Arc Tangent

A rather colour­ful post on the canon­i­sa­tion of Mary McKil­lop by @ruzkin (fol­lowed by a slightly longer expla­na­tion of his posi­tion) got me think­ing. (First, go read those posts; I can’t say I dis­agree with a word he’s writ­ten, but you might want to. Go on. I dare you.)

I often hear the faith­ful claim that ‘your belief in sci­ence is just faith of another stripe’. I finally found a way to express why that isn’t so:

The sci­en­tific method exposes itself to sci­en­tific analy­sis. You can form a hypoth­e­sis (that the sci­en­tific method works, or does not) and given ade­quate con­trols and data (i.e. meta-​research), prove or dis­prove the util­ity of the sci­en­tific method. Sci­ence is self-​referentially prov­able or dis­prov­able, by definition.

Of course, the faith­ful will still refute the valid­ity of sci­ence. “God is just not sci­en­tif­i­cally explain­able” is an easy cop-​out. It’s still igno­rant as hell and morally cor­rupt, how­ever. If you truly believe God exists, pony up and prove it in a testable and repeat­able manner.