After a vacation from good ol' #210879, it's back to rolling the rock...
On 17 Jan 2004, at 15:24, Anthony Towns <aj@azure.humbug.org.au> growled:
> There's nothing more to be said.
MOYERS: But this is what frightens many believers. They see science as
uncertain, always subject to revisionism. They see science as presenting a
complex, chilling, and enormous universe ruled by chance and impersonal laws.
They see science as dangerous.
ASIMOV: This is really the glory of science--that science is tentative, that
it is not certain, that it is subject to change. What is really disgraceful is
to have a set of beliefs that you think is absolute and has been so from the
start and can't change, where you simply won't listen to evidence. You say,
"If the evidence agrees with me, it's not necessary, and if it doesn't agree
with me, it's false." This is the legendary remark of Omar when they captured
Alexandria and asked him what to do with the library. He said, "If the books
agree with the Koran, they are not necessary and may be burned. If they
disagree with the Koran, they are pernicious and must be burned." Well, there
are still there Omar-like thinkers who think all of knowledge will fit into one
book called the Bible, and who refuse to allow it is possible ever to conceive
of an error there. To my way of thinking, that is much more dangerous than a
system of knowledge that is tentative and uncertain.
-- from a 1988 Bill Moyers interview with Isaac Asimov.
(I suppose some philosopher hereabouts might object on the grounds that Asimov
was probably an absolutist as to the existence at least one thing: human
uncertainty. And who isn't?)
Try to get more rest...
