Death of a Thousand Qualifications

A very odd article at MSNBC about Gregory Paul's argument that there is a correlation between religious belief and sociological dysfunction. It claims that the argument of Paul's article is sound; except that its methodology is inadequately explained, its data possibly unreliable, and, contrary to his explicit complain only to be establishing correlation, his discussion in the paper appears to presuppose a causal link. But it's still sound! Whatever that means. But this may in part be misleading journalism. In his response to his critics Mr. Paul manages to sound a great deal like a caricature of a pseudoscientist:

Paul said such questions were beside the point. No one has persuasively challenged his raw data or what they demonstrate, he contended; if other scientists don’t believe him, they can do the research themselves. That’s how science works.

“No one’s shown what I did was wrong,” said Paul, who said he was planning to write a book on the subject. “They tend to go off on tangents.”

Since one's credentials, the reliability of one's data, the adequacy of one's statistical methodology, the sloppiness of one's presentation of the results, and the logic of one's inferences from the analyzed data (the major points for which he has been criticized) are here being lumped together as 'tangents', I'm left not knowing what Gregory Paul's view of science is.

(HT: prosthesis)