The Nature of Scepticism

Or, an advanced race of aliens, posing as a supreme being decided to play a little joke and implanted the thoughts into those sheep farmers who would then write the books of the bible....Or Apollo, bored with his life on Olympus, decided to pose as the one true supreme being while the other Olympic Gods were busy playing poker...Or, we look at the historical context of these writing and find out that many of the writings accepted into today's bible are unremarkably similar to previous myths and stories from other religions. That these other myths and stories were contemporaneous or previous to the writings of the people who wrote the bible and parts of the bible are just plagiarized stories.In any case, we use skepticism to help lead us to the most likely story, and remember the axiom, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence," while continuing our search for evidence.

'Proven' is a pretty loaded word. Our established 'knowledge' of the universe is never proven, something I am sure you've agreed with outside of your philosophical debates. We may be able to draw inferences based on what we think we know, but we can never be absolutely certain that we are absolutely correct.

Do you understand that humans are great at seeing patterns? We can see constellations in the sky. Does that mean those stars are lined up to make those particular objects? If so, why do some cultures see completely different objects in the same quadrant of the night sky? The point is that you are counting the hits and forgetting the misses. In other words the fallacy of observational selection, or the enumeration of favorable circumstances. You have a dream that you have an accident and in the morning you decide to walk to work and hope to prevent the accident, which you happen to do. Perhaps you dreamed you won the lottery and you buy a ticket. You don't win. Which dreams do you believe and which ones do you write off as 'just a dream'? How do you discern between dreams? Is a sex dream divinely inspired, telling you that you ought to go out and get laid, or is it just your brain working out a desire (or fear) you had?

Why can you not stand for being good to others without some invisible god telling you to do so?Is your moral compass so damaged that you require the god of the bible to tell you to treat others with kindness?Skepticism isn't a belief, it is a way of discerning a path towards knowledge.

There is nothing wrong with being skeptical of evolution or any other theory. Scientists codify 'skepticism' by limiting well supported ideas to the position of 'Theory.' While evolution is a Theory that is well-supported by evidence, has been tested a multitude of times, and makes correct predictions, there is still the chance, however slight, that someone could come about and turn it on it's head. Same thing with our "Theory" of Gravity. Scientists know our knowledge is not and will never be complete.That being said, Evolution is a fact. Life evolves. Whether it is through the process laid out by the Theory of Evolution or by some other process not yet discovered is the question. What those who rely on a religious text for their understanding of science seem unable to grasp is that they have replaced skepticism with credulity. I may be mistaken but I would say that the vast majority of the people on this forum are not physicists, and I am not either. I don't think I would conclude anything about the Big Bang from what others say about it, no matter how knowledgeable they appear. It's always good, imho, to have at least a little bit of skepticism about the extent of peoples knowledge and try to investigate it yourself by looking for reputable sources.The point is that you may think that people are avoiding an admission of whether the Big Bang was "In the beginning" but it may be the case that they just don't know what "In the beginning" means in the context of the Big Bang. You seem to be missing the point of skepticism. My understanding of how things work could be flawed, and thus I should never assume that my view of how the universe works is complete or proven.

We employ something like the scientific method when we determine that putting our hands in the fire will burn our hands and we draw the conclusion that putting our hands in the fire is dangerous. While this conclusion is related to the scientific method of determining why it is dangerous, it isn't an explanation. For an explanation of why things burn, we draw upon our knowledge of physics and chemistry. Our understanding of these processes is not truly complete. Our assumptions may be flawed. We don't have a complete understanding of physics and chemistry, and thus we can not say with 100% certainty that every time we put our hand in the fire it will burn. We can be reasonably assured that this will happen and wouldn't recommend testing it out by placing our hand in the fire. We can continue testing our theory and refining it and draw conclusions from it but there may come a time when something happens that we don't expect and the physical and chemical process
of fire doesn't act the way we think it should. It may be a complete shock and wonder but that is the process of science.By the way, just because something doesn't act the way we think it should doesn't mean we just drop our theory of how we thought it should work. We remain skeptical of our assumptions and look for flaws in the new observations. If the new observations hold up to further testing then we update or change our theory. But even so, it can never be complete. Our perception and understanding of the world is limited and thus my skepticism.The short of it is: We can have an observation that fire will burn and a theory on how or why and draw valid conclusions from it, but we should remain skeptical and be prepared to change our understanding when appropriate.

It still is a contradictory statement. The act of proving something is a recognition of it's completeness. Thus if you recognize something as incomplete it is, by definition, NOT proven.edit: I read this wrong and substituted 'validated' with 'proven' when I read it. I recognized this when Straggler responded. Pardon the error.Edited by DBlevins, : No reason given.

Absolutely. and can never be proved, otherwise we wouldn't call it falsifiable. (which I was trying to say so inarticulately.) It seems to me that Dr. A nailed it when he spoke of those who would accept skepticism in some instances and not in others. RAZ seems to be of that ilk.