One rule of science is that liklihoods are never zero --or 100%.

The ancient Greek's refusal to do autopsies left them with only wild theories on anatomy, unrelated to reality. On that they did not ask those questions of nature, tho they are the ones who taught us how.

Vatican priests refused to look in Galileo's new telescope. Incredible ignorance and arrogance, I thought. But appalled as I was, I am even more so now that I see so many people still doing it. They "believe in belief" as a substitute for finding out the truth; and think that a lack of proof of their beliefs is made up for by an even stronger level of belief! But there is no pressure they can put on belief; there is no degree of desire that will make up for a lack of evidence.

To paraphrase Poe: A person either has an ear for the scientific truth... or two unusually long ones! (Donkey, to put it nicely.)

The Scientific Method changed jurisprudence. The concept of "innocent till proven guilty" would not have been likely before the scientific precept that "the burden of proof is on the claimant".

Science is a method of communication with nature (and, as we shall see, a communion with nature). A well-designed experiment ignores the scientist, and lets the examined thing itself speak of its truth: what it is, and where it sits in the larger scheme. The proper application of the method makes the scientist's results immune to his opinions. His results may even contradict his previous opinions. If so, the opinions must give way.

This is a fine example of how obscure little things can tell us volumes.

Some may question how scientists can know, for instance, what the temperature was in the distant past. It's a good example, for there are many ways. The one I'll mention is my favorite.

Clams don't have legs, but fish have otoliths ("ear"-"stones". I love the Greek prefix/suffix system!) Otoliths are a mineral (aragonite) which looks plate-like, and grows from the center, like tree rings. Also like tree rings, temperature changes effect the growth pattern. Two degrees change in water temperature create a band in the fish's newest layer of otolith. Hatcheries can cool the water for a couple days to make unique marks to later identify which hatchery raised a particular fish. Conceivably, its otolith could be read with something like a tiny bar-code reader, like at a supermarket checkout!

Fossils of fish would have these same bands, indicating the water temperature during its entire life. This gives us partial weather reports from millions of years ago! Similar effects are found among many other fossils and non-organic remnants.

Another surprising instance: it's likely that we know in what month (tho not year) the disasterous comet/planetisimal(s) hit the Earth, sixty-five million years ago. The resultant dust cloud froze the Earth for a few years, and wiped out all the dinosaurs. (the big, toothed ones, anyway.) A certain species of flowering plant --one still extant-- left fossils of itself in that stratum... in new bloom. It blooms only in late June. Perhaps in the afternoon. We know all that --a late-June afternoon-- but not the exact year --not within thousands of years.

Coleridge: "To doubt has more of faith ... than that blank negation of all such thoughts and feelings which is the lot of the herd of church-and-meeting trotters."

Paul d'Holbach, "The System of Nature", 1770: "The source of man's unhappiness is his ignorance of nature. The pertinacity with which he clings to blind opinions imbibed in his infancy, which interweave themselves with his existence, the consequent prejudice that warps his mind, that prevents his expansion, that renders him the slave of fiction, appears to doom him to continual error."

But it's difficult for the fish to see the water. If a scruffy old man said that a rock floated in the air and typed out a new religious book for him, would you believe? I doubt it, though there are incidents very like that, and many people believed and paid money. But that doesn't test the healthy development of your skeptical powers, because it's easy to see something new. But what if a fantastic thing was professed to you since you were a baby? Then this fantastic belief has "always been there", like water to a fish (I call it "fish-water"). Say that 90% of the people around you seem to believe it. Now... can you be sufficiently aware and un-enculturated to apply intelligent thought? Or are you the trees you can't see the forest for?

Gaia people revel in nature, and science is the only way to find out what nature is. If there is uncertainty in the scientific method, that's all to the better. To be wise is to be uncertain, and vice versa. But to argue that mere belief compares with a large number of exhaustively designed and competitively-checked real-world tests is ludicrous. The desire to believe can be useful to reveal your desires, but without awareness, foolish people may let the desire lead them into a denial of reality. Doubly foolish, because reality --when fully known-- is nearly always more fascinating than mere fantasy.

For example, the vast and awesome wonder of evolution is vastly more worthy of a god than the idea of blowing life into a fistful of dust. (Other gods "did" that before the Christian God.) A well-understood reality will top a metaphor every time.

Bertrand Russell: "What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the wish to find out, which is the exact opposite."

