Zosimus

Hawking radiation — isn't that the proof that black holes don't exist? Somehow the rest of science never took notice. Why are you so desperate to change the subject? What's wrong with the one we're on? Another desperate attempt to change the subject. Yet I could have sworn that the topic of this thread is science and whether it leads to truth and knowledge. Obviously, the answer is no. The simple fact that 80 percent of non-randomized studies (the most common type of studies) are later convincingly refuted shows that at least 80 percent of scientific findings are false. That number could easily be 100 percent. You have no way of knowing. No, I'm not talking about evolution at all. I'm talking about math and logic vs. science in an attempt to find truth. You are desperately trying to turn the conversation into something that it isn't. If you want to talk about the philosophy of evolution, go right ahead — in another thread. This one is not the right thread for that. No, this is a philosophy forum. If you want to talk about religion or biology, there are forums for that on this very website. You are welcome to go to either of those forums and discuss non philosophical matters. I won't stop you. No, both Copernicus and Galileo were mathematicians. Copernicus was a good one. Galileo... not so much. No, the geocentric model was proposed by Aristotle and calculated by Ptolemy. Both of these people predated the Christian religion. A simple search of the Ptolemy Wikipedia entry for religion, religious, or anything similar turned up nothing at all.

You are right. I was alluding to Hempel's Raven Paradox. On this matter I must part company with my esteemed colleague. Science does have a self-corrective mechanism. As Max Planck said: "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." With that in mind, I'd like to salute the scientific progress made on March 14, 2018. Now that Hawkins is dead, science might actually progress a bit. Since have you advanced no evidence to support the above claim, I consider said claim preposterous. That's just as well because there are zero known true scientific theories. I'm going to echo the previous sentiment mentioned above: Show your work. If you really think that evolution is 99.99999% true, I'd like to see exactly what calculations you went through to arrive at that number. I notice that you made no comment on the vast bulk of evidence supporting the theory that Dawkins doesn't exist. Therefore, your opinion is that Copernicus theory that the Earth wasn't the center of the universe was not scientifically true at the moment he made it because there was no preponderance of evidence supporting it? If you believe in science, then you believe that what you think you see is not actually what you see. Rather, your brain is guessing what the world will look like in 0.7 seconds because that's how long it takes for your visual cortex to transmit those signals to your brain for action. Were it not so, we would be unable to catch a ball thrown at us for we would "see" it 0.7 seconds behind where it actually is. True dat. It's not a question of the truth or falsehood of the claim but rather whether that information is relevant. Imagine, for example, that you have been dating a girl for a few weeks. You like her and she seems to like you. She has suggested that you get together at a hotel this weekend. We can imagine what is likely to happen there. Suddenly, someone appears and proves to you that you are actually just a brain in a vat. That 'girl' doesn't exist. She is a neurochemical illusion generated by scientists trying to understand the brain better. Would that knowledge make you change your mind about going to a hotel with her? Cuz it wouldn't dissuade me in the slightest. No, science is a process that can produce false output even when all inputs are true. The first indication that anyone had that the Earth moved even in the slightest was the discovery of Stellar Aberration by James Bradley in the 1720s. Copernicus died in 1543. Galileo died in 1642. Wrong. Math and logic both predate scientific methodology. Neither is inductive. Neither is experience based. Neither can be experimentally falsified. 2+2 = 4 even beyond the event horizon of a black hole or at a very high relativistic speed.. Another claim for which you have no scientific evidence. No, knowledge is justified true belief. Science is a process that yields false results more often than true ones.

Again, you claim that knowledge comes through science but you spout a bunch of nonsense as "knowledge" but when challenged to provide a scientific backing for it, you have nothing. Showled and lead... interesting. Well, as I have pointed out, Tycho Brahe's model was the one that everyone was using. Galileo and Copernicus had nothing. The best Galileo could say was, "Our system is simpler" to which the natural philosophers said, "So you've eliminated some epicycles. Yet, you have the moon's orbit around the Earth on an epicycle. Why is that?" And Galileo didn't know what to say. No, I think you're missing out on the whole point of the conversation. On my side, we have logic (deduction and math) and on your side you have inductive logic. My claim is, as it has always been, that math and logic call science into question. Your answer has been a faith-based assertion that science is self-correcting. Don't you have anything to back up your claims other than quoting journalists? I fail to see how logic and math are non-scientific myths. As I have already pointed out, science as we know it was invented in 1933. And the word scientist was coined in 1834. I certainly understand your need for historical revisionism to try to pretend that all discoveries made were made by scientists. Unfortunately, it's just not true. False dichotomy.

