re: #377 Romantic Heretic

Such people like nice, clear cut answers to everything. ‘The Great Intelligence wills it’ is nice and perfect.

Of course asking them what evidence there is of that Great Intelligence and what forces it used to create life will get a response of, “LALALALALALALA! I can’t hear you!”

But they’ll be the first to tell you they were ‘trained in science’.

There’s a reason Scientists are mostly liberal and engineers are far more likely to be conservative. Science is about uncertainty, about embracing the knowledge that even a p value below 0.05 doesn’t mean you’re not wrong.

A LOT of people are more uncomfortable with uncertainty than they are with being wrong.

I was discussing this with a friend who’s a biblical literalist, who told me his worldview was on rock solid ground because it came from God. I told him there is no God, and that the only thing one can be certain of is one’s own existence, and that we can each only infer that reality is in fact real. But if we treat it as though it were, it responds appropriately, so it’s a reasonable working hypothesis. He couldn’t understand how I could possibly tolerate that much uncertainty. He needed the certainty of a deity for the world to make sense to him.