For the purposes of this debate, “truth” = “models purported to be actual conditions of reality”.
Science is a method of collecting independently reproducible, empirical data, interpreting the data, categorizing it and developing useful and predictive models from that data – useful in the sense that it predicts future data of the same sort, hereafter referred to as IRdata. One can consider “science” to be, entirely, the collection and development of a kind of IRdatabase, the purpose of which is to take IRdata and develop it into useful IRmodels.
For this argument’s sake, Let’s call all other data and models non-scientific, or NSdata and NSmodels.
Am I obligated to accept as true (in the sense of “what reality is”) any model developed by science, regardless of how useful and independently repeatable it is? Certainly not. In the first place, science doesn’t claim that “what reality is” (truth) is the same as that which is independently repeatable (scientific data & scientific theories/models). Science only claims its models function successfully and are independently repeatable. Science claims its models are provisional and subject to future revision or even abandonment; this is contrary and irreconcilable with any claims that a scientific model = truth claim about reality. Scientists that make truth-claims about reality are necessarily abandoning the fundamental principle of the provisional and fallible nature of scientific model-building.
Secondly, there is no natural or man-made law that says I should consider science at all when developing my views on what reality is. I’m simply not obligated to consider science anything more than a tool that happens to be useful in my experience – and I’m not even obligated to hold science as that much if I wish otherwise. Science itself makes no metaphysical demands upon my worldview whatsoever.
All scientific models are provisional and subject to change. There is no added scientific value in considering any scientific model “true” and, in fact, such a view might be a problem if new data indicates a different model. Once invested in as “true”, scientific models become psychologically entrenched as a paradigm that might thwart the development and acceptance of better models. Science eschews the assertion that scientific models represent truth (the way reality is). That is a metaphysical or religious worldview.
What does science say about NSdata (non-scientific) and NSmodels? All it has to say is that such data doesn’t meet the criteria for being admitted into or used by the scientific database. It doesn’t claim such data is true or false, only that it is not appropriate for scientific modeling.
What does science claim about models that contradict its models, such as the model that the Earth is only 6000 years old? Science would only be able to claim that the old-earth model is more useful than the 6000-year model; science doesn’t claim either model is true or false, because all scientific models are provisional and only models, not claims of reality. Science doesn’t claim its models are true, only useful (as described above), and so cannot be used (as far as science is concerned) to claim the 6000-year model of Earth is false. In science, the term “prove” is not a true-false claim about reality, but only about a provisional model’s capacity to produce independently reproducible (IR)data.
Am I obligated to dismiss NS data and NS models when it comes to beliefs about reality? Certainly not. Science has nothing to say about what the true nature of reality is; it only talks about IR models developed from IRdata. Nothing more.
So, how is it that some people claim that science has disproven, say, a Young Earth Creationist model of reality? Science can only say that the YEC model is not as effective at producing IR data as some other model – say, the old-earth model. Science itself can make no claim about the “reality” value of either model. Science cannot claim the Earth “is”, in reality, more than 6000 years old; it can only claim that its current, most effective IRmodel is that of a much older Earth. Some new evidence may show that our previous means of determining the age of earth were mistaken and that the Earth is more likely young – just as, in the past, scientists changed their view of the age of the Earth from thousands, to millions, to hundreds of millions, to billions of years.
Whatever the age of the Earth actually is may be entirely irrelevant to the usefulness of the IRmodel. If a false IRmodel produces more useful IRdata than a true NSmodel, then in science the true NSmodel will be discarded in favor of the false IRmodel.
One might wonder, how could a false IRmodel produce more useful IRdata than a true NSmodel? The answer is that reality itself may not mostly or entirely conform to the consensus, independently repeatable paradigm. Thus, in some cases, the true model may not be independently, universally repeatable (NS). As such, science would not even be able to accept the NSdata that would lead to such an NSmodel; it could only find whatever approximation could be supported by IRdata translated into an IRmodel.
