A long time ago I had a classroom teacher who introduced us to something called The Parable of the Invisible Gardener. It goes along these lines: two guys stumble across a garden flourishing in the wilderness. One of them is a skeptic and he just thinks it's a lucky find, while the other guy is a "believer" who attributes it to the "invisible gardener."
They devise all sorts of tests to capture evidence for the gardener and these all fail to provide any, but the believer is undeterred and continues to insist that there must obviously be some gardener tending the plot. James Randi, a magician and debunker, refers to such believers as "unsinkable rubber duckies" because their beliefs persist despite lack of evidence.
Without an observable corresponding phenomenon, what exactly is a "belief"?
Thursday, December 11, 2008
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