Reciprocating Bill
Posts: 4265
Joined: Oct. 2006
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| Quote (Daniel Smith @ April 25 2009,11:38) | | So deadman, is common descent settled science (IOW, the final answer) or was Bill lying? |
So now I'm the arbiter of all that is true, Daniel?
OK: you're full of shit. Give it up.
Deadman and JAM might find my use of the term "settled science" pernicious, which might be worth discussing. But whatever the outcome of that discussion, the intention of the passages you quote was to underscore that, your feigned interest in science notwithstanding, you really are a science denier in the worst sense, as evidenced by your embrace - typical of creationists - of the hope that there is some possibility of a young, 10,000 year earth, and of special creation for individual species, particularly the human species. Like it or not, the leading edge of science has moved on from these questions, which have assumed their places in fund of background knowledge that becomes the framework within which new science is done.
I am a fan of Wittgenstein's little volume On Certainty, his last work (patched together from notes and notebooks written during the last 1 1/2 years of his life), in which he argues that pragmatic certainty inheres not in absolute knowledge that what one believes is correct, but rather in the observation that (to paraphrase) "if we can be wrong about that, then we don't really know anything."
| Quote | If a blind man were to ask me "Have you got two hands?" I should not make sure by looking. If I were to have any doubt of it, then I don't know why I should trust my eyes. For why shouldn't I test my eyes by looking to find out whether I see my two hands? What is to be tested by what?
[later]
That is to say, the questions that we raise and our doubts depend on the fact that some propositions are exempt from doubt, are as it were like hinges on which those turn....If I want the door to turn, the hinges must stay put. |
A 4.5 billion year earth, common descent, and the historical continuity of the human species with the rest of the natural world have long attained the status of the "background" world picture, the hinges around which our actions turn, including scientific investigation. There may be a basis in the future for justified doubt of those propositions, but at present there is none. To reject these facts is really to doubt not particular scientific assertions, but rather the value of the scientific process generally, for if these facts can be doubted, all scientific assertions must be doubted.
Of course you are free to do that, although in so doing you render further conversation on these topics inherently futile within a scientific context, as you have become a science denier and no longer share the essential frame of reference that makes scientific knowledge pragmatically attainable.
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Myth: Something that never was true, and always will be.
"The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you."
- David Foster Wallace
"Here’s a clue. Snarky banalities are not a substitute for saying something intelligent. Write that down."
- Barry Arrington
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