Well, that's the thing, isn't it? People who believe that Science is the best tool to understand Reality will judge everything by scientific standards. "What evidence do you have for that claim? How much of it? Can it be repeated and understood?"
Most things in Reality aren't about evidence or proof. Even Philosophy, which deals ultimately in logical proofs, doesn't offer "scientific proof". And, of course, we, in our daily lives, rarely need an appeal to Science to understand Reality (as we perceive it).
Even people who believe religion has better explanations than science tell me that Sam, TD screaming for me to have evidence for my claims (I probably already had some, but you know how he is) or others.
On the bold, I disagree, and I'll go with Harris on this one, "Tell a devout Christian that his wife is cheating on
him, or that frozen yogurt can make a man invisible, and he is likely
to require as much evidence as anyone else, and to be persuaded only
to the extent that you give it."
People tend to operate, with one exception, on empiricism. On fact. Not the scientific method per se, people don't start a conversation or start sweeping the floor at McDonalds and take each action using a scientific method testing hypothesis anew, but the ideas of requiring proof to believe things is practically universally in all things other than religion.
If there are supernatural beings or forces, therefore, it does not stand to reason that they would be bound to scientific inquiry. They would, being at least partially outside of Nature, be the least bound.
And we would have absolutely no way to actually know of their existence. They may as well be teapots.
What unscientific way of investigation is going to reveal that a specific god does, or does not, exist? If we do have a supernatural universe, then we live in a remarkably consistent one.
To me, the basic question her is privileging the hypothesis. Why believe in the first place. Why don't you believe in the muslim idea of god? Or one of the eastern ideas? Because you have no reason to.
But when was this time of great improvement? If you're thinking of the Enlightenment, I would very much argue that the Enlightenment supported but by no means created this recent technological thrust. Various forces, not the least of which were technological and political advances created prior to the Enlightenment, cannot be separated. Indeed, we should view our modern progress merely as a continuation of a process that's been at work as far back as we have history. The Egyptian and Sumerian technological advances were just as revolutionary as ours today.
I'm speaking rather broadly. When it comes to disease for example, the only way we've improved our condition is when we stop praying, imagining demons cause sickness, and operate on naturalism. And it works.
Same thing for meteorology and practically anything else I can think of. When humans stop accepting supernatural explanations for something and seek to understand how it works then cool stuff tends to happen.
While Egypt and Sumeria did cool stuff, think about how much the rate of scientific advancement has snowballed now that the process has been left, relatively, unmolested for so long? We went from the earliest successful heavier than air flight to the moon in, what, 50 years? Crazy!
The universe is in line with naturalism more so than arbitrary or anarchist supernaturalism, I grant you. However, there is no strong evidence (certainly no scientific evidence) that supernatural beings do not allow natural law to affect the world the vast majority of the time without intervention. And that's all Science can say. Science does not say, "X is an immutable law and there can be no violations." In the past, there have been violations of an accepted scientific law (Mercury's orbit vs. Newtonian physics, for example). The "law" is then supplemented or altered to take the new data into account.
Of course, yet there is actually an example of this I was reading of yesterday where some scientist proposed ~his names~ theory of gremlins, in which in the inside of every electron there was a tiny gremlin that we had no way to detect and it consciously chose, without exception, to act in a manner consistent with our understand of how electrons are supposed to work.
You can't disprove this, its unfalsifiable in the premise. So should we be agnostic about it because we have no strong evidence against it?
Occams Razor Sam.
On science changing when new information comes in, of course this happens. Theories are modified when we have new data.
As an example, I have a drill in my room. I believe that this drill is the appropriate tool for every construction job I do. Today, I have to attach a coat rack to the wall, make round holes through the floor for cables and hang a picture. Does the fact that my founding assumption ("A drill is the most appropriate tool of every construction job I do") is correct today mean that it will be correct tomorrow, when I have to re-shingle the roof?
Science works consistently within its limitations — arguing that means its founding assumptions are metaphysically correct, however, is to mistake utility for actuality.
The drill bit would be an example of a Hasty Generalization, right? Your over-extrapolating your example.
I argue that the limitations, that science is commenting only of the natural world, is a holdover from primitive, superstitious times. We no longer believe in dualism because we have Cat Scans, would be one example of this. Think of it like this, imagine you have amnesia or something and have infront of you a copy of the bible, the koran, the vedas, the oddessey and illiad, and perhaps some stuff from asatru or the modern printing of american indian legends.
Which of these is apparently true?
Sidenote, how many people do you think are religious today, simply from the fact that they went to sleep as a believer?
Well, if you want the standards of scientific certainty applied to other areas of study and knowledge, nothing that I know of. But people never live their lives set to that standard, anyhow. It is nice to have relative certainty of some things and we should be very thankful for the ability to glean knowledge from Nature in such a consistent manner. But there have always been large swaths of human knowledge and experience that are outside the limitations of Science — I don't think we should ignore those in favor of holding onto the "safe bet". One could probably adapt the parable of the talents for this discussion.
Well, like I said above, people still live by facts and reason for the majority of their daily lives, if not science proper. To me though this is an unimportant distinction. I don't recall the parable of the talents atm, sorry. On stuff outside science in human experience, of course stuff like an individuals memory is hard to corroborate and we can't quantify beauty, but these, to me at least, seem like short term problems. On a long enough timeline, once we know fully how the brain works, both of those, at least, seem like solvable issues.
Peace,
J
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