My Dogma Ran Over My Karma

Yet no physicist of any repute truly believes that the universe doesn’t exist beyond our visual horizon, or that that it didn’t exist prior to the decoupling era. We simply accept that although our knowledge of it is progressing, it is, and always will be necessarily limited. If my friend’s standard of “truth” is taken at face value then the universe beyond what we can see and directly demonstrate doesn’t exist, rendering the very practice of physics and cosmology “irrational.” To any reasonable person this is grandiose nonsense.

As for Logical Positivism, its final death blow came from something far more mundane than any of the previous considerations. By the start of World War II it had fully developed it into a formal truth standard codified in the so-called verification principle, which in essence was identical to my friend’s claim: Truth is to be defined as that which can be observationally and mathematically verified. Any statement that cannot be (particularly metaphysical statements) is at best false, and at worst meaningless. No sooner had this been done than philosophers and scientists alike began asking the obvious question…

Can the verification principle itself be verified? If not, then it is self-refuting.

No satisfactory answer to this challenge was ever produced. Ultimately, the claim that science is the source of all truth is metaphysical, not scientific, and thus self-contradictory.

All of this is lost on New Atheists because for all their teary-eyed love of it, they’re largely ignorant of the reality of how it’s actually practiced in the trenches. The general public is no better off in this regard either. People tend to assume that being an expert in a scientific field like physics, cosmology, or evolutionary biology automatically makes someone an expert in history, philosophy, comparative religion, Elizabethan poetry, beer brewing, feminine hygiene, or any other subject he/she cares to have an opinion on regardless of whether they’ve been trained in it or not (logicians refer to this fallacy as the Argument from Authority, or Argumentum ab Auctoritate). But in science there are no authorities, only experts. There’s a difference, and ignorance of it is why book stores are filled with popular science titles by New Atheist authors that are bestsellers despite being riddled with fallacies and inaccuracies that wouldn’t get past any undergraduate philosophy, history, or comparative religion student.

Myth 3: Confusion of opinion with fact

Consider the following statement,

    a)   Water witching is pseudoscience.

Is this a statement of fact? No. It is an opinion. On the other hand if we were to say something like,

   b)   Water witching has been subjected to controlled multi-variable, double-blind tests and results have never differed at statistically significant levels from the predictions of random chance. (Citations to sources here)