{"id":2071,"date":"2004-10-11T20:59:00","date_gmt":"2004-10-12T00:59:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.meehawl.com\/Blogfiles-wp\/?p=2071"},"modified":"2004-10-11T20:59:00","modified_gmt":"2004-10-12T00:59:00","slug":"creeping-infiltration","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.meehawl.com\/Blogfiles\/2004\/10\/11\/20\/59\/creeping-infiltration\/","title":{"rendered":"Creeping Infiltration"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>During my cell biology class today I sat behind two women who kept chatting about <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Intelligent_design\">intelligent design<\/a>, and how there simply *had* to be some supernatural force at work. They called it &#8220;God&#8221;. I prefer &#8220;the big pink invisible bunny that lives in my shoe&#8221;. Try it. Whenever anyone talks about &#8220;God&#8221;, simply substitute the phrase &#8220;the big pink invisible bunny that lives in my shoe&#8221; for &#8220;God&#8221; and see how much sense they are making.<\/p>\n<p>That got me thinking. &#8220;Intelligent Design&#8221; is demonstrably unfalsifiable, because proof of this would deny faith, and hence the existence of &#8220;the big pink invisible bunny that lives in my shoe&#8221;. <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Falsifiability\">All real science is falsifiable<\/a>. Of course, there are <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Confirmation_holism\">pathological instances<\/a> when a <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Pathological_science\">wobbly theory<\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Standard_model\">mutates endlessly<\/a> thanks to a desire of its adherents to avoid loss of ego. In these cases, it seems no amount of novel, <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Euler%27s_Identity\">re-contextualised<\/a> or contradictory data can remove the non-doubts of its adherents, so you just have to <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Revolutions\">wait for them to die off<\/a>.  Of course, you may get a few <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Bruno_Latour\">entertaining<\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Sokal_Affair\">scraps<\/a>  and <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Cognitive_science_of_mathematics\">revelations<\/a> along the way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>During my cell biology class today I sat behind two women who kept chatting about intelligent design, and how there simply *had* to be some supernatural force at work. They called it &#8220;God&#8221;. I&#46;&#46;&#46;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2071","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.meehawl.com\/Blogfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2071","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.meehawl.com\/Blogfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.meehawl.com\/Blogfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.meehawl.com\/Blogfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.meehawl.com\/Blogfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2071"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.meehawl.com\/Blogfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2071\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.meehawl.com\/Blogfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2071"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.meehawl.com\/Blogfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2071"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.meehawl.com\/Blogfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2071"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}