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The Borderlands Of Science
Michael Shermer's background is psychology and ultra-long-distance cycling; he's written a number of books on cycling and analysis of (and refutation of) Holocaust deniers. He's also president (apparently for life) of the American Skeptics society and a reasonably good writer. In this book, Shermer spends a lot of time talking about the scientific method, its strengths and potential flaws -- and, more importantly, its system for dealing with its flaws (which he claims "sets science apart from all other knowledge systems and intellectual disciplines" -- a heady claim I wish he discussed more).
Since this is supposed to be a review of The Borderlands Of Science and not Weird Things, I'll just say that if you like one, you'll like the other as well. In Borderlands, Shermer analyzes beliefs that are defensible, beliefs that could (or were once thought to) be scientifically accurate. Among these are, for instance, ramifications of cloning, confirmation bias in explaining racial differences in sports (about which Malcolm Gladwell has also written), and a whole, whole lot of discussion of Alfred Wallace. Wallace and Charles Darwin were both responsible for the theory of evolution. Wallace is not remembered as widely for a number of reasons, which are explored in frightening detail in roughly three and a half of the 16 chapters of this book. Not coincidentally, Shermer did his doctoral thesis on Wallace. The ratio of stuff-about-Wallace-or-Evolution to everything-else, by chapter, is 3:7; Shermer is pretty focussed on this specific discussion.
The book has four sections: a short introduction (which is quite heavy in skeptical theory, exactly what I wanted) and the main body, discussing borderlands theories, people, and history. In "Theories," Shermer tends to stray a little from 'why people believe weird things' into 'why stupid people believe weird things' (as he did in the book of the same title) and that's fun. He covers a lot of quite current topics (like cloning, Wacky Unified Field Theories, and the importance of Punctured Equilibrium in the evolution of evolutionary theory).
In section two, "People," he discusses the Copernican revolution and its effects, then goes off about Alfred Wallace. Here, he does something weird that needs more discussion. In analyzing Wallace, he constructs a psychological profile, which he derived by having a large number of Wallace experts fill out a survey of the "strongly agree, 9, 8,.. 3, 2, strongly disagree" sort, and then uses the results of these surveys to fill in his discussion of why Wallace became a scientific spiritualist, for instance. It's an interesting technique that he also uses with Steven Jay Gould and Carl Sagan. It is tempting to ask how much confirmation bias exists in a survey of this sort, though. Since I've already let the spoiler out of the bag, Shermer discusses Gould and Sagan, spends some time doing a statistical analysis of Sagan's greatness as a scientist (by comparing published papers by topic with a number of other contemporary, canonically great scientists) and pauses briefly to smack Freud upside the head in a somewhat snarky comparison of Freud and Darwin.
Finally, in section three, "Histories," he does a lovely discussion of the myth of pastoral tranquillity, including a quick summary of four ancient civilizations that probably managed to destroy themselves through environmental stupidity without (as he puts it) any need of Dead White European Males coming in and inflicting devastation from outside. Shermer then analyzes (and debunks) the theory of transcendent genius, the Mozart Myth, as he calls it, and goes back to two more chapters on Wallace and evolution, in a discussion of the Piltdown Man hoax and why that should have (but doesn't seem to have) supported the idea that science can be self-correcting and learn from its mistakes.
I like what Shermer is doing, and he writes well and readably. If I sound a bit impatient, it's because I want him to be writing about the application of critical thinking rather than case studies, and when he starts out writing just what I want to read, then goes off in a different direction, he leaves me standing at the intersection saying "hey, wait, this isn't the bus I wanted." The book could stand to be either edited down into two books (a Wallace analysis, and a case-studies book on how science inspects itself), or edited up with a clearer discussion of the math involved in his statistical analysis of Sagan or his psychological profiling of people.
In the end, I liked this book, I learned a fair bit from it, and I would recommend it to people who want to learn more about both critical thinking and science history.