Also, it might be that humans have only a limited access to true data, have a limited capacity to interpret it, and have a limited capacity to model it towards the ends of generating IR predictions. IOW, it may take something other than a human to be able to create scientifically functional true models; the best we may be able to do with limited capacity is to generate scientifically useful false models. IOW, the 6000 year-old earth model may be true in reality, but reality may be such that there is no IRdata that would support that model, or at least no IRdata that a human mind can apprehend, translate and model as such.
When one claims that science has either proved or even just indicates that some other model is not true (meaning, not a factual condition of reality), they are no longer speaking from a scientific viewpoint, but rather from a metaphysical viewpoint that has incorporated the IRdata and model system as part of its ontology – also known as “Scientific Realism”.
Science cannot disprove anything in any ontological sense; it cannot ascertain if the YEC model is true or false. Science cannot even say if it one model is more likely true than the other without circularity. Science can only say that one model is currently more scientifically effective at making independently reproducible, empirical predictions about data than the other, given the nature and limitations of the human condition & experience.
Science cannot say that we are not brains in vats being kept alive artificially and fed what is, vis-a-vis “reality,” completely spurious information.
That said, humans actually make truth claims about reality all of the time very usefully and in a legally-liable sense (if we’re brains in vats, reality is a sort of information feed–so what?). That car is there, smash into it and there will be much damage. That’s reality, ontology can go hang itself.
Cars are real in human interpretations of reality, so is iron, and so are the four and a half billion years of earth’s existence, including the evolution of life.
And it’s all very well to say that science can’t disprove anything in any ontological sense, but it’s also true that no one can show that there even is an ontological sense, beyond philosophical musings.
Glen Davidson
Exactly. Science doesn’t make truth claims about reality. What it does is accumulate a specific kind of data and translate that data into specific kinds of models. Nothing more, nothing less.
Irrelevant. The question is not what humans do, but rather whether or not certain claims made by humans are in fact scientific claims.
Again, irrelevant to the point. Humans claim cars are real. Science doesn’t. Science doesn’t even define what “reality” is, much less make a case about whether or not a car is real.
Whatever that means.
It means that you can’t demonstrate that there is a “reality” beyond our senses and interprepretations. Until you can, what do your objections even mean?
Glen Davidson
Is it science when scientific claims are made regarding the utility of FSCO/I, the EF etc etc?
Science doesn’t deductively prove to us the fundamental nature of reality, that is certainly true. But we already knew this, noone here is laboring under the delusion that it does – so what are you trying to achieve with pointing this out?
I don’t see how you could do any better at getting to an understanding of existence than to do science however. What other alternative do we have?
Deductive arguments are only as good as their premises, but how do we “prove” the premises?
It seems to me the best we can do is work with what we seem to have before us: Our senses and the appearance of an external reality they give us. Science simply allows us to “make the most of it” without making any claims about the ultimate truth of this external reality. Again, I don’t see any workable alternative.
I’d like to hear from someone who thinks they can present a superior alternative that we can be more certain of presents us with “fundamental truth” about existence and the nature of reality.
Yes.
Your own definition of truth:
According to your own definition, truth amounts to what is purported. I take it that you are obliged to accept as true, that which fits your own definition of truth.
Or, to put it all differently, your own definition of truth is useless and your description of science is no better.
Let it be pointed out that Wilfrid Sellars, the great foe of both phenomenalism and instrumentalism, famously remarked not only that “in the dimension of describing and explaining the world, science is the measure of all things, of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not” — but yet also (just as famously) remarked that science is a rational, self-correcting enterprise because it can put any of its claims in question, though not all at once, and — this is a nice remark, I think — “the essence of scientific wisdom consists in being tentative about what we take to be necessary” .
From what I can tell, the contradiction between fallibilism and realism is your own fabrication, William, because your religious and ideological prejudices make you unable to understand how someone could accept a metaphysical doctrine with anything less than unshakeable dogmatism. That indicates something about your personal psychology, William, but nothing about what is reasonable for anyone else to believe.
