What Fundamentalists and Scientists may have in common.

What could a fundamentalist and a scientist have in common? Both build barriers around their conclusions and refuse to consider anything else. You may have noticed that the media usually place fundamentalists in the spotlight and focus on their close-mindedness. However, I just finished reading a great article in BBC’s Science Focus (Issue 282 / July 2015; p. 23) by Robert Matthews -- How a `crackpot’ theory has just been proved correct. Matthews puts scientists in the spotlight. Below are quotes from the article (highlights added).

Back in 1915, Alfred Wegener published The Origin of Continents and Oceans, in which he presented evidence for what is now called plate tectonics. He hoped the book would spark interest among geologists. Instead, they seized on the obvious flaw in the idea: how can continent sized slabs of rock slide around the Earth?

Now the mystery has been solved – and it turns out Wegener was on the right track. Using controlled explosions to trigger seismic echoes from deep within the Earth, a team of researchers in New Zealand has recently found that the plates of rock making up the crust sit atop pools of slippery, melted rock around 70-80km down. So it seems that Wegener wasn’t so crazy after all.

What the new findings, published in Nature, really show is the danger of dismissing a theory just because it doesn’t fit with current knowledge. This Is the Argument from Omniscience: the assumption that just because we don’t have an explanation, it means no-one will find one, ever.

That sounds like arrogance to the point of lunacy. Yet you’ll find plenty of otherwise rational people wheeling it out to dismiss ideas that they don’t like, such as   homeopathy. . .

But I can think of a host of intriguing theories in everything from cancer therapy to cosmology that keep running into the Argument from Omniscience: science cannot currently explain them, so it never will.

There are better rules for judging new theories. For example, Ockham’s Razor says -- the more assumptions a theory makes, the less likely it is to be valid.

And science popularizer Carl Sagan advocated another rule of thumb -- extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

These rules are not always easy to apply, but they do have a solid basis in the mathematics of evidence – which the Argument from Omniscience doesn’t.

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Jim Myers