You can purchase The Borderlands of Science from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
"Flim-flam!" or just about anything by James Randi (the guy who exposed Uri Geller),
he's a magician, not a scientist and has a good sense of humor.
(Also don't miss out on his $1 million dollar prize or his weekly newsletter on what the kranks are up to..)
I used to subscribe to (and read) the Skeptic Observer at one point. It was interesting.. but I think in some cases the dyed in the wool "skeptics" swing too far on the other side. Yes, the majority of them are anti religion, anti creation, anti anything that cannot be proven, but if you extrapolate a bit, you realize (or I realize, anyway, YMMV) that its very very subjective.
100 years ago they would not have believed aspirin works. (Heck.. medical science STILL cant tell you _why_ it works, just that it does.)
1000 years ago, they probably would not have believed in Lions or a round earth or some magical force that cannot be explained like gravity.. but they all exist.
I worry about anyone who feels the need to debunk and be skeptic just because.. faith is somewhat required in daily life, even if it is faith in the traction of your tires while going around a corner. And the fact that we keep finding scientific reasons for things that have been based on "faith" in the past works both ways.
Just my opinion, though far from humble.
Maeryk
Feminine Protection? What is that? A chartreuse flame thrower?
They are raised that way. Why the else would anyone believe in god?
Simply put people are afraid of the unknown. If you play to those fears you'll sell anything you want. Sad really.
"the way it turned into case studies of debunking, rather than the process of debunking"
Actually, I'm not sure you can do a "generic" how-to debunking book: eventually, you have to apply those tools to real-life situations. Shermer sets out the tools in the first section, then shows how they apply to specific cases: I think that's an excellent way to do it.
I did enjoy Borderlands, though not as much as Weird Things (perhaps because Weird Things was more "fun").
With all the current cloning fun going on, a book like Borderlands becomes even more important.
Vincent J. Murphy
Spandex Justice
The theory that sometimes evolution happens in spurts as opposed to slow gradual change is Punctuated Equilibrium, not Punctured Equilibrium. I used to be a Molcular Biologist.
Do really dense people warp space more than others?
Knowledge is fractal, and domain specific. Can something be in two places at once? Well, yes-no. It depends on the domain. If it's an electron, the answer seems to be sort-of "yes, if you can't see it in mid process".
People who are certain are a large part of the problem. WHENEVER you are certain, you've made a mistake. You may have mistaken a high probability value for truth (which usually works quite well), but you've made a mistake.
That said, there are definitely a lot of scams out there. If something looks unreasonable, then you need to insist on a higher degree of proof than if it seems reasonable. In either case you may be wrong. But it's better to live with the knowledge that you may be wrong than to fool yourself into certainty.
And also, much knowledge is time-bound. When I was a kid the idea of people going to the moon in my lifetime was laughed at. Now what they laugh at is the idea of people going back to the moon. But they are laughing for very different reasons, and in a very different way. (I happen to think that the second group of people is as wrong as the first, but it looks like it will be China or Japan that proves this.)
If something contradicts experience, then it may be either wrong, or misunderstood. Don't doubt your experience, even though you KNOW you left your sock on top of the dresser, and then it wasn't there. (I tend to model this [humorously] as parallel universe slippage.) Your memories of your personal experiences are all that you have to work with. But doubting that you understood what you saw is quite reasonable. And doubting the truth of what you were told is quite reasonable.
Telepathy... I have not seen either a proof or a disproof that met my standards. I also have a lot of trouble with defining it. E.g.: If I were to have an implanted cell phone that operated by direct neural connection, and someone else had a corresponding model, would this be telepathy? If so, then it's just a few years away. But the crucial point here is that I don't see any reason to decide. And I don't see any way to decide in general, though certain special cases are decideable. Of course, an existence proof would be a "sort-of" proof. But one might wonder exactly what was prooved. I saw one claim that there was a repeatable experiment that could transmit about one bit per day via telepathic channels... I never bothered to investigate this much, but 1) special setup was required (e.g., isolation rooms for both the sender and the receiver, and the willingness of both of them to be confined for the months that the test message required). and 2) it didn't seem useful for anything short of interstellar messaging, presuming that it would work in that situation (HAH!). So it may be true but worthless. (So much is.)
