Skeptico recently posted an excellent article I will probably link to plenty of times in the future. In fact I should probably add a link as a "see also" in the Doggerel Index. It gave me a bit of a flashback to an idiot troll calling himself "Mr. FreeThinker" who apparently thought "we don't know yet" counts as an extraordinary claim. This is, of course, to borrow a phrase from across the pond, utter bollocks.I also had a flashback to a clip of Bill O'Reilly with Richard Dawkins. He essentially said that as long as us scientifically minded people don't know, he's free to believe whatever random stuff some guys just made up ex nihilo. That, of course, makes it a matter of pure, baseless faith.
Of course, science has given us great knowledge. We know evolution happened and have a damn good idea about many of the details. We know the Earth revolves around the sun. We know The Big Bang happened. The evidence for all of these things gives us >99% confidence. Of course, we can't know everything, since we can't shove the entire universe into an evidence locker or examine the whole of its lifespan. There are still unanswered questions, like what happened before the Big Bang, or even if that's a meaningful question.
Yes, we've got a lot of cosmologists doing mathematical calculations of what happens when you play Cat's Cradle with superstrings, trying to figure out those answers. Who knows, they might find and successfully test an answer. Right now, they don't, and many of my fellow skeptics have expressed doubts about the whole approach since testability is hard to come by. In any case, we don't know yet. Not knowing is only a mild irritation for most of us, and often exciting for those doing the research: They're going to get a surprise, no matter what the results are.
For faithheads, not knowing is somehow an indictment for science: Because science isn't perfect, they need to make up a perfect being to tell them what to believe. Of course, there are a lot of these fictional beings competing for dominance because evidence isn't involved. Seems to me you could pick one or a set at random and still be on equal ground with all the other stone idol roulette players.
Of course, I think the only winning move is not to play.
3 comments:
No, that one loses too... The players hate the disinterested. It's like when I tell a sports fan I'm not into sports. Some of them can get rather religious about it, thinking that if I don't support "our team" I should just move. Seriously, it's disturbing and completely irrational all at once.
I'm very familiar with the sort of person who uses that bizarre liscense to believe in the form of scientists not knowing. It's one thing when it's an indirect flaw you can point out. However as you noted with ol' Bill, some of them actually REVEL in it. There was a time I did too. However what they are really admitting is how completely random at whim-like their own beliefs are and the only justification they can find is "well everyone else is just as random and baseless as me so it's okay". Firstly, I disagree with that premise on it's face, every idea out there being completely random and baseless would, at least to me, suggest you should either work to generate some hypothesis that you can test that isn't so random, or just not believe any of it. I also reject that science is random and baseless and I need not bother explaining why there. Other sites do it far more in depth than I could.
Really though, all it does for me when they say "well everything's just as random as my belief" is undermine any possible claim that their religion is a "bedrock" to build a life on. That biblical analogy of building a house on a rock vs sand is trivially easy to show applies just as much to the bible as any other sand hut belief they had to work with at the time. What they are saying is they built their big ol' house of beliefs on a pile of sand and have no bedrock to stand on.
That's the sort of thing the next atheist on Bill's show needs to tell him when he tries to say "since you aren't completely sure, it's all random, making me free to believe this", specifically say "so your beliefs are built on sand instead of bedrock?". At the very least, even if Bill bounces back a few seconds later (or just mutes him while shouting about how much of a rude "attack" that was to challenge his faith on the air), it should give the people at home something to think about. It's been a while since I was "in the game", but back when I was a christian the bedrock thing was a pretty popular analogy.
He essentially said that as long as us scientifically minded people don't know, he's free to believe whatever random stuff some guys just made up ex nihilo. That, of course, makes it a matter of pure, baseless faith.
The fundamental mistake this idea is making is that everything falls into one of three states:
1) Definitely true.
2) Definitely false.
3) Neither.
And anything in group 3 is purely a matter of choice as to whether you believe it or not.
But any system which leaves what to believe up to choice (except in strange marginal cases) is fundamentally flawed. No account has been taken here of probability. Based on the information we have we can estimate how likely it is that a proposition is true, we should be more inclined to believe a more probable proposition is true than a less probable one. And some propositions are so improbable that that can essentially be dismissed without extraordinary new evidence. The existence of God or gods falls into that low-probability space.
The fundamental mistake this idea is making is that everything falls into one of three states:
1) Definitely true.
2) Definitely false.
3) Neither.
Interestingly, none of those categories is of any relevance to reality, which makes it unsurprising that they end up holding such bizarre beliefs.
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