Isn't this what led to the Argument From Authority Fallacy? Scientist need to stay in their lane, and expect blowback when they don't. Newton's belief in alchemy doesn't tarnish his development of calculus.
this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2025
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Indeed. Though Alchemy was a much more credible branch of natural philosophy back then
The motions which the planets now have,..could not spring from any natural cause alone, but were impressed by an intelligent Agent.
Non-credible scientist, notorious for spreading his "theories" about planetary motion.
I see two possibilities:
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You disbelieve the quote and you are using it as a counterexample. In which case, you consider the source to not be credible on the matter.
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You believe the quote. In which case, you prove how people may believe what a prestigious scientist may say without critically examining it, even if the claim is contaminated by incredible magical thinking. This is precisely what the meme advocates against.
Neither of these scenarios contradict the meme.
Don't look into why we use the Latin word for ghost to describe light then
I get where this meme is coming from, but I think it's a bad idea to remove a person's credibility if they believe in a thing that I consider supernatural/bullshit/pseudoscience/charlatanesque.
Firstly: a supernatural phenomenon today could be a scientific field tomorrow. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Secondly: They could simply be ill-informed about the state of knowledge about that subject, or they had a very bizarre experience that they don't know how to explain otherwise, or they never thought too much about it.
They do lose credibility to me when I present facts and arguments as to why I believe it to be false, and they fail to show they can have a rational debate to explain why they think I should change my mind or understand that they could be in the wrong and acknowledge it.
I don’t believe in things that are considered “supernatural”. However, I don’t think that someone believing in something supernatural disqualifies them from doing good science, the same as someone who has a purely materialist belief system isn’t necessarily qualified to do good science. The clincher for me is that they can do their best to operate science without biasing it.
For example, It’s perfectly possible for someone who believes in string theory to study it as long as they are using the true scientific method, the same as it’s possible for someone who does not believe in string theory to study it with proper scientific method. If you project that same example towards something more controversial, like telepathy, it’s still a valid understanding of how scientific study should work.
You could jump to conclusions, or you could ask whether or not there is evidence that scientists' work in their own field is affected by irrelevant unscientific beliefs that they hold. In my experience, people are very good at compartmentalizing their beliefs.
Psi research is a fascinating field, responsible for lots of improvements in study design, metastudy statistics and criteria, whatnot.
Like, it is hard to control your experiment so that you don't accidentally measure side channels as telepathy or whatnot. Or subjects having hit rates because they have the same cognitive bias as experimenters selecting cards "at random". The list is endless.
Sceptic: "Your study has these and these flaws". Psi researcher: "We're using state of the art experimental design, accepted in every other field, and are open to suggestions". Sceptic "...damnit". I guess at least half of Psi researchers are consciously trolling for the heck of it, the bulk of the rest is dabblers, full-on crackpots are actually a rarity. Crackpots don't tend to have the wherewithal to get their stuff into a form that's even remotely publishable.
That’s why it’s important to have peer review and replicable results
Science is a process for learning knowledge, not a set of known facts (or theories/conjectures/hypotheses/etc.).
Phlogiston theory was science. But ultimately it fell apart when the observations made it untenable.
A belief in luminiferous aether was also science. It was disproved over time, and it took decades from the Michelson-Morley experiment to design robust enough studies and experiments to prove that the speed of light was the same regardless of Earth's relative velocity.
Plate tectonics wasn't widely accepted until we had the tools to measure continental drift.
So merely believing in something not provable doesn't make something not science. No, science has a bunch of unknowns at any given time, and testing different ideas can be difficult to actually do.
Hell, there are a lot of mathematical conjectures that are believed to be true but not proven. Might never be proven, either. But mathematics is still a rational, scientific discipline.
Weird you'd call ideas that long predate rationalism and the scientific method science
Predate rationalism? Modern rationalism and the scientific method came up in the 16th and 17th centuries, and was built on ancient foundations.
Phlogiston theory was developed in the 17th century, and took about 100 years to gather the evidence to make it infeasible, after the discovery of oxygen.
Luminiferous aether was disproved beginning in the late 19th century and the nail in the coffin happened by the early 20th, when Einstein's theories really started taking off.
Plate tectonics was entirely a 20th century theory, and became accepted in the second half of the 20th century, by people who might still be alive today.
And sometimes they're not. Apothecaries believing in homeopathy e.g.
Because Einstein's science had absolutely no basis in fact.
What?
50 people so far that should be banned from this sub
I really did not expect it to be so controversial
20% of the US population believe in ghosts, and another 25% think they're a possibility.
These aren't even bad numbers globally.
🤷♂️
?
I don’t tell people I’m an atheist, I am, instead I tell them “I don’t believe in magical thinking” that way religion is covered and all this other stupid bullshit along with it