Also, something doesn't have to be valid to be useful. Newton's mechanics are known to be false. But that's what NASA uses for orbital calculations.
Of course, Newton's mechanics are exactly bogus... but then what does bogus mean, precisely?
etc.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Telepathy... I have not seen either a proof or a disproof that met my standards. I also have a lot of trouble with defining it. E.g.: If I were to have an implanted cell phone that operated by direct neural connection, and someone else had a corresponding model, would this be telepathy? If so, then it's just a few years away.
Laugh if you want, but I have seen it, and I believe it. Maybe not everyone.. but I know a set of identical twins, and have watched them both together and with one or the other and seen it pretty much in action.
They finish each others sentences and stuff, and I doubt that counts as telepathy, probably counts much more as a "we think along the same lines". But if anyone can explain why one gets stuck for a word and the other calls from two states a way and says "the word you are looking for is X" totally unbidden, I would like to know.
I know a lot of studies have been done on "twinning" and they have pretty much come up with "it works for some people, we have no idea why, but we suspect it has to do with sub-verbal cues". Thats great.. face to face.. but two states away?
To me, thats enough proof that at least these two have some immeasurable link between them. Will we be controlling the android GURT on Mars with telepathy in five years? I dunno. (G)
Maeryk
Feminine Protection? What is that? A chartreuse flame thrower?
Fred Cohen (of the Deception Toolkit fame, http://all.net) offered the following suggestions in a posting to RISKS-22.44.
"... If you are studying criminal behavior, reading books by crooks is probably a good idea. But if you want to know about cons, far better books are:
"Flim-Flam" by James Randi
"Scam School" by Chuck Whitlock
and "Rip-Off" by Fay Faron
All three are by legitimate researchers who present results taken from scores to hundreds of incidents and present how and why scams work, the
techniques used, the different plots, and so forth. They present many excellent examples of how these sorts of crimes work, how they impact
the victims, the psychology of the criminals, and so forth.
[snip]"
The absence of a plausible model than could be tested for telepathy is what is the big problem.
People thought that the idea of moving continents were stupid, until a mechanism was proposed and then earth crust plates were discovered.
...richie - It is a good day to code.
Ultimately, these theories gain respectability in large part due to the people backing them, and a desire to look at the world through a desire to achieve particular goals. This is no surprise but it does limit critical thought. Critical thought is in many ways impossible without trustworthy evidence, and a desire by a majority to look at evidence critically, but this leads to a conundrum - where do you start believing? If contrary evidence exists, who do you trust? Is there time in the universe to actually examine every claim critically, or examine every piece of evidence? Is it surprising people lock themselves into belief systems and attempt to examine only that that is related to that system?
Skewing this problem further is the not insignificant fact that people's perspectives are shaped by the evidence provided to them and their educations. This begins at school age, where any number of factors may skew how a person develops their own belief systems. State education is dying in the US, and many would argue that such schooling is unduly influenced by governmental factors. Private education however, creates equal and opposite horrors, with parents likely to choose schools that promote their own belief systems and hang-ups, and such schools looking more attractive than those that at least make an attempt to promote critical thought. And a parent's choice is only part of the problem, a school that is inherently designed to promote a specific belief system will attempt to promote itself to a wide range of groups; this leads to a situation where a relatively small number of groups can encourage particular ideologies and ways of looking at the world.
It doesn't stop at schooling. An explosion of information sources, and a lack of accountability where TV networks, publications, and other heavily promoted sources of information have become little more than pulpits for what the proprieters believe is a reasonable balance between the views they wish to express and what the public will stand, has lead to a situation where a huge amount of information presented is unfair, inaccurate, and promotional of particular belief systems. As competition has increased, quality has decreased. A "liberal", ie largely accurate, fair and balanced, media has become used to promoting views of the world that fit a less liberal agenda, lead by Fox, and groups playing catch-up to Fox's brand of popular illiberalism.
