This afternoon I listened to an interview with some scientists and one vital message came through. Scientists are the biggest sceptics of the lot. A good scientist is always trying to disprove his own hypothesis or results. He wants to be the one to disprove his own thesis rather than having the embarrassment of someone else doing it. A story was told of an astronomer who gave a public lecture before hundreds of his peers explaining not how he had discovered planets around other suns but all the mistakes that led him to realize he had discovered nothing: he was given a standing ovation.
Interviewer: I don’t know if many theologians do that.
I have never heard a scientist warn a layperson against being “too sceptical” though I have heard the warning often from theologian-historians. Continue reading “Is there a sceptic among the theologians?”