21:8
	What’s a Tarheel?	Isaiah 29:14
2	Archaeopteris	1 Timothy 6:20
	Archaeopteris (1991) Term Paper	(Further reading)
3	Carl Linnaeus	Luke 12:27
	Salvation	Romans 10:9-10

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