I'm John. As a home project and semi-obsession, I started working on a document outlining, for just myself, all the reasons why I thought that the "faith" (more appropriately called trust or belief) that people of reason have in how the world works is different than the faith that is tied up with religious, supernatural, new age, and other non-rational beliefs.
Since college many years ago, I have been running into people off and on who would try to equate the two, claiming that science was the "new religion of the 21st century", or that as traditional religion faded (I didn't know it was fading!) that a new technological/scientific religion would or should take its place. I don't see it that way. For starters, I'm not sure that superstition and other non-rational belief systems are fading at all. At best, we occasionally trade one form of irrationality for another. Although church affiliation may possibly be declining, we begin yoga, take homeopathic cures, believe in ESP and the paranormal, watch TV shows about ghost-hunters, buy books about Angels, and keep a sharp eye out for miracles. Secondly, I don't see Science and rationality as being a follow-on act for religion in any way. Science won't be the new religion any more than Plumbing or Accountancy will be. It seemed like a complete non-sequitur to me.
Another motivator for this blog - during the first Viking landing on Mars back in 1976, I was enthusiastically expecting that life would be discovered (it wasn't). A devil's advocate friend fully expected we would find nothing alive, and we didn't, darn it, though I don't think that mission was equipped to detect it, anyways. He argued that we had no reason to believe that anything on Mars was the same as on Earth - that chemistry might be completely different. He challenged me to prove otherwise. I discovered I couldn't since we had never been there before - it actually might have been different. I had just assumed it would be roughly the same. He claimed that only my unjustifiable "faith" in science made me believe that!
That has really stuck with me and has bothered me ever since. It has served as one of several inspirations for me to put this together. It turns out that there is good reason to believe claims like "Chemistry on Mars is probably like chemistry on Earth" and other assertions of the same kind. That is one of the things I will be delving into in this blog.
Anyhow, my project got bigger and bigger, and I started bringing in more and more material. I went back through old notes I took from various philosophy books I had read. I gathered information from other books I had around the house, from science and skeptical blogs, and from various online references, encyclopedias and wikipedia style sites. I found mystical/spiritual/religious/deconstructist websites that contained the exact type of thing I was irritated by. So, I combined this information with ideas I already had and kept on writing. After a while I began to wonder how I could share what I was doing with others. At first, I decided to try to link to it from my facebook page, but that didn't seem really like what I wanted to do or how I wanted to do it (maybe I don't want my little niece to read this stuff, anyway). So, then the blog idea was suggested to me.
I will probably introduce my ideas and writings in installments - segments/chapters/sections and see how it evolves. Because of the way blogs unfold, the structure of what I am presenting is in reverse order - the initial thoughts and sections at the very bottom, and the conclusions, final thoughts, and all the most recent installments at the top. I guess that's just how blogs work - the beginning (which I type in first) comes at the very end, and the end (which I type in last) comes at the beginning! I hope this doesn't confuse anyone.
Anyhow, thanks for reading and commenting -
John
