On scepticism

On scepticism

What do you think will be happening next in above’s marvellous depiction of a butterfly hunter by Carl Spitzweg (1808 – 1885)? 

Obviously, the dear fellow is absolutely flabbergasted and ill-prepared to catch one of these amazingly large creatures before him on his trip into the tropics, far away from home, back in Biedermeier Germany. 

Will he just surrender into a feeling of absolute amazement over the impredictability and the ever so much bigger, more complex and mind-boggeling nature of our world – like a poet? 

Will he try – as a practical man – to catch one of them, maybe with the help of the handy white gown, he is wearing? 

Or will he start to smash whatever does not fit into his tiny butterfly net with its rear end, the little psychopath?

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Sadly, nowaday’s self-proclaimed “sceptics” seem to go for the third option, whilst encountering homeopathy, in what could hardly be called the “thinking man’s choice”.

In a manner, that reminds us of the Pope’s reaction to Galileo Galilei’s discovery that the sun, and not the earth, is actually in the center of your solar system, and that it is our planet that turns around the sun, and not the whole universe that turns around ourselves, many scientists nowadays think, that what cannot be according to our current understanding, shall not be true. Giving thus more weight to their beliefs and their “faith”, rather than to other people’s observations.