Be careful of the ego's desire to control. Some things we can't control; yet, in a futile effort, some people would sell out their intellect as if in a deal with the devil: "I'll agree to believe your theory if you'll convince me that it'll cure me of cancer." That's as if a belief were a commodity to be exchanged; or that something could be decided for reasons unconnected with the belief itself!

Voltaire: "Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is an absurd one."

If you doubt, (and that's a healthy habit) it is not necessary for you to prove a premise untrue. Relax; the burden of proof lies with the asserter, because there would be no end of possibilities for you to prove untrue. Nothing would ever be known. And belief is not an alternate way of knowing; that's ridiculous; a perversion of language and rationality. I may believe that Einstein or Elvis is still alive, but that does nothing to make it true, and belief is emphatically not a "way of knowing"! Yuk!
. . The Illiterati may say "You can't prove there's not a god, so there is." True, it's impossible --which says not a whit that there IS one. It's a basic logical precept: A negative cannot be proved. It's ridiculous to try. A positive can be proved --eg: one may search and find a cow, thereby proving its existence. One may search everywhere and not find a Unicorn --but that does not prove it doesn't exist --you may've missed a spot in the universe to look.

Science is the only way to know. (whatever can be known, that is.) This should be obvious. It's as simple as good communication with a person: if you want to know reality, ask it. And frame your question well. If you don't ask, you're only making an assumption; a guess. Be a student of reality --let it teach you.

So what is clear communication with nature? How do we ask it what is? What is its voice? The only way is to let the truth of a part of nature prove itself--use a test that will turn out the same way every time (or result in the same percentage figure, etc.) no matter who does the experiment. In this way, it is the investigated that "speaks", not the investigator! And anyone else who "listens quietly" to the structure of reality will hear the same result; will know what is.
All else is a concoction of ego.

The more an ego is damaged, the more it will want to prove itself acceptable; that's natural. If that person doesn't accept that he already is acceptable, he may try to believe and prove something that's false.

I can remember, in my teens, wanting to believe that I had telepathy, etc. I learned of ways to make others believe it, sometimes. It was more Sherlock and Barnum than Mandrake. I grew out of it; others have gone on to make a profession of it.

These selfish beliefs are soon found disappointing, and one might be taken to a further extreme, such as reincarnation. (not a new flower, but to be "in the flesh again". As in chili con carne; "with meat") This belief too, has the advantage of being impossible to disprove; you can be many special people! Notice that the fantasied previous lives are seldom confined to being plain folk that nothing ever happened to. This way, even if you're not "ok" now, you can create a "previous self" who was.

I hope that many people will get past that stage and learn to accept that they're special as they already are. It can be a roundabout way of learning. So could playing Dungeons and Dragons. But it's ridiculously, unnecessarily difficult.

Test whether your feelings are perception or imagination. Perception is objective sensory input. Imagination is subjective sensory output. Imagination can be wonderful, and I have a very active imagination, but it would be a detriment to be unable to discriminate imagination from perception. So it's both sad and humorous when a self-deluded person tells a rational person that it's he who doesn't have an open mind! He tries to believe that if you don't accept his fantasy, you are lacking!

I have noticed and wondered why hypnotherapists tend toward Zen. (I was once a hypnotherapist.) Or is it that Zen people tend to become hypnotherapists rather than straight therapists? Which is cause and which effect? Both hypnosis and Zen deal with the subconscious area of intuition. Let me give one definition of intuition: quickly-available knowledge without conscious thought or attempt at recall. (not that it's always right!) And paradoxically, that knowledge may not be as available to conscious effort.

You'll notice that I often speak with great respect about Zen and about science, though they might be thought of as opposites. Not at all. Zen is --with vast simplification-- acceptance of things as they are. Not as we wish they were --though Zen does not stop you from changing things. Science takes great pains to learn exactly how things are... by eliminating experimenter bias. You see that both Zen and science take out the ego-involvement! That's why both are known to lead to truth, personal and objective.

Thus (seemingly backwards) Zen is another path to knowledge, and science is another path to enlightenment!

THE IMMORALITY OF IGNORANCE

A preliminary, unfinished essay.

Let us mention right away that we are all ignorant of many things; and of all things to some degree. It's no dishonor, unless purposeful. And by "ignorant", we don't mean a criticism, but merely a "non-knowledge". Not "it's evil to be stupid", but rather: some things that we do without thought are harmful enough that it it becomes our responsibility to become more aware of the results of our actions, and if needed, change them.

Ignorance is of at least two kinds: simple, which is a neutral not-knowing; and the prideful, which is not knowing about the subject, but having an opinion anyway.