Belief systems feed off belief systems. Critical thought takes a back seat as assumptions become treated as facts, and the sheer volume of dubious and inaccurate information wieghts so heavily that more accurate pictures of the world look less and less likely. People believe because someone who says things that repeat other things they believe are saying these things.
And, frankly, there's bugger all anyone can do about it.
KMSMA (WWBD?)
A simple method for rating potentially revolutionary contributions to physics. A -5 point starting credit.
© 1998 John Baez
If you know any twins like this, send them to take James Randi's test and collect $1,000,000. Maybe they will give you a cut!
Skeptic.com - terrific stuff
The prototype for this type of work is Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, by Charles MacKay. On Amazon, here.
Floating face-down in a river of regret...and thoughts of you...
Proof is only subjective if it is used to support faith, and then it's not really proof, it's more of an opinion. Saying "I have faith car A is the best race car." is a subjective opinion. Saying "Because it has run 48 of 50 races, car B appears to be the best race car in those races." is an objective conclusion based on "proof". If you call that subjective and go with the first statement, you aren't really basing anything proof.
True, not every proof begins with an absolute baseline, but it can always be traced back to one. Your argument about school textbooks illustrates only that without complete data sets, conclusions can be wrong. Wow.
And just which "debunkers" are you referring to? Debunkers of creationism, or debunkers of evolution? They have fairly different arguments. On the one side you have observed (the flu evoles to survive, you know) and inferred evolutionary occurances, both of which are willing to incorporate new data to smooth out the edges, or move entirely as appropriate. On the other you get twisted logic (the world is too ordered to not be created) and egotism (we are not related to monkeys!). I don't see either of these using absense of proof.
Or are there other debunkers your referring to? Debunkers of Holocaust? Debunkers of Santa Clause? Debunkers of the moon landing? Granted none of these may be the ones you were generalizing, but I'm guessing the first two were the ones from how you openned your post.
R: That voice. Where have I heard that voice before? B: In about 365 other episodes. But I don't know who it is either.
Classic debunker examples include:
-
Nobody saw that rock fall out of the sky,
therefore your claim that rocks (ice balls,
frogs) fall out of the sky is false.
-
Your airplane prototype crashed, therefore
men will never fly.
-
You haven't produced a half-man/half-ape
fossil, therefore Man is a special creation.
The pattern is that incomplete evidence or faulty reasoning is taken to disprove the conclusion, instead of the correct result: that the status of the conclusion is (was) unknown. Rocks might or might not fall, Man might or might not fly, humans and modern apes might or might not have evolved from a common ancestor. We don't know if life originated "elsewhere", We don't know if antimatter repels matter gravitationally, we don't know if some people can sense the death of relatives from afar. We might never know.Scientists are prone to this fallacy, perhaps because they are temperamentally uncomfortable with uncertainty. That's why they became scientists in the first place. That's also why saying "I don't know" is considered, among scientists, so virtuous; it's hard to bring themselves to say it.
Among scientists, the fallacy manifests most harmfully when the conventional theory for a phenomenon is no better supported than the alternatives. Careers are blighted. Recent examples from biology that suffered "debunking" for decades include:
I see a lot of posts talking about how you need absolute proof to believe something.
I've seen many theories postulated that are based on inductive reasoning (i.e. the Sun has risen every day in history, so it will rise again tomorrow) or a building of theories based on proof of other theories.
A lot of science is based on things we can't prove or haven't proved yet, but are are given credibility by the accepted theories on which they are based.
However, I do agree that when I hear someone say "Foo happens because of Bar, and that's a fact!", I tend to cast a skeptic's eye until I can see why they believe this to be the case.
The revolution will be televised. Blackout restrictions apply.