I can’t even fathom how William can get to his position in this argument. The only reason we can even discuss the idea of an absolute “truth” in reality in any sense is because we have progressions of models that more and more accurate in terms of predictability. The assumption is that the progression is a move towards a standard of “truth”. It’s not particularly difficult then to determine when the degrees of improvement of a given set of model progressions reaches a point of negligibility and it is at that point that any scientist can make an accurate truth claim. To deny this is just arguing for argument’s sake.
ETA: Oh…and just to make the point – it is true that it is impossible for the world to be young for just this reason.
KN,
Both you and Sellars, then, are guilty of circular reasoning; defining reality as that which is IR (or simply assuming it), and then saying that IR is the best means of describing reality.
So what?
I see Robin has thrown his hat into the circular reasoning bin. Reality is defined as that which is IR, and so the more IR a model or data is, the “truer” it must be.
WJM,
With respect to Intelligent Design theory, are you prepared to say?
Science cannot disprove anything in any ontological sense; it cannot ascertain if the ID model is true or false. Science cannot even say if one model is more likely true than the other without circularity. Science can only say that one model is currently more scientifically effective at making independently reproducible, empirical predictions about data than the other, given the nature and limitations of the human condition & experience. At present, ID theory is ‘non-postdictive‘ whereas many of the theories that comprise Evolutionary Theory are predictive, making it more scientifically effective.
Richard Hughes & Glen Davidson,
Metaphysical assumptions about reality is not the domain of science. That IR data & models @= reality is a metaphysical assumption. It’s not scientific whatsoever – it’s just a religious perspective.
I, on the other hand, do not make claims about what reality is; I’m only concerned with useful models.
Which is what makes KN’s idea of me being “dogmatic” so funny; dogmatic about what? I have no belief I even hold as “true”, other than, perhaps, “I experience”. KN, though, is so dogmatic about science-as-indicator-of-truth-and-reality that he cannot even see the circularity of his and sellars’ position.
What I am starting to get a clearer picture of, though, is how similar you lot are to entrenched believers of any sort of reality faith, religious or secular. It appears to be a need of some sort to stake a claim on what “reality” really is. I guess it’s obvious enough that one’s sense of self is largely defined by what one considers reality to be. How can one be confident in who and what they see themselves as unless they are also confident in what the reality that self is occupying is?
Well, that’s really some interesting food for thought.
That’s an interesting objection, but I don’t think it works. I would treat independent reproducibility as a criterion of successful cognitive grasping of reality, not a definition of reality. As a definition of reality, I would not presume to improve on Philip K. Dick’s observation, “reality is that which, when you stop thinking about it, doesn’t go away.” I would prefer to say that the Real is that which is as it is, independent of all thought and will.
The great virtue of science is that in doing science, we test our models against the data and revise our models in light of better data. The Hard Problem is, how could we possibly be justified in holding that our data tells us anything about reality? How can we escape the problem of solipsism writ large? If our data is already preformed or prefigured by theory in the very process of gathering it, then how could we ever be justified in saying that the fitting of models to data tells us anything at all about reality?
The answer to this problem is two-fold. First, it involves recognizing that the process of accumulating data is itself a causal process, and that means physically interacting (via technological proxies) with the entities and processes that we are measuring. So although our finite, embodied subjectivity is everywhere present in our data — we cannot see reality “naked,” so to speak — we are nevertheless justified in saying that our data is not just our own projection. (Not without being skeptics about causation, anyway.)
Second, it involves recognizing that convergent realism is based on comparing theories with their competitors and predecessors, not on comparing theories with the naked truth. (This does raise the very interesting problem of incommensurabiity, but I think that Michael Friedman and Jay Rosenberg offer independent and mutually reinforcing criticisms of Kuhn. More on this point for those interested.)
