Thieving Thursday: Suspension of Disbelief

This is an unusual thieving Thursday because, for one thing, I'm not sure if I actually made the comment. The comment was on Think Science but it isn't showing up which either means I didn't actually get it to go through (which frequently happens on today.com blogs) or that it's being moderated. But, for entertainment value, I'm going to carry on as if my comment was there.

Now, I've pointed fingers and picked on religion here and there, not because I have anything against religion, but because I have a problem with how, too often, religion has been used and manipulated. I have a problem with anything that gets used as an excuse to treat people poorly, to hate, to judge, to close one's mind. Any belief system that seems to require turning off your brain and insulating it from facts and science, well, it's not for me. Science, in my opinion, should not be at odds with one's belief system.

But there's another side of the coin, a side I find just as frustrating. There are many laymen who take it as a given that scientists are closed to religion or, in fact, to any notion that can't be translated into math, closed to compassion, closed to anything that doesn't fit neatly into a science book, closed to wonder and whimsy, closed to dreams. The notion that scientists are closed to these things completely blows my mind. I mean, dreaming and wonder, isn't that what drives a scientist?

But, more than that--and that's what gets me--there are scientists and scientific explorers who seem to feel that layman notion is right. I don't know whether it's a reaction to the backwards anti-evolution, anti-reality religious fanatics or whether they truly believe that nothing can exist unless it can be proven and explained, that anything that can't be reliably demonstrated and scientifically peer reviewed can't really be true, that that is what science is all about.

That makes me very sad. Why?

Because dismissing something out of hand because it can't be proven to be so is just as close-minded as ignoring scientific proof because of one's beliefs. Science is about the pursuit of knowledge, searching for the explanations for reality - you can't do that objectively if you close yourself off to possibilities.

So much of science has come from exploring what didn't seem possible, challenging the idea of reality and science as it was then known. Galileo, Einstein, they were treading new ground. Vaccinations and penicillin are really counter-intuitive. I mean, protecting against disease with disease? With mold? And yet look what those revolutions in medicine have done for us.

Of course, some thing are readily disproved. The world is conclusively not six thousand years old. We conclusively landed on the moon. Etc. But I'm not talking about that.

Can we disprove God? Magic? Telepathy? Horoscopes? Reincarnation? Nope. Can't prove 'em either.

Am I saying that scientists have to believe in God (Allah, Buddha, etc)? In reincarnation? In psychic power? In magic? Of course not. But being a scientist doesn't preclude believing those things either. And, even if you don't believe, it doesn't mean you have to scoff because someone else does. The world, the universe, is a mighty strange place. I don't think we're so knowledgeable that we can automatically discount what can't be disproved.

I don't think we should confuse our beliefs with science - science has to meet criteria. But the impossible should be limited to what can be disproved not what can't be proved one way or the other.

Or, at least, that's what I think.