Terrible news for the Creation Science museum (and Republicans)

Recent article about Popper not having a good argument.

The appeal of falsificationism is obvious. It provides a bright line, and it rewards the boldness that we often like to see exemplified in science. How well does it work?

The short answer is: not very. Philosophers of science recognized this almost immediately, for two main reasons. First, it is difficult to determine whether you have actually falsified a theory. This is largely a restatement of one of Popper’s own objections to verificationism.

http://bostonreview.net/science-nat...ael-d-gordin-quest-tell-science-pseudoscience
 
BidenPresident said:
The appeal of falsificationism is obvious. It provides a bright line, and it rewards the boldness that we often like to see exemplified in science. How well does it work?

The short answer is: not very. Philosophers of science recognized this almost immediately, for two main reasons. First, it is difficult to determine whether you have actually falsified a theory. This is largely a restatement of one of Popper’s own objections to verificationism.

http://bostonreview.net/science-nat...ael-d-gordin-quest-tell-science-pseudoscience
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BidenPresident is a virgin. To women anyway.
 
Darth Omar said:
The other side of that coin is that uncertainty could provide a safe place for philosophical naturalists.

‘We may never know the answers to some of these questions’.
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I was the first one out of the gate acknowledging that anyone anticipating the scientific method was going to provide all the answers to all questions about the nature of reality was going to be sorely disappointed.

I am unaware of one educated and thoughtful person who does not think there are limits to human reason, nor that there is a ceiling to the cognitive capacity of our souped-up chimpanzee brains.

But that is not really what we are dealing with here.

We are dealing with a vast, unwashed multitude of Deplorables who outright reject credible scientific evidence and dismiss out of hand well supported and secure scientific theories and tenets

In this thread alone I believe you had bible thumpers denying carbon isotope dating, deny significance of the fossil record, and deny that anatomically modern homo sapiens evolved from archaic human subspecies and variants.

That all is firmly in the camp of Denialism, not healthy scientific skepticism.
 
Micawber said:
Those are the perennial questions they do ask, but some pervert them and try to shove them in my kids school textbook a la
Kitzenmiller v Dover. (sp?) Yes agreed, they should stick to philosophy.

The relative degree of chaos v order is something I am unconvinced about either way, as to which may predominate.
So I find the fact that there is enough order for us to "know things" and frankly, predict anything let alone
everything, does not suggest a designer in any way. The reasoning becomes circular and unsolvable immediately.
Well if we only knew more we would know more. Why don't we know more? The is not enough order? Therefore there is no god?
The corollary is equally unappealing intellectually. So I file that question in my debate while enjoying adult beverages file.
I'm no longer in philosophy 101 and stopped smoking dope in college.

I will offer this, if there were a god who wished us to know him, he would have hired better advocates on earth. ;)
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I agree that fundamentalist dogma and creationism need to be kept out of science classes.

Fortunately the creationists and their offspring the intelligent designers have a long history of losing in court.

And losing badly.

I tend to be agnostic on whether the metaphysical questions about the deepest levels of reality have anything to do with providential design.

I do think it is human nature to ask those questions, even outside of a dope smoking philosophy 101 class. Preeminent physicists have been speculating on those kind of questions which are currently beyond any kind of technology or experimentation to test. Some people are blessed to be paid money to think about the deepest levels of reality.

Fine tuning vs. the contingency approach

Physicist Robert Dicke pointed out in his article “Dirac’s Cosmology and Mach’s Principle” that we can arithmetically. combine the physical constants of general relativity and quantum mechanics to give rise to dimensionless numbers—that is, we can multiply and divide these constants in combinations that make all the units cancel out. Numbers that should have nothing to do with each other—things like the age. of the universe, the mass of the proton, and the gravitational constant—seem to be intricately related when properly multiplied and divided by each other.

That is strange.

Physicist Martin Rees has argued that it seems to be the result of the fine-tuning of the universe. If these constants were slightly. different in numerical value, the result would be a universe completely incapable of giving rise to life. Richard Swinburn, a professor, contends that the facts arising from contemporary physics show an interrelation and a sensitivity that cannot but. resurrect the teleological argument: The intricacy of the universe implies the existence of an intelligent creator God.