The heart of this view, on Rosenberg’s account, lies in the diminishing value of the absolute value of the variables used to generate an analogue to the preceding theory in the successor theory. For three theories T1, T2, and T3, we can say that the succession T1, T2, T3 counts as progress, and that the T1, and T2, and T3 are successively more accurate descriptions of reality, if and only the absolute value of the terms used to generate an analogue of T2 in T3 is smaller than the absolute value of the terms used to generate an analogue of T1 in T2.
Not really, Mindpowers. I use models that I find useful in real (as I comprehend it) life for things like not getting by cars, nourishment, etc. So do you, but you’ll never admit it. You still eat your cornflakes with a spoon and are functionally a materialist. Big boy pants, William.
Measuring the age of the earth, however, is in the domain of science. That you confuse the two so badly is not my problem.
Unfortunately, you are using terms extremely equivocally. YECism was being discussed, along with facts that are already understood to fit a “reality” that involves a host of assumptions. That those assumptions are not necessarily “truth” is well understood, but whether or not we can determine if the earth is four and a half billion years old using those assumptions is what is at issue in the age of earth question.
You make a huge number of claims regarding reality, many not in agreement with each other. And you take meanings out of context in order to “support” your claims about meaninglessness of whatever provides conclusions with which you don’t agree.
About your equivocations, for one matter.
Of course it’s circular. It’s just based upon what people usually mean by “reality,” while you can point to no “reality” beyond sensing and interpreting, while you continue to assume that there is one. Ding an Sich, basically.
Really. The equivocations, unquestioned assumptions, and out-of-context argumentation you typically use fit the bill of dogmatic believer in my experience.
You’re the one claiming that there is something beyond sensing and interpreting. I’m just writing about reality as I know it, sensing and interpreting along grounds that have worked thus far. Science works very well in that realm, the evidentiary realm generally assumed when age claims are made.
And you won’t deal with what reality sensibly means to people, rather you conflate it with some ontological status of “truth” for which existence you have absolutely no evidence.
Ah, well, that’s your problem.
Yes it is, for the fact that you won’t deal with matters within their normal contexts, but must “measure them” against something for which you have no evidence, suggest that you’re largely flailing in a poorly-defined set of concepts.
Glen Davidson
Nope…sorry William. That’s not a valid assessment based on what I’ve written. I don’t define reality as Independently Reproducible data.
It’s perfectly scientific to make the truth claim that “rain comes from lake and ocean evaporation.” It doesn’t even matter that such a statement is overly simplistic; it’s still an accurate statement based on science. You can complain about this all you wish, but science is going to continue to offer assessments about reality and, for the most part, be right about them. Science is also going to outright disabuse some aspects of reality, like the possibility that the world is only 6000 years old. Such is just not possible scientifically. That’s not circular; it’s just sensible.
Conversely, philosophies which deny the existence of the self also articulate that denial in terms of the criteria of reality. In Mahayana Buddhism, for example, the self does not exist because all beings depend each other for existence (“co-dependent origination” is the phrase I’ve seen used), and so there aren’t any beings which could exist independent of all other beings — such as the self or ego is usually taken to be.
We can engage in metaphysics well or badly, knowingly or unknowingly, implicitly or explicitly, but can we avoid metaphysics entirely? I used to think that we could, but I no longer think so. We have to do metaphysics as part of the constant activity of thinking reflectively and carefully at all.
Adapted: From what I can tell, the contradiction between theism and realism is your own fabrication, KN, because your religious (secular Jewish) and ideological (wide-ranging mixture of ‘-isms’) prejudices make you unable to understand how someone could accept a metaphysical doctrine with anything less than awkward eclecticism bordering on disenchanted nihilism. That indicates something about your personal psychology, KN, but nothing about what is reasonable for anyone else to believe.
