YOU JUST NEVER KNOW. The minute you think you're on safe ground, the shells start landing. It all started like this. In a typically fascinating email, a good frined of mine casually mentioned that the galaxy is inhabited by quite a few lifeforms that are genetically very similar to humans.
My first mistake was to ask: "how do you know this"? Just leave it alone, right? But no. After enduring a cobbwebbish exposition exploring the rhetorical question "what does it mean 'to know'?", i shoulda known i was whipped, or dead meat, or whatever.
Instead i plowed straight ahead, joyfully explaining that the scientific method has, for four hundred years now, provided a solution to the problem of gaining knowledge and communicating it to others, by defining a standard, universal process of logical steps to examine, test, retest, verify, and explain.
In other words, i crooned, the question of whether there are human like beings scattered around the galaxy is an answerable question, answerable by direct, clear observation, accessible, explainable, presentable to everyone. another mistake.
By implication, by extension, said question has yet to be answered, remains open, eh?
Well, free freee to try that on a true believer, and see how far you get. Its just that I never in a million years thought I would end up using and defending the scientific method as an aswer to a intellectual argument; and be rejected summarily.
WE live in credulous times, maybe because we seek escape from verifiable reality.
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