I’ll intervene on this conversation started by S. Joshua Swamidass as my guess is he’s going to mangle terms & then claim mastery over them, as he has done in the past on the topic of ‘methodological naturalism’ (MN). Paul Nelson (of micro-/macro- distinction) has posted here in the past & has done a fine job of staying more neutral, scholarly and welcoming to discussion than most IDists at the DI. It would be welcome for Nelson to clarify, re-iterate or to add any points here that Swamidass might not wish to address at PS, or in case the naive scientism cum MN lobby grows too loud there.
This is one of those topics where in my view Swamidass scores quite low in credibility and coherency (much like I score in biology! = P). This makes sense because he has little training and doesn’t seem to have done much personal reading in philosophy, social sciences or humanities. Paul Nelson, on the other hand, did a PhD in the philosophy of biology. So if Swamidass starts to try to out-philosophize Nelson, things could get hilarious quickly, as they have in the past, e.g. with Jonathan Burke, who discovered predecessors to GA -> GAE that Swamidass missed & had to add at the last minute.
Let’s see if Swamidass is ready to learn if the term ‘methodological naturalism’ is really a sword he wants to fall on or not. So far, it has been. Nelson, as do I, rejects MNism, & not just as a misnomer.
In the highlighted thread, we see Swamidass ask Nelson for clarification on a topic that Swamidass has obviously done a little bit of armchair talk with buddies about, but hasn’t actually got into the main course yet. Swamidass insists, “For the record, I think MN is legitimate, but that debate is a separate issue.”
Swamidass keeps repeating the same clumsy and imprecise language, then insisting there is nothing to debate about it. He continues to use a word duo (M+N) that he says he thinks is ‘wrong,’ yet without making any attempt to get beyond it. Why not? If he has to hear it 20 times before he understands it, then despite his proficiency in biology & computation, that might be what he needs in order to learn in other fields, such as philosophy. MN is not simply ‘legitimate’ or ‘illegitimate;’ it is rather an expression of ideology about the way (natural) science is done, i.e. its methods. That Swamidass doesn’t realise the inherent bias in the way he is framing the conversation explains much about why people communicating about ‘origins’ topics don’t understand each other.
The reasons Swamidass won’t debate are because, 1. He doesn’t have an original place to stand that was not already taken first by others who likely know the field better than he does, 2. Debate for Swamidass seems always to quickly turn into a kind of non-mainline Christian evangelical apologetics, similar to the BioLogos model, at least how he frames his ‘Empty Chair Confessional’ scenario, as if he were the Science Pope. And when you can’t evangelize evangelcalism to your opponent, or claim A&E as your own in front of them, then the game is up, and, 3. He’s trying to promote peace when there is no peace, using inciting arguments (re: MN) & doing so while flying the confessional banner of the very community that has been among the most protesting & agitating & stubborn & backward (consistent biblical literalistic bigotry & anti-science misunderstanding) in the conversation. And yet he hasn’t yet issued a word of apology for even the METHOD he is using, which comes right out of the same fundamentalist-creationist playbook that caused the problems in the first place and which in his own way, he exacerbates even while ‘scientifically’ preaching peace.
Mature catholic and orthodox Abrahamic monotheists have no need for the highly ideological, scientistic ‘peace’ that Swamidass would sell them on the way down the road to further separation of theology/worldview & human life.
“1. Using God as an explanation is disallowed by MN in scientific work.”
Technically speaking, that comes closer to ‘methodological anti-supernaturalism’ (ASN) than to promoting a naturalism-only approach to methods used in natural sciences. The latter would require a positive signification that Joshue doesn’t adequately provide, which is why the DI produces books like “The Nature of Nature.” It is difficult to figure why Joshua doesn’t understand that MASN does not = MN. Yet he keeps repeating it. One could write it down to a kind of narrow thinking required to ‘do biology’ that may make it difficult to explore other fields of thought respectfully and on their own terms, & thus to try to better understand than just dictating standard-fare (most often, but not always, atheism-driven) MN to philosophers.
