(This is a comment I made on a blog somewhere, where they posted quotes as truth. I felt it made for an entry for mine on its own.)
“One who claims to be a skeptic of one set of beliefs is actually a true believer in another set of beliefs.” - Phillip E. Johnson
A staunch Christian then is rejecting the belief of all other Gods and religions, claiming their own belief is the ultimate “right” one…often providing “proof” that the others can’t be possible. In a sense, they’re atheists to all other beliefs than their own.
This is a mischaracterization of non-believers and non-belief in a theology. It’s a fallacy to assume that one HAS to BELIEVE in something. I’m not an atheist, I’m a deist. I DO believe in a God. However, most athiests will say that they believe in nothing because belief is not required. And the idea of believing in something that can’t be proven is a holdover of the idea that if something can’t be explained naturally, it must be supernatural.
That quote also misuses the term skeptic. A skeptic is not a non-believer, a skeptic is someone who examines and does not believe in something because they’re told to. They examine evidence, question rationale.
If you’re not going to believe one set of beliefs because there’s no evidence to support it, you can’t just claim what you believe is true because the others aren’t. Just because A and B and C and D are false, doesn’t make E true by default. It could be just as false. If one is going to say that belief is false for lack of proof, then you’re obligated to prove yours is true with proof.
“People almost invariably arrive at their beliefs not on the basis of proof but on the basis of what they find attractive.” - Blaise Pascal
Truer words have never been spoken.
“Because the scientific method is not developed through science, but rather through philosophy, science is a slave to philosophy. Bad philosophy results in bad science.” - Frank Turek
The scientific method is a method. You can’t “believe” or “disbelieve” a method.
It’s view events, form a hypothesis of cause and effect, form a theory as to why, test and observe, then accept or reject theory if it matches the objective data. Then have numerous other people do the same to validate the results.
If someone can find a better method to explain the natural world, be my guest.
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=method
What about a method has anything to do with a philosophy? And since when does a “philosphy” bring about space travel, microbiotic medicine, cures for diseases, the means for deep sea travel….
The battle against scince, for some unknown reason, is a misguided attack against non-believers. It’s a straw-man tactic, and one that will ultimately fail.
(Added here in this reprint: ) Not to mention the fact that the observation of data, which is the core of the scientific method, is purely objective unlike philosophy. We don’t even have to rely on human eyes and ears any more. We have machines, instruments, devices which are incapable of adding subjectivity to observed data, doing the observations. If two different types of instruments come up with the exact same atomic weight for an element, then there you go. What’s freakin philisophical about that? THAT’s science.
“If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.” - Charles Darwin
IF he actually DID say that (which I’m willing to believe), I fea that the quote is mentioned and likely misused in Frank Turek’s “Not Enough Faith to be an Atheist” book to help support a straw-man fallacy. That is to mischaracterize and misrepresent your opponent so that you can better refute it.
I’ve read several reviews of the book that state the entire foundation of the book is a straw-man arguement. It completely misunderstands the atheist thought-process and position. It builds the athiest position incorrectly so that it can tear it down easier.
One such way is the incorrect idea that atheists/evolutionists/whatever, believe that a highly complex amoeba that began the life generation of life spontaneous generated with encyclopedic genetic information.
Totally and completely false. No one in the legitimate scientific community or evolutionary science or biologist or paleoarchiologist or paleobiologist believes this is the case. The first single celled creature gradually developed over eons with constantly changing and growing chemical composition. It’s a very complex process that took eons of gradual hit-and-misses.
Slightly off the subject, but a good if not highly exaggerated version of the straw-man fallacy, during the 2004 Presidential race the Constitutional Party candidate has said in various high-school appearances “evolutionists want you to believe that your grandfather was a monkey and your great-grandfather was a fish. Can you really believe that?”
Granted I doubt (hope!) he wasn’t being literal, but he grossly mischaracterized his opposition in order to ridicule it.
Darwin said what he said because he was a good scientist. He realized that for science to be critical and viable it must be testable and subject to scrutiny! The method of science is to eliminate theories until one remains non-disproveable. (Unlike religion and philosophy where you start with a theory and then find data or ignore data or modify data which will support your theory.) He provided a means to test his theory.
And so far there has been no good disproval of his theory. All complex strutures from the eyeball to the single-celled amoeba can be explained with gradual developments and the coming together of already complex components. There are creatures alive today that have very primitive eye structures. Collections of photosensitive nerves which can detect the change and direction of light. It’s a protoeye that developed over time though genetic hit-and-misses, and combined with other genetic processes to make a new process.
There are evidence that biological structures that have one function may not have always had that function and have changed function to do something else. There can be very indirect evolutionary pathways which prevent us from making a direct and simplistic line backward.
All that notwithstanding, if Darwins theory of complexity were to be proven false, that does not wipe the entire field as false. Evolution does not cease to exist because one component of the theory is understood incorrectly.
2+2=4. 4 will always be four even if we misunderstand 2+2, as it might be 1+3.
I think one of the reasons fundamentalists are so tooth-and-nail and mischaracterize science as a philosophy, partly because they’re so scared for their own misapplied faith (and by that I do NOT mean mistaken belief in GOD! But rather the mistaken idea that faith should be used to explain the natural,) as over the centuries science has disproven concept after concept the fundamentalists belived in. Spontaneous generation, Earth centrism, 6000 year old Earth, creation in 6 days, etc.
I also think it comes from fear of the unknown in the realm of scientists. It takes a person YEARS of devoted study to just one field of science to understand it. A biologist isn’t a biologist after one semester of post highschool study. A biologist has to devote their life to years of study. Just to be a biologist. A palentobiologist even more different study. An exobiologist. A physicist. A quantum physicist. A cosmologist. A macrophysicist. Any of the hundreds of fields of study, it takes years to understand that field.
And yet ordinary people who are shop clerks, Web authors, preachers, insurance adjusters, factory workers, accountants, think they so understand one or all fields of study that they can refute it and disprove it by reading a book or two or pages of Web pages that amount to not much more than opinion stated as fact. It makes me sick, it really does.
And so people who are afraid of the fact that these people who spend years and years in study of science in order to find answers to our natural world, or find better ways to cure cancer, or develop new strains of wheat to feed starving countries, they mischaracterize them as labcoat wearing priests of a mysterious philosophy of Science. It’s the same thing that has made humans create hundreds, thousands of religions over the centuries: make explanations for things we don’t understand and mischaracterize and demonize the things we fear.
Afraid of oogly-boogly Science with their potions and concoctions and undecipherable figure and shapes and tomes of unapproachable knowledge, then make them into something they’re not in order to try to refute them and prop yourself up.
I’m really literally sick and tired of it. And I do mean literally.
CelticBear’s Musings