We've covered, elsewhere (in "Virtue"), the concept of Selfish Altruism: that doing good will eventually have consequences that are beneficial to the one who did the original good thing, as well as everybody else. Doing harm will also return its burden to the doer; so we see that immorality is ignorant.

Here, we also mean the reverse, that sometimes ignorance is immoral; it often leads to harm, especially if it's done with the passion of a true-believer trying hard to help. (See "Love and Evil" and "The Deadly Virtues".)

Starting with a very simple example --if you pull a gun's trigger, you have the responsibility to see that nothing alive is in front of the gun. This applies not only to guns, but to many things --like to the purchase of a big car/SUV-- where the entire planet is in back of the tailpipe. It applies to the return and reuse of grocery bags, on your next trip to the store. It applies to the kind of light bulbs you buy. It even applies to the "garbage" you might throw out instead of recycling it.

The world is in many dangers, but other than another planetisimal-strike from space, man is the world's only enormous danger. Think of it: the effect of humanity is the worst thing to happen here in the last 65 million years!

What makes us so dangerous is not simply our intelligence, but our ignorance of the dangers of intelligence. The Gaian mechanism has never had to cope with such a thing. We are the sophomores: wise fools. Our intelligence runs far behind our wise application of it. Our abilities far exceed our wisdom.

But isn't it extreme to call it immoral? Isn't ignorance a good excuse? Not if ignorance causes harm, and a person is aware that he/she is lax in knowledge about his/her actions. In law, the phrase is famous: ignorance of the law is no excuse. You have a legal duty to know. So, what we're saying here is that you have a moral duty to know --to know, at least, what is likely to cause harm, not only as a direct consequence, but secondarily or eventually... to people you know or can see, and those not known or seen.

At what point is it immoral not to study a possible danger? How does that point change as the population goes up? More study is required before you actually do anything. You could wind up afraid to even breathe! The culture furthest along this path is the Jainist, of India, who believe it's their duty even to feed the bedbugs.

The U.S. went thru quite an uproar to stop the SST airliner, but the public interest finally won out. A few people know that just because we can do something like that doesn't mean we should. Scientists now know even better what damage the SST would do to the ionosphere. We were fortunate that they knew enough back then. It could easily have been that the data was still a few years into the future, and the plane would've been built.

On the personal level, how about some required study before parents can have a child?! It's too important a thing to leave to rank amateurs.

Here is a definition of science from Robert Root Bernstein of the Salk Institute for Biological studies. (Thanx to Bob Moses for finding it)

1. The first set of criteria are the logical criteria:
   There are four primary logical criteria. . A scientific theory must be:
   • a simple unifying idea that postulates nothing unnecessary ("Occam's Razor");
   • logically consistent internally;
   • logically falsifiable (i.e. cases must exist in which the theory can be imagined to be invalid);
   • clearly limited by explicitly stated boundary conditions, so that it is clear whether or not any particular data are or are not relevant to the verification or falsification of the theory.

   ---

2. There are four primary empirical criteria as well. A scientific theory must:
   • be empirically testable itself or lead to predictions or retrodictions that are testable;
   • actually make verified predictions and/or retrodictions;
   • concern reproducible results;
   • provide criteria for the interpretation of data as factual, artifactual, anomalous or irrelevant.

   The basic point is that not all data are valid for a particular theory. Some data may be interpreted as factual (that is, they fall within the boundary conditions specified by the theory and verify its predictions or retrodictions); some may be artifactual (that is, the result of secondary or accidental influences lying outside the boundaries set for the validity of the theory); some are anomalous (that is, demonstrably valid within the bounds of the theory, but also at odds with predictions or retrodictions made by the theory); some are irreproducable and so, invalid; and some are irrelevant since they address the theory not at all.

   ---

3. Third, there are sociological criteria for scientific theories. A theory must:
   • resolve recognized problems, paradoxes, and/or anomalies irresolvable on the basis of preexisting theories;
   • pose a new set of scientific problems upon which scientists may work;
   • posit a "paradigm" or problem solving model by which these new problems may be expected to be resolved;
   • provide definitions of concepts or operations beneficial to the problem-solving abilities of other scientists.

   ---

4. The final set of criteria are historical ones. A theory must:
   • meet or surpass all of the criteria set by its predecessors or demonstrate that any abandoned criteria are artifactual;
   • be able to accrue the epistemological status acquired by previous theories through their testing--or, put another way, be able to explain all of the data gathered under previous relevant theories in terms either of fact or artifact (no anomalies allowed);
   • be consistent with all preexisting ancillary theories that already have established scientific validity.