I came across a great quote on the Evolving Thoughts blog that sums up in a single sentence what I’ve been trying to get across to students for a long time in a less pithy and far wordier fashion. Here’s the quote:
“you are entitled to your opinions, but you are not entitled to your own
facts”
That just puts it so well – and fits well with what I’ve said about Hebrews 11:1. It says that faith is the evidence of things not seen – it does not say that faith allows one to pretend evidence doesn’t exist. That is a big difference. What distinguishes the often diverse hypotheses of mainstream science and scholarship from fundamentalism and other fringe movements is an awareness that one has to do justice to the evidence, and not simply rewrite history to suit one’s presuppositions. This is not to say that even among credible scholars our presuppositions don’t get in the way, and clearly it is often possible to interpret evidence in more than one way. But it is the desire to do justice to the available data that separates scholarship from wishful thinking and science from pseudo-science.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In