|
hatten_jc
New Member
Sweden
44 Posts |
 Posted - 12/19/2001 : 08:51:19 [Permalink]
|
Great absolutly great :)
quote:
Dear Juliet,
Now that you are ten, I want to write to you about something that is
important to me. Have you ever wondered how we know the things that we know?
How do we know, for instance, that the stars, which look like tiny pinpricks
in the sky, are really huge balls of fire like the sun and are very far
away? And how do we know that Earth is a smaller ball whirling round one of
those stars, the sun?
The answer to these questions is "evidence." Sometimes evidence means
actually seeing ( or hearing, feeling, smelling..... ) that something is
true. Astronauts have travelled far enough from earth to see with their own
eyes that it is round. Sometimes our eyes need help. The "evening star"
looks like a bright twinkle in the sky, but with a telescope, you can see
that it is a beautiful ball - the planet we call Venus. Something that you
learn by direct seeing ( or hearing or feeling..... ) is called an
observation.
Often, evidence isn't just an observation on its own, but observation always
lies at the back of it. If there's been a murder, often nobody (except the
murderer and the victim!) actually observed it. But detectives can gather
together lots or other observations which may all point toward a particular
suspect. If a person's fingerprints match those found on a dagger, this is
evidence that he touched it. It doesn't prove that he did the murder, but it
can help when it's joined up with lots of other evidence. Sometimes a
detective can think about a whole lot of observations and suddenly realise
that they fall into place and make sense if so-and-so did the murder.
Scientists - the specialists in discovering what is true about the world and
the universe - often work like detectives. They make a guess ( called a
hypothesis ) about what might be true. They then say to themselves: If that
were really true, we ought to see so-and-so. This is called a prediction.
For example, if the world is really round, we can predict that a traveller,
going on and on in the same direction, should eventually find himself back
where he started.When a doctor says that you have the measles, he doesn't
take one look at you and see measles. His first look gives him a hypothesis
that you may have measles. Then he says to himself: If she has measles I
ought to see...... Then he runs through the list of predictions and tests
them with his eyes ( have you got spots? ); hands ( is your forehead hot? );
and ears ( does your chest wheeze in a measly way? ). Only then does he make
his decision and say, " I diagnose that the child has measles. " Sometimes
doctors need to do other tests like blood tests or X-Rays, which help their
eyes, hands, and ears to make observations.
The way scientists use evidence to learn about the world is much cleverer
and more complicated than I can say in a short letter. But now I want to
move on from evidence, which is a good reason for believing something , and
warn you against three bad reasons for believing anything. They are called
"tradition," "authority," and "revelation."
First, tradition. A few months ago, I went on television to have a
discussion with about fifty children. These children were invited because
they had been brought up in lots of different religions. Some had been
brought up as Christians, others as Jews, Muslims, Hindus, or Sikhs. The man
with the microphone went from child to child, asking them what they
believed. What they said shows up exactly what I mean by "tradition." Their
beliefs turned out to have no connection with evidence. They just trotted
out the beliefs of their parents and grandparents which, in turn, were not
based upon evidence either. They said things like: "We Hindus believe so and
so"; "We Muslims believe such and such"; "We Christians believe something
else."
Of course, since they all believed different things, they couldn't all be
right. The man with the microphone seemed to think this quite right and
proper, and he didn't even try to get them to argue out their differences
with each other. But that isn't the point I want to make for the moment. I
simply want to ask where their beliefs come from. They came from tradition.
Tradition means beliefs handed down from grandparent to parent to child, and
so on. Or from books handed down through the centuries. Traditional beliefs
often start from almost nothing; perhaps somebody just makes them up
originally, like the stories about Thor and Zeus. But after they've been
handed down over some centuries, the mere fact that they are so old makes
them seem special. People believe things simply because people have believed
the same thing over the centuries. That's tradition.
The trouble with tradition is that, no matter how long ago a story was made
up, it is still exactly as true or untrue as the original story was. If you
make up a story that isn't true, handing it down over a number of centuries
doesn't make it any truer!
Most people in England have been baptised into the Church of England, but
this is only one of the branches of the Christian religion. There are other
branches such as Russian Orthodox, the Roman Catholic, and the Methodist
churches. They all believe different things. The Jewish religion and the
Muslim religion are a bit more different still; and there are different
kinds of Jews and of Muslims. People who believe even slightly different
things from each other go to war over their disagreements. So you might
think that they must have some pretty good reasons - evidence - for
believing what they believe. But actually, their different beliefs are
entirely due to different traditions.
Let's talk about one particular tradition. Roman Catholics believe that
Mary, the mother of Jesus, was so special that she didn't die but was lifted
bodily in to Heaven. Other Christian traditions disagree, saying that Mary
did die like anybody else. These other religions don't talk about much and,
unlike Roman Catholics, they don't call her the "Queen of Heaven." The
tradition that Mary's body was lifted into Heaven is not an old one. The
bible says nothing on how she died; in fact, the poor woman is scarcely
mentioned in the Bible at all. The belief that her body was lifted into
Heaven wasn't invented until about six centuries after Jesus' time. At
first, it was just made up, in the same way as any story like "Snow White"
was made up. But, over the centuries, it grew into a tradition and people
started to take it seriously simply because the story had been handed down
over so many generations. The older the tradition became, the more people
took it seriously. It finally was written down as and official Roman
Catholic belief only very recently, in 1950, when I was the age you are now.
But the story was no more true in 1950 than it was when it was first
invented six hundred years after Mary's death.
I'll come back to tradition at the end of my letter, and look at it in
another way. But first, I must deal with the two other bad reasons for
believing in anything: authority and revelation.
Authority, as a reason for believing something, means believing in it
because you are told to believe it by somebody important. In the Roman
Catholic Church, the pope is the most important person, and people believe
he must be right just because he is the pope. In one branch of the Muslim
religion, the important people are the old men with beards called
ayatollahs. Lots of Muslims in this country are prepared to commit murder,
purely because the ayatollahs in a faraway country tell them to.
When I say that it wa |
 |
|
Topic Locked
