From the article:

Privately funded science, of course, isn’t affected by any government gag order. It’s notorious for being biased, flawed, and misleading, because often, the person or group supplying the money for these studies is hoping for a specific conclusion. What this means is not necessarily that all privately funded studies are untrustworthy, but that extra care when reading, and reading about, these kinds of studies is necessary. Historically, tobacco companies spent decades trying to manipulate the evidence that cigarette caused lung cancer, funding studies to research alternate explanations for the disease, such as pollution or asbestos.

But surely, if there were some way that scientists could get paid for their hard work without the pressure of arriving at a predetermined conclusion, more valuable scientific research would be done.

Government-funded science should offer that opportunity. Scientists employed by the government generally submit their papers to journals for peer review, the process whereby other experts in a specific field review a scientific paper, looking for holes in their method or errors in their analysis, and give feedback to the authors, as well as approve of a new paper’s legitimacy before a journal publishes it.

Read the full article by Ryan at The Gateway.

The audio has problems, so you’ll have to crank it up at times. The debate begins about 6 minutes in.

Michael Horner argues that morality must come from a higher power (God) and that we have morals, and that we know morals exist, which proves the existence of God. Massimo Pigliucci argues that morality is very real, but exists only in the context of humanity as a combined genetic and social concept.