Reasonists
September 7th, 2009
The abundance of even non-religious conspiracy theories is yet one more reason to challenge faith-based thinking. But it isn’t all roses…
Welcome to Sacred River!
The Sacred River Project is dedicated to promoting a naturalistic approach to spirituality that is grounded in
(a) progressive, humanistic principles,
(b) a rational understanding of the universe informed by scientific inquiry, and
(c) a reverent orientation towards the natural world. Read more...
(a) progressive, humanistic principles,
(b) a rational understanding of the universe informed by scientific inquiry, and
(c) a reverent orientation towards the natural world. Read more...
Everyone is welcome to add comments to the posts, or you may contact us with suggestions or questions.
I found that to be rather misleading. Although there’s plenty of faith-based reasoning proliferating through modern society, it’s evidence-based reasoning that leads to “conspiratorial” heresies like 9-11 “Truthers”, “grassy-knollers”, etc. Whoever made that cartoon conflated inductive and deductive reasoning, which is pretty poor logic.
I could just explain to you all the things that are wrong with your comment, but then you wouldn’t learn anything. So, take your time and see if you can’t figure it out on your own…I promise it isn’t too hard. I’ll give you a hint: look into the definition of the term “evidence”…
I think FPSK’s comment is fair –
I looked up evidence, and the dictionary said: “Evidence is anything that you see, experience, read, or are told that causes you to believe that something is true or has really happened.”
I once read a skeptic trying to get other skeptic’s to change their argumentative form. He said, “You can’t say these people aren’t empirically based, because they are — they’ve got loads of evidence. (That evidence is just flimsy and is better explained by skeptical arguments.)” And he continued, “You can’t say they don’t peer review, because they do. They’re out there cross-coordinating, checking each other’s ideas out, and so on.” And “You can’t say they aren’t reasoning, because they are. Some of these people are highly intelligent, and looking at things from multiple angles.”
The effort of the argument was not to say “Therefor, their world-view is valid,” but rather, to say “We need to form a better argument about what’s so special about science and the scientific world-view.”
Even the term skepticism is somewhat broken, because a lot of science works on the basis of trust, for example. How many papers do we read that we don’t independently verify, for example? We trust that others independently verify them. Why? And how?
We know that science works, and these other methods don’t work. So why is that? It’s not just reason + evidence + peer review, because the fruitcakes do all that as well. So what’s up? We need a better understanding of how it is that our position works, and theirs does not.
There are some major differences between science and pseudo-science. For example:
1) Science isn’t so much about skepticism as it is about setting a high bar for what counts as reliable evidence and reasonable theory. That bar is grounded in the scientific method, a method which has proven its utility countless of times for hundreds of years—no other method can match it in terms of establishing valid and reliable knowledge about the workings of nature.
2) Science does not begin with a conclusion and then invent, distort, or ignore evidence in the effort to confirm it. When researchers do violate this, it is generally discovered and their findings rejected. Rather, science begins with observations (and hypotheses based on past observations or mathematics), and with theories established only on the basis of empirical observation. Moreover, every scientific theory can, in principle, be overturned as soon as a better explanation presents itself; the same is not true in something like creationism, where the conclusion is immutable.
3) Peer-review doesn’t mean having other people in the field look over your work and agree with you, or at least agree with your unproven conclusions (see #2). It means undergoing impartial scrutiny, at least ideally. But for the flaws in any human review, scientific peer-review tends towards conservatism (in the sense of maintaining established scientific models)—this means that it is difficult to pass peer-review, especially with findings that are surprising. If a journal like Nature publishes a study that is flawed, and any findings are overturned based on rigorous methodology, then it reflects badly on the journal, making them appear less reliable. For this reason, it is in the best interest of the peer-reviewed journals to set a very high bar for publication.
4) A major difference is in science’s ability to produce testable predictions. If one’s models are neither testable nor able to predict future events, then they remain pure conjecture without explanatory value.
These are just some basic differences. I’m sure folks can come up with more…