Oh, okay. So if an expert in his field says something, then it's automatically true. So the top expert on Mormon writings is Hugh Nibley (or was... I think he's dead). So here's an expert in the field: https://www.fairmormon.org/testimonies/scholars/hugh-nibley I’ve been collecting some marvelous stuff on Joseph Smith recently. I could say my testimony gets stronger every day. These scriptures are true; they are real. Well, there you have it. An expert on Mormon scriptures assures us that they are both true and real. I guess we have to accept that as truth, right? Because Appeal to Authority is (according to you) only when someone uses his authority is one field in another unrelated field. Well! Get me a temple pass, some magic underwear, and a second wife. I'm convinced!

So you accept that science is continuously wrong but ever changing. This is progress. First of all, you cannot say that an Earth-centered view of the solar system is wrong. Only relative motion can be described. Second, an observation of Jupiter and moons doesn't prove anything about the solar system. Yes, as I said, you know that the theory is wrong but you use it anyway because it's good enough for government work. Let's stop you right there and prove that truth exists. If you believe that truth does not exist, then you must hold that the statement "truth does not exist" is true. Therefore, you must hold the belief that truth does exist otherwise you will hold self-contradicting ideas. http://zimmer.csufresno.edu/~larryc/proofs/proofs.contradict.html No, I get it. You hate logic because you're bad at it, but you want to pretend to be logical. So you try to pretend that rationalists are theists. Please indicate the scientific experiment you conducted that demonstrated that "science...will always prevail and improve." Please also indicate the peer-reviewed journal I can read said experiment in. Oh, I see. The burden of proof is on me to prove science false. Whereas if a theist showed up, the burden would be on him to prove that God exists. Never does the burden fall upon you. I believe this is called the argument from ignorance. Let's start right there. Astronomy involves no experiments. It only involves observation and conjecture. The point is that all of the discoveries that you hold so dear were provided not by scientists but rather by priests. Again, these statements are factually incorrect. The Sun is not the barycenter of the solar system. Neither Galileo nor Copernicus had any kind of evidence showing that the Sun was the center of the universe. And Brahe believed that the Earth was the center of the universe with the Sun going round it and the planets going round the Sun. As already established, there were no scientists before the 1830s and science as we know it was invented in 1933. Even if we assume that natural philosophers (such as Sir Isaac Newton) were merely scientists by another name, none of the people you have mentioned were natural philosophers. There is no logic to the scientific method. It is based on a logical fallacy. The in-vogue attempt to gloss that over is to pretend that Bayesian statistics can overcome that problem. Unfortunately, you don't seem to be able to make that argument. You just ignore the problem. Please indicate the scientific experiment that you undertook to demonstrate the above. No, you are quite wrong. An appeal to authority is the claim that something must be true because it is believed by some authority. If an expert on Buddhism thinks that Buddhism is true, does that mean that it must be? You seem to be missing the point. Perhaps I can help you: Here is a sequence of numbers. What's the next number in the sequence? 1, 3, 5, 7 … ?

If by "a few trials (or even zero trials)" you mean 46 times that women have run for the presidency and failed, then I can't help but wonder what you consider a large number of trials. Wasn't it you who claimed that it was zillions? I'm sure you must know that zillions is not an actual number.