KN openly celebrates and mimics Sellars’ textbook scientism (one of KN’s philosophistic heroes), yet says he doesn’t really understand what ‘scientism’ even means; obviously can’t speak clearly or convincingly about it. That shows the miniscule power (read: great irrelevance) of 4th rate USAmerican philosophy nowadays and why KN’s appeals that people should openly appreciate and learn from/by doing philosophy largely fall on deaf (skeptic) ears here at TSZ. He’s got no actual re-enchantment to share here (cf. nostalgic romanticism), nor would it likely be welcome for most here anyway.
WJM seems highly confused. Does he actually wish to promote a ‘young’ earth now or is he just saying that ‘anything could be true’ from a ‘scientific’ standpoint? It’s bad enough he defends ‘IDT’ as ‘scientific’ (but, admittedly, they’ve got a ‘big tent – please join us’ sign on their marketing heads, which attracts certain messy penguins). He is once again giving theists of all stripes a bad name, just as Dawkins gives atheists and ‘skeptics’ a bad name.
Is Dawkins the ‘hero’ or ‘leader’ of anyone still at TSZ? Or does TSZ skepticism even extend to him?
I would note that a number of the assumptions tacitly accepted when doing age measurements are necessary to measuring the ages of Angelina Jolie and the earth, which is why it’s egregious to rip the matter away from that context and those assumptions. One needn’t believe that science tells us the “ontological truth,” whatever that even can mean, of those ages, to recognize that it nevertheless informs us about “reality” as that term is used in the vernacular (and not in the shifted meaning that William uses, without properly dealing with the large differences resulting from such a shift).
If I get up on the witness stand and say, without being stoned, insane or stupid, that Angelina Jolie is in reality a shape-shifter of 2.7 million years of age, I really don’t have a defense in ontology against a perjury charge. The court would say that no one has an excuse to blather on like William does to avoid the truth that Angelina is “in truth” and “in reality” only 38 years old. Empirical methods enable us to make truth statements about age measurements, unless one equivocates and pretends that because of possible trickster gods, a reality that we really don’t comprehend, or something equally vapid, makes this impossible. The “truths” that we reach are contingent, yet frequently reliable.
Glen Davidson
KN,
Testing one’s assumption about “what reality is” with models that assume the same thing about reality and utilize the same kind of data is not really at test; it’s just a circular affirmation of one’s original assumption.
For instance,when you say
How is this a virtue, if science is not, in fact, leading towards a better understanding of reality, but is, in fact, leading away from a better understanding of reality? This is another piece of evidence that demonstrates your a priori position that IR @= reality.
Have you ever attempted to conceptualize how one might test whether or not IR (independent reproducibility) @= (approximates) reality?
Gregory,
Just because I think scientism is a deeply confused notion, doesn’t mean I don’t think it can’t be clarified and made useful. In fact I’ve spent a lot of time reading up on various criticisms of scientism grounded in the phenomenological, hermeneutic, and critical-theoretic traditions (roughly, Heidegger, Gadamer, Habermas, Adorno, etc.). Or do you think that they are all “fourth-rate” as well?
What I’ve come to think, however, is that the notion of “scientism” amounts to not much more than scapegoating science for the social, spiritual, and ecological ills fostered by capitalism. It’s part of the ideology of romantic anti-capitalism. (I once said exactly that to a room of Heideggerians. They weren’t happy with me after that. Good.)
As for theistic realism, I have a more conflicted attitude about that. I certainly don’t think that scientific realism is the only kind of realism that matters, after all! (Or have my remarks on direct realism and moral realism gone unnoticed here?) And I certainly don’t think that theistic realists have failed to live up to certain standards of epistemic virtue or whatever. I’m not interested in arguing against theistic realism. I’m interested only in defending one’s right to choose a wholly secular way of life. I have no criticisms of those who chose otherwise.
And as for Dawkins — heck, I never liked him, really. I admired Gould far more than Dawkins as a kid, and my understanding of evolutionary theory (and its limits) comes from Gould, not from Dawkins. I thought The Blind Watchmaker was, quite frankly, unbearably smug to the point of being an offense against literary style. Then I ignored Dawkins entirely until The God Delusion, which I loathed — its signal redeeming virtue is an enlightening footnote that explains why moths fly into candles.