Anti-supernaturalism is a different position from pro-naturalism. Methodological naturalism is still a type of naturalism. Swamidass can’t seem to come to grips with or allow his own English language to reflect this in his thoughts. So instead he might pause to ask why philosophers, not to mention social scientists and humanities scholars rather widely, reject the ideology that Swamidass thinks he is defending by simply calling it ‘good science’. We don’t want Swamidass’ naturalistic ideology hidden behind the term ‘methodological,’ yet Swamidass insists we must accept it or be negatively counted.
Sorry Swamidass, ideology is not just automatically ‘good science’ because a PhD in biological computation with a medical degree says it is & encourages others on a soapbox to echo him.
2. Wrong based on answer to 1.
“3. The idea was to discuss an intelligent designer rather than God, design rather than creation, and remove references to Scripture. In fact this was all an attempt to abide by MN.” – Swamidass
How can Swamidass get this so wrong? Is it because he is fixated on MN as a personal ideology he holds as a natural scientist? I have asked Joshua in the past to clearly articulate what a non-naturalist natural scientist looks like & he has avoided answering as if a plague were chasing him. In other words, in his ideological incoherence, he claims both to reject naturalism & accept naturalism at the same time. And now having been caught doing this, doesn’t wish for it to be pointed out. It would be better if Swamidass could learn his error openly & move forward with a clearer message. I believe Paul Nelson could help him do this.
First, it’s an Intelligent Designer, capitalized, if one has a proper sense of Divine Names. C’mon, Paul, don’t just peter out on this – take it head-on! Yes, the DI won’t talk about the Intelligent Designer as part of the ‘theory,’ which is rather minimalist in the end anyway, definitely not a ‘design revolution’. IDism in short: information, therefore mind & therefore a better chance of divine Creation than according to an atheist worldview. Apologetics. Yet Swamidass doesn’t seem to realize how using & promoting the ideology of MN, actually furthers the atheism he somewhat vaguely claims he is against. And the problem is that he can’t just up his science-talk in giving an answer to this because it is not a ‘strictly scientific’ observation or problem he is facing. Pushing harder the wrong way isn’t a good choice. So, when Swamidass gets off his high Science horse, we may actually be able to have a better conversation that takes the ideology of MN more seriously than Swamidass currently does, perhaps just because he can’t see the other side.
4. Facepalm.
“5. Consequently there has been a shift in ID. Rather than work within MN, more and more ID proponents want to get rid of MN in questions of origins.”
No, IDists have been consistently anti-MN since the beginning of the Movement. I’ve been following it since @2002. “In questions of origins,” one of the problems is the scientistic attitude Swamidass brings to the table in contrast with Nelson. Then Swamidass has the gall to ask: “How would you rewrite your narrative in a way that could be common to us?”
I realise the guy deserves some slack, but how about Swamidass making an attempt to rewrite his non-mainline ‘narrative’ in a way that doesn’t particularly privilege the ideology that he holds in the conversation? It would be more productive to instead open up the conversation even to people who patiently, consistently & faithfully reject the scientistic ideology of MN. If Swamidass is unwilling to even consider that it is he who might be misperceiving things, perhaps due to his philosophical immaturity & loose use of concepts & terms, progress with Nelson might indeed take place, which could be good for the future of ‘the conversation.’
One of Nelson’s flaws, of course, is his trust in the work of Stephen C. Meyer, whose definition of ‘history’ leaves more than a lot to be desired. I was quite surprised at what I discovered at Cambridge where Meyer wrote his dissertation & don’t think they appreciate being linked as Meyer & the DI likes to advertise. Let’s leave Meyer out of this & listen to what Nelson has to say.
I’d pick Nelson over Swamidass when it comes to MN. And of course Steve Fuller has gone perhaps even further than Steve Dilley, who Nelson recommended to Swamidass, in exposing MN. Whether or not Nelson can finally get through to Joshua on this topic is another issue. Sometimes more attempts is all it takes.
