Part I and Part II
On being wrong for the right reasons:
None of us have access to absolute knowledge. So, what CAN we base our viewpoints on? Some people believe that you can use faith and emotion to know things. I say you need evidence. Some folks counter that everything is subjective, which is a waste of time because if you reject objective reality then no one can say anything about anything. Further, no one lives that way: we live as though the world is more or less the way it appears, and follows rules that we can understand. We don't take precautions against gravity failing, we don't assume medicines will magically transform into poison, and we don't expect corpses to rise from their graves with a hunger for human flesh... we might HOPE, but we don't expect. :)
So, we don't assume absolute knowledge, but we rely on conditional knowledge in order to live our lives. If we can't know anything absolutely, why can't people just make stuff up and the rest of us take it seriously? After all, all those scientists and experts and smart people could be wrong, and religious people, schizophrenics, morons, Republicans, and Brittney Spears could all be right!
Well, sure, they could be right. How would they figure it out, what way could they check? How could they tell, unless they fall back on the same things that the experts use? And, when those smart science-types get something wrong, they rely on other science types to correct them... no one has ever exposed something that science got wrong by praying about it or asking "the universe" to reveal the right answer.
Sometimes science gets things wrong, but even then it is generally "wrong for the right reasons." That is, sometimes when you apply the best methods you can still sometimes get an incorrect answer. For instance, the evidence could be incomplete, someone could be lying, or some of the machinery might be broken. If you make a bad decision because someone you trust tells you something that isn't true, you weren't stupid for doing so, and if you get better at picking who you trust you'll make better decisions in the future.
Also, when you are "wrong for the right reasons" your answers tend to be closer to a correct ballpark than if you are just "trusting your gut" or praying about it. We're not sure how old the universe is, but we can be pretty sure that the people who claim it is a few thousand years old, based on the Bible? Those people are fucking stupid, and probably need an adult guardian to make sure they don't wet themselves or decide to home school their children to be as stupid as they are. I can't give you an answer based on absolute knowledge, but we can feel pretty safe in saying the universe is somewhere in the neighborhood of 15 billion years old. Religious fundamentalists feel they can give you an absolute answer, but it is absolutely wrong.
Let's say there's a jar that is a foot high, a foot wide, and is filled with jellybeans. Without opening it, how do you figure out how many jellybeans are in it? Do you consult a psychic, or a Magic 8-Ball? Do you consult with holy writings (hypothetically, jellybeans could be part of a religion...)? Do you throw a dart at a board covered with numbers, and ask "the universe" to guide you to the right answer? Or, do you pull out your calculator, figure out an approximate volume for the jar and the beans, and use that to come up with a "pretty close? answer? Do you buy 20-30 identical jars, fill them with jellybeans, count them up and take an average to come up with a pretty good estimate? Do you weigh an empty jar, a jellybean, and the full jar, and use those weight figures to calculate the number of jellybeans within a pretty close margin of error.
Maybe I'll be off by a few, but I'm sure I'll get pretty close. On the other hand, someone reading chicken guts might guess the number exactly. He's right, but not for any good reason. I'm wrong, but I was on the right track. Why is my way superior? Because while in every "objects in a jar" scenario someone is likely to guess the right answer exactly, it will always be a DIFFERENT person. The person who gets the "jellybeans in a jar" exactly right, will probably get the "golf balls in a swimming pool" wrong by a really wide margin. I may never get the exact answer, but I'll always be very close to the right answer no matter what objects we're dealing with. My methods are sound, so my outcomes are consistently better than by other less sound methods.
Just one other thing, and then I swear I'm done. I talked about the age of the universe before. I've heard people say "you don't know the exact answer, and science is always changing its answer, so I'll stick with the Bible answer that never changes. You can't prove me wrong, unless you can give me an exact answer" Here's the thing: I don't have to know a perfect answer in order to identify a whole universe of wrong answers. In the jellybean example, there are probably somewhere between a couple of hundred and a couple of thousand jellybeans in the jar, based on nothing more than a random guesstimate as I'm typing this. If you told me the exact number was 917, I couldn't say you were wrong without counting every jellybean.
On the other hand, I can tell you with almost absolute certainty that you are wrong if you guess that there are 17 jellybeans, or if you guess 17,498,761 jellybeans. I don't off the top of my head know what 182 times 4237 is, but I know that the answer isn't 210 or 210,000,000,000,000,000.3 either. I don't have to have attended the creation of the universe to have very good reasons to assume that it is older than 6,000 years... like the fact that there are plants older than that.
To wrap his all up: science and rational thinking are the only things that have contributed much of ANYTHING to our knowledge of the world we live in. No other method has shown itself to be anywhere nearly as consistent and effective. It is not arrogant to depend on a method that works, or to point out how very badly other methods fail. And, finally, I'd rather be wrong occasionally while using the best methods possible, rather than to be wrong all the time while being smugly certain that I'm right.
Ok, I'm done. Back to lighter stuff tomorrow.
