Determining Truth

I once had the opportunity of observing a trial. The trial was between two individuals who had gotten into a fight. According to the witnesses, there had been drinking involved, threats, and fists thrown. I had a chance to talk to the judge afterwards and what he said amazed me. He said that the human mind is unreliable. In his experience, witnesses to crimes frequently do not tell the truth. He came to this conclusion because witnesses to the same incident will often contradict each other. He also said that these errors are generally not made on purpose. The witnesses truly believe what they are telling the judge is the truth but perspective, emotion, faulty memory, and human frailty cause their view on reality to be skewed. It was his job to sift through the testimony and try and determine what the actual truth was.
We human beings decide on what is truth by receiving input from our senses and using our brains to come to logical conclusions. Let's suppose that a adult was knocked on the head and lost all her/his memory so that (s)he had to start determining truth all over again. (S)He picks up a stone and lets go of it and notices that it falls down to the ground. His/Her mind creates a theory that things fall toward the ground. (S)He tries it again and the same thing happens. The theory becomes more solid in her/his mind. After numerous tries, (s)he decides that the truth of the matter is that when something is dropped, it falls toward the ground.
Science decides on truth in much the same way except that there are no facts in science. To be an absolute fact, there has to be zero chance for the theory to be broken. The only way to know for absolute certain that the stone will fall toward the ground every time would be to perform this experiment every time possible. Since we cannot perform experiments infinity times, we cannot say with absolute certainty that it is truth. We call things "facts" when there is an extremely high likelihood of it being true. The only certainty is a reasonable probability in the scientific world. Thus it all comes down to percentages. Determining truth is like a big poker game. If there are extremely high odds for a theory to be true, it is considered truth. It is our job then to calculate the probabilities, taking into account that our senses are fallible and the truth may have to be adjusted if we receive new input.

Rhetoric Overload

Parts of the web are platforms for rhetoric.

The existence of the universe is a puzzle to me and my brain is continually looking for pieces to help me to understand it. There are two major camps when it comes to promoting theories about how we got here, the creationists and the evolutionists. Both sides are evident on the Internet and both sides use much the same tactics and tone. They adamantly submit their ideas and often deride those who belong to the other camp. I get the feeling that these two camps have decided in their minds what they believe and do not easily consider other ideas.

I consider myself a scientist. I am not working in a science field, don't have a PhD., and do not perform experiments. I consider myself a scientist because my mind loves logic. I try to make sense of things and feel vaguely uncomfortable when things don't make sense. I have tried searching for sense in the Big Question on the web but often find discrepancies and illogical statements. In future blogs I will post musings that make sense to me and would greatly welcome logical input. Please, leave the rhetoric at the door when you check in.