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Originally Posted by Boots13
AJ, I wish my mind worked like yours....but somewhere along the way I ended up being satisfied with throwing my brainless body through space and the text books fell by the wayside. You are indeed remarkable !
My impression is that Evidence is based on the equation of hypotheticals...beliefs. We approximate, we ask, we reason, we hypothesize and then we have equations that solve, or not, the question at hand....for example , when we fail we make the rule "THAT CANNOT BE" but we have the potential to ultimately evolve the information to find an exception to the rule...proven by equation.
Rules (evidence) have exceptions but how would we know, if we did not believe and work, rework, continue to hypothesize based on our beliefs?
And we may never know all the hard rules and evidenciary benefits of our belief systems but should that dictate that we stop striving for truths?
And I really hate that this argument extends to beliefs that oppress and damage people, cultures, religions, etc. (Pat Robertson, Jim Jones, Radical Terrorism and individuals following their damaging beliefs).
Oh gawd, I feel like I just poked the bear...be kind AJ !
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I'm a big believer in continually testing beliefs against reality with reality being the final arbiter. One thing that I wish more scientists would do in their public pronouncements is make it clear that there's always a codicil "to the best of our knowledge at this date, subject to revision on new evidence". Of course, when we *do* say that it drives the general public nuts because they want us to be certain. In fact, one of the ways that scientists are hobbled in our public discussions with, say, creationists or global warming deniers is that we tend to hedge ourselves in. It is a habit of mind to say "X works like this, however, it may be that it could work like that..." While creationists are free to say "it doesn't work like that" full-stop.
Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic magazine and columnist for Scientific American, gave a scale in one of his books that I think is really useful in talking about what we know. The scale goes from 0 to 1 with 0 being absolute certainty that the idea is false and 1 absolute certainty that the idea is true. With the exception of certain rather prosaic things (my parents are dead, I am married to Belly, my son is named William, I'm a lesbian, etc.) everything else falls into the realm of .1 to .9. I would put astrology, psychic powers, homeopathy and racialist conceptions of humanity (be that Aryan nationalism or Afrocentrism) at .1. I would put quantum mechanics, relativity, evolutionary theory at .9.
It's a GOOD thing to constantly question and ponder what we think we know and why we think we know it. Ultimately, however, I think we have to, at some point, fish or cut bait and proceed 'as if' we knew. I also think that in testing our ideas with the real world we should always 'be humble before the data' and accept the world that the data presents to ourselves. While I don't believe in God I am willing to be convinced that there is one if someone (like God) ever presents compelling evidence for it. But the bar for that level of evidence would (and should be) set high because the God hypothesis is an extraordinary claim and as Carl Sagan so sagely put it "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence".
You mention exceptions to rules. Sometimes those exceptions *prove* the rule. Let's say, for instance, that I took a picture of an apple hanging suspended in a room. It's clear that there's no string holding the apple up and it's not in anyone's hand. Would I have just disproven gravity which demonstrates that apples can't just float in mid-air? No. If I'm honest I'll say "well, this picture was of an apple that was released by an astronaut on the International Space Station". At which point, it's clear that I haven't disproven gravity but, in fact, supported the theory of gravitation because in the absence of a gravitational field apples (or anything else) will float but IN a gravitational field it will drop. (As an interesting aside, if it were on the space shuttle and the shuttle were accelerating the apple would STILL fall because acceleration and gravity are effectively the same thing)
Part of why I'm so passionate about this is that I'm watching my country descend into a very scary state. Over the summer there were the tea party protests against the health care reform bill. Now, whatever you might think of the bill, it is demonstrably true that nothing in the language of the bill mentioned 'death panels'. Yet, people *consistently* made this claim and were rarely ever challenged to actually quote the language, chapter and verse. When I was growing up and someone had said that the bill contained language it didn't on, say, 60 Minutes or Walter Cronkite those newspeople would have said "We have a copy of the text here, would you mind reading it to us" and when they hemmed and hawed they would be called out for telling a lie. Now, we have become a society where if you *believe* that HCR bill contains language about death panels and you SAY that it contains language about death panels then even if the language isn't in the bill, we'll treat AS IF it were there!
As queer people this should give us all a moment of pause. In California a trial just wrapped up about gay marriage where the proponents of Prop 8 said manifestly untrue things about us. They claimed (falsely) that we are more likely to molest children. They claimed (falsely) that in the Netherlands, where same-sex marriage is legal, the divorce rate and out-of-wedlock birth rate skyrocketed *because* of the passage of gay marriage laws (the first is an outright statistical falsehood and the second is untrue because the out-of-wedlock birthrate was already climbing for a decade before SSM became legal). While the judge will most likely dismiss their arguments, many in the public and media will take it as being true no matter WHAT the reality is. This is a threat to not just our ability to have our relationships recognize legally but a threat to our very ability to live peacefully in this society. Why? Because if *enough* people believe that about us, they *will* pass laws to protect their children from us. It won't matter if we are *not* a threat, all that will matter is that they *believe* us to be.
Don't know if that answered your post or not. Please let me know if I didn't.
And thank you for the praise, I never quite know what to say when folks say such things to me. I don't think I'm intellectually all that but I'm flattered and humbled that you do.
Cheers
Aj