Shortly after I read it, I read the McGraths’s The Dawkins Delusion, which has a lovely quote by Michael Ruse: “The God Delusion makes me embarrassed to be an atheist, and the McGraths show why.” I agree entirely. Taken together with Eagleton’s delightful evisceration of The God Delusion in the London Review of Books, I think it’s fair to say that I’ll never take anything Dawkins says seriously ever again.
Yes; my point about Jay Rosenberg’s account of convergent realism is an answer to this question:
The only part of this account that worries me personally is that figuring out all the bells and whistles requires that mathematizability be a reliable guide to reality, which is closer to Platonism than I’m usually comfortable with.
Does this roughly boil down to the assumption that increased explanatory or descriptive efficiency = closer approximations of reality?
It seems to me that you are confused between “science leads toward a better understanding of reality” and “science makes true claims about reality”. Those are not the same.
Right now I’m examining reactive devaluation and the framing effect for the most part. I don’t care if the Earth is young or old.
What do you care about, William? It seems to me you’re striving for a false equivalence as a licence to peddle batshit-crazy.
They may not be the same thing, but one is contained in the set of the other. The claim that science leads to a better understanding of reality” is necessarily a truth claim about reality. It’s not a scientific claim, though.
Once again, how would one test if science was increasing our understanding of reality, or deepening a fundamental misconception about reality?
I’ve stated several times what I care about; enjoying life and being a good (enough) person.
You are talking about “convergent realism”, and “convergent” is a mathematical concept.
The criterion given seems to be an attempt to produce something like Cauchy’s criterion for convergence.
I see two problems with this, which is why I hesitate about convergent realism. Firstly, convergence is an asymptotic notion. The relation between T2 and T3 doesn’t really matter. What matter is the asymptotic relation between Tn and Tn+1 as grows very large.
The second problem is that comparing absolute values of terms presupposes that there is an absolute metric available. And that seems dubious. I’ll note that mathematics does have general definitions of convergence that don’t depend on specific metrics and don’t depend on sequential relationships. But even those are asymptotic notions in some sense.
Practically speaking, science will never get beyond the first few terms of the sequence, so we could never have good evidence of asymptotic convergence. So my preference is to evaluate a theory on its observable pragmatic virtues, and not concern ourselves with convergence.
I’m more inclined to say that it is an untestable personal opinion, given that “understanding” is subjective.
But how do you know that. I mean really, transcendentally know that? YOU CAN’T. Therefore, ID.
This, again.
A number of the issues you’re discussing here are talked about in this 3AM mag interview with philosopher of biology Peter Godfrey-Smith:
http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/philosophy-of-biology/
William:
Correction: You care about enjoying life and feeling like you’re a good enough person. If you actually cared about being a good enough person, then you would care about the truth of your moral judgments. Yet you’ve told us that you don’t care about truth.
In other words, you are practicing mental masturbation. I’m not sure why you insist on doing it in public. An exhibitionist streak, maybe?
I’m not terribly interested truth, apart from the entertainment value of projects like CERN, the utility of medical research, and gadgetry.
When you reach my age you understand that TRVTH isn’t going to happen. You have either learned to enjoy the journey, or you are perpetually unhappy.
if you retreat from science equals truth then there is no reason to invoke science when discussing conclusions about origins.
Creationists can always say the model is wrong as long as its about evolution etc.
This is not how the world accepts science.
Science is meant to convey a methodology thatr is better then regular methodology’s of figuring things out. The regular is pretty good. SO science is that MUCH better.
ITS SCIENTIFIC they cry when proving some point.
Science doesn’t exist I say but as far as it does it MUST be a higher method of investigation.
its raising the stakes on the truth it asserts. Sure it is.
