> Science, is, IMO,
> the generally accepted way for everyone to know if something
> is real and how it works.
Which you have to disclaim as being IMO, because such an idea is entirely
outside the purview of science. In fact, most of the departments at a
university are entirely outside the realm of science. Parking meters work,
but that's technology, not science proper.

-----

Everything anyone says is effectively IMO.

Sorry to be rude, but I have no idea what you point is.  "science" as a word
in the way I was using it, refers to human beings common understanding of
the world and it mechanisms, science applies to everything.  The reason we
like a nice painting or a film, at some point will come down to scientific
explanation, maybe it's complex or simple, but there is always a reason for
why something happens, including our thought processes, choice's of partner
and falling in love.

There are no miracles as such, just events that yet to have a detailed
explanation, but I'm sure eventually they will.

We are just organic machines at the end of the day.



-----Original Message-----
From: [log in to unmask] [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 26 July 2002 16:29
To: [log in to unmask]; [log in to unmask]
Subject: RE: OT: Science and Truth; was Darwin, Satan & Macintoshes


> Science, is, IMO,
> the generally accepted way for everyone to know if something
> is real and how it works.
Which you have to disclaim as being IMO, because such an idea is entirely
outside the purview of science. In fact, most of the departments at a
university are entirely outside the realm of science. Parking meters work,
but that's technology, not science proper.

> If we take every crack pot, claim about ghosts,
> God, telepathy,
> alien abductions, re-incarnation, the after life, astrology,
> and just accept
> it, as some people say it's true and they truly believe it
> is, then society
> would be in a complete mess.  Science is, of course, not
> perfect, but it's a
> close as you will get to an accepted truth.  People are
> rarely objective and
> just because someone believes there is a 'Chi', if there is
> no scientific
> evidence of it, then it probably doesn't exist.  Maybe it requires
> investigation, but until that happens, I will remain sceptical.
I think that you are creating a false dichotomy between crack pot claims and
science. What do you do then with history? Archeology? Linguistics? I give
those, because I've studied some of each. I remember a graduate course in
the history of science, in which the professor raised the question of how
the historian of science knows something. He cited a source the described
the epitaph on a tombstone in a European church cemetery, quoting another
source. He had confirmed the citation. But he had been to the cemetery, and
the tombstone was not even there. What was he to make of that? Fortunately,
he knew enough European history to appreciate that the tombstone had likely
been removed.

Archeology purports to be scientific, but succeeds in being peculiar. We
have learned a great many interesting things from it. We have recently found
evidence that there really was a king named David in Jerusalem. Some think
we have found Jericho, and that the Joshua story is true, without having
unpacked their shovel first. Some think we have found another Jericho, and
that the Joshua story is, at best, exaggerated. While things that some have
doubted have been confirmed, it remains to be seen whether archeology will
ever finish cataloging every remaining artifact (there's the small matter of
funding). And if it did, would absence of evidence tell us anything? Or, is
archeology the study of happy accidents, like discovering that some book or
paper you were sure was lost was in a sealed box in your basement? After
all, when did Alexander the Great say, "OK, now, let's bury the rubble, so
someone can dig it all up in a few centuries, and see that there used to be
a city here just yesterday"?

I hope you remain so skeptical about science, as well. There will likely be
only a small body of knowledge that was known to be scientifically true when
you were born, that will still be known to be true in your golden years (the
periodic chart has held up well, albeit with some revisions over the years,
but periodicity seems sound enough). A much larger body of knowledge will
have come and gone (Dawkins, Gould, Hawking, I don't care to bet on). Neils
Bohr won a Nobel prize for his model of the hydrogen atom. That model has
been extended to other atoms, and was good enough for me to make it thru two
years of high school chemistry. But we know now it not to be true. Perhaps,
someday, we will know that Schrodinger's model isn't true either, in spite
of being incredibly useful for understanding quantum effects.

> This is why I don't believe in any religion, just hearsay and
> mass hysteria, don't equal fact.
The boundary between mass hysteria and history is much less sure than we
might like to think. Some religions are not at all concerned with
intersecting history. Perhaps someone who is intimately acquainted with
Graeco-Roman mythology can tell us if the Pantheon meaningfully interacted
with history. There is some doubt whether there ever was a prince name
Buddha, and more that Confucius really said all the things attributed to
him. I would be fascinated if you could provide an instance of where a
single incident in the chronicles of the Israelite kings, or the return from
exile, is known to be false.

I recall an archeological discovery of the annals of a non-Israelite king,
who, according to the Hebrew Bible, lost his battle. In his annals, he says
he won. How are we to understand this? I can think of several explanations.
We can attribute it to a difference of opinion, depending on how the
participants perceived their objectives in battle. Or, since one only need
to survive to write their own history book (and not win, as some claim), he
wrote the story he wanted to tell. Some of us have relatives like this. It
is an interesting mindset that would automatically conclude, given two
disagreeing accounts, that the better attested account is now proven false
by the other, simply because they disagree. I would not call that skeptical.


Greg Stigers
http://www.cgiusa.com

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