A Mustard Seed
By knowing one tiny technique, a technique the size of a mustard seed, you can come to learn mountains of truth.
What is this mustard seed? It is simply:
Only believe in those things that can be demonstrated with evidence.
This one kernel of behavior will build, grow, and compound to allow those that follow this method to come to know everything in the universe. This technique separates the true from the false. Facts selected by this means can be trusted, and added to a trusted collection of knowledge.
This one technique will free you from the tyranny of those who just make stuff up to suit their own agenda or to spread misinformation. Demand a demonstration and see it yourself, and it become much much harder to fool you or give you false knowledge.
This is the core of all science: ignore your intuition and preconceptions, and believe only those things that can be demonstrated. The scientific community works because of this one paramount principle.
It truly is the mustard seed that can move mountains.
Appendix / Extras
Why Mustard? In ancient times, the metaphor of a mustard seed was used to mean something tiny. It was not actually the smallest seed known at the time, but it is a very small seed, and was probably the smallest seed with which most people would be commonly familiar.
Why Mountains? Similarly the mountain is used a metaphor for things that were very large. The sun of course is larger, but it is far away, while you can get quite close to a mountain. In human existence the mountain is the largest thing you can come directly in contact with (other than the entire world).
I am borrowing from these metaphors openly, to find a way to express the one key kernel of truth. Science builds knowledge layer by layer, and each layer needs to be firm, to support the layers above it. The only way to assure that a layer is firm, is to demand evidence. Any scientific claim should be demonstrable. Any demonstration contrary to a scientific theory is good enough to throw that theory out.
Origin: Descartes is often credited with promoting this concept. It is certainly true that this was an important part of his accomplishments. But further research shows that William of Ockham promoted the concept 150 years earlier. William of Ockham was a scholar in the Catholic Church, and he was excommunicated at one point, his books and teaching banned by the church, which made it extremely difficult to spread his ideas. We are thankful then, that Descartes took up the charge, and invented science.
Do we always demand evidence? Of course, you can’t demand evidence directly on every fact you learn, that is not what I mean. There are too many facts. The benefit of the mustard seed is commutative: a person who demands evidence can accept knowledge from others who demand evidence. The idea is that the mustard seed is accepted by a community, and that community can build a foundation of literature based on demonstration of evidence. That literature can be trusted by the reader, because the author has a commitment to evidence. Scientific papers are careful to document the evidence that they have, however they still reference other scientific papers and trust that they are correct because of the commitment to the mustard seed. The effects compound into the community, into the literature, and allows for a trustworthy body of knowledge to be built.
Is this faith? Some will say that this trust in the other scientists amounts to “faith” in their commitment to the method. The words trust and faith are very similar, but the different is important. Trust in a situation is some belief which is based on some — maybe only a little — evidence that the situation is true. Faith in a situation does not need any evidence. So trust is based on some past behavior, while faith need not be. I have seen in hundreds of scientific papers a clear commitment to only believing things based on evidence. Some papers are bad, I am sure, but my trust in the average paper is justified. It is not blind faith that compels me to believe an average scientific paper. So it is not accurate to say I must have “faith” in scientists. They are trustworthy.
Biblical Background
In Matthew 17:20, Jesus says: “If you have the faith of a mustard seed, you can you can say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you.“
This passage connotes that faith is powerful, but notice how specific it is about the kinds of powerful things you can do. Faith is supposed to turn your voice in a magical ability to violate the laws of physics. That is silly. You would think that there would be at least one person in history — maybe Saint Peter himself — with this much faith. The temptation to go tell a mountain to move itself would be too great to pass up. I mean, what a spectacle that would be! It would be incredibly useful in places where the mountains make it difficult to travel. Imagine a nice flat valley allowing travel from Italy to Germany.
It could be a metaphor for “doing great things” but then why be so specific about the voice command and the mount trotting out of the way? It might just say something like “the greatest things that people can do” and mean something like faith being a means to bind people together into a common goal, and allow for pyramids to be built, or the California desert to be transformed into an agricultural wonder. If the meaning is that faith is the critical ingredient for people to do things collectively, then it is pretty poorly written.
It could also mean that you personally do not have enough faith. Apologists are likely to use this as a guilt message telling you that your faith is lacking. Get off your lazy sofa and get your act in order — all you need is a mustard seed worth of faith. It is powerful stuff. Maybe the most faithful person has only a poppy seed worth?
A Christian friend responded that I had not really considered what the bible was saying.
Your analysis of Matthew 17:20 reveals some limitations of science. Because of course you are taking the words as they are, brute facts, with no need of interpretation. Modern scholars (Christian and not) who embrace the scientific method would tell you you are portraying Jesus’ words terribly incorrectly. They would tell you that Jesus, as recorded in the gospels, spoke like Jewish teachers of the 1st century. They used hyperbole. Like, “in order to be my disciple you must hate your father and mother.” Jesus was not telling his people to deny the fifth commandment. He was giving them a set of priorities. This is pretty obvious to people who get acquainted with this world. My point about this revealing some weaknesses of an ’empiricist only or primarily’ epistemology is that somehow we have to decide what facts are important, what facts mean, and what questions to even ask. That doesn’t come from science. That comes from our values and biases. It comes from our faith commitments. You seem to have antipathy to religion, so you interpret the data to fit your assumptions.
If you use the Bible, you should want it to be understood in the best way possible. That verse from Hebrews 11 (“Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”) can be used to support blind faith. But again, in context, the chapter is about ‘be like these heroes of the faith’ who all had good reasons and previous experiences of God. And inherent in the application, ‘be like them’, is the argument that “here is a ton of evidence of how a faith-filled life turns out: See what happened to these people? You don’t have to be afraid!”
I do appreciate the corrections, and hope all of you know I am not a biblical scholar at any level. Yes it is true that took some liberties and interpreted the words in a needlessly literal way. I hope I will be excused because this post is not really about the bible so I did a cursory job. Instead, I am trying to make the post about this one key concept at the core of science. However, I did steal the idea from the bible, so I mention it in case there are some not familiar with it.
Closing
To me, faith is powerless. It is make-believe, literally.
If you look at the world around you, the scientific revolution is the single most powerful movement in human history. More has been discovered in the last 100 years than in all history before that. THAT is true power. And the core concept in science is simply to believe only in things that can be demonstrated. Using this technique, you can build knowledge upon knowledge, and given enough time, there is nothing is that is impossible to know.
THAT truly is the mustard seed that can move mountains.