I was expecting something like "The great mambo
chicken and the transhuman condition", but sadly
this doesn't look anything like as interesting as
that great book.
Examples that spring to my mind:
Crystals storing healing "energy".Quartz is piezoelectric, 'nuff said.
Homeopathic cures. Anyone heard of Avogadro's number?
"Natural" cures being better than pharmacuticals. Lead and Radon exist in nature, should we take those too?
"Faith" healing. Confirmation bias anyone?
Aromatic healing. No comment needed.
Cold fusion, where neutron counts around 2x background were detected, is a good example. Effects of power-line RF on humans fall into this category. The FDA's insistence that medications be proven "effective" above the noise threshold causes many drugs to be rejected.
Mainstream science isn't immune to this problem. Some papers in particle physics reflect a very small number of recorded events. It's worse in the life sciences, where there's more noise and less ability to control it.
"If you need statistics to interpret your experimental results, that indicates that your experiment is badly designed" - Rutherford
It's easy to reconcile science and religion.
Religions are memes in culture; someone (a jesus, a joseph smith, a mohammed, a l. ron hubbard, a david koresh) somewhere starts a religious idea (or, extremely commonly, mutates an earlier religious idea), and spreads it around. Those religious traditions that appeal to people more spread more efficiently, and become dominant in the thinking of those people infected by it, such that one's spiritual feeling (and that of one's co-religionists) is taken as affirmative evidence for the dogma in question. It doesn't matter that other people believe other things upon equal evidence, as they are simply considered 'other'.
That's one scientific (or at least rationalist) description of religion. Nice and reconciled, makes perfect sense.
You can go the other way as well.. Jehovah/Jesus Christ/Allah/Xenu created the world and set everything up as a test to see if the little people on the ground would believe the right thing and live forever minus their bodies/pay money and get Clear. Skeptics are nothing but cynics, trying to ruin a beautiful thing for everyone, hell-bound, forces of the devil, whose greatest trick was convincing people that lack of evidence for him might imply that he didn't exist, and etc.
That's also reconciliation of a sort.. certainly anyone who holds that sort of belief has a place for skeptics (cynics), and is happy with that place for them.
Asking the scientist/rationalist to accept that feelings are a reliable basis for making factual statements about the world is asking too much. Asking the religious to accept that feelings are not a reliable basis for making factual statements about teh world is often asking too much as well.
How therefore shall they be reconciled?
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
While it's not a field guide to identifying bad science (he mostly covers stories that were or are popular in the media), he periodically takes a break from storytelling to identify the common threads shared between the cases. Basically, anyone making claims that fly in the face of conventional knowledge is suspect, doubly so if they refuse to submit their ideas to peer review or confirmation. Clonaid anyone?
That's fantastically awful. Do you have links? I can't believe this happened!! Fraud is fraud, even in the murky world of religion and law.
If you can't prove anything (supreme beings, distant historical miracles, etc...) leave it alone-- but for the court to ignore blatant trickery and lying under "separation of church and state" is ridiculous. If I want to rob people, all I have to do now is to do it in the name of God through some mystical-ish technology-assisted cheating.
That is a rather romantic depiction of a skeptic. However, as skeptics tend to be humans they tend not to live up to that idealized depiction.
Not to mention that the skeptic bears as much onus to prove the foundations of the skeptical worldview as a constituent of any other belief system has for his or hers. Unfortunately for the consistent skeptic, many of the axioms of the skeptical worldview are improvable.
This outrages me, a person who believes in miracles. Why? Because fraud does make it hard for others to tell where the hand of God is involved.
Why do I believe in miracles? I'll just say: personal *private* experience, supports it -- but I did believe that they occur, long before I had such personal experience.
Is that a reason for you to believe in miracles?
No.
Nonetheless, one place where I don't think there was a scam involved, was the formation of Youth Challenge (or was it Teen Challenge), as written in the story "The Cross and the Switchblade." Do I know that to be a true case of miracles?
No. I was not there.
