Over at the Book of Face, I remarked:
Great. Wheel ’em out. Let’s see ’em. As Neil DeGrasse-Tyson is fond of saying, nobody has to ask if you “believe” in whales, giraffes, or elephants. We can see them. Same with dodos and dinosaurs. We have their remains. If you’ve got a corporeal alien, alive or dead, let’s see it. Otherwise, shut up. And don’t give me any crap about “the public will panic”. Everybody on earth is already fully prepared and downright expects to see an alien. If you showed them one, the near-universal response of John Q. Public would be, “Toldja.”
The real shock will be the discovery that there are no aliens, alive or dead, in the Secret Vault that doesn’t exist.
To which a reader replied:
Right? Imagine believing unprecedented stories based on personal testimony.
My response:
We do that all the time and with good reason. But not about questions pertaining to the metric properties of time, space, matter and energy.
To which he replied:
I don’t “do that all the time” (believe unprecedented stories based on personal testimony). I’m not aware of doing so at all, nor that there is good reason to do so. What sort of thing are you thinking of, that we commonly believe on that basis?
My response:
Nearly every weird thing you “know” about the universe from the stretchiness of time to the strangeness of quantum physics is something you take on faith because a high priest in a lab coat or a man with Important Hair on the Discovery Channel told you and you take it on faith, not because you have (or could) prove it from evidence yourself. Hell’s bells, left to themselves the average person could not, without the Appeal to Authority, demonstrate heliocentrism from the resources available to him in the environment. We trust Reliable People for our picture of the world all the time. I trust Neil deGrasse-Tyson on general relativity, not because I have seen it or could prove it, but because I don’t think he is lying to me about the weirdness of time dilation.
His reply:
None of that is based solely on personal testimony. At the very least, those models are based on multiple independent observers who collect data which is in principle available to anyone, and which in practice is available to many, many people across every group and culture, and the models they generate are likewise subject to informed criticism *and revision* by, again, anyone who understands the topic.
Nor do I (nor should anyone) believe those ideas without reservation, by faith. I accept them provisionally, to the extent that I understand the evidence supporting them and the results they correctly predict. And I am fully prepared to modify or abandon these provisional beliefs if presented with sufficient contrary evidence.
This level of proportional acceptance is not analogous to belief in… UFO claims.
and my response:
It is for you. Unless you have competence in the relevant sciences, almost every scientific fact you “know”, no matter how weird, is completely taken on faith. Same with history, which is chockablock with unprecedented stories based on personal testimony. Nobody doubts Herodotus’ account of the defeat of Persia, despite the fact that he is our sole source of the account and despite the fact that the tale is as unlikely as Star Wars (upon which it and a million other stories of Plucky Rebel Alliances vs. the Big Evil Empire are based). Everything you know about history, including the story of your own immensely improbable birth, is taken on faith in witnesses we deem reliable.
His reply:
Well, I do have competence in some few aspects of relevant sciences. I don’t claim to “know” much for which I have incomplete understanding. I don’t claim to know what happened at Thermopylae. I don’t claim to know that time dilation occurs.
I don’t think any historians simply accept Herodotus as an unimpeachable source. The guy wrote about islands with dog-headed men, right? We don’t believe that. But are you seriously calling a military defeat “unprecedented”? And the birth of a baby? Babies are born all the time; I’ve seen it happen myself.
And are you seriously equating a guy telling a story about UFOs with, say, heliocentrism? I’ve seen the phases of Venus, I understand the model. Thousands of astronomers in hundreds of observatories all agree on how it works, plus the space programs of several nations all getting probes where they’re intended. This is overwhelming evidence, not faith. Yes, it’s somewhat based on believing people’s observations, but those observations can be checked, and I’ve personally done that for some of them. If that’s “faith” then so is my belief that the state of Washington exists.
Equating the two cases is just plain silly… I begin to suspect deliberately so.
I’m not sure how you got the idea that I am equating helicentrism with tales of UFOs. But I do think your argument sacrifices common sense for the sake of winning an argument against faith in the reliability of human testimony. The reality is that we do know that geocentrism is false and heliocentrism is true (with other things with the advancement of cosmology) despite the fact that not one person in 10,000 would have the slightest idea how to prove it without a massive appeal to authority and human testimony. Same for the basic fact of the Persian War and time dilation. One does not need to call Herodotus “unimpeachable” (and I know of no historian who does) to regard his account of the Persian War as reliable. (As far as I know, Herodotus does not discuss dog-headed men, but he relays, as faithfully as he can, stories he has heard, many of which he himself is clearly skeptical about.) My point is not that military defeats are unprecedented, but that a military defeat of the scale of the Persian defeat was unprecedented, as in Lichtenstein-crushing-the-United-States-unprecedented. Likewise, while the birth of babies is common, your birth is such a freakishly unlikely thing that the odds against your existence are staggering. “Unprecedented” is a very slippery term. For related reasons, my guess is that in a universe of this size, the odds that organic life exists elsewhere are staggeringly high, while the odds that it has visited here are, so far, very low. So when somebody tells me we have physical evidence, I don’t dismiss it. I demand it. But when somebody tells me they have no physical evidence but they do have photos or personal testimony, I don’t dismiss them. I ask to hear their story and examine the quality of their witness. That includes their photos. If they claim to have photos or bodies but refuse to produce them, that is strong evidence that they are not reliable. It keeps coming back to faith.
Your appeal to “thousands of astronomers” is an illustration of precisely my point. We who lack expertise constantly defer to the testimony of those who possess it because it would be impossible for society to function otherwise. That is faith. And the irony is that lack of faith in expertise results in exactly the idiotic stupidity of those who “do their own research” and conclude that geocentrism, or a round earth, or germ theory are all false because they have lost faith in the consensus of the experts.
For similar reasons, there are claims of the miraculous that I find credible and even highly credible: the incarnation and resurrection among them, not to mention those claims that have been investigated by the Church concerning healings, apparitions and whatnot (none of which are, by the way “unprecedented” and many of which have thick files of documented scientific evidence. Science cannot, of course, document the miraculous, only the inexplicable. “Miracle” is a theological category that assigns causation to what is beyond time, space, matter, and energy and those are the only things Science can see. You might as well expect an audio frequency monitor to render a verdict on the quality of Mozart’s music as expect Science to pronounce on whether a healing is a result of divine intervention by a personal God. But it can, and has many times, rendered the verdict “inexplicable” to healings that do look uncommonly like a miraculous answer to prayer.
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I do not understand “dark matter” or “dark energy.” It appears to be a construct made up, so that equations work. A sort of plug figure. The higher level Astrophysics seems to become less scientific and somewhat theological. It’s beyond me.
Is there intelligent life out there? Well, given the potential number of planets,there could be. Of course, the distances are so great, will we ever have contact?
You wonder if Elon Musk is an alien? He appears to be somewhat human, but if you look closely, you have doubts.