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Old October 2nd 18, 02:01 PM posted to sci.astro.amateur
Chris L Peterson
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Default Neil DeGrasse Tyson headed down same loony road as Carl Sagan?

On Tue, 02 Oct 2018 09:37:04 +0200, Paul Schlyter
wrote:

Sure. But it's difficult to imagine what we might find supernatural
today. Today we understand most of nature. I doubt Clarke's Law
applies anymore. I don't imagine we could encounter any technology
advanced enough to appear as magic. We now have enough knowledge to
recognize the likely natural law underlying anything we encounter,


You sound like a physicist from the late 1800's. Back then, physics
was believed to be understood almost completely. Only a few minor
details needed to be clarified. However, those "minor details" soon
expanded into relativity and QM, making physics quite different
compared to earlier...


Back then we lacked the knowledge to know what knowledge we lacked.
That doesn't appear to be the case anymore. We have a good
understanding of where the holes in our knowledge are, and we have
good ideas about the sort of things that are likely to fill them. And
we have a much better understanding of the nature of nature, meaning
that I doubt there's anything we could observe that science wouldn't
quickly provide plausible hypotheses for, without anybody feeling the
need to draw on magic or the supernatural. We have a different
worldview today regarding natural law.

Why couldn't an apatheist just as well be a theist? He mcould believe
there might be deities but he doesn't care about them.


Because the word itself refers to atheists.

Og course an apatheist is nonreflective. But being nonreflective is
getting fashionable these days. Consider the increasing number of
people believing in a flat Earth. Or the election of Donald Trump as
the US president.


Yes, lack of reflection is a problem. All rational people are
atheists, because critical thinking always leads to atheism. But not
all atheists are rational, because there are atheists who are such
simply because they were never brainwashed as children. Those
atheists, like lots of other people, may lack critical thinking skills
and therefore easily adopt the same sort of silly ideas that any
irrational people can fall for.