Do any of the skeptics of skepticism think there is an alternative to science in medicine or engineering?
When confronted with unexplained mysteries, is incredulity a better stance than parsimony?
Is the invisible hand that constructs complex systems Adam Smith’s, or the hand of a deity?
Is nature regular or subject to caprice?
We say that you alleged skeptics don’t use science and tat is evident by your acceptance of evolutionism.
You alleged skeptics seem to choose incredulity
Why only those two choices?
Yes, nature is both regular and subject to caprice
Do any of the skeptics of skepticism think there is an alternative to science in medicine or engineering?
I don’t see science and skepticism as being the same. I also don’t see a clear division between science and non science. I think people have been “doing science” for as long as there have been people. Why is surviving unreasonably effective?
What would an “alternative to science” look like?
Is nature regular or subject to caprice?
Must it be either or? How about both and? Are living things part of nature and if so are they ever capricious? So my answer is yes, nature is regular and capricious.
Judging by what most “Darwin skeptics” do, the alternative is complaining that evolution (science) can’t explain this or that, then assuming that an extremely capable Designer (like God, but should not be assumed to be God) did it instead, while ignoring the fact that life has the limitations of evolution and not those of intelligence–let alone those expected of extreme intelligence.
That this does nothing but “save” their a priori beliefs seems not to be any sort of deterrent.
Glen Davidson
You tell us. You IDiots are the ones always whining about science being limited to methodological naturalism and not letting your supernatural woo in the door. Tell us how do science if you have to allow for a Loki God changing your research results on a whim. Tell us how to produce a vaccine if Loki God makes it work well one day, be a deadly poison the next.
I’m puzzled at the “unreasonably” in the question. Is science “unreasonably” effective? What would “reasonably effective” look like?
To clarify: I do think that empirical science is our best institutionalized practice for generating reliable models of contingent (non-necessary) phenomena, and it does so by producing causal explanations of those phenomena.
And I do think there’s an interesting question lurking hereabouts, about how evolutionary processes could have produced cognitive systems capable of discovering objective truths about the world.
But I’m not sure if that question matches the question being asked in the OP.
LoL! adapa is confusing methodological naturalism with metaphysical naturalism.
LoL! Your equivocation is duly noted. ID is not anti-evolution. And what ID argues against is not science
Because it’s a miracle!
Eugene Wigner, Nobel Prize Winner in Physics (before he got the Nobel Prize):
https://www.dartmouth.edu/~matc/MathDrama/reading/Wigner.html
There you have it from Wigner and Schrodinger, Nobel Prize winners in physics.
Because God made it so. God did it. Praise be to the Intelligent Designer of nature and laws of physics that make the scientific method unreasonably effective. Hallelujah!
And the wasps that drill into childrens eyes! Praise bee!
I think the strength of science is the use of the scientific method. Create a hypothesis through data collection then test the hypothesis.
When both these steps have been done diligently with repeatable results then you have a tested hypothesis that is on firm ground. If you read papers in the area of cancer research they all attempt to follow this process.
Some theories are hard to test and this leaves their claims with greater uncertainty.
This is getting disgusting! Enough about your fetish parties!
Please give us an Intelligent Design hypothesis, the method used to test it, and the falsification criteria.
If you can’t use the scientific method on your ID claims then it isn’t science.
I’ll say it again: We’re all functional naturalists. Even Mindpowers Murray. Whispering to skydad for no effect doesn’t change that.
Go ahead Chubs. Explain how to do science and include the effects of your supernatural POOF Designer.
I’ll also note there may be a hidden tautology. If science is in part a search for regularity, then it will work regularly.
It’s word play.
https://www.dartmouth.edu/~matc/MathDrama/reading/Wigner.html
I used the word effectiveness rather than truth. Effectiveness is to physical what money is to the dismal science.
1: an extraordinary event manifesting divine intervention in human affairs
2: an extremely outstanding or unusual event, thing, or accomplishment
Designer of inefficient Rube Goldberg mechanisms , hallelujah.
Ah, got it!
I think Wigner is quite badly mistaken — the effectiveness of mathematics in science is neither unreasonable nor miraculous.
Amen!
But Wigner! Nobel Prize winner! Famous scientist! Published in prestigious journals! How can you argue with that?
Unreasonable in the sense of leading to counterintuitive formulations of causation, as with relativity and quantum theory. Or game theory. Or evolution.
To me, science is submission. In the same sense as submission in religion. It requires giving up one’s intuitive sense of how things work, and accepting a received process for acquiring knowledge.
