Today’s Blog For A Beer is a bit different. I invited Mike Brotherton to expand and repost some commentary from his blog as a jumping off point for this week’s Fantasy Friday. It’s an experiment, we’ll see how it goes. The post is pretty interesting.
A conflict under these situations, pitting a logical scientific type against a wild-eyed believer, reason against belief, is a false conflict. Scientists are not dogmatic and their measurements, experiments, and observations can and do change their minds. Or not, in too many cases. How many times have you seen the skeptical scientist character in a story with fantastic elements mutter something like, “There must be a logical explanation,” and then go on to offer something feeble and likely stupid in face of the reality of the story? Let me illustrate this with some TV series that regularly pitted science against the fantastic.
The only real quibble I have with his thesis is the part about scientists not being dogmatic. hahahahahahaha NO, I say. Sure, Mike probably isn’t, but hoo boy, I have come across many dogmatics in my brief exposure to various types of sciences. I think scientists are like any other group of people. Some are prone to dogmatism and head in the sand behavior and some aren’t. We’re all human (I hope), it comes with the territory. And at least those type of scientists don’t tell me I’m going to hell. That’s a step up!
Anyway, go read and comment, it’s sure to be an interesting discussion today.
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