Today in the RichardDawkins.net chat, a user whose name began with Spartan (insert obligatory “300″ reference here) started something of a discussion. Unfortunately, it was a rather one sided discussion; he repeatedly insisted that math and science are nearly useless because they can give only “estimations”. Before going through this with a fine toothed Comb of Ockham, though, it would help to know where he was coming from.

His argument is one typical of “New Agers”, or post – modernists. He insisted that it is absolutely impossible to know anything, in terms which would confuse even the best theologian. This makes a bit of sense at first, because it’s logical. If you want to absolutely prove that something is true in all frames in all situations at all times, you need to be omnipresent (to borrow a term), and able to measure the states of these many, many frames all at once, and at all times. We can’t do this at the moment, so for the time being we have to make due with a lack of absolutes.

Gosh, this is hard. We can’t know anything for sure! Whatever are we to do? Wait a minute. What changed? Absolutely nothing. That’s right – we can go on living without knowing things to 100% certainty. Ninety – nine percent is good enough for me.

His argument might have made a bit of sense if it weren’t more circular than a twelve dimensional hypersphere on LSD. Often, his speech followed the lines of “how do you know that’s why you know what you know? You don’t know you know that, and neither do I, so we don’t know what we know is actually what we know, you know?”. Yes, he actually said that (paraphrased, but the order of the words doesn’t matter much). The problem with what he’s saying is that it doesn’t matter.

Whether or not we “know” anything for sure doesn’t matter for the world we live in. What does matter is figuring out how this world works, how we can improve it, and what to do with it. Filling this world of ours with hours of tripe, while potentially good served with sugar coating, is not the way to go about doing anything useful.

I lost blood today. I suspect my brain is still bleeding. IQ points are seeping out my ears, and various other orifices. Have a very nice day.

Bunnymuffins.