Think Carefully before you argue about your beliefs

We tend to hold closely to what we belief is right, sometimes with ill fated consequences.

The physicist Gerhard Robbins whote that "strictly speaking, no hypothesis or theory can ever be proven. It can only be disproven. When we say we believe a theory, what we realy mean is that we are unable to show that the theory is wrong - not that we are able to show, beyond doubt, that the theory is right.

"A scientific theory may stand for years, even centuries, and it may accumulate hundres of bits of corroborating evidence to support it. Yet a theory is always vulnerable, and a single conflicting finding is all that is required to throw away the hypothesis into disarray, and call for a new theory. One can never know when such conflicting evidence will arise. Perhaps it will happen tomorrow, perhaps never. But the history of science is strewn with the ruins of mighty edifices toppled by an accident, or a triviality."

Where scientific theories are porous, what about our own personal judgements and beliefs?