Nelson wrote that: “MN is the current dividing line because the ID community is united by the bare proposition that “intelligent design is empirically detectable in nature.” In order for design to be detectable, of course, it must have some observational or empirical content which does not reduce ultimately to physics. That’s intelligence as a distinct cause, issuing in distinct effects. MN forbids appeals to intelligence (i.e., as a basic or fundamental constituent of reality). There’s the conflict.”
Here’s where Nelson starts to go off the rails. 1) It’s Intelligent Design, not intelligent design’. The detectability of divine Intelligence, as Phillip Johnson & Charles Thaxton, along with Olsen & Bradley believed & believe. 2) Design is already ‘detectable’, but it is not the end goal simply to ‘detect’ some kind of thing (ontology). Rather, IDism is about implications, the implication of a Mind beyond matter. Good natural science and social science can & do already “appeal to intelligence”. I was speaking with a design theorist & reading a design thinking paper recently. But that’s not ‘Intelligent Design Theory’ and never will be. 3) Science is not a ‘forbidding’ field or discipline. Nelson himself couldn’t see a coherent, clear, valuable ‘Intelligent Design Theory’ even recently, in his own words. The IDists simply have provided no strictly scientific evidence of the instantiation of what they call ‘Intelligent Design’ and instead depend on probabilism & sciency apologetics, the latter much like the earlier ‘creationist’ movements.
So, in the end Swamidass is right about at least this: “The issue is divine intelligence, and the attempt to recognize design without considering the designer (neither approach works in science).” Biology differs considerably from theology & theological biology isn’t welcome; it’s intentionally schismatic. Yet Swamidass is otherwise wrong to suggest that ‘science’ is & only ever can be ‘naturalistic,’ so it’s a rather small & narrow view he is espousing, in the name of Science.
At least S. Joshua Swamidass might learn the difference between philosophy and ideology from Nelson in this conversation. He may then come to realize he’s been foisting a figment of his own imagination that needn’t have been constructed. Then again, he may just shrink back into typical disciplinary language that wreaks of natural scientism, ideological naturalism, biologism & reductionism again. Whatever he does, because I’m calling him out on it here and he doesn’t like being called out away from PS, Joshua will likely deny it all or just ignore it in public because he can’t seem to figure any other way out of the philosophical corner he’s pained himself into than to blame the messenger. Sad to see such an ethically-challenged scientist.
Properly understood, ‘methodological naturalism’ denotes ideology, not ‘good science.’ If Nelson would go further than he has in the past and acknowledge this, a different, likely better conversation would open up. The problem is that Swamidass hasn’t yet shown he’s ready to travel that road. Maybe Nelson will help him get there towards meeting next year with his former ‘hero’ (as Swamidass once briefly called) Behe.
I don’t think I can agree with this. The claim that the earth is 6000 years old is not a supernatural hypothesis, it is a purely scientific hypothesis. Scientific claims can be proved wrong, but scientific claims are not supernatural claims.
So let’s change our hypothesis a little bit. Let’s say a supernatural agency created the universe last Tuesday, complete with every conceivable (and fully consistent) indication of great age. Now, let’s prove it wrong.
Recently I have been reading about some interesting advances in the study of aging. The researchers identified 8 elements that contribute to aging, and have found various ways to get around or neutralize seven of them. The one they haven’t yet been able to address is reconstructing the telomeres to restore their original length. However, what they have come up with so far has increased the lifespans of mice in the lab by about 25%.
No testing on humans yet, and probably not for quite a while. But the long-lived mice do not appear to become Struldbrugs either; they retain full vitality and health throughout the longer life.
I think Keiths will point out again that this begs the question.
I know that is not a scientific rebuttal of the supernatural in general, but it’s a rebuttal of a particular definition of a supernatural entity, that happens to come with falsifiable properties. It doesn’t seem fair to ask for testable definitions of supernatural causes or gods, just to then dismiss them out of hand as untestable.
