Should Experts be Humble when they Speculate about Virgin Fields?
Abstract
Experts can speak with justified authority when they are expert in a mature science like chemistry about which a great deal is understood. When subjects are semi-mature they tend to be quite humble, realising that there is so much which is not understood that they had better not risk looking a fool in a few year’s time by proclaiming too assuredly today. Now curiously, when experts are speaking about virgin fields of discovery, they consider that they run no risks by saying almost whatever they like because it will be decades if not centuries before anything is discovered likely to contradict them. So it is that ordinary punters are daily fooled by the authority with which some expert or another pronounces on subjects about which no one knows anything at all. Who Lies Sleeping? The Dinosaur Heritage and the Extinction of Man by Dr Michael D Magee
It will be hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.
Jesus on wealth, Matthew 19:23
Abstract
Experts can speak with justified authority when they are expert in a mature science like chemistry about which a great deal is understood. When subjects are semi-mature they tend to be quite humble, realising that there is so much which is not understood that they had better not risk looking a fool in a few year’s time by proclaiming too assuredly today. Now curiously, when experts are speaking about virgin fields of discovery, they consider that they run no risks by saying almost whatever they like because it will be decades if not centuries before anything is discovered likely to contradict them. So it is that ordinary punters are daily fooled by the authority with which some expert or another pronounces on subjects about which no one knows anything at all. Who Lies Sleeping? The Dinosaur Heritage and the Extinction of Man by Dr Michael D Magee
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Before you go, think about this…
An old superstition mentioned by the Jesuit Father, Herbert Thurston, in his book Superstition is the belief that spit has curative properties as long as the person providing it is fasting—the so-called “fasting spittle”. Pliny wrote of it in his Natural History, but an old witch, Bridget Bostock of Coppenhall, Cheshire, was reported in 1748 to have had queues of patients waiting for a cure. She would take nothing to eat all day until six in the evening while she was curing, by which time she was faint with hunger and had to dismiss any of the crowd remaining. She cured with her spittle and the words “God bless you”. Thurston has this down as a superstition, but Christ used spit for healing a dumb man and two blind men in the gospels (Mk 7:33; 8:23; Jn 9:6). Those are miracles!
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When you buy a used car, you might want to believe what the salesman is saying: “So much car for so little money!” And it takes work to be sceptical. You have to know something about cars, and it’s unpleasant if the salesman gets angry. Even so, you recognize that the salesman might have a motive to shade the truth, and you’ve heard of other people being taken in. So you kick the tyres, look under the hood, go for a test drive, ask questions. You might bring along a mechanically inclined friend. You know some scepticism is required and why. If you don’t exercise some minimal scepticism, if you have an absolutely untrammelled gullibility, there’s a price you’ll have to pay later when you find the car is duff.