Do I believe it to have been a case of miracles? Yes. The patterns all indicate to me that it was probably real.
Should the government get involved, and prosecute the pastor who did this? I dunno -- I tend to be pretty libertarian.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
Some physicists have speculated that gravity has a "mechanism" in the form of graviton particles. But (AFAIK) this has not been proven. But does (or did) this lack of a "mechanism" bother scientists? Hardly. They are happy to model gravity as "spooky action at a distance" or "curvature of spacetime" for most purposes. Why can't telepathy also be modelled as "spooky action at a distance" (whose reliability depends on aptitude, training, and/or psychological conditions of the subjects)?
Female Prison Rape in NY
True, the force of gravity is little mysterious (in fact all the force really are - why is positive charge attracted to negative?).
However, unlike telepathy, gravity is easy to demonstrate with experiments that repeatable by anyone.
...richie - It is a good day to code.
My experience with organized religion is that they tend to be social organizations with a common set of beliefs. These beliefs do not have to be based upon anything scientific for the individual members to derive some sort of benefits from belonging to the religion. A similar set of processes is involved in any social organization. (Professional societies, clubs, fraternities, etc.)
To imply that belonging to a religion makes one deluded is simply wrong. To say that members of a religious organization removes credibility is to toss many of the great scientists of the world upon the pyre of discredit. For all our technology, we are the same creatures we were 10,000 years ago.
Interestingly enough, there is a respected text book around my house that demonstrates that there is a specific place in the human brain that shows activity only when religion is involved. I'll have to dig it up as I don't remember the name of the book. It was used as a college text last year.
Creative Spelling Copyright (2002). May use without Persimmons
Oh, I don't deny that one can reason about human perception and thinking, and that such reasoning is by necessity much more high-level and abstract than for things like physics, chemistry, etc.
Feelings are absolutely appropriate for describing the internal state of a mind. Indeed, feelings are even a fairly reliable way to learn about the internal state of other's minds, as well.. non-verbal communication, and etc.
Sure.
The laws in the Hebrew Bible. Clearly an attempt to reign in human passion. Or even better, many of Jesus' parables which are counter-intutitive.The point being that sometimes god has to overrided human feelings.
If you say so. I agree that the Torah and Bible were (and are) defining characteristics of civilization, and that there's lots in them that might be counter to what one individual might like to do at any given time. That doesn't mean that the accepted validity of those books isn't due to people's emotional acceptance of them. Guilt and shame are human feelings, too.
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
I look at the responses to this story and notice that the posts are divided into roughly two factions:
1/8th complain that "skeptics" are too eager to shoot down any new/unpopular idea (paraphrased VERY heavily)with various and sundry reasons.
7/8ths dog pile on the 1/8th with quite a bit of name calling - referring to "head up your ass", "religious zealot" and my favorite "just a loony".
There are huge holes in arguements on BOTH sides, and typically - the people who posted to this topic really should read up on logical thinking and practice it some more.
Shouting "Think logically, retarded bitch!" is just plain dumb.
Insulting someone for religious beliefs is just plain dumb.
Besides - the world is alot more fun if you just DON'T ask for proof. Believe anything anyone says to you. It makes life oh-so-much more exciting.
I'm the guy that when he heard the old kids story about "step on a crack, break your momma's back" was found on the playground stamping on the broken sidewalk screaming "That's for beating me when my sister broke the car windshield and blamed it on me, you insensitive harpy!!!"
My experience is that some organized religions are amassing political power through whatever means necessary, and then using that political power to enrich themselves, and impose their dogma on others. I am especially troubled when said dogma is life-threatening, for example the insistance that condoms do not reduce the risk of sexually transmitted diseases. Soon to be part of the U.S. policy.
And the rest of organized religions don't distance themselves from the deceiving, power-mad ones.