So I think I’m with Keiths on this one
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dazz,
“since you believe human choice is supernatural”
Where’d you find that idea from? Figure you’re a little god, do you? Putting words in peoples’ mouths isn’t good behaviour.
You said human choice is not reducible to natural processes, right? Why don’t you simply clarify what you meant if I got it wrong?
dazz,
Would you first offer any ‘alternative’ to ‘natural’ other than ‘supernatural’? It appears less like I’ve ‘got it wrong’ than that you disallow perfectly good English language terms with rich histories to have value for people in a way you don’t have & maybe never did. I’m not going to let you rig the game & then call it ‘fair.’ Sorry, if you’re captive to materialism or naturalism or empiricism or pragmatism or whatever irreligious or anti-religious ideology, there’s likely little help to offer, if you’re not willing to learn.
Just like with KN, ‘geist’ is something you wish could be ”naturalized”. Unfortunately, it can’t.
Sorry, no time for people closed to anything other than ‘natural.’ Positive terms for non-natural things are too obvious to miss for an open heart.
Can it be super-naturalized tho?
Maybe you could expand a little on what you mean by “verificationism”.
My opinion: verificationism is probably a mistake, but operationalism seems reasonable.
Neil Rickert,
Moderator Neil, I’d like to request that don’t intentionally derail a thread.
Methodological naturalism & ID is the topic here, not some fantasy of what KN thinks MNism is like, after finally having just read the primary text. This is not a person who should be trusted with ideology, as murky & convoluted & self-admittedly ‘disenchanted’ as KN says his worldview is.
Please go start a different thread on verificationism & operationalism if you want to go play with KN’s philosophistic toys. Don’t pollute this one as a ‘moderator’ here.
Flint,
I think you’re confusing two different hypotheses:
1. The earth is less than 10,000 years old.
2. The non-deceptive YEC God created the earth less than 10,000 years ago.
#1 is not a supernatural hypothesis, but #2 is. Both of them are falsified by modern science.
KN,
I would say yes, because it’s possible to hew to methodological naturalism without being a verificationist.
KN,
Actually, the latter doesn’t entail the former. It’s quite possible (and consistent) to be a metaphysical naturalist who rejects methodological naturalism.
(I’m one of them.)
Just claim you don’t know what supernatural means. Then anything is possible.
I understand van Fraassen as imposing limits on what we are entitled to say about the [ETA] reality of unobservable entities postulated by science ; namely, that we should remain agnostic about them. I don’t think that is the same as MN.
For me, MN should not be thought of as pre-specified limits for scientific explanation. Rather, it is about what is acceptable as a scientific explanation to a particular scientific community at a particular time (or perhaps, to a the paradigm being followed in that community at that time). My point is that part of the scientific methodology of that community at that time will be to determine that acceptability; it is not prespecified.
I like your upthread point that MN in practice means that no explanation that appeals to processes which violate fundamental physics will be acceptable to any scientific community under MN. Violation of Conservation of Energy and violation of 2LT are two examples of things that must be avoided for any MN explanation*. I think this recognition of limits imposed by fundamental physics is the working definition of “supernatural” used in scientific communities.
But, as per the Boudry paper I linked upthread, this is not a fixed limitation, but it is justified by its success by producing explanations that meet the goals of successful science.
——————————————
* Perhaps this working definition fails for fundamental physics: GR might violate C of E, and Craig Callender at least questions the generalization of thermodynamic entropy used in quantum cosmology .
Perhaps this most recent book in the New Books in Philosophy podcast series might interest you:
Wundt, Avenarius and Scientific Psychology: Debate at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
https://newbooksnetwork.com/chiara-russo-krauss-wundt-avenarius-and-scientific-psychology-a-debate-at-the-turn-of-the-twentieth-century-palgrave-macmillan-2019/
Good news: the author studied history of philosophy in Italy and so got an education unsullied by the ideology of the Five Eyes countries.