The received process could be thought of as religious or tautological, but it is reinforced by effectiveness. That’s the nub of my OP question. Why is science more effective than older approaches to knowledge?
I like the irony of this being quoted by someone who’s reasoning power is unmistakably quite short of being miraculous, or perfect.
By the way, if powerful reasoning abilities are evidence for a divine origin, flawed reasoning is evidence against it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases
Human reasoning looks more like something that is the product of a blind evolutionary process to me. After all, we had to invent this gigantic, slow and painful process of science, with peer-review, replication of experimental results and all that, exactly because people are by themselves so prone to error in reasoning.
Because creationists are so unmistakably and provably biased and error-prone in their “reasoning”, they sought to invent their very own “journals” just so they could get their crap published and pretend it meets basic standards of rigour.
ID has presented testable hypotheses and potential falsification criteria- evolutionism, not so much.
There isn’t one person who can present a testable hypothesis for the claim vision systems arose via natural selection, drift, constructive neutral evolution or any other blind and mindless process. You FAIL
You can’t lead by example and attacking ID with hubris and belligerence is never going to be evidence for evolutionism.
Close.
It just ends up meeting the basic standard for scientific rigor mortis.
Glen Davidson
If someone thinks the effectiveness of science is unreasonable, then they do not understand science.
And note that I don’t agree with Wigner, on the effectiveness of mathematics in the sciences.
No, and Yes respectively (but taking “caprice” in a metaphorical sense).
Science governed by dogma, be it Church or metaphysical naturalism, is unreasonable.
So why did ID fail and evolutionism get taught in every decent university in the world?
OMagain,
The universities have a strategy to abuse young adults 🙂
Why is evolutionism being taught in any science class seeing it makes untestable claims and because of that isn’t science?
Real skeptics want to know
How would you falsify the hypothesis the Intelligent Designer was using processes which looked identical to naturally occurring evolution?
Speak up Chubs, you’re the ID-YEC expert.
And speaking of teh clueless:
Again- using the explanatory filter you would never reach a design inference if blind and mindless processes or laws/ regularity, can explain what you are investigating. Newton’s four rules of scientific investigation and Occam’s Razor tell you not to add agencies if they are not needed.
It’s all science 101, adapa., and that is why it eludes you.
Your turn- how can we test the claim that vision systems evolved by means of natural selection, drift, CNE or any other blind and mindless process?
The prediction is you won’t answer or you will try to bluff your way through it.
petrushka,
To repeat the message in a lot of the above comments:
Please explain to us why you use the word ‘unreasonably’.
Is there some other science somewhere else that isn’t ?
Chubs admits there’s no reason to add an Intelligent Designer since one is not needed
Chubs admits ID is unfalsifiable which means it’s not science.
graham2,
I gave two responses to the question of why “unreasonable.”
petrushka, there’s no room for humor here. If you’re not careful you’ll be labelled anti-science, lol.
Is the invisible hand that constructs complex systems Adam Smith’s, or the hand of a deity?
On this one I am going to go with deity. Adam Smith’s hand wasn’t invisible.
When confronted with unexplained mysteries, is incredulity a better stance than parsimony?
I guess that depends on whether you’re a skeptic or not. Take the resurrection of Jesus. Obviously the skeptical response is incredulity.
The defining characteristic of science, by my lights, is that we can reliably distinguish successful explanations from failed ones. When we endeavor to test an empirical hypothesis, we know what will count as failure, and it is (in a sense) failure that we looking for.
A successful empirical explanation of underlying causal regularities will be one that illuminates the modal character of those causal regularities, e.g. by showing that if the system obeys a determinate set of parameters, the variables cannot help but fall into a quantifiable range of possibilities.
By contrast, any theological “explanation” can always be rescued with a bit of ad hoc postulation that is not constrained by any rules. Nothing counts as definite failure in theology — and hence nothing can count as definitive success, either.
The “unreasonable” effectiveness of science is, I think, a deep error — one generated and perpetuated by ignorance of cognitive neuroscience. What we learn from cognitive neuroscience is that (and here I’m putting my own prejudices front and center) an embodied-and-embedded cognitive system will consist of a large family of inter-related action-guiding representations that detect, classify, and track the relevant affordances and solicitations comprising the ecological niche within which the system is embedded.
