Origin of the Specious
  • Dan Davies Brackett
    July 2, 2010

    Thalience!

  • Divine Right
    July 2, 2010

    The next big thing!

  • Johnny Boy
    July 2, 2010

    The manifest destiny of nothing in particular.

  • Anonymous
    July 2, 2010

    And whenever hipsters speak, clouds appear at the very mention of the word science.

  • Ailu
    July 2, 2010

    I feel soooo identified with cat.
    But then, Carl Marx said it too.

  • Ailu
    July 2, 2010

    Oh I had not read the discussion in the previous comic. Ok, I´m south-american, so being marxist is for me still an option. Uija!

  • Jacob Adam
    July 2, 2010

    That is not a pipe.

  • Ben
    July 2, 2010

    In order for science to crumble, it must first become religion.

  • Q. Lickit
    July 2, 2010

    Hah! Only the most well-read of World-dwellers can possibly distinguish between (for instance) Lutheranism and its parent brand on face value (and
    it’s the same with Crosstianity and its fathers, and other traducions). And in the same way, the dawn of science was self-described in the words that were available: like a light appearing where light was wanted… the Enlightenment. And, buy Good, there’s a difference, and it’s a fundamental one (we’re told, and I be-LEAVE, of course, like all reasonable people do), but no one can quite describe what it actually tastes like.

  • Nny
    July 2, 2010

    I always felt truth is truth. religion, science, proof or not, We either landed on the moon or we didnt. unless it affects my property taxes, though, i dont care.

  • Nny
    July 2, 2010

    but science is the search for truth anyway…but then isnt religion? why the conflict? I hate thinking about this. which is why iv convinced myself i dont care. ok im lying.

  • Niha
    July 2, 2010

    I like Science, but if Thalience comes from Thalia… Can I have a bit of both?
    By the way, great strip.

  • walter
    July 2, 2010

    Well… anything that replaces science has to at least be science as well.

  • sfe
    July 2, 2010

    My belief is that… (re @Ben’s comment) -> BIOPSYCHOLOGY is a church (with tools such as publication bias, a necessary prop, to support its false sense of universality); CBT (& other things COGNITIVE) its -spin off- denomination… PSYCHOANALYSIS a sect (hurrah! for that -> more art please?)… and HUMANISTIC PSYCHOLOGY is the cult, where all the nihilists go to hang and hide from a cruel world that violently pushes to rule out a multitude of meanings (in accordance with a p-value of <0.05, for example)
    I think I worship @ the altar of Freud (or maybe, Dali… I'm a fickle follower)

  • Poweronoff
    July 3, 2010

    Post-Science? Über-Science? Quantum Science? Fuzzy Science?

  • Erika
    July 3, 2010

    You don’t need anything to explain the world’s existence. You can just say “It was always here.” Isn’t that the explanation people have for the existence of God?

  • Kazuhiro
    July 3, 2010

    I don’t like this. Girl’s denouncement of science (and by extension, reason) smacks of creationists who say that science is a religion.

    Or maybe Girl is just disillusioned about the chances of the truths of our time being vindicated by history, given the example of religion-as-truth.

  • Nny
    July 3, 2010

    @Kazuhiro: Girl’s not denouncing anything. its just a reflection of the viewpoint of people “who grew up with religion as the sole explanation for the workings of the world”
    her statements are neither condemning, condoning, or praising.
    and if you look at history, theres nothing wrong with “religion” or “science.” its the boneheaded people in authority who oppress alternative viewpoints and refuse to bend or adapt who are the problem. It doesnt matter what you believe when the earth DOES revolve around the sun.

  • Nny
    July 3, 2010

    maybe its cuz i just woke up but does anyone else feel like my last post doesnt make sense? i wish i could delete it. oh well.

    i rented The Escapist. pretty good movie. Toy Story 3 was also excellent.

  • Kazuhiro
    July 3, 2010

    I cried at the end of Toy Story 3.

  • Craig!
    July 3, 2010

    Science is already being replaced.
    The culprit? Reality by consensus. What everybody else says goes.
    Either that or solipsism, strengthened by the already-mentioned phenomena of blogs and the like making everybodys opinions seem important.

  • MrLapin
    July 4, 2010

    Very perceptiv, Craig, but what you describe is another religion. Religion exalts belief. Science seeks knowledge. Belief and knowledge are mutually exclusive.

  • David Thomsen
    July 4, 2010

    Belief and knowledge are not mutually exclusive. Belief is what you believe it is.

    (That is my entire counter-argument.)

    Toy Story 3 was great. There was this amazing, powerful gravity about the scene with the thing that does the whatsit. This is why I love Pixar… the combination of absurdity with spectacle on a monumental scale.