Consider the platypus for a moment. It's an animal with the bill and webbed feet of a duck, the tail of a beaver, and some features of reptiles. If the platypus became extinct today, I suspect that a few hundred years from now, skeptics would begin to deny its existence. The records wouldn't matter. We have skeptics and outright deniers of the Apollo moon landing, the Holocaust, and the Reagan economic boom, all to which there are living witnesses today.
Look at what I found on the platypus:
Today's skeptics may well be tomorrow's fools.There is an excellent, though old, discussion of the hallmarks of cranks in Martin Gardner's book *Fads and Fallicies*, in the opening chapter. Most University libraries should have a copy of this work. The rest of the book describes case studies.
"WHENEVER you are certain, you've made a mistake."
You certain about that?
"Gold still represents the ultimate form of payment in the world." - Alan Greenspan, 1999
From the "Science Blues":
"Scientists have an irritating habit of saying one thing and meaning another. (...) In his 1977 book The Dragons of Eden, the late astronomer Carl Sagan, one of the great popularizers of science in the 20th century, argues that consciousness, as most laypeople think about it, does not exist.As he explains: '[The brain's] workings--what we sometimes call mind--are a consequence of its anatomy and physiology, and nothing more.' Yet Sagan states in his final book The Demon-Haunted World that 'science is not only compatible with spirituality, it is a profound source of spirituality.' Huh? To be told that mind and consciousness are illusions and that this can be the foundation of a profoundly spiritual view makes most people think they're being bamboozled."
Maybe, if those people never heard about Buddhism.
Prescriptive grammar:linguistics
Unfortunately all the details escape me and I haven't the time to look them up now, but IIRC there's a pretty good description of this in Boorstin's excellent book The Discoverers.
"Biped! Good cranial development. Evidently considerable human ancestry."
Occam's Razor, which seems to be a favorite of Mr. Sagan's, (I LOVED Contact, the book BTW) hasn't really borne itself out well in my experience. A good example: Newtonian physics was debunked by a far more complex and complicated theory, Einstein's relativity. Simple inverse-square equations (ie gravity) became much more complicated. Or consider quantum mechanics.
In the end, you could just accept the philosophical underpinnings of religion as a much less complicated means to understand the world than science and physics using Occam's Razor, but that would obviously leave you in the dark, and experimental evidence would certainly disagree...
Hey, I'm just your average shit and piss factory.
You are confusing irrationality with provisional assent. Scientitst do not give credence to the process of science and the collected results of that process because they are irrational; they give credence to science because it works. You cannot refute my assertion, becuase in responding to my post, you demonstrate that science can be applied to produce technologies that objectively work.
Anyone that is pompous enough to assume they can understand the universe in it's entirety by saying "it's god's will" is a fool.
In historical studies the rise of government centered around quasi-religious symbols that were feared and worshiped (primarily phallic in nature since people figured out that is where we come from). So the first governments were all religious in nature. This is of course assuming you don't subscribe to the "spontaneous generation" theory put forth by the Christian religion.
In the end you can test the theory or it's just a guess. Everyone is guessing there is something on the other side because to admit there may not be anything would mean we could all be sociopathic and live our lives by our own rules instead of those instilled through fear and societies mores.
If you take any child, raise them away from a society that blames bad things on a malcontent evil force (sound's like StarWars bullshit to me) and everything good on a miracle, you would have no god and no reason to need one. Simply imparting your morals/convictions on your children by explaining "it's the right thing to do" instead of "because you'll go to hell" makes the same point but one is positive and one is negative. Organized religion is overwhelmingly negative. As an American of Italian decent I was raised in the catholic church and it always amazed me at the hypocrisy of those in church and the overall lack of common sense in the teachings.
In the end I'm not athiest I just don't profess to the common held belief that we can answer all questions related to life through one word: "god". Simple people may find this soothing, I just find it pathetic.
I love stirring the pot.
No, I do not.
To believe that "because it works" is a good reason to believe in science is irrational because there is no rational basis to believe that "because it works" is a good reason to believe something. There is no rational reason to believe the correlation implies causation. We can use this supposition as the basis of science, but that we cannot rationally demonstrate its truth.
