The debate between Nye and Ham is, at bottom, about how we know things. Hams position relies entirely upon faith, which ultimately regards divine revelation as its source, with the allegedly revealed truths passed along by tradition and authority. A key problem for this method of claiming knowledge is that revelation is indistinguishable from, to be blunt, simply making things up. Anyone can claim that anything was revealed to him, and even if many people do so independently, it would remain to be confirmed that the alleged revelation corresponds to objective reality. Another insuperable problem problem lies in the fact that neither tradition nor authority is a foolproof method for passing information with high fidelity. Traditions get modified. Authority is subject to corruption. By contrast, Nyes position relies upon the scientific method, summarized by the phrase “evidential evaluation of falsifiable hypotheses.” In other words, science aims to disconfirm its hypotheses and uses evidence to do so. This falsification process is a powerful way to eliminate bad ideas, and nothing proves an idea false better than its disagreement with reality. The humility of science is its chief tradition, which, to paraphrase physicist Richard Feynman, lives in recognizing that no matter how beautiful our hypotheses, if they disagree with evidence, then they are wrong. Observable evidence is the fundamental authority in science since even one observation confirmed to be out of agreement with theory overturns the theory. - Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay
Posted on: Thu, 30 Jan 2014 05:54:41 +0000
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