If you were born knowing everything, you need never change your mind about anything.
If you were born knowing nothing, you must learn and constantly check what you think against reality, and over time, you will learn to be less wrong.
Here is the Patron Saint of Certainty and Rigidity, Inspector Javert, singing to The Eternal Heavens, in Les Miserables.
Stars
In your multitudes
Scarce to be counted
Filling the darkness
With order and light
You are the sentinels
Silent and sure
Keeping watch in the night
Keeping watch in the night
You know your place in the sky
You hold your course and your aim
And each in your season
Returns and returns
And is always the same
And if you fall as Lucifer fell
You fall in flame!
He is certain because Heaven is unchanging and eternal.
This is merely wrong.
The stars do change. I have seen it myself.
On August 29, 1975, a nova appeared in the constellation Cygnus. I knew well what Cygnus looked like since it is high overhead in Hawaii in the summer. I went outside and looked, and there it was, a new second magnitude star, as bright as any of the others in Cygnus. I took the skychart out from my telescope box, and yep, there was no star marked at that location on the chart. Over the next few days, it faded rapidly and disappeared.
Here is a photo of a part of Cygnus before and during the appearance of Nova Cygni 1975.
So much for The Eternal Heavens.
Anyone who asserts that the Heavens do not change is simply lying or can't be bothered to look.
If you photograph Antares, the bright red star in Scorpius, when you are young, and then photograph it again in your old age and compare the photographs, Antares will be seen to have moved.
If you photograph Polaris, the North Star, when you are young, and then photograph it again in your old age and compare the photographs, Polaris will be seen to have moved closer to the celestial pole.
The constellations in the sky in winter now were, 10,000 years ago, summer constellations.
Take a look at this page. It shows the stars of the Big Dipper now. Click on the radio button for "Animation "(100,000 Years)" on the right and you will see how the stars move all over the place.
http://astronexus.com/node/81
The Sun is a variable star. It has sunspots and is not spherical. It is neither constant nor perfect in any way.
The Earth goes around the Sun. This takes one year.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=940DE6DD143BF936A15753C1A96E948260
Typical of the kind of nonsense humans are capable of... if only it ended with factually challenged ideas about the sky...
Then, of course, some of this behavior falls into the category of
"Trying to kill your own demons in other people".
Jorge said, "Hmm, I thought the Patron Saint of Rigidity was William F. Buckley Jr.".
No, I replied. Buckley is the Patron Saint of The Argument from Personal Ignorance and the Patron Saint of The Argument from Personal Incredulity (otherwise known as I-don't-know-anything-about-neurobiology- but-boy-do-I-have-opinions-about-it and if-I-don't-like-it-it's-not-true modes of certainty).
At least Javert realized in the end that he was wrong. He could have saved himself, and many others, a lot of trouble.
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