"The meaning of the world is the separation of wish and fact." - KURT GÖDEL
"According to Peirce's doctrine of fallibilism, the conclusions of science are always tentative. The rationality of the scientific method does not depend on the certainty of its conclusions, but on its self-corrective character: by continued application of the method science can detect and correct its own mistakes, and thus eventually lead to the discovery of truth".
A guiding principle for accepting claims of catastrophic global events, miracles, incredible healing, invisible friends, or fill in the blank is:
“extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” - Carl Sagan
"Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable." - H. L. Mencken
I would add irrational and highly delusional to the mix when faith requires one to accept magical violations of the well known, well tested or easily demonstrated laws of Nature. - PWL
"Science is Progress and the Future. Faith is regression to the Dark Ages." - PWL
“It pays to keep an open mind, but not so open your brains fall out.” - Carl Sagan
"It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring." - Carl Sagan
"Two important characteristics of maps should be noticed. A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness." - Alfred Korzybski
"Science is a search for basic truths about the Universe, a search which develops statements that appear to describe how the Universe works, but which are subject to correction, revision, adjustment, or even outright rejection, upon the presentation of better or conflicting evidence." - James Randi
"Hypotheses are nets: only he who casts will catch." - Novalis
"Nullius in verba. Take no one's word for it." - Motto of the Royal Society
"I'm trying to find out NOT how Nature could be, but how Nature IS." - Richard Feynman
"The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, scepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin." - Thomas Henry Huxley
“A foolish faith in authority is the worst enemy of truth.” Albert Einstein
"Science is empirical. Knowing the answer means nothing. Testing your knowledge means everything." - Lawrence Krauss
"Skepticism is the agent of reason against organized irrationalism - and is therefore one of the keys to human social and civic decency." - Stephen Jay Gould
"Science is best defined as a careful, disciplined, logical search for knowledge about any and all aspects of the universe, obtained by examination of the best available evidence and always subject to correction and improvement upon discovery of better evidence. What's left is magic. And it doesn't work." - James Randi
Thanks to TSK for the this link to today’s fiery volcano.
Scientists sailed on Thursday to inspect an undersea volcano that has been erupting for days near Tonga, shooting smoke, steam and ash thousands of feet into the sky above the South Pacific ocean. (March 19)
Crazy maniacs risk their lives chasing down a LIVE VOLCANO as it erupts. Well I guess they didn’t quite make it into the Darwin Awards yet. Cool, er, hot show! Hey, where are your marshmallows? You mean to say that you went to all that risk going near an active volcano and didn’t bring your marshmallows? You really are crazy!
At least these people have their priorities right, they brought marshmallows to the volcano and some “tongas” too (tongs to hold them in the heat). Groan! Sorry, couldn’t resist.
This is a very interesting analysis with some very cool maps too of surface temperature anomalies. Isn’t it amazing how much there is to learn about climate science and our tiny planet earth? Wow…
Then over here at The Big Picture they have stunning photos (as seen above) and an interactive google map of the area. Talk about sweet.
Nothing can exceed the speed of “c”, light, not even gravity! Einstein proved this in his Special and General Theories of Relativity. This means that even invisible beings (aka gods) can’t travel faster than the speed of “c”, which proves that they can’t be omnipotent, omniscient or omnipresent since these attributes all require information travel faster than light! Sorry, as a result gods simple can’t exist in our universe!
“The Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory is spearheading the completely new field of gravitational wave astronomy and opening a whole new window on the universe. LIGO’s exquisitely sensitive instruments may ultimately take us farther back in time than we’ve ever been, catching, perhaps, the first murmurs of the universe in formation.”
TRUTH, FAITH AND REASON: POPE BENEDICT XVI’S LECTURE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF REGENSBURG
By Gerald E. Marsh
The Stupid Delusionals with Invisible Friends, it burns. Cartoon by Plognark dot com - Thanks...
Pope Benedict XVI interleaved two themes in his lecture at the University of Regensburg on September 12, 2006.1 These will be discussed here in two separate parts: Truth, Faith, and Reason and The Dialogue of Cultures. The first addresses the Pope’s proposal to expand scientific reasoning to include the “rationality of faith”; and the second with the threat of radical Islam, and whether a “dialogue of cultures” is possible if the West persists in its belief in what the Pope calls a “reason which is deaf to the divine”.
PART ONE: TRUTH, FAITH AND REASON The essence of the Enlightenment, as put by Isaiah Berlin in his essay The Counter-Enlightenment, “is the proclamation of the autonomy of reason and the methods of the natural sciences, based on observation as the sole reliable method of knowledge, and the consequent rejection of the authority of revelation, sacred writings and their accepted interpreters, tradition, prescription, and every form of non-rational and transcendent source of knowledge”. Notice that Berlin does not say that this approach is the sole method of obtaining knowledge, only that it is the sole reliable method, meaning that knowledge obtained in this way can be confirmed by experiment. This form of knowledge is increasingly coming into conflict with beliefs based on divine revelation.
Knowledge based on reason and the methods of natural science is threatening to many of those who hold conventional religious beliefs because the implications of such knowledge raise the fear that their lives may lose meaning and direction, and that they will no longer have an ethical basis for behavior. They especially abhor a future bereft of personal immortality. If the origin of life, and humanity in particular, has a natural explanation, how can one believe in the immortal soul, or that humanity is central to God’s creation? Belief in the findings of science about our origins will not only destroy the creation myths of humanity, but will also force the acceptance of the proposition that impersonal and indifferent forces were behind its creation, along with that of all other living creatures.
Professor Oleg Georgievich Sorokhtin, Dr. Sci. (Phys.–Math.), is chief
researcher at the Shirshov Institute of Oceanology, Russian Academy of Sciences.
“Of all the solar system’s planets, only the Earth possesses a unique atmosphere that provides a friendly climate for the development of higher life forms on its surface. This is due to a fortunate combination of a number of preconditions: the Sun is a quiet star; the Earth is at an optimal distance from it; the Earth has a massive satellite, the Moon; the chemical composition of the primeval Earth itself, etc. The comfortable climatic conditions for life on our planet have developed owing to the optimal composition and pressure of the earth’s atmosphere and strong feedbacks between the evolution of the earth’s biota and the development of the atmosphere. As for the periodic coming of ice ages, they are connected to precessional self-oscillating processes provoked by lunisolar interactions; this is the topic of the article below.” – The Evolution of the Earth’s Climate and the Genesis of Glacial Epochs
THE COMING OF A NEW ICE AGE
BY GERALD E. MARSH, physicist
CHICAGO — Contrary to the conventional wisdom of the day, the real danger facing humanity is not global warming, but more likely the coming of a new Ice Age.
What we live in now is known as an interglacial, a relatively brief period between long ice ages. Unfortunately for us, most interglacial periods last only about ten thousand years, and that is how long it has been since the last Ice Age ended.
The Ice Age is Ending... It must be our fault.
How much longer do we have before the ice begins to spread across the Earth’s surface? Less than a hundred years or several hundred? We simply don’t know.
Even if all the temperature increase over the last century is attributable to human activities, the rise has been relatively modest one of a little over one degree Fahrenheit — an increase well within natural variations over the last few thousand years.
While an enduring temperature rise of the same size over the next century would cause humanity to make some changes, it would undoubtedly be within our ability to adapt.
Entering a new ice age, however, would be catastrophic for the continuation of modern civilization.