BruceS,
Also, as far as we know so far, doesn’t quantum entanglement violate fundamental physics? If we can also say that GR violates fundamental physics as well, this is essentially the problem I have with materialists view of science. When something violates our fundamental principles, the materialist just says, well it just is. So anything can be “just is”. Again its the stars aligning to write out the words FAITH. The materialist can still say, well, it sure is strange, but I guess it just is. We have to figure it out one day. Its the multiverse…
Fair enough, we could modify MN to allow those supernatural hypothesis that flow from operatonal definitions of supernatural entities/agents/forces/whatever.
It won’t help the ID-ists because they flat out refuse to provide operational definitions of their designer. They really don’t seem to understand that this is the main reason why ID can’t be tested and isn’t scientific.
Umm… quantum entanglement is fundamental physics so I don’t know why you would say that. Same for GR.
Now what it is true is that QM makes assumptions about spacetime that GR denies, and that GR fails in certain extreme conditions according to QM. So we do know that we need to combine them somehow and that hence there is something incomplete about fundamental physics. But that is not a reason (yet!) to deny MN in the sense I use it.
However, it is true that the non-locality entailed by entanglement was characterized by Einstein as “spooky action at a distance”. So, if one takes “spooky” as meaning supernatural in a sense, that one can say that the paradigm change to QM meant that something that was considered supernatural pre-QM (by Einstein at least) became something that was not considered supernatural post-QM.
So if your definition of “materialism” refers to pre-QM, pre-GR science, I agree that the philosophical position that science gives a complete description of reality is not materialism. That is one reason why the preferred term today is “physicalism”; it is explicit about acceptance of best physics for the starting point for metaphysics, rather than a more loaded term like “materialism”.
That is not to say that physicalism is true, only to say it is the preferred term in contemporary analytic philosophy for the position that is at issue.
Then is Newtonian physics also fundamental physics? You are making my point. if two aspects of physics are incompatible, what do we do? We just say, well, that’s the way it is, a new fundamental!
So if we find out tomorrow that gravity only works sometimes, or the speed of light isn’t always the same, well, that will just be our “new” fundamental. Your fundamentals are unfalsifiable. We just revise them.
BruceS,
And the same things happens with biology. They say, “evolution is true, its the most verified scientific theory in history!. Its all just DNA and random mutations.” Then when we find its not all DNA and its not all random mutations, well, they just revise what they call evolution. “Oh well, but its still true…”
You can ask ten different biologists what the mechanisms of evolution are and you will get ten different answers. Ask 100 and you will get 100 different answers. And every time we get a new discovery or a new date for the earliest life forms, they just quote in the science media “An unexpected discovery today…” New paradigm. You can find these new discoveries or these new timelines practically everyday.
Recently I read how virtually all life on the planet was wiped out 2.5 billion years ago, then started all over. Gee, that changes things. new paradigm. UnFalsifiable…
No, Newtonian physics is no longer fundamental, although it is a good enough approximation for many cases.
And your last paragraphs are a pretty good start at some of the issues Kuhn raised and the problems he and subsequent commenters thereby pointed out for naive scientific realism. Namely, if our best current science tells us that unobservable scientific entities are real, but our best current science is also fallible and in particular its theories can change to use incommensurable terms during a paradigm shift (like Newtonian ‘mass’ to GR ‘mass’), then doesn’t fallibilism+paradigm change contradict scientific realism?
Contemporary scientific realists claim to have answers for this issue, but although scientific realism is a majority position among philosophers, it is far from a consensus. Furthermore, it is not one position, but many.
Van Fraassen’s constructive empiricism is the best alternative according to most.
Right, that is what I just said. You can always just change it at will. So this notion of “processes which violate fundamental physics” is totally meaningless, if we just change what fundamental physics means each time.
Its the same as changing the meaning of evolution every week.
I do agree that MN can thereby change over time, which is why I relativized it to time (or to a paradigm) in my posts.
But I don’t think that means MN is not a useful concept for understanding successful scientific practice.
[ETA] For although the meaning of terms can change, this change is not arbitrary, but rather the conclusion of the process in a scientific community at a given time.
