This is my first post here so I am trusting the moderators to do their thing if anything in it violates the rules. Sometimes I have a difficult time parsing what others will see.

In the search for origins, agenda seems to be a real problem.

Agenda gets in the way of everything. Of science. Of the search for truth. "Don't bother me with facts when my mind is already made up!" is the cry of the day. It is the cry of agenda.

Now, I personally don't think the ordinary scientist HAS an agenda. Sure, there might be exceptions -- there might be some hypothetical handful of rabid atheistic materialists who are glad to leave God out of the picture -- but they are the exception rather than the rule. Ordinary scientists take the facts they find and form a conclusion about them which becomes a working theory. In my opinion, where origins are concerned, they simply don't comprehend that "the things which were made were not made of things which do appear." In fact, if they did comprehend that, it would negate all scientific pursuit in the area of origins. Obviously if we cannot deduce origins from studying what we see, there becomes no place in the field for the scientific method, which necessitates analyzing what we can see.

Some, however, believe ordinary scientists DO have an agenda, simply because they leave the supernatural out of the equation. I would submit that doing so is part of the scientific method itself, and has nothing to do with agenda.

Creation "scientists" -- now that's another story. Is it fair to suggest that here there is a clear agenda here to "prove" Biblical creation or at least "intelligent design"? That they have the conclusion foregone and try to fit the facts around it? Whatever that is, I do not think it is the scientific method. They can believe, think, and function as they like, but as they are not using the scientific method, I question the use of the label "scientist" for them.

Quote:

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The scientific method is the process by which scientists, collectively and over time, endeavor to construct an accurate (that is, reliable, consistent and non-arbitrary) representation of the world.

The scientific method has four steps

1. Observation and description of a phenomenon or group of phenomena.

2. Formulation of an hypothesis to explain the phenomena. In physics, the hypothesis often takes the form of a causal mechanism or a mathematical relation.

3. Use of the hypothesis to predict the existence of other phenomena, or to predict quantitatively the results of new observations.

4. Performance of experimental tests of the predictions by several independent experimenters and properly performed experiments.

If the experiments bear out the hypothesis it may come to be regarded as a theory or law of nature. If the experiments do not bear out the hypothesis, it must be rejected or modified. What is key in the description of the scientific method just given is the predictive power (the ability to get more out of the theory than you put in) of the hypothesis or theory, as tested by experiment. It is often said in science that theories can never be proved, only disproved. There is always the possibility that a new observation or a new experiment will conflict with a long-standing theory.

Source: Introduction to the Scientific Method

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