  • Melen
    July 4, 2010

    My friend shared the link of your website unfortunately my computer was working funny then.

    After reading articles on why clean windows registry. I finally figured out that I have to install a registry cleaner. I ran the registry cleaner and in less than a 2 minutes my computer is up and running again properly.

  • Alice. B.
    July 4, 2010

    Windows Registry should be groomed frequently and thoroughly, using as much product as necessary. I have mine cleaned up to three or four times an hour.

    But this has nothing to do with Science and in particular Its Noodley Godness, which I believe is the topic of this issue of Pipe and Girl.

  • DoubleW
    July 4, 2010

    First there is Science (hypothesis leading to controlled experiment), then there is Google Science (don’t bother with control, just gather as much data as you can with supercomputers and search for correlations). At least that’s what Wired is telling me.

  • Zack
    July 5, 2010

    Both science and religion are driven by motive, whether sociological or personal.

    To get the next big thing, change the principle that creates motive in a human being. But would that be a human being any longer? On that note, why place humanity on a pedestal? Are we still so mired in development that we need to cling to it?

    When the question mark dies we will be a different species.

  • BenK
    July 5, 2010

    Kazuhiro: you don’t like your religion being attacked, eh? Or even revealed as a religion…

    How can belief and knowledge be independent? Even if something is a ‘fact’ you still must believe it to act on it; knowledge is a belief about the world.

  • Donahue
    July 5, 2010

    According to Zizek, ecology will replace religion. Science will probably be replaced with some kind of reality show.

  • Nny
    July 5, 2010

    @Donahue: holy crap man! WERE THERE NOW!!! i said i didnt know what a carbon footprint was, i was almost burned on a post made of 80% post-consumer product

  • Kazuhiro
    July 6, 2010

    Again why do you have ‘fact’ in quotation marks like that? Is science not accurate in describing our world? And at any rate, I believe that atheism is a default. Someone has to convince you of, say, Islam; you’d never think of it without being told.

    I wouldn’t quite say that science is my religion because I’m an atheist, but maybe it’s true enough. My religion at least is one of those that doesn’t require telling science it can screw itself.

  • Nny
    July 6, 2010

    not all ‘facts’ are fact.

  • Teddy
    July 6, 2010

    @Melen are you spamming the Cat and Girl comments? That’s incredibly strange…

  • foraz
    July 6, 2010

    Trying too hard again :-\

  • athom
    July 6, 2010

    There is a lot of psuedo scientific dogma and a lot of psuedo religious dogma and if you do anything more than choose sides and start arguing you’ll see through it all, and have healthy respect for the underpinnings of both. Since they are not actually opposed but science has grown out of religion, one has to wonder what will come of the project of ‘science’ — which could be called a christian project begun 350 years ago but really has roots all over the world, deeply related to the evolution of monotheistic religions and civilizations.

    I’m sure there are people who would say that science does not ‘prove’ things, it’s a problematic word like ‘belief’, but simply gathers evidence and provides mechanical theories which support each other.

  • M.T. Ismism
    July 7, 2010

    Seriously, the underpinnings of the implicit assumption that cause,
    by definition, must lead to effect, have become questionable, and not
    only because of the continuing productivity of statistical microphysics. It’s just as if some unknown person long ago said (or perhaps wrote): “well, everything leads toward the Reunion of Cheeses with Its Noodly Goodness. So, it is our task as Good Pastafarians to deduce and/or infer the intermediate Seasoning in any particular Dish.”

  • Craig!
    July 7, 2010

    I think the Pastamancers said that.
    Or the Saucerors. It’s easy to confuse them.

  • Kazuhiro
    July 8, 2010

    Biased research funded by environmentalists is still science. It still derives authority based on the fact that its conclusions are supposedly derived from scientific experimentation and/or data gathering.

    Not really a big cultural turnaround.

  • Kazuhiro
    July 8, 2010

    *derives its authority from the fact that

  • athom
    July 8, 2010

    Well you can use logic to prove anything, just obscure and deny your premises.

  • Antsan
    November 10, 2011

    Science is a method, religions are constructs to explain the world. The method of science might one day prove impractical, but I cannot see that coming. But then again that was Girls point, I guess…

  • Golux
    October 14, 2013

    Science is a method that creates constructs called theories that are used to explain the world. It goes one step further and attempts to prove or disprove those theories. Theories that withstand rigorous tests of proof showing they properly describe their premise become laws until extraordinary proof shows otherwise. Religion can say any damn thing and codify it as a construct to explain the world, religion often requires you to take it on faith, science demands that you prove it. Both require belief. And all too many modern atheists wish to deny or much worse, are ignorant of the roots of science.

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