(September 1, 2012 at 11:19 am)Napoléon Wrote:(September 1, 2012 at 10:06 am)Penhorse340 Wrote: The main truth I've found is "I / we don't know". That truth stinks.
Sure there's a lot we don't know, but there's also a lot we do know. That is thanks to the scientific method. The thing that sets apart the scientific method from every other way of discerning truth is that it actually works.
If you think that sucks, then more fool you.
More than that, the truthism that is "I don't know" is the driving force behind science. To quote Dara Ó Briain, "Science knows it doesn't know everything, otherwise it'd stop."
"I don't know" leads to "But let's find out."
(September 1, 2012 at 10:06 am)Penhorse340 Wrote: That's why we wrap everything in simplified models which distil the bits we think we do know into bitesize chunks. Trouble is the models are almost always oversimplified! That's not truth, it's a different flavour lie.
And that, I think, is your major stumbling block. You're expecting simple one-sentence answers to huge, complicated questions. Just as an example, a creationist prefers the answer "God" to the question "Why is there something rather than nothing?" (most commonly phrased "Who created the Universe?", as if the qualifier "who" is supposed to make sense) because as well as feeding into their presuppositions and beliefs, such simple non-answers are far more comforting far more bite-sized - than either "we don't yet know" or diving into the deep end of quantum physics.
At the age of five, Skagra decided emphatically that God did not exist. This revelation tends to make most people in the universe who have it react in one of two ways - with relief or with despair. Only Skagra responded to it by thinking, 'Wait a second. That means there's a situation vacant.'
