Fish in Space

One objection to comparing the evidence for unicorns to the evidence for gods is that they're not the same thing. Unicorns didn't create the universe, God did. But how do you justify this claim? There's just as much evidence to support the creation of the universe by a herd of unicorns as there is creation by a god. Thus I introduce the Cult of the Celestial Unicorn Herd. Rather than there being a single, omnipotent unicorn running everything, the universe is instead segregated into specific tasks. There's a herd of unicorns dedicated to maintaining gravity, and another to maintain magnetism. There are herds to oversee inertia and chemical bonds, biology and everything else we see in the universe, as well as more that we haven't discovered. What we misinterpret as natural processes are actually supernatural forces governing everything. There is, of course, a special herd of unicorns dedicated to guiding intelligent life throughout the universe. There are intelli...

What is "scientism?" Broadly, scientism is a criticism levied by believers against people who point out that science and skepticism have done more to expand our knowledge and improve our lives than any religion or faith. Thomas Burnett of the creationist organization BioLogos claims: As this new method [science] found great success, the specter of scientism began to emerge. Both Bacon and Descartes elevated the use of reason and logic by denigrating other human faculties such as creativity, memory, and imagination. Bacon’s classification of learning demoted poetry and history to second-class status. Descartes’ rendering of the entire universe as a giant machine left little room for the arts or other forms of human expression. In one sense, the rhetoric of these visionaries opened great new vistas for intellectual inquiry. But on the other hand, it proposed a vastly narrower range of which human activities were considered worthwhile. Astonishingly, Burnett quotes Carl Sagan ...

In discussing presuppositionalism yesterday and today, the topic naturally turned to creationism (one of the biggest examples of presuppositionalism around). A few defenders of creationism attempted to argue the old straw about science being unreliable and incapable of offering certainty, therefore God. In doing so they betrayed their ignorance of what science is and how we know what we know. To begin with science doesn't talk about absolutes, it talks about degrees of certainty . The short explanation of this is that certainty is defined by supporting evidence. The less evidence you have to support your idea, the less certainty we have that it's true. The more evidence you have, the greater the degree of certainty. There are no absolutes when it comes to knowledge. We're always updating and refining our knowledge, but at this point we very rarely end up refuting something that has a great deal of evidence supporting it. Most of the ideas in science that get left behind...