This is nonsense and you know it. It's like saying, "Every time a woman runs for the office of the president of the United States, she is defeated. Every time. EVERY TIME. Can we use these observation (sic) to predict that next year, when a woman runs for president, she will be defeated?" Well, of COURSE you can make that prediction. Will that prediction be true? You have no idea. The napkin religion is the one true religion because I've read this napkin and it's said so the past 20 zillion times I've tried it. P.S. It's 9.8 m/s2 not m2/s So, science is often wrong but that's a good thing? Yes, Galileo went to Medical School. That made him an astrologer. In addition, the word scientist wasn't even invented until 1834. So how can you claim that a person who was born before the word even existed was a scientist? We might as well claim that Moses was the first Muslim. I think you need to take a serious look at https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/12/13/the-truth-wears-off And I think you should take a remedial logic class. Induction—from the false everything follows. For example, I plan to prove that Richard Dawkins does not exist. The statement "Richard Dawkins does not exist" is logically equivalent to the statement "Every thing that exists is not Richard Dawkins." Now, I have been to the beach. I have seen endless grains of sand. Not one of them was Richard Dawkins. I have looked into the sky and seen endless stars. Not one of them was Richard Dawkins. I have met thousands of people in my life. Not one of them was Richard Dawkins. I have eaten countless bites of food. Not one of them was Richard Dawkins. I have breathed in countless molecules of air. Not one of them was Richard Dawkins. In short, the entire data set that I have provides overwhelming evidence that Richard Dawkins does not exist. Induction — it's great.

So, basically, your argument is that we can use observations from the past to guide us in the future because in the past, this method has been generally successfully. Thus, presumably, this method will be generally successful in the future. Isn't that circular logic? So you admit that science doesn't find truth, isn't even trying to obtain truth, but rather invents its own version of "truth" which it calls "scientific truth" but which we all know is not actually true? So, in short, science is better because alternatives are unscientific? And by "scientifically true" you mean not actually true, but rather merely a "situation that holds at anyone (sic) time?" So, basically science "works" because scientists have decided that it works. And when it doesn't work, scientists circle the wagons and claim that models grow in certainty over time. Of course, this flies in the face of what we know -- https://bigthink.com/neurobonkers/believe-it-or-not-most-published-research-findings-are-probably-false and the reasons for this are well known. Here we go again with the Great Atheist Myth. Let's set the record straight. 1. Galileo wasn't a scientist. In fact, there were no scientists before the 1830s. Galileo was a medical school dropout turned amateur mathematician who got his university position because he calculated the dimensions of Satan using Dante's Inferno as a source. 2. Galileo was a devout Catholic who went to mass every day, even when he was so old and weak that he had to be carried there. 3. Galileo's discoveries (all three of them) were confirmed by Jesuit priests, and Galileo was celebrated in Catholic circles. He was a personal friend of the Pope. 4. Galileo had absolutely zero evidence to back up the idea that he was most fervent about, namely that the Sun is the center of the universe. The consensus of every natural philosopher of the time was that Tycho Brae's system was far superior. In fact, no evidence that the Earth moved would be found for more than a century later. So, only verified, reproducible facts produce scientific truth? Can you describe the procedure by which you verified and reproduced that claim? Or do you just take it on faith? So if someone invests in stocks in 2015 and makes money, invests in stocks in 2016 and makes money, and invests in stocks in 2017 and makes money, then stock investing has become a scientific truth? I suppose you will tell me that stocks never go down? You're not answering the question. The question was this: What's the difference between scientific truth and unscientific truth? Argument by quotation. Isn't that the appeal to authority logical fallacy?

That's partially right. Science is based on evidence and observation even though we know that relying on evidence and observation flies in the face of established rules of logic. I certainly do have an agenda, and it has everything to do with science, knowledge, and truth. My agenda is to criticize empiricism and to promote rationalism. Yes, I've heard that before. When theism or rationalism is wrong, that's proof that they don't work. When empiricism is wrong, that's proof that it does work. https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/special-pleading Yes, that's the point. No finite amount of data will ever establish something as true. It will always be conjectural. We might say that it is all just a theory in search of falsification. This is rather silly. Do you think that merely because you jutted your jaw out while you said it that we would all believe you? Where I come people need reasons to back up arguments. It's not enough to just say "nyah, nyah, nyah, I'm right." By the way — what's the difference between scientific truth and non-scientific truth? Yet copious numbers of advancements were obtained before scientists existed and long before science as we know it was even dreamed up. How do you reconcile your claims that science is the one true reason for progress and the fact that progress occurred pre-science?

