So, my S.O. and I just saw the new Sherlock Holmes movie yesterday. Must say I liked it quite a lot, despite (or perhaps because) of its unconventional take on the characters and presentation. In any case, one theme in the film was relevant to religion, science, and epistemology that I found quite heartening coming from a popular Hollywood film:
***SPOILER ALERT***
So the Big Bad's master plan was to use black magic to eliminate his adversaries, come back from death, and take over Parliament (and then the world!!!). The first half of the movie presents this whole magic thing as a plausible or even likely explanation for the events in the film, but slowly and surely Holmes figures out how all the effects were achieved using science and technology craftily and surreptitiously and then leaves no doubt (rather than copping out like most Hollywood films would and leaving it ambiguous) by actually going through each instance of "magic" and specifically debunking it onscreen.
This whole thing is lampshaded by a conversation between Holmes and Watson wherein Watson holds the Idiot Ball for about five minutes (the only time in the film he really does at all) by theorizing that the supernatural explanation is plausible. Holmes replies that he has no data, and so theorizing is a silly undertaking, noting that theorizing without data introduces the temptation to twist future data to fit your theory, rather than letting the data indicate a theory on its own.
Score one for Hollywood.
