Dara O’Brian on bullshit:
“Anyone who’d answer the difficult questions in life like ‘What happens after I die, or how can I stop myself from dying, with an easy, bullshit answer, and you go “well do you have any evidence for that”, and they say “Well, there’s a lot more to life than evidence!” …. get in the fucking sack. “
Seriously. Scientific method or go home. It’s not some list of procedure designed for The Man to keep you down. It’s not a routine created to reinforce one particular group of ideas over another.
It’s the best known way of perceiving, documenting and repeating an experience so that you and everyone else can understand better how our world works. It’s the closest we can come to eliminating personal bias, and it allows strong, supported ideas to survive while ideas that can’t resist argument or contrary evidence are refuted.
Scientific methodology has been practiced in some form for at least one thousand years. It was not designed nor intended to attack religion of any sort. Just like scientifically derived and vetted evidence contradicts some information written in the bible, it also contradicts previously believed information from scientific communities, from corporations, and from our government – which have an interest in having you believe what they want you to believe.
Every time I hear someone disbelieve evidence derived from, say, radiocarbon dating or glacial coring with the phrase, “I just don’t believe they’re right”, I kind of want to shake them, turn them around, and point them to the world. “Go! Prove your point. Here is the evidence gathered up to now. Start anywhere you like, with any assertion, and make a difference.”
It’s a method of inquiry that empowers skepticism, that says “I won’t agree with you until you show me that it is so in a way that I can then repeat myself.”
I greatly respect a person’s spirituality – there is plenty of room for religion and science to work and understand the world together. I just don’t understand how anyone can see conspiracy in freely available information that they can interpret or refute themselves. I don’t understand how a conversation can go like this (silly example): “We understand gravity to work this way because every test we’ve devised has proved it to be so, and every test we’ve devised to prove it is not so has failed.” “No, it doesn’t.” “Show me how it works, then.” “I don’t have to.”
I may be ranting at this point. There is no scientist worthy of the name who believes they understand completely how the world works – if they did, there would be nothing left to do. It is a noble, difficult and sometimes thankless task of helping humanity understand itself and the world we live in just a little better, one step at a time.
QFT.
I’ll try not to respond because all I do is scree against the assclowns who love to fight against the scientific method but sure do love to use the fruits of that efforts.
As far as I’m concerned, people can believe whatever they want about life after death so long as they don’t expect everyone else to agree they’re right.
For everything dealing with the tangible, though, science or GTFO.
— Steve’s including apparitions, “voices from beyond”, little green men in their flying machines, and miracles in the “tangible” column, please note.
Hell yes.
Let me be the dick for a bit…and recognize that this comes from a HUGE fan of good ol’ logic and the scientific method…
You have to recognize that trusting science constitutes merely a system of belief to some 75% of the nation or so. They aren’t scientists, and they probably never will be. When we power up a computer, these techno-shamans within our national tribe tell us that electricity makes 1s and 0s fly around and perform infinitesimal yet profoundly significant operations that result in the voodoo that appears on-screen. We believe this even though most of us aren’t engineers, cannot see electricity, and have no real reason to believe it aside from people that call themselves “scientists” rather than “priest” tell us to.
It’s not shocking to me, because it is *ALL* a system of belief. The REAL explanation of gravity is only marginally more rational to the layperson than “god said so”.
*shrug* When it is said that ‘people need belief’ I am entirely convinced, because most people cannot solve these heady problems on their own, and we need them to believe in our answers. That double-edged sword, sadly, cuts both ways; sometimes they believe something just slightly more insane than the truth.
Pshaw, sure, the television picture rides in on invisible waves and some random stick of metal sucks them in. Right, that makes perfect sense. :P
i have huge agreement with this. you, sir, are not a dick in my book.
Clearly, you haven’t met my friend Jer_. :D Though I will admit that this was not, as I see it, a dickish comment.
I wouldn’t say this is you being the dick, maybe because I’m familiar with your dick…ishness. *ahem*
I agree with you that we all, every one of us, choose to believe none, some, or all information we receive from other people. No matter how many journals exists to vett discoveries or theories, unless a person steps up to the plate and actually studies the topic at hand, you’re going on faith somewhere. The average person is far too busy living their lives to dissect every crackpot (or valid) idea thrown their way.
I am saying that the difference, as I see it, is that we have that choice to trust that information or to go back as far as we would like and test out these ideas. The scientific method is, I suppose, a way of arguing. It gives us a framework for questioning our assumptions and a ways of validating our answers with others.
It is, as I see it, a (very imperfect) shield against manipulation, should we choose to use it.
I would not even say that the real explanation of gravity IS more rational to the layperson than “God said so” – if one were to go with Occam’s Razor, “Of several acceptable explanations for a phenomenon, the simplest is preferable, provided that it takes all circumstances into account”, well, God certainly is simpler.
I’m not trying to pit religion vs science, though – in my fantasy world I think religion should embrace science as the collective history of our understanding of the base plane of existence, and accept science’s determination that it cannot address the incorporeal world specifically because that cannot be measured.
Of course, my fantasy world has ice cream made of rainbows, so, whatever.