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My lab:
lab.png
Or, as I quoted the German writer and polymath Goethe in my Facharbeit in 1990: "Geheimnisse sind noch keine Wunder". This old insight is basically what Michael Shermer is saying in his nice short article in Scientific American today. Apparently, Houdini said as much to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Michael writes:
This problem is called the argument from ignorance (“it must be true because it has not been proven false”) or sometimes the argument from personal incredulity (“because I cannot imagine a natural explanation, there cannot be one”). Such fallacious reasoning comes up so often in my encounters with believers that I conclude it must be a product of a brain unsatisfied with doubt; as nature abhors a vacuum, so, too, does the brain abhor no explanation. It therefore fills in one, no matter how unlikely. Thus do normal anomalies become paranormal, natural phenomena become supernatural, unidentified flying objects become extraterrestrial spacecraft and chance events become conspiracies.
Most modern creationists (or cdesign proponentsists) use this argument, be it Behe or Comfort or any of the other vestiges of creationism today. Creationists today have forgotten what was known already hundreds of years ago: not knowing something only implies that we don't know. Ignorance cannot be turned into knowledge by making things up from thin air. Just becasue we don't know something, doesn't mean a magic man did it.


Posted on Tuesday 08 February 2011 - 16:40:07 comment: 0
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