Archives for posts with tag: evidence

and, too often, disregarded!

Well, last time I checked, there were more than a dozen onions in my cellar.
And since my cellar is orbiting the Sun… along with the rest of the Earth…

As for who says what about who made what…

This morning I had to shovel some snow. I live near a kindergarten so the sidewalks should be clean.
Along with the snow, I also had to shovel some dog turds.

Snow coming down from the sky and dogs dropping turds are natural occurrences.
People shoveling snow so that other people may walk on the sidewalks is de rigueur. Also de rigueur is to pick up the turds dropped by the pet you take out at least twice a day.

People have a clear idea about who is responsible for the dog turds on the side-walk.
Even if they were dropped by dogs, the responsibility lies with the owners.
It’s the owners who have raised the dogs, who take them out to poo and who ‘forget’ to pick up the droppings.

In the last couple of centuries, people – well, some of them – have also developed a rather clear understanding regarding the snow. Regarding the water coming down from the sky. About evaporation, clouds, condensation… etc.
God is no longer held responsible for these matters.

Which brings us to the real subject.

There is a guy, Richard Dawkins, who tries to demonstrate there is no God.

And here we go again… I have at least a large china teapot. And since my house, along with the rest of the planet, does follow an orbit in the solar system…

More about who made what, if you care about the subject, can be found here:

https://nicichiarasa.com/tag/god/

So young… and yet so satisfied with himself… he must have had a strong set of beliefs on which to build such a strong self-esteem!

Let me put it another way.

Each of us needs to believe.
Something!
Would you have enough courage to go to bed at night if you weren’t absolutely convinced that the sun will come up next morning?
Furthermore, for things to work as we expect them to, enough of us must share a certain number of beliefs. For instance, would you go to work/accept payment if you weren’t more or less convinced that the money you’d get will enable you to fulfill at least some of your wishes?

Hence belief being based on a deep seated need to believe is a truism. Uttered only as a lame excuse for ‘you can’t convince a believer of anything’.

Which isn’t exactly a lie… only a half truth. A ‘fake news’, if you will!

First of all, a believer is already convinced.
Hence somebody had been able to convince him/her, at some point, of something.

Somebody had somehow convinced the aforementioned believer that the object of what was going to become belief was obvious enough to become ‘evidence’.

Complicated?

Let me rephrase.

‘I haven’t been able to convince a believer of what I was trying to convey to him/her. Hence it must be his/her fault.
Not mine!
Otherwise I would have to admit that what I was presenting as evidence was false, I wasn’t presenting my evidence in a believable manner or, lo and behold, both at the same time. Totally unacceptable!
Now I need to come up with a good enough reason for his/her inability to see the light!
His/her ‘need to believe’ must be the only explanation. Otherwise he/she would have accepted my evidence as being obvious….’

On the other hand, the rest of Sagan’s work cannot be dismissed.
Which proves that self-esteem is a good base on which to build a career.

The need to believe being yet another thing which cannot be dismissed!