Word: layman
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...questioning, but still runs into difficulties with some Catholic dogma. Recently, she said, she tried to organize a Bible study group at the Catholic Student Center, where she is very active. The idea met with little enthusiasm, she said, because of the Catholic reliance on authorities mediating for the layman with God. The idea of a student-organized Bible study group was too Protestant to be acceptable to a Catholic group...
...DAWKINS, a young professor of animal behavior at Oxford, would actually write a book like this one, is a mystery, but it is easily solved. Dawkins probably decided he could cut the academic rhetoric, simplify his writing style to suit the layman, exploit an exciting new angle, and make a mint...
...nightmarish blunders. Detergents that make dishes gleam may kill rivers. Dyes that prettify the food may cause cancer. Pills that make sex safe may dangerously complicate health. DDT, cyclamates, thalidomide and estrogen are but a few of the mixed blessings that, all together, have taught the layman a singular lesson: the promising fruits of science and technology often come with hidden worms...
...skepticism, at bottom, is not antiscience at all. It is only at war with the once prevalent assumption that science and technology should be allowed utter freedom, with little or no accounting to those who have to live with the bad results as well as the good. If the layman on the street has discovered that science is fallible, that hardly makes him its permanent enemy. After all, everybody has forgiven Newton for thinking that the sun was populated...
...leaving aside for now the question of Fell's claim to a unique competence in linguistics, there are other aspects of America B.C. that raise doubts. To the layman, Fell's theories seem well-constructed and scholarly at first. But after a while a certain pattern develops. Time after time the internal consistency of his argument depends upon the acceptance of ad hoc hypotheses that strain the limits of credibility...