SO saying evolution is a scientific theory is issuing a challenge to those confident its gibberish.
NONE of this ITS the best till better comes. NOPE. its more then that. Don’t wimp out evolutionists.
IS evolutionary biology a biological scientific theory???
No!!!!
Suppose we give up “TRVTH” and deal in “certainty” and “confidence”? These are amenable to external verification, consilience and statistical warrant.
Didn’t anyone watch Indiana Jones? Science deals in fact, not truth.
I’m rather of the view that the very concept of “truth” cannot be made sense of independently of such concepts as verification, warrant, degrees of confirmation, and so on.
So rather than toss “TRVTH” under the bus and just stick with the pragmatic, verifiable stuff, I’d say that sticking with the pragmatic, verifiable stuff is the best way of making any sense out of the concept of truth to begin with. This isn’t because the verification, pragmatist notions are constitutive of truth, but because they are criteria of it — even “truth-as-correspondence” can be brought down from Mt. Olympus (or Mt. Sinai) and made a thing of this world, if the right distinctions are drawn as needed.
WJM @ TSZ
WJM @ UD
Seems you make different claims depending on the audience.
I presume, by “significant sense of the term ‘matter’, William means some form of billiard ball matter that engages in billiard ball cause and effect.
When models of matter are expanded to encompass all observed attributes, it impinges on William’s idea of god.
Omagain,
The term “prove” science means that one model is more effective in terms of producing IRdata. It has nothing to do with claims about reality. Try to keep up. “Disproven” simply means that science has found a more effective IRmodel.
I’ve been following these debates for fifteen years, an I’ve frequently seen people on the science side try to explain the science doesn’t prove claims. The word prove is inappropriate when applied to facts.
Except in law, when it is modified by phrases like beyond reasonable doubt.
ETA:
Although “proof” has a special meaning in mathematics and formal logic, it derives from a word meaning test.
To prove something means to subject it to test.
In that sense (the original sense) it is what science does.
PPS:;)
Scripture says in a number of places, do not put God to the test. In other words religion is outside the practices of science. I am not a theologian, so I could be misinterpreting this. But I don’t think so.
So I find it amusing when people like Dembski make elaborate mathematical models to test for the existence of the designer.
Or people like Behe make elaborate mathematical projections of probability to demonstrate the need for intervention.
Or when churches set up committees to decide whether some candidate for sainthood has performed a miracle.
Your knowledge has been demonstrated to be lacking in many fields, history of science especially. But, continue to argue with working scientists and tell them all about their chosen field of study and how they are all wrong, it’s vastly amusing.
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/prove
I suppose you mean “not getting hit by cars. You keep bringing up this false dichotomy; because I don’t hold reality as being entirely IR doesn’t mean I hold none of it to be IR. This thread is explicitly about examining the domain limitations of the IR model and not about claiming that it is irrelevant or counter-productive in terms of usefulness in that domain.
I see that the reactive devaluation on display is being appreciated by others.
I’ve also seen them reject the idea that science asserts “truths”, and insist that all science does is create provisional models, which is what makes it different from religion. I’ve actually asserted nothing in the OP that most here haven’t either stated themselves or at least agreed with – I just re-worded it in a way that draws attention to the contradictions that come up when they make statements that contain inherent truth-claims about reality and are not provisional in nature.
Interesting stuff, psychologically speaking.
There seem to be a cottage industry among IDists that involves ignoring the common usage of words and redefining them such that ID wins.
See my post above.Proof does not equal TRVTH.
Proof is about facts, not TRVTH.
ETA: Proof of facts does not require prediction of future data (although such predictions are nice).
Proof of the events of a crime does not require that the crime be replicated. Proof of the existence of living animals associated with fossils does not require recreating ancient times. Proof of common descent does not require recreating evolution. Proof of the age of the universe does not require recreating it.
You have ignored most of what science does and focused only on a few narrowly defined activities that are consistent whir your fantasy version of science.