Fish in Space

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.

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...

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...