I don’t have a manga doodle to go along with this entry (I’m working on Legend of the Ztarr). I just wanted to post about the Beyond Belief conferences, after recently finding out that the 3rd conference, BB3: Candles in the Dark, took place earlier this month. The videos were available online through The Science Network’s website, but apparently had to be taken down do to overwhelming demand and will be available through Google video sometime soon. Beyond Belief 3: Candles in the Dark, has a wonderful Carl Sagan quote on the about page:
In The Demon-Haunted World, Carl Sagan wrote:
Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.
(My bold)
One of my favourite talks is from the 2006 conference, in the second session, which is by Neil deGrasse Tyson. I couldn’t get enough of the first conferences so finding out about the third is really making me geekout. These kinds of lectures make me giddy as a schoolgirl.
Tyson’s talk is basically about the “god of the gaps” argument. I’ve come to realize that even atheists aren’t immune to this type of thinking, despite their lack of belief in a deity. Atheists can still believe in astrology, homeopathy, psychics, dowsing, acupuncture, or any other paranormal/pseudo-science faith based systems, without ever invoking a god to fill in the gaps. Instead, they can throw around words like “energies”, “vibrations”, or fill in what they don’t know with quantum magic words “entanglement”, “fields”, or my favourite gap-filler, “uncertainty principle”. You can be an atheist and still not be a critical thinker, still not be a skeptic. The atheist equivalent to the ‘god of the gaps’ that I’ve come across most often is to say that there are just some things that are out of the realm of science. I think Tyson’s talk illustrates very well that it’s this kind of thinking that hinders discovery.