Your point being what exactly? That when you quote someone it's proof of something but when I quote someone it's proof of nothing? https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/tools/lp/Bo/LogicalFallacies/163/Special_Pleading Now I'm confused. You think that the theory that a photon is both a wave and a particle is unsupported drivel and myth but you accept that Jesus is his own father? What gives?! Well, I'm sorry that you cannot follow a simple argument. Nevertheless, you have not answered the fundamental question. It's essentially the same reason that one cannot define one's terms because there is never an end to the defining. If we want to define light, we might say: "A form of electromagnetic radiation that can be detected by our eyes." As soon as you say that you have to define electromagnetic, radiation, detected, and eyes. But when we try to define eyes we say "a pair of globular organs in the head through which people and vertebrate animals see" oops! Now we have to define pair, globular, organs, head, people, vertebrate, and animals. The definition of terms will never end. Right. So if someone says, "All swans are white" and is shown a picture like then the most sensible thing in the world is to say, "the theory that all swans are white is supported overwhelmingly by mountains of data, so we should just choose to believe that this is not actually a swan." It's in that vein... referring to a vein of ore. Again, you don't seem to get it, but here's the problem. You theorize that dark matter exists, you go searching for it, and you find things that are consistent with the theory, so you think (falsely) that the theory has been supported. In reality, you are only dealing with the problem of scientific underdetermination. There are an infinite number of explanations for every observed phenomenon. So your own quote refutes you. It claims that the existence of dark matter is "favored" which is far from saying that it is known to exist. A hundred years from now, everyone will laugh at all your cherished scientific ideas and wonder aloud how anyone could have been so silly as to believe them — just as you would if you encountered someone from 1918 sharing his knowledge of science.

Well, I'm not here to argue about semantics. It appears that we do agree to a greater or lesser extent. The point is that we are aware that an atom is NOT a positively charged ball at the middle with large numbers of negatively charged balls swarming around it. Anyone familiar with quantum mechanics will inform you that every time an electron is accelerated it releases energy. Accordingly, if electrons really were small balls swarming around a nucleus, they would lose all energy and crash into the nucleus in a fraction of a second. We are informed that electrons are actually wave functions with particle-like properties including spin. This is all quite ridiculous, of course, and just goes to show that we have a very limited understanding of what atoms are and how they work. Nevertheless, scientific realists will eagerly proclaim that light is both a wave and a particle as a real and unquestionable truth and one post later will insist that the idea that Jesus is his own father is too absurd to consider. Of course, the above is a paraphrase of Richard Feynman's quip. Remember that I labeled the inductions as 'good' vs 'bad.' As far as I'm concerned, there are no good inductive conclusions. That is not to say that a person cannot make an inductive leap and have it work out. This is comparable to a woman glancing at a stopped clock, seeing that it shows 7:50 (when the real time is 7:30) and rushing out the door believing that she is late only to arrive at work on time. Yes, it is true that the stopped clock helped her to get to work on time, but that does not mean that consulting stopped clocks is a good idea. Similarly, most of what people consider the triumphs of science are nothing of the sort. For example, a man designing a sub that has to go to 100m of depth may well design the sub to withstand 200m of water pressure. People unfamiliar with the matter may then gush at how exacting science is when in reality the engineer was simply being extra careful. The point of the story is that it may seem perfectly reasonable to the person to think that everyone speaks Spanish because he has yet to see a counter example. Yet, the base problem is that his entire experience is with people living in his city in one small country in one corner of the planet. His experiences are not representative of the planet as a whole. Yet, this obvious insight is ignored when science is contemplated. Our entire experience with gravity is limited to what happens on our planet or in our solar system. Then we observe galaxies light years away and see what said galaxies don't obey Kepler's laws. Rather than admitting that our understanding of gravity is based entirely on observations in and around our solar system, observations that may not be valid in other places in the universe, we instead postulate invisible 'dark' matter that we can drop in anywhere we want willy nilly so that we can pretend that we understand things that we obviously do not. No, it is not my contention that induction (and other logical fallacies) cannot yield true conclusions. We can easily construct horribly bad logical sequences with true conclusions. For example: P1: All dogs are cats. P2: Pigs can fly. C: Therefore, Donald Trump is the president of the United States. Here we can see that we have two false premises (dogs aren't cats and pigs don't fly) plus the conclusion does not follow from the premises, yet the conclusion may well be true. What I would object to is someone saying, "Well, if the conclusion came out true then obviously the logical process of arriving at that conclusion is not as bad as you make it out to be." I completely disagree. Aye, it's a problem with no easy solution. Your claim seems to be that observation, experience, and experimentation are the source of knowledge. Yet, we have adequate reason to doubt this assertion. From Einstein imagining what it would be like to ride on a photon or from Feynman's double-split THOUGHT experiment, we can see that much of what is today taken as truth was a result not of observation but rather of rational thought processes. Similarly, we need not engage in experiments to confirm the truth of the idea: If John is taller than Mary and Mary is taller than Michael, then John is taller than Michael. It would be ridiculous to scour the Earth for a large number of Johns, Marys, and Michaels so that we could experiment with the idea and calculate an adequate p-value for subsequent publication in a scientific journal. We can simply use our brains (well, at least some of us can) to verify through pure thought the truth value of the proposition at hand. The problem with this statement is that it's not developed. I will flesh your statement out more so that we can see exactly what is occurring. P1: If electrons exist, then we should be able to see their traces in a cloud chamber. P2: We can see electron traces in a cloud chamber. C: Therefore, electrons exist. Unfortunately, this is a textbook example of the "affirming the consequent" logical fallacy. Fundamentally, this is no different from saying: If Bill Gates owns a gold mine he will be rich. Bill Gates is rich. Therefore, he must own a gold mine. (Except, of course, we know that a gold mine is not the source of Bill Gates wealth). Now don't get me wrong. That doesn't mean that electrons definitely don't exist. They might. It's just that your reasons for believing in them are unconvincing.

