Fact or Fiction? (General)

by dhw, Wednesday, March 24, 2010, 19:34 (5356 days ago) @ dhw

This is a thread we might consider developing, because there are so many examples every day in our newspapers and journals. David has drawn our attention to an article dealing with the lies and damned lies that go to make up statistics. Two days ago the Guardian carried a piece about global warming, from which here are a couple of salient quotes:
 
"Much of the record-breaking loss of ice in the Arctic Ocean is down to the region's winds and is not a direct result of global warming, a study claims."-Last year, Vicky Pope, head of climate change advice at the Met Office wrote: "Recent headlines have proclaimed that Arctic summer sea ice has decreased so much in the past few years that it has reached a tipping point and will disappear very quickly. The truth is that there is little evidence to support this. Indeed, the record-breaking losses in the past couple of years could easily be due to natural fluctuations in the weather, with summer sea ice increasing again over the next few years."-The papers have also recently been full of the appalling behaviour of various Catholic bishops, who have covered up child abuse (fact) in order to protect the reputation of the Church (fiction), while the "infallible" Pope (fiction) pontificates with words and takes no action to deal with the guilty parties. -None of these topics has any direct relevance to the existence, non-existence or nature of God, but they have a great deal to do with our methods of approaching the subject. All of us depend on so-called experts for information concerning the many fields we know little or nothing about. Millions of people will have been misled by statistics, the headlines on global warming, the self-proclaimed virtues of the Church, and in exactly the same way people also accept the pronouncements of politicians, economists, scientists ... until others come along to debunk their claims. You might think that the questions we've been asking on this forum are best answered by scientists, mathematicians, poets, priests, mystics or philosophers, but whatever answers they come up with in relation to the existence and nature of God may well entail a great deal of fiction and precious little that can be confirmed as fact. Much of the fiction is cloaked in impressive language, often diverting attention away from the degree of speculation involved in the different conclusions, but of course the art of fiction is precisely to appear factual. A good writer or speaker will always find ways of convincing some people that such and such a vision/miracle/revelation actually occurred, or that globules of unconscious matter can make themselves into reproducing, seeing, hearing, moving, thinking machines. -Who, then, are we supposed to believe? Plenty of clever people have found a solution: follow the experts you want to follow, and take their word as fact; dismiss the others as purveyors of fiction. I suppose this is part of what we call faith.