Okay, all you skeptics (and, yes, even you True Believers, if you dare), the Skeptic News is back up and running.
What’s that? You say you don’t know what I’m talking about? Well, the Skeptic News (at http://www.skepticnews.com ) is a website that brings you all the news of interest to skeptics. This should be of great interest to Straight
Dope fans and Great Debates participants especially. I know it is for me.
Anyway, in the past it has just been an announcement and link site. For example, when Cecil covered acupuncture and homeopathy, the articles were highlighted on Skeptic News.
Those of you who had been checking probably noticed a severe slowdown in news postings. Well, if you haven’t checked back, now’s the time to do it.
The webmaster has switched to Slash software, which allows more frequent postings, addition of extra staff to help (including yours truly – cus I had so much free time :rolleyes: ), and comments and discussion on the site about the items posted.
Check it out. And I dare you to debate me about it!
So, are you saying it’s better to be gullible than to think clearly? There’s no virtue in being easily fooled when the tools to evaluate the logic and veracity of claims are readily available.
Nice David. I just read your article on AIDS. Well written. It did raise some questions for me though. I live in SF. ACTUPSF is one of the bigger AIDS denial groups. They subscribe to the belief that AIDS isn’t caused by HIV. They have a website here http://www.surviveaids.com
I’ve never been able to get a straight answer of what exaactly they think AIDS is. And what HIV is. Do you have that information, maybe you picked it up while writing your article.
Logic is not God. It is not a philosopher’s stone that can transmute base metals into gold. It is not a substitute for all of the other faculties of the human brain.
It is a Good Thing. It is not the only Good Thing.
Well said, Matt. It is good advice to be skeptical of logic. So many fallacies. So little time. As it happens, deductive logic is built upon one of its own fallacies. Can you guess which one? (Hint: logic is valid because it is logical. :D)
I’m not quite sure what your point is. Nobody thinks logic is a god. Rational thinking is a useful tool to separate truth from BS. If someone tells me that peachpits cure cancer and he can sell me some extra-powerful peach pits for $100 dollars a pound, should I take his word for it? Or should I check out his claims with some independent verification?
Does knowing that sunlight is produced by nuclear fusion instead of Apollo driving a chariot in the sky keep me from enjoying the beauty of a sunrise? Of course not. Knowing the
mechanics of the universe leads to a deeper aesthetic appreciation of natural beauty, rather than the reverse.
The greatest scientists, like Einstein, Newton, and Darwin, combined curiosity and imagination with the scientific method to make their discoveries.
Y’all must think that being rational makes one into a Mr. Gradgrind from “Hard Times”, the killjoy schoolteacher who tries to eliminate whimsy and imagination. That’s completely false.
I strongly recommend y’all read Carl Sagan’s book, “The Demon-Haunted World,” for an excellent apologia for logic over credulity.
I’m reminded of an exchange between Hotspur and Owen Glendower in “Henry IV, Part One”. Glendower says, “Why, I can call spirits from the vasty deep,” and Hotspur replies, “Why, so can I, or so can any man, but will they come when you do call them?”
There are many epistemologies. Logic usually means deduction. You can’t get truth from it, only conclusions. Truth is in the axioms you use. Other epistemologies include empiricism (peachpits don’t cure cancer) and its cousin, the scientific method (sunlight is produced by fusion). And there are many more, all equally valid.
When they e-mailed me my password, the e-mail said “Someone from thus-and-such IP address requested a new account with skepticnews.com, and gave us this e-mail address to send the password to. If you are not this person, don’t worry, ‘they’ aren’t seeing this message and you can disregard it.”
Heh! Even their new-user account e-mail system is skeptical!
Hrm … at the bottom of the articles on the main page, there’s a link that says “Read more or comment.” When I click on it, the page that it takes me to has no (obvious) place to submit comments…
As for the “slamming the mod” thing, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have been so general. I sat down in my library and read several issues of SI, and I was overwhelmed by the pomposity of some of the articles. It was as though everyone writing for the magazine was operating on the premise that there is nothing logic can’t explain away. Explaining everything might be possible sometime in the more advanced future, but science is still young. We simply do not have the tools to explain absolutely everything quite yet. It’s like walking into a cave with a match and believing that you can see absolutely everything in that cave.
Well, we skeptics and atheists have to deal with our less tolerant fellows just like the theists have to admit to having some undesirables in their midsts. There are certainly some condescending, arrogant, pompous asses that look down on believers, and the same is true of believers who tell all us poor sinners we’re scum fit for hellfire too.
Your line about the cave is very true-- we cannot claim to know what is beyond our vision. Just because we atheists don’t see God does not mean he isn’t there. However, we also are understandably dubious when we hear claims of people who can see into pitch blackness.
