The Path of Least Resistance

I'm always jealous when better people than I formulate a thought I'd been circling around for years. In this case it's Michael Sherlock's tweet sporting this image. I'm impressed by his succinct description of the consequences of non-skeptical thought.

Critical thinking and scientific skepticism are the filters required for producing rational statements of probable truth. Without these filters our brains will inevitably follow the path of least resistance and succumb to credulity, supernaturalism and all manner of magical thinking.

I'm unable to find a source for this on the web, leading me to believe that this is taken from Sherlock's new book. I don't yet have confirmation.

Scientism

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 as an example of scientism in the modern age when Sagan said, “The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be.” For those of you who may not be familiar with his work, Carl Sagan never once denigrated creativity, memory or imagination. In fact he had a lot to say on the importance of those topics.

It's worth pointing out that creativity, memory and imagination are all important aspects of the human experience. They help us create solutions, express feelings and communicate ideas. Without creativity and imagination it would be impossible for us to form new questions for us to test on our way to finding answers. It would be impossible to challenge the ideas we've already formed to make sure that they accurately reflect reality. In science and all other aspects of life these qualities are what allow us to do more than merely survive but also thrive.

We look to the dark and undiscovered places, imagine what their secrets are, and pour every bit of cunning we have into amazing, complex tools just to see if we were right. We cast a light into the darkness and find ourselves intrigued by the darkness beyond that and start the whole thing over again. Imagination both fuels and is fueled by science. Creativity is what turns theory into knowledge and knowledge enables further creativity in turn.

However, this has its limits. We can't invent an answer and expect it to be correct simply because we like it and want it to be true.

Scientism is a slur against people who dare to acknowledge that we are flawed creatures with senses that are not always reliable. Consequently we must approach our assumptions and conclusions skeptically, no matter how we arrived at them or how long we've held them. What accusations of scientism does is betray a fundamental misunderstanding of what science is and how it works. Ultimately, science is skepticism applied in a rigorous and methodical manner.

Another thing the accusation tries to do is pull science down to the level of religion. I'm often faced with accusations that they're both based on faith. Richard Dawkins shows us what science would be like if that were true.

Speaking of presuppositionalism

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 are ones that didn't have that much evidence supporting them regardless of how popular they were. One such example is the Big Crunch hypothesis for how the universe will end. Current observations make that hypothesis extremely unlikely so cosmologists have a very low degree of certainty.

Creationism has no evidence supporting it. The conflation of creationism as a branch of science is a lie meant to comfort people who are emotionally invested in it. There's no evidence of a creator, no evidence that the universe was fully formed at its beginning or that a trickster god planted false evidence to lead us to believe that it's actually 13.8 billion years old (See: Last Thursdayism).

The "young earth scientists" out in the world aren't scientists. They're religious partisans who make no useful predictions, perform no repeatable experiments and devote the majority of their time either attempting to refute real science or creating apologetics for what current discoveries mean for their beliefs. What they do is not science. It's more accurately described as lying for Jesus.

Who has the power of prophecy?

Lots of religions claim the power of prophecy, to make predictions of the future that will come true. The New Testament claims fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy in various acts and events depicted of Jesus, but since the writers weren't themselves eyewitnesses we should dismiss that as attempts to shoehorn Jesus into messianic prophecy. Certainly, the Jews themselves aren't convinced.

I know of no religion that can legitimately claim the power of prophecy. All of the claims of prophecy fulfilled I've seen from Christians and Muslims are either so vague as to be meaningless or once again shoehorned by reinterpreting events to match the prophecy. Did you know that the Book of Isaiah predicted airplanes? Yup. A metaphor of people flying is meant literally flying although the prophecy somehow neglects to mention that the flying people are riding in a vehicle. Of course when the Bible records Jesus explaining how to distinguish a true believer, that's just metaphor and not meant to be taken literally. But I digress.

On the other hand, we do have access to a methodology that does allow us to make predictions that come true. It's not 100%, of course, because it requires humans to do the work supporting the conclusions. This method is called "science." What do I mean by that? Consider that in 1783 a humble English scientist named John Michell predicted the existence of black holes. It took us several generations before we could verify this, but he got everything right except one detail. That's better than any prophecy from the Bible I've ever seen, and it's no fluke. Scientists make accurate predictions of what we're going to find all the time, even when they're insanely difficult to verify. For example, it took physicists decades of research and expensive equipment to finally catch the Higgs boson based on the math worked out by Robert Brout, François Englert and Peter Higgs.

Does the existence of black holes or elementary particles like the Higgs boson have any mystical import? Do they herald the End Times or the arrival of an auspicious leader? Naturally, no. They're much more useful than that; they help us explain the natural world and verify the consistency of the results we can expect. The early calculations of Isaac Newton help us build faster, safer cars and transport food around our globe. The experiments in electricity led us to a world of possibility that wasn't possible before we learned how to harness it. Imagine what we can do as we learn more how to harness gravity or subatomic particles.

When a holy book begins to match that sort of predictive power, then I'll be impressed. Right now all I'm seeing in these claims of prophecy fulfillment is a lot of Texas sharpshooters.