Friday, August 04, 2006

Conclusions first. Questions later.

In science, one of the first steps of the scientific method is to pose a question. You call this a hypothesis and test it to arrive at a conclusion either supporting or refuting your hypothesis.

However, in the religious world, that's not how things work. It seems that over in Wadowice, Poland (the home town of Pope John Paul II) noticed that a statue of the former pope had started sprouting water from its base and immediately concluded it was a divine miracle.

Pilgrims rushed there from all over to collect bottles of the liquid. Why? I have no idea. Magic water must be lucky, or ward of demons, or something.

Sadly for them though, reality got in the way when Mayor Eva Filipiak revealed that the city council had installed a pipe beneath the statue to spurt the water in an effort to make it look prettier.

The moral of this story, is that, sometimes, its better to be a skeptic than to travel half way around the world on a silly assumption just for a bottle of water.

3 comments:

Paul D. said...

Reminds me of being at World Youth Day in Denver when John Paul came to visit. There were people there showing phots of the Virgin Mary. No amount of convincing on my part could get them to realize that these images were simply due the way light was refracting and reflecting in the camera under certain lighting conditions.

A good illustration of how people subjectively pick out the patterns that they want to see.

Anonymous said...

Looks like you had a double post :)

croxis said...

Looks like you had a double post :)