Tuesday - August 07, 2007

Assumptions

When we look at a fact, it is done through a set of base assumptions that we already have.  For example, when we look at the grand canyon, we see the work of millions of years of erosion working its way through a mile of rock.  Carving and pulling the canyon deeper and deeper each year.  I learned this in school and it seemed intuitive.  After all, I knew rocks were “hard” and it would take a very long time to erode one away.

Or would it?

When Mount St. Helens erupted on May 18^th, 1980, there was a massive deposit of pumice on the north fork of the Toutle river.  Within five days a pit had developed in the pumice that was over 100 feet deep, with dendritic patterns of gullies and rills, mimicking what we would normally classify as thousands of years of erosion.

On March 19^th, 1982, an explosive eruption of Mount St Helens melted a thick snowpack in a crater, creating a massive mudflow north of the mountain.  This mudflow cut into the pumice dam on the Toutle River, creating a new drainage pattern.  By August, 1984, this drainage has cut over 100 feet of rock into what is now called the “Little Grand Canyon”

So how long did it take to form “the” Grand Canyon?

We don’t know. 

You see, what we can observe is what is real today.  When we look at the canyon, we have a set of facts that we can observe, but they all exist today.  People talk about “looking back in time” with the fossil record, but the fossils exist in time today.  We can only guess about what happened to them to cause them to be here today and that guess is based on our pre-existing base assumptions.

I told you that so I could tell you this.

This is not a discussion over young earth vs. old earth or creationism vs. evolution (we’ll have that discussion at another time), but rather about the military.

I never got that worked up about the Abu Graib “torture” story, or the Haiditha “civilian killings” or more recently, the Scott Beauchamp story.  The reason is that my base assumptions are that the military are generally doing the right thing.  I assume that when they cleared that area in Haiditha, there was a darn good reason for it.  I don’t dispute that civilians got killed, but I take great exception to the charge that they were killed deliberately.  If they were using extraordinary techniques in the Abu Graib prison to get information that was crucial to saving our guy’s lives, my base assumption is that it was a good thing to do.

So Scott Beauchamp writes a story for the New Republic saying that our guys are committing all kinds of atrocities and the Left goes ape.  Their base assumption is that the military men and women are baby killers and this story simply proves it.  Mine, on the other hand, is that the MSM are generally liars, especially when it comes to war reporting, so I distrust everything I read at first.

Recognizing that your assumptions drive your view of facts in that your mind fills in the history automatically is a great bit of information.  It’s helpful for me to check my reactions to things as well as to gauge the reactions of those with whom I disagree.

Posted by Drew458     on 08/07/2007 at 10:10 AM   
Filed Under: • Media-Bias • Terrorists • War-Stories •  
• Comments (5) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

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