It is important to understand how the meaning of terms thereby change. Old usages are not denied, but rather are extended by a deeper understanding.
That’s why any suggested new theory in physics has to also explain what was explained by an old, accepted theory and is also required to capture the old theory as a limit case in some sense (eg SR with c=infinity is Newton, roughly speaking).
That’s why we have to use ‘evolution’ in its contemporary sense, not in Darwin’s sense. That is not to deny Darwin’s contributions to science, of course.
Except there is no such thing, as I have pointed out. The is no agreement at all about what the mechanisms are, its a complete hodge podge. And yet the mainstream audience in the developed world still think evolution is random mutation and natural selection ultimately. Its repeated nearly every day. I just listened to a Radiolab podcast (one of the biggest science podcasts there is) and they still talk about random mutations and natural selection, and how that leads to greater and less intelligence, …
If most people knew that the mechanisms of evolution are totally controversial, and that biologists all over the world disagree about the nature of change, they might well have a completely different belief about it. But to average people everywhere, its still Darwin, Darwin, with a few meaningless caveats they believe.
But those caveats aren’t meaningless at all.
This is probably a silly question, but why the emphasis on fundamental physics? Wouldn’t a violation of any well supported scientific theory present the same problem?
Isn’t that your position?
In number two you are judging a deity by human standards of behavior, that the supernatural must confine itself to our present scientific understanding less it be thought as deceptive .
That seems to me to be a naturalistic argument.
Not at all.
I think that is the position of someone who can’t decide what they mean by evidence. As I have said repeatedly, the evidence already exists.
Adam and Eve ate an apple?
Even the immortals need love.
Still why does supernatural healing work only sometimes?
Then what is not possible with the supernatural?
In other words ,what would constitute evidence against the supernatural?
Scientists seem to have a pretty decent idea of what it means. The proof is in the pudding.
What do you mean by evidence?
3 is not correct.
What would be evidence against the multi-verse?
Because fundamental physics is by definition the theory that is universal in scope.
(I want to be explicit that being consistent with physics does not mean being reducible to physics in any sense — ie either explanatorily or ontologically. Those are two separate issues from basic consistency.)
You can of course make parallel claims about scientific pairs, eg it would be questionable if biologists put forward an explanation that was inconsistent with chemistry. But I don’t think that adds anything to operationalizing MN in its original usage which is about how practicing science should be independent of one’s religious beliefs (as I understand de Vries paper Gregory linked).
Yes, you have pointed it out repeatedly. But pointing something out and making a cogent argument for it are two different things. That’s been addressed many times by others who know more about biological evolution than I do, so I will leave that topic to them.
Right. And I think it’s important to distinguish between a formal conception of fundamental physics — what it takes for a theory to belong to fundamental physics — vs what the currently accepted theories of fundamental physics are.
In that sense, we can say that it used to be thought that Newtonian mechanics was a theory of fundamental physics, and now we know that it isn’t.
We don’t know what the theories of fundamental physics will be in one hundred years, but we know that there will be at least one.
And I agree that there’s at least one sense of “supernatural” that defines the supernatural in terms of violation of at least one law of fundamental physics.
But if we were to discover that we were mistaken about what those laws are, would we then re-categorize what was supposedly supernatural as being in fact natural?
I see, thanks, Bruce & KN. Much appreciated
How does one do that, other than simply saying something is fundamental? If the sky starts flashing in colors at night and making lighting that plays hymnals, what’s the difference between calling it a new fundamental, and it being unnatural?
A fundamental theory of physics would have to unify QM and GR. I can’t say this is possible, but I don’t expect to live to see such a theory. We tend to forget that centuries passed between Newton, Einstein, et al.
Yes, I’ll bite that bullet. Boudry does too. Although Einstein never did, as far as spooky non-locality in any event. But the Bell tolled for him….