The contingency approach to denying design takes a different line, arguing that there is not actually anything here that needs explaining. It contends that things just are the way they are. If that is the case, there is nothing to explain.

Elliot Sober weighs in on this question of fine-tuning arguments in philosophy of physics. His argument does not make the move of the necessity approach. We don’t need to assume anything about the ultimate form of the laws of nature. We can take them as they are. We can also grant that the universal laws could be of a different form and that the constants could be of a different value. We will allow all of this to be contingent—that is, not necessary.

If all of this could have been otherwise, but turned out to be as it is, then it seems we need an explanation. However, Sober argues that is not the case. Just because something highly improbable occurs does not mean that it was designed. Improbable things accidentally happen all the time. The key is to look at them from the proper direction.

For instance, imagine a lottery: If the lottery sells 250,000 tickets, the odds of winning are very tiny. As such, it is more than unlikely that any given person will win.

However, it is certain that. someone will win.

Sober argues that the fine-tuning argument makes the mistake. of looking from the wrong direction. We are holding the winning. lottery ticket. We are in a universe that supports life.

https://www.justplainpolitics.com/showthread.php?139501-The-physics-of-God&p=3616963#post3616963
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Cypress said:
Into The Night: consistently ass-backwards wrong, time after time after time after time >>[/COLOR][/B]
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Bulverism fallacy.
Cypress said:
"Einstein's Theory of Gravity"[/B][/COLOR][/SIZE]
https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/how-to-understand-einsteins-theory-of-gravity
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Discover Magazine does not speak for Einstein.
Cypress said:
"A theory of quantum gravity"[/B][/COLOR][/SIZE]
https://www.google.com/amp/s/cosmos...ep-closer-to-a-theory-of-quantum-gravity/?amp
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Google is not God. They are not a theory either.
Cypress said:
"NASA Planetary Science program" [/B][/COLOR][/SIZE]
https://science.nasa.gov/solar-system
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NASA is not God. NASA is not a theory either.
Cypress said:
Stanford University: Division of Planetary Science[/B] [/COLOR][/SIZE]
https://earth.stanford.edu/planetary-science
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Stanford is not God. Stanford is not a theory either.
Cypress said:
University of California: Division of Planetary Science[/B][/COLOR][/SIZE]
http://guide.berkeley.edu/undergraduate/degree-programs/planetary-science/
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Berkeley is not God. Berkeley is not a theory either.

Science is a set of falsifiable theories.
Science is not a university, government agency, license, degree, certification, Holy Link, book, pamphlet, or a voting bloc.
 
Cypress said:
I agree that fundamentalist dogma and creationism need to be kept out of science classes.

Fortunately the creationists and their offspring the intelligent designers have a long history of losing in court.

And losing badly.

I tend to be agnostic on whether the metaphysical questions about the deepest levels of reality have anything to do with providential design.

I do think it is human nature to ask those questions, even outside of a dope smoking philosophy 101 class. Preeminent physicists have been speculating on those kind of questions which are currently beyond any kind of technology or experimentation to test. Some people are blessed to be paid money to think about the deepest levels of reality.
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If we accept that God is all powerful, all knowing and all merciful, then why couldn't God have created the Universe just as we find it? A Big Bang that expanded out to what we are experiencing now 13.8 Billion years later? God is eternal. The few billions of years of the Universe's existence is nothing in comparison.


https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smit...-discovering-about-big-bang-theory-180949794/
It was cosmic microwave background radiation, a residue of the primordial explosion of energy and matter that suddenly gave rise to the universe some 13.8 billion years ago. The scientists had found evidence that would confirm the Big Bang theory, first proposed by Georges Lemaître in 1931.

“Until then, some cosmologists believed that the universe was in a steady state without a singular beginning,” says Wilson, now 78 and a senior scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “The finding helped rule that out.”

92PKaj0.jpeg
 
AProudLefty said:
Yeah. Just weird that he would say it doesn't describe motion. Granted on it's own, it just calculates the force between two masses at a distance at a time. The time aspect is what describes the motion. a = v/t.
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Newton's law of gravitation does not have a term for time.
You can't add terms to the equation.
 
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