Integrity: A Family Value

I’m not looking for a way to make what I think fit the data. The data determine what I know. Reason determines how I think. I am not prejudiced by any unsubstantiated “favorite ideas” or beliefs that others use to guide their research. I know that reason is the only path to the truth in existence.

[My epistemology.]

This is what I teach my children.

I reject all faiths on principle. It is immoral for a man to give up his rational mind. The true lovers of humanity are not the people of faith who say that man is nothing, that man can know nothing, that morality is something commanded from above, that men are born sinners, that self-sacrifice is a virtue. The true lovers of humanity believe in man, believe that man must be free, believe in man’s ability to rule his own destiny by the only method suitable to man: science [i.e. rational thinking].

All faiths are irrational in that they ask man to believe that which cannot be proven. Every faith known to man was invented by ancient people who knew far less about “everything” than we know today. Yet, despite all of the achievements of man through science since Colonial times and the creation of the first free society in the history of the world, most Americans still view faith in some un-provable, un-testable god as a virtue. I do not.

People of faith claim to have "special knowledge" about life before and after death [among other things]. When you ask them how they know these things or how the laws of physics change to satisfy their wishes, they say only their god knows these things, and he has told us all we need to know. They say their holy book has all of the answers and that it’s a sin to ask these questions. They threaten me with hell for all eternity, never realizing that eternity is life on Earth and that hell is life without freedom.

I answer to no authority higher than the truth. I have something far more valid than faith to guide me. I have integrity. Integrity is a profound respect for the truth, like it or not. It is a top-tier family value.

I trust the scientific method and the validity of peer review and replication. Through the scientific method, only, man may define reality: data must be collected and evaluated; data must be tested and tests must be replicated; conclusions about what is and what isn't may be drawn, finally. Any conclusion not consistently supported by the data remains a hypothesis.

Nothing exists that cannot be known to man while he lives. As our tools improve, so too does the data, so too does “what I know.”

A man of faith hopes [as virtually all men always have] to live forever, but he ignores the means by which that dream will one day become reality: science.