(OK, that’s a pretty lousy pun, as least relative to my usual Canadian dry
ginger alesense of humour.)ETA: Of course, I understand that would make ‘supernatural’ mean something different from current everyday usage. But changes like that are not atypical in language evolution.
You could also use “free will” as an another example where philosophical usage might diverge from everyday usage. But X-phi indicates that everyday usage of “free will” is possibly not what both some philosophers and those of the Coyne-Harris persuasion think it is.
Your best bet is to go on a long round trip.
At near light speed.
A stay-at-home twin is optional.
Such an extended youth (relative to Earth time) would be in accord with MN.
Ah yes, people in Five Eyes countries sullied by ideology.
Is there ANYONE here who was not educated primarily or entirely in a Five Eyes country? According to this, BruceS & KN both had their “education sullied by ideology”.
What difference has this sullied education made on their ideologies today? Uninspiring & dehumanizing (at least in so far as anti-religion or spiritually numb), both. What else?
Yes, as we now know, that’s not MNism, that’s MASNism.
I’m actually keeping a live option that de Vries was badly wrong with his definition of MNism + MNism & that he mangled the names.
The philosophistic atheist/agnostic ‘skeptics’ here somehow haven’t yet been ‘skeptical’ enough of de Vries’ work even to reject his misnomer. They have just so far ‘gone along with de Vries.’ That’s revealing on its own.
If we grant that your supernatural god is “non-deceptive”, then the claim is only a borderline supernatural claim, since it presumes, as a necessity, that the supernatural must be non-deceptive and (if I’m reading you right) this means the earth was not created with the appearance of age. However, the problem is what you falsified is NOT that the earth is young, but that the YEC god is non-deceptive. Yes, science can establish that either such claims are false, or claims about the nature of the YEC god are false. But which one is the case?
Well, I must say I don’t have a clue what “supernatural” means. The best I can derive from what theists say is that “supernatural” means that some purported god “exists”, but cannot be observed or tested, and does things, but only things that can’t be observed or tested. The problem here is, “the supernatural” is indistinguishable from no supernatural at all. Can you give me a good definition of supernatural, an operational definition that any skeptic can go out and test?
I don’t quite see your problem here. Science attempts to explain our universe. But scientists are people, people are limited, knowledge is incomplete in many ways, interpretations of the same evidence often vary a lot. This doesn’t mean there’s no such thing as the fundamental rules of physics, but it does mean that people have not completely described and understood them. One of the tenets of science is that EVERY scientific theory can be improved, because it’s going to be incomplete and perhaps misleading in some respects.
As superior theories based on more complete and accurate evidence supplant previous theories, this has nothing to do with the underlying fundamental rules. Instead, it reflects advancement of human knowledge. If we find out tomorrow that gravity only works sometimes or the speed of light isn’t always the same (uh, actually, it is NOT always the same), it’s not a new fundamental, it’s simply a more complete understanding of the actual fundamental.
Just because the blind men disagreed about what the elephant was like, doesn’t mean there was no fundamental elephant.
Not at all. The theory of evolution is incomplete. Over time, more causes of change are identified, etc. The theory of evolution has changed dramatically since Darwin, to the point where Darwin is considered an interesting historical figure who probably got some things right, and surely got a lot wrong. Would you prefer that theories NOT change in light of better evidence?
But this is evidence of the health and vigor of science. Should people STOP learning new things? Or should they stop trying to explain what they learn?
Baffling. When theories are replaced by better ones, which (at least somewhat) falsify the older ones, you claim falsification can’t happen!
What I’m going to guess you are saying is, when any scientific theory is improved in light of superior knowledge, the improved theory retains the SAME NAME as the prior version. Generally, this is true. But that doesn’t mean the replaced version couldn’t be falsified. Maybe we need to attach version numbers to give improvements different names, so we can say “version 6.142.4 was falsified, version 6.142.5 is now current.” Would that be better?
Pretty sure Bruce was being facetious.
I wasn’t.
That would grant a new major release at v7.0.0, wouldn’t it?
keiths:
Alan:
What exactly is the error?