Tag: Skepticism

Over the years I’ve found that ill-tempered guardians of scientific truth can’t abide speculative thinking. And as the renowned Richard Dawkins has proved, they are also very annoyed by a nuisance named God.

In science we may start with experimental results, data, observations, measurements, “facts.” We invent, if we can, a rich array of possible explanations and systematically confront each explanation with the facts. In the course of their training, scientists are equipped with a baloney detection kit. The kit is brought out as a matter of course whenever new ideas are offered for consideration. If the new idea survives examination by the tools in our kit, we grant it warm, although tentative, acceptance. If you’re so inclined, if you don’t want to buy baloney even when it’s reassuring to do so, there are precautions that can be taken; there’s a tried-and-true, consumer-tested method.

What’s in the kit? Tools for skeptical thinking.

What skeptical thinking boils down to is the means to construct, and to understand, a reasoned argument and—especially important—to recognize a fallacious or fraudulent argument. The question is not whether we like the conclusion that emerges out of a train of reasoning, but whether the conclusion follows from the premise or starting point and whether that premise is true.

Perhaps it is the perverse appeal of mass destruction and the idea of a return to “simpler”, depopulated, tribal living that compels the recurring popularity of End of The World theories.

2012 is the latest apocalypse du jour, rooted in the fact that the old Mayan calendar ends somewhere in December of that year.  But, according to some, not even the Maya believed the world would actually end at that time.  The Telegraph consulted Guillermo Bernal, “an archaeologist at Mexico’s National Autonomous University” who notes that Mayan inscriptions refer to dates well beyond 2012 “including one that roughly translates into the year 4772.”

Expel from your mind the stereotyped image of the robed, bearded yogi.  Forget the worn image of the unkempt, hash-headed, lotus-seated hippy listening to sitar music in an incense-filled room behind a beaded curtain.  This is not the Transcendental Meditation [TM] we are talking about.  This is Science!

Wanted: Islam’s Voltaire
TRP: The Economist discuss the dangers of open minded inquiry in Islam.

Orator and defender of agnosticism Robert Ingersoll (August 11, 1833 – July 21, 1899), tells the truth about the Bible as he knew it in 1894.

GIVE Richard Dawkins a child for a week’s summer camp and he will try to give you an atheist for life. The author of The God Delusion is helping to launch Britain’s first summer retreat for non-believers, where children will have lessons in evolution and sing along to John Lennon’s Imagine.