On Wed, Feb 8, 2017 at 2:34 AM, Telmo Menezes <te...@telmomenezes.com> wrote:
> > Does the agnostic or the atheist have >> t >> he correct scientific >> >> stance regarding a teapot in orbit around Uranus? I like what the great >> >> Isaac Asimov >> >> had to say on the subject: > > > > > Both have a healthy tendency to estimate probabilities. This prevents > > them from wasting time but also get killed, etc. > > Sometimes the estimates are wrong, of course. How can one be certain of anything, what does "certain" even mean? Euclid proved 2500 years ago that there is no such thing as the largest prime number, his proof makes perfect sense to me but maybe the proof contains a flaw somewhere that I and everybody else has overlooked for the last 2500 years. Well maybe, but I judge the probability of it containing a flaw to be so low that it would not be worth my time looking for it because there are plenty of far more interesting things to do and the time spent looking for a flaw in Euclid's proof is time not spent doing something else. So "being certain" is a emotional state not a logical one, it marks the point where you judge a train of thought should stop and the point where you judge it's time to move on to something new. Yes your judgement could be wrong, but if you're smart it probably isn't. > > > This happens a lot in > > science. If you have a good idea that is sufficiently new or unknown, > Most new ideas in science turn out to be dead wrong, especially if they're BIG new ideas, that's why scientific revolutions don't happen every day. People like Newton Darwin and Einstein are rare. > > > The difference between god and a tea pot is that the tea pot is > well-defined. > Good point. I am certain there is not a teapot in orbit around Uranus, but I judge there very well could be an invisible amoral mindless formless metaphorical blob of some sort in orbit around that planet. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