The only ‘trick’ that needs to be pulled off here is that of explaining how simple cognitive systems like that can bootstrap themselves into social practices where hypotheses can be produced, tested, revised, etc. And the key there lies in what language makes possible. For language makes it possible for differently embodied-and-embedded cognitive systems to construct shared meta-representations.
Each cognitive system represents the similarities and differences between its own representations and its representations of representations belonging to the other cognitive system. And each cognitive system is committed to minimizing the discrepancies between its meta-representation and the other system’s meta-representation, because otherwise cooperative action (remember, the primary function of representations is to guide action!) would not be successful.
And in order to do this, each system must become aware of which causal/modal regularities that constitute the affordances and solicitations to which it is responsive are merely local — even singular! — and which are shared or more global. In this way both systems become aware of the implicit distinction between appearance and reality.
And with that rudimentary, fundamental distinction in place, as a result of a shared language, the cognitive agents can begin to explicate in language what it is that they are doing (i.e. construct a shared metalanguage) and then use that metalanguage to inquire into whether what they take to be real really is real.
The rest is history — human history, all 100,000 years of it.
So you agree that the ancient Israelites were doing science, not religion, when they judged a prophet? Or perhaps the supposed division between science and religion is a myth.
I think this is false. How do you explain the test of a prophet in the Jewish tradition?
https://www.ou.org/torah/parsha/rabbi-fox-on-parsha/the_test_of_the_false_prophet/
Why on earth would a religion have a test of a false prophet, given the KN view of religion? [One obviously divorced from Judaism.]
Thanks to adapa for fulfilling my prediction.
But anyway, I don’t know why you have to misrepresent what I post. Well, I do, it’s because you don’t have an argument. And why do you always say that ID is unfalsifiable after you have been told how to falsify it? Oh, I know, because falsifying ID requires you and yours to step up and support your position’s claims. And we all know that ain’t happenin’.
And finally why do you and yours ALWAYS fail to support the claim that your position is the scientific one? Why can’t you guys lead by example and show us how its done? Step one would be to stop equivocating when it comes to “evolution” and “common descent” by defining your terms and sticking to it. And then it would be nice to see a few testable hypotheses that include natural selection, drift and/ or CNE as mechanisms producing systems ID claims are out of the reach of those processes. Darwin talked about the vision system so that should be one. Dr Behe’s bacterial flagellum another and the genetic code for a finale.
I know that is asking too much and no one will do so but that alone will make my point.
Thank you
I think Adam smith was wrong about any concept of a invisable hand in human economics. He was making a Newtonian structure for human economic results as opposed to a protestant motivationalism that he grew up in.
I don’t agree science exists in nature but is only a human concept.
So its about coming to accurate conclusions. science is just a methodology to bring, or pronounce, accurate conclusions in nature.
Yet its humans doing the methodology and so failure is common.
evolutionism is , and will be seen in the future, a failure of humans to see methodology break down before conclusions were drawn./
i mean that a biological theory was made without biological evidence but instead biological data and then lines of reasoning. The LINES were not tested or testable.
colewd,
That’s right. Likewise, basketball’s strength is the basket. And the ball.
Do any of the skeptics of skepticism think there is an alternative to science in medicine or engineering?
All depends who is promoting science and what kind of science..
Larry Moran probably believes that his view of science is the accurate one and should be followed. What’s wrong with Larry’s science? Did he go wrong? If yes, Where? Who has the power to shut up Larry if he is wrong? Who has the power to to stop nonsense?
As far as I can tell, nothing.
Supposing he is wrong, should people we think are wrong be “shut up”? Or do arguments and evidence ultimately decide?
Are intensely cognitively biased religious retards following bronze-age folk-myths with talking snakes and magical appltrees the sort of people who gets to decide what is good science, and who to shut up? No thank you. We had such a period in human history, when people like that were in charge. Commonly referred to as the dark ages. The christofascist theocratic masturbation fantasy, complete with witch-trials and inquisitions.
Right this very moment, there are people on Larry’s blog saying they wish he had his limbs cut off, or that he was roasting in hell. Literally, people who wish for his flesh to burn.
I will resist you utter psychotics till the day I die.
Well concerning science in practice, as carried out by the greater scientific community over time, eventually some ideas either survive lots of tests and become broadly accepted, or they eventually disappear into fringe views.
So that power to “stop nonsense” is the power held by the experts in the relevant field, applied over decades of experiment, observation, publication, debate and formation of broader consensus views.
You have a better alternative that simultaneously ensures academic and intellectual freedom to have your views heard? If so, let’s hear!
How very authoritarian of you.