Simulation Theory according to Dilbert

[Mister Agenda]

All of history is constructed from anecdotes. That includes paleontology too. The fossil record is just a pile of physical anecdotes.

Stupidest thing I have read all week, and it's been one of those weeks.

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I can't make sense of what you mean by "physical anecdotes". There are interpretations of the fossil record, yes. There are also expectations of what the fossil record should contain, along with the arrangements and such, based on current scientific theories.

When some skeptics use the term anecdote usually they do so as a way to dismiss personal statements about that do not fit in with how they think the world 'should' work.  Except 90% of what history is made of is anecdotes - letters, inscriptions, records, artifacts, etc.  For example, if I think my ancestors came from Reading, England to Wheaton, Illinois sometime around the turn of the century, then I would expect to find them listed in the census around that time. And lo and behold, I did find them. Theory confirmed.

My point is that anything that happened in the past is a reconstruction. We cannot go back and run experiments in the past. Evolution and geology are basically history. You cannot run an experiment about speciation any more than you can for the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. All you can do is see if new information fits together with what is already known.

And since reconstructions can't be perfect, they are all equally reliable, so we should trust your scriptures just as much as we trust anything else about the past. Of course, that means we should also trust everyone else's scriptures equally with yours, except not, because reasons.

If only there was a method that would allow us to determine which reconstructions of the past have a higher probability of being better approximations of what really happened than others....