"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
Isn’t it very strange that Bill Nye is supposed to be such a science educator yet he makes vast generalized statements that violate the spirit and substance of the scientific method with his almost every appearance on the news or in print.
Bill Nye, Anti-Science Doomsday Soothsayer; Prognosticator of Climate Raptures; Purveyor
of Personal Political Attacks Against Skeptical Scientists; Violently Opposed to the Scientific Method and the Right of Every Scientist to be Skeptical of any and all Science Claims.
To claim as Bill Nye does that “skeptics of a science claim” are not scientists is absurd as the very heart of science is skepticism of all claims made by anyone including and specifically those claims of other scientists. Read the rest of this entry »
One of many proofs against the existence of alleged gods goes as follows.
The Speed of Light Limit prevents all matter, energy and most importantly information from going faster than the speed of light, c. Since the universe is a very large place it takes a very long time for matter, energy or information to travel from one place to another should they not be near each other. For example the nearest star system to Earth’s Sol system that has a known planet is about 20 light years which means that it takes light and thus information 20 years to travel there.
The alleged gods are super alien beings because of their alleged super powers, specifically their alleged omni* powers, omniscience, omnipresence, omnipotence, omnibenevolence aka omnievil.
Unfortunately for these alleged gods their omni* powers are not possible in the actual objective reality of Nature due to the limiting factor of the Speed of Light. Read the rest of this entry »
“We show that although these anthropogenic forcings share a common stochastic trend, this trend is empirically independent of the stochastic trend in temperature and solar irradiance. Therefore, greenhouse gas forcing, aerosols, solar irradiance and global temperature are not polynomially cointegrated. This implies that recent global warming is not statistically significantly related to anthropogenic forcing.”
CAGW is therefor automatically falsified by the rules of the Scientific Method. Bam. Time to end your beliefs about co2 doomsday. The science for CAGW just isn’t supportable and has now been utterly demolished.
“No theory is carved in stone. Science is merciless when it comes to testing all theories over and over, at any time, in any place. Unlike religion or politics, science is ultimately decided by experiments, done repeatedly in every form. There are no sacred cows. In science, 100 authorities count for nothing. Experiment counts for everything.” – Michio Kaku, a professor of theoretical physics at City College of New York
Sorry Sir Paul Maxime Nurse, PRS (President of the Royal Society), in science funded by the public purse you’ve got to show your work when asked for it. If there are any scientists who refuse to show their work they can expect to get Freedom Of Information Requests. All they have to do is put their work with all the full details fully documented so that their entire paper including all data and details of experiments can be replicated step by step up on their research lab’s web site so that their work can be verified, corrected or refuted in part or in whole. It’s all very easy if they have already done their science carefully!
“Show and justify your work”: If you can’t stand the heat get out of the kitchen, and if you can’t stand skepticism about your methodology, assumptions, and analyses get out of science — go into religion. – Indur M. Goklany, Science and technology policy analyst, United States Department of the Interior, Represented the United States at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and during the negotiations that led to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
But no Sir Paul Maxime Nurse, the all mighty and all powerful President of the Royal Society wants scientists to abandon and give up the scientific method. If you hide data or details of your papers that are required to replicate the alleged claims then expect to be challenged on it especially when the alleged claims have a significant impact upon the public purse or policy.
“Freedom of information laws are being misused to harass scientists and should be re-examined by the government, according to the president of the Royal Society.” – Guardian
Woops, can’t do that as it’s in violation of the rules of the scientific method and you should know better than that Sir Paul Maxime Nurse. Heck your own Royal Society says:
While part of Professor Muller’s video takes the Team (Mann, Briffa, Jones, Wahl, et. al.) to task for stuff you can’t do in science, the longer version makes it clear that the Professor is biased towards the Catastrophic AGW hypothesis claims. Unfortunately the Professor doesn’t explain the reasoning behind his claims or his support for the CAGW claims.
The extract from the longer talk with Professor Muller taking the Team to task for what you can’t do in science and rebuking them by asserting that he now has a list of people whose papers he won’t read anymore. Ouch, cast them out of the science club. Three cheers for professor Muller for standing up for scientific integrity. Read the rest of this entry »
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