ANTESCRIPT: The title of this post must be referring to my own mind, because the body of this post, which I wrote based on reading a biased sampling of the responses given in the article discussed, is completely wrong. (See the complete set of responses here. Thanks to commenter Alison for the correction and pointer.)
This article from the New York Times (via Pejmanesque) doesn't help my disposition any.
It reports on the answers "scientists, futurists and other creative thinkers" gave in response to the question
What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?
You just know what kinds of answers this question is meant to elicit. ("Hmmm, let's see, love, forgiveness...oh, now let's see--oh yes, of course: that an invisible being created a universe!")
And you also know that believers find such tissue-thin responses doxastically felicitous. ("Hallelujah! Even scientists admit they believe things they can't prove! Science be praised! My nonrational but epistemically completely unjustified and unmotivated belief has been preserved!") Particularly when they are provided by Trained Scientists.
So, obviously, this is an ideological trap--one that seeks to project a seeming rapprochement between science and religion.
One, alas, that even the eminently reasonable Richard Dawkins has fallen into:
I believe, but I cannot prove, that all life...anywhere in the universe, is the direct or indirect product of Darwinian natural selection.
Now, this does I admit sound quasireasonable. It's true, after all, that we don't have demonstrable proof of that hypothesis.
But most of us don't have demonstrable proof of anything. I know very well, for instance, that Fermat's last theorem is true, but I certainly can't prove it. (In fact, in the hyperdemonstrable sense of 'proof' seemingly being used here, I can't even "prove" that my ears aren't made of broccoli. At least arguably.)
Moreover, surely it can't be the case we positively lack any good inductive or abductive reasons to believe Dawkin's hypothesis. (We have every bit as much epistemic grounds to extend natural selection cosmos-wide as Newton did gravity.) But then Dawkin's belief is very far from suffering the same feeble level of justification as, say, the notion that there's a one-eyed, one-horned, flying purple people-eater orbiting Alpha Centauri. And while we certainly can't "prove" the negation of latter sort of belief, we nonetheless routinely prescribe medications to those who believe such things.
That all being the case, what on earth is the point in answering a question that by design seems to privilege both types of belief equally?
None--save perhaps inadvertently to provide talking points for the advocates of theism's strange doctrines.
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