Dave believes dogs are spies from the planet Venus. He views any canine with great suspicion, for he believes they are here from Venus to do reconnaissance work. Dogs, Dave supposes, secretly send their reports back to Venus, where the rest of their fiendishly cunning alien species are meticulously planning their invasion of the earth. Their spaceships will shortly arrive from Venus to enslave the human race and take over the world. Unsurprisingly, Dave\u2019s friends think he has a screw loose and try to convince him that dogs are comparatively benign pets, not cunning alien spies. Here\u2019s a typical example of how their conversations with Dave go:<\/p>\n
DAVE: It\u2019s only a matter of weeks now! The spaceships willarrive and then you\u2019ll wish you\u2019d listened to me. We mustact now\u2014let the government know!
MARY: Look, Dave, dogs are pretty obviously not space invaders, they\u2019re just dumb pets. Dogs can\u2019t even speak, for goodness sake, let alone communicate with Venus!
DAVE: They can speak\u2014they just choose to hide their linguistic ability from us. They wait till we leave the roomqbefore they talk to each other.
PETE: But Venus is a dead planet, Dave. It\u2019s horrifically hotqand swathed in clouds of acid. Nothing could live there, certainly not a dog!
DAVE: Dogs don\u2019t live on the surface of Venus, you fool\u2014they live below, in deep underground bunkers.
MARY: But then how do earth-bound dogs communicate with their allies on Venus? I\u2019ve got a dog, and I\u2019ve never found an alien transmitter hidden in his basket.
DAVE: They don\u2019t use technology we can observe. Their transmitters are hidden inside their brains!
MARY: But Pete is a vet, and he\u2019s X-rayed several dog\u2019s heads, and he\u2019s never found anything in there!
PETE: In fact, I once chopped up a dog\u2019s brain in veterinary school\u2014let me assure you, Dave, there was no transmitter in there!
DAVE: You\u2019re assuming their transmitters would be recognizable as such. They are actually made of organic material indistinguishable from brain stuff. That\u2019s why they
don\u2019t show up on X-rays. This is advanced alien technology, remember\u2014of course we cannot detect it!
MARY: But we don\u2019t detect any weird signals being directed
at Venus from the earth.
DAVE: Of course, we don\u2019t\u2014like I said, remember, this is advanced alien technology beyond our limited understanding!
PETE: How do dogs fly spaceships? They don\u2019t even have hands. So they can\u2019t hold things like steering wheels and joysticks.
DAVE: Really, Pete. Think about it. You are assuming that their spacecraft will be designed to be operated by human hands. Obviously they won\u2019t. They\u2019ll be designed to be maneuvered by a dog\u2019s limbs, mouth, tongue, and so on.<\/p>\n
You can see how this conversation might continue ad nauseum.Mary and Pete can keep coming up with evidence against Dave\u2019s belief that dogs are Venusian spies. But, given sufficient ingenuity,Dave can always salvage his core theory. He can continually adjust and develop it so that it continues to \u201cfit\u201d the evidence.<\/p>\n
CONFIRMATION\u2014THE \u201cFIT\u201d MODEL<\/p>\n
Clearly, Dave\u2019s theory about dogs is not well confirmed by the available evidence. The first moral we can extract from this example is that, whatever is required in order for a theory to be well confirmed, rather more is required than achieving mere consistency with that evidence.<\/p>\n
As Dave illustrates, any belief, no matter how ludicrous, can be made consistent with the available evidence, given a little patience and ingenuity. Believe that the earth is flat, that the moon is made of cheese, that the World Trade Center was brought down by the US government, or that George W. Bush is really Elvis Presley in disguise? All these theories can be endlessly adjusted and developed so that they remain consistent with the available evidence. Yet they are obviously not well confirmed. The claim that Young Earth Creationism is at least as well confirmed as its scientific rivals relies crucially on what we might call the \u201cfit\u201d model of confirmation. According to the \u201cfit\u201d
model, confirmation is all about \u201cfitting\u201d the evidence. But more is required for genuine confirmation than mere \u201cfit,\u201d which any theory, no matter how absurd, can in principle achieve.<\/p>\n
THIS IS AN EXTRACT FROM BELIEVING BULLSHIT<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Dave believes dogs are spies from the planet Venus. He views any canine with great suspicion, for he believes they are here from Venus to do reconnaissance work. Dogs, Dave supposes, secretly send their reports back to Venus, where the rest of their fiendishly cunning alien species are meticulously planning their invasion of the earth. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-298","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-creationism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/298","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=298"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/298\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=298"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=298"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=298"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}