Imagine you are a law professor giving a lecture to a class about how to use persuasion to plant an idea in someone's mind. Suddenly, a student asks, "How do I know you aren't using persuasion to plant this idea in our minds?" And your answer, whether you admit you are persuading the students or deny doing so, must be persuasive. No easy way out of that one. This example demonstrates the same obstacle science has in validating itself. Scientific arguments are the only arguments accepted by the scientific community. Ask a scientist to validate science without using science and he will be at a loss for words. When writing a dictionary, one cannot use a word in its own definition. It is not proper to have a judge preside over his own trial. Flipping a coin to decide the validity of gambling does not prove anything. ...and using the scientific method to prove its merit achieves little. Believe it or not, one has to assume that the scientific method is valid. No matter how obvious its merit may seem to you, it cannot be proven within itself. In other words, scientists must have faith in the scientific method.
in other words you can't really prove the theory of gravity can you? you just have to have faith it exists (gravity that is)
Science is based on rational observation. Hate to burst your bubble there, bud. I trust rational observations over complete random bursts of psyche and imagination to dictate what I believe in.
urm, er..., i cant accept your invitation because in fact I (ta-DAAaaa) completely agree with you. exactly because I am "entrenched in the sciences" I`ve seen where the slippery slopes start and where the arguments fail about the "science explains the universe" mantra. i just dont know where you got this from: please do not pool me with whatever pre-knowledge about entrenched academics you have. oh, or maybe its because of my reply to gandhi? it was NOT ironic. recently i find him and fucketeer the most sensible people here (sry, folks, i know you try hard to be the unlikeable ones). there have been threads on the same topic previously and if you check my posts I everywhere I tried to explain that science has no inherent authority over other systems of perception of the world and that our choice of rational science over anything other is based on pure faith. (Well, mine is based a bit also on aestetics. ) In fact, if one reviews the pro-science posts here he will see the arguments fall in two categories: a) particularly blind faith due to lack of understanding - the "unlike religion, science can be proven", "mathematics is prooved" type of posts. the word "prove" here denotes some mystical act similar to the turning of bread and wine into the flesh and blood of Christ. But in this case the Almighty is i`d guess Einstein. b) reducing science to a collection of empirical knowledge. i.e. science is that which can be observed. it works (obviously, if it is observed, and since we believe in our means of observing it) so it is fundamentally true (whatever this means). i admit that many scientists themselves, who are occupied in more practically oriented natural sciences (biology, chemistry, etc.) share the viewpoint b). rutherford refered to sciences apart from his own as "stamp-collecting" and he was partly right. but if you talk to pure mathematicians, elementary particle or astro- physicists, philosophers or certain humanities - all fields which have tradition of pushing the far edges of knowledge and knowledgeable itself and actually try to understand whats going on - you will see they know very well how much hanging in the air is the whole thing.
Thank you for explaining that. I did not think anyone took gandhi seriously, so that is why I interpreted your response the way I did. Seeing what you actually intended, I apologize for my response to your post. I will have to take gandhi's posts more seriously in the future. ...somewhere, gandhi is laughing.
i object that. i have faith into what i see. actually not faith, but trust. or else i cannot posess any orientation in the world. ok, i trust myself. then i see a simple experiment. then i hear deductive/inductive conclusion. what shall i do? i will make more complex experiment to check the method of conclusion. and what i see? i see that method selected is correct since i tells what i would see in complex experiment, based on just simple experiment. therefore i must believe (not messy faith) in the method used for conclusion. i can check it as many times as i want, and since the method works, i trust it it. methods of science are such methods. i trust them. science is very fragile. millions of positive results means nothing to just one negative. so science have defending mechanism: it uses induction to generalise ex-correct knowledge to find more common law. just look how einsteins relativistic theory included newton's mechanics. being beaten million times, sciense corrects itself, and it's still an excellent tool to predict the reality. religion never gave it. it has some scientific elements, as transmitting common sense, such as 'an apple doesn't fall far from apple tree'. but this is really laughable in front of newton's gravity law. anyways, in the field of reality prediction, the religion is beaten many times by the science. what religion always says? 'god desires so'. then the science gives numeric answers again and again. religion can be good only avoiding any conflicts with science. a good religion must operate terms that could not be proven or disproven by science and the only such a field is morality and ethics. actually very narrow circles of these. for me, a good sample of an excellent and proper religion is zen zen just does not intersect with science. [jocular on] p.s.human created the god by it's own ikon. p.p.s.human arisen from the ape, that was created by god's ikon. [jocular off]
