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Originally Posted by KnifeMissile
This is rather disingenuous in so many ways...
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It would be disingenuous if I didn't mean it.
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None of the "assertions that we presently accept as scientific fact" can be compared to "The Dragon in My Garage." The dragon in Carl Sagan's garage had no evidence to support it. Scientific theories, almost by definition, have evidence to support them. Certainly the ones we earnestly believe in have strong evidence to support them...
None of what we presently accept as scientific fact was even thought of 500 years ago. It's difficult to think of anything people of 500 years ago got right. The parable of Carl Sagan's dragon would have helped them a great deal!
If you're suggesting that if the people of 500 years ago adopted "The Dragon in My Garage" and we had a time machine and went back and told them of all the scientific things we believe that they would disbelieve us, that's only somewhat true. It's definitely false if we could tell them the whole story and use our current technology to demonstrate the principles to them. It's only arguably true if we were restricted to using their technology to demonstrate what we currently believe. Either way, it's irrelevant to the parable of Carl Sagan's dragon.
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Speaking of irrelevance, what you wrote is irrelevant to what I wrote. I was just pointing out that sometimes "dragons" exist, even though there isn't evidence of their existence. Speaking of believing things without evidence, how about you presupposing the results of time travel?
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It's pointless to believe things without evidence even if they happen to be true.
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Clearly it isn't. You just invented, without any evidence at all, an explanation for how people from the past would respond to our efforts to travel back in time and explain our current scientific theories. You seem to have found use for believing in something without evidence.
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There are many different approaches to see why this is the case. Most pragmatically, most of the ideas people will concoct will be false and it's worth throwing out all the stupid ideas even if a couple gems get thrown out. You'll surely pick them up again with evidential reasoning. More philosophically, if there's no evidence for something, how can its truth affect you? Once its truth can affect you, that effect will be evidence and you're right back to evidential discovery...
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But this is assuming that people who "believe things without evidence" just pull things out of thin air. I would imagine that if a person believes in ghosts, they've probably based that belief on whatever evidence they have at hand.
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Can you expand on this? What do you mean?
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Do you think physicists would spend time attempting to find that one theory to explain them all if they didn't think one existed? But why should it exist? There is no evidence that it exists (unless you count the wishy washy philosophical kind of evidence, in which case, there must be a god because Descartes said so).
Do you think that the large hadron collider will yield any sort of useful data? I know a lot of physicists do. I mean, I would hope that somebody thinks it won't be a dead end. Because that's an awful lot of money to spend.
Really, though. Why would anyone expect the LHC to not be a dead end? Dead ends happen all of the time.
The world is a very unscientific place. It has to be. Do you know how complicated it is to show scientifically, as in, here is some peer reviewable scientific evidence, that indoor smoking bans result in an increase in indoor air quality? You can't just be like "Well, it was all smokey in here before the ban, and now it isn't." I mean, you could, but it wouldn't mean anything.
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At the very least, no one "believes" in, say, string theory the same way that, say, Christians believe in Christianity. Proponents of string theory don't think that it has got to be true and there's just no way in can be false no matter what anyone says. The same thing can't generally be said for Christianity nor many other beliefs...
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I don't think that you're in a position to speak on behalf of all string theorists or all Christians. Do you have any evidence to support these claims?
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The lack of credible evidence does say something about whether ghosts exist. They may exist despite the lack of evidence but I don't find it likely.
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The "unlikeliness" that you refer to here is more philosophy than anything else. It certainly has nothing to do with probability. Probability is irrelevant here. What's your population? The set of all universes? What is the probability that we find ourselves in one where ghosts exist?
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Again, do you find it likely that there are still living dinosaurs on Earth? Are you still holding out for perpetual motion machines 'cause no one has proven that they don't exist?
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You don't need to like to wikipedia like I'm some sort of twat. There is very little evidence correlating the ability to be condescending with the ability to properly form a coherent thought.
In any case, if you think that these are important and illustrative questions then you need to redirect your focus.
I don't care if dinosaurs are still living on earth. Dinosaur is an arbitrary term-- is Pluto a planet? If someone discovered a dinosaur would we call them dinosaurs? You need to be more precise than a wikipedia article. Is there even consensus among the relevant experts as to the precise definition of the term dinosaur?
Do you think that the laws of thermodynamics are absolute? Seems like they probably are, but, you know, there isn't any actual evidence that they are. I know it's pretty easy to trick yourself into thinking that the fact that you've never known something to be false is evidence that it is always true.