This is neither here nor there. In fact it only begs the question.
My experience is that some organized religions are amassing political power through whatever means necessary, and then using that political power to enrich themselves, and impose their dogma on others. I am especially troubled when said dogma is life-threatening, for example the insistance that condoms do not reduce the risk of sexually transmitted diseases. Soon to be part of the U.S. policy.
re the condom bit.. do not *reduce* or do not *prevent* as seems to be the way it is usually taught? "If you are going to have sex, use a Condom so you dont get diseases" is the way I usually see it presented in classes and in the media. I would rather see "Using a Condom reduces your risk of pregnancy by 99 percent, your risk of Herpes by 0%, your risk of HIV by @ 50%" etc, with REAL figures.
The problem is, we _still_ dont know some of those real figures. A guy I know works for a company that does research on polymer and rubber compounds and such for a medical company. He was the one that mentioned that counting on a Condom to prevent deadly STD's is kind of like depending on a clothesline when bungee jumping... it just doesnt work. Especially since a some of the cheaper condoms will stop a relatively large thing like a spermatazoa, but will not stop the much smaller virii from passing through.
Maeryk
Feminine Protection? What is that? A chartreuse flame thrower?
As far as I'm concerned, a Skeptic is just a member of a cult as dangerous to rationality as the Religious Right is, and any dogmatic statements made by one are just as open to "Prove it" as anything said by a person who believes "Creation Science" about biology.
It's like the difference between libertarian and Libertarian when applied to a person.
Tech Public Policy stuff
I don't think so. :-)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
There were two questions that asked the same thing.
Of course, I do consider the possibility of validation error.
Nonetheless, here is a basic description of what happened:
(1) difficult times, financially speaking.
(2) we do give food to beggar children, but decided that we didn't have the money (upcoming) to do so. So we had told the children "no food until August", and they had not come for over a month.
(3) Still not satisfied, I was worrying about that.
(4) Normally I don't work on Sunday, fully understanding the reasons against it. One Sunday I did, *sortof*.
(5) Getting ready for church Sunday evening, I started to face what seemed like self-accusation, and started defensive thoughts, all over #4. But the faster my responses, answers came back shooting the excuses down. At that point, I just said I'm sorry; and all of a sudden, I couldn't stand up -- I had to sit down, and I was sure that God was there.
(6) I prayed first over the situation with the children, and prayed "if you want me to, then send them to my door (silent prayer) and I will feed them". I then prayed about my worries, my concerns; but prayed "Each time I have asked for something, you gave it to me. But when life gets hard, I forget. So this time, please give me nothing, except the reassurance that you do see us, and do care for us, and will care for us."
(7) Half an hour later, the children came by, asking for food. 5 hours later, I opened up my email, and found an email from my pastor at the previous parish, asking if we needed financial help. Although I had, a week before, turned down a request for a pledge for their new parish hall, saying that times were slightly hard, I had not requested any money. And indeed, times are not hard enough for me to have to say "yes". But later I checked -- our old pastor had sent his email at the same time as I had prayed.
I should note that there have been other events--this is just one, and the other events don't all involve me. In some cases, they involved family friends. But this is recent in my memory, having been just this past summer.
That said, I'm not really sure about one thing, because not too long after that the kids -- I dunno -- one started making dirty jokes about us, and was banned, and others started stealing -- so we said "no more" for a while (2 weeks initially, but each time they violate their punishment it doubles; they've still not been reinstated). So I wonder sometimes what misfired. Was it us? Them? Or maybe it was God's will that they should have something that they lose for a while? I don't know. But it does initiate some doubts sometimes -- not about God, or the miracle, but about us.
Is it possible that this is validation error? I suppose so.
But in some ways, it is an awful lot like what is described in "The Cross and the Switchblade". So when I read that, I have to say I tend to think the story is true. I know the organization does now exist, and still does a lot of good, though it is not needed as much as it was needed when it formed.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's