I must say that I am more accustomed to arguments that contain premises and conclusions than to long screeds by grammar-challenged posters who veil their personal attacks in off topic statements littered with factually inaccuracies and logical fallacies. The post goes off the rails almost immediately as the poster accuses us of being "philosophical inebriated friends" rather than "philosophically inebriated." What does he mean, exactly? Does he mean that we are both philosophical and drunk or does he mean that we are drunk on philosophy? He then follows up by comparing the years we spent at UNI (Universidad Nacional de Ingenería?) to the practical institution of science. I fail to see how years can be compared to an institution of science. So let's just skip over the rambling quotes and the guilt-by-association logical fallacy to the real question: Can we verify that the Earth is round? No, we cannot and there are two important reasons. The first is that the Earth is not round (not even spherical, which is probably what he meant). Even experts will say that the Earth has a tendency to bulge somewhat at the equator because of the spinning action of the Earth. What our poster fails to realize is that my brief summary of the problem of verificationism is just a paraphrase of Karl Popper's essay on the subject, large portions of which can be found at http://www.criticalrationalism.net/2010/02/02/karl-popper-on-the-empirical-base-of-science/ where he points out: Quote: There are at least two next steps. One would be to reflect that ‘I have read it in The Times’ is also an assertion, and that we might ask ‘What is the source of your knowledge that you read it in The Times and not, say, in a paper looking very similar to The Times?’ The other is to ask The Times for the sources of its knowledge. The answer to the first question may be ‘But we have only The Times on order and we always get it in the morning’, which gives rise to a host of further questions about sources which we shall not pursue. The second question may elicit from the editor of The Times the answer: ‘We had a telephone call from the Prime Minister’s office.’ Now according to the empiricist procedure, we should at this stage ask next: ‘Who is the gentleman who received the telephone call?’ and then get his observation report; but we should also have to ask that gentleman: ‘What is the source of your knowledge that the voice you heard came from an official in the Prime Minister’s office?’, and so on. There is a simple reason why this tedious sequence of questions never comes to a satisfactory conclusion. It is this. Every witness must always make ample use, in his report, of his knowledge of persons, places, things, linguistic usages, social conventions, and so on. He cannot rely merely upon his eyes or ears, especially if his report is to be of use in justifying any assertion worth justifying. But this fact must of course always raise new questions as to the sources of those elements of his knowledge which are not immediately observational. This is why the programme of tracing back all knowledge to its ultimate source in observation is logically impossible to carry through: it leads to an infinite regress. (The doctrine that truth is manifest cuts off the regress. This is interesting because it may help to explain the attractiveness of that doctrine.) Endquote. As our poster has already pointed out, he is a layman with no formal training in either science or logic. This is not necessarily a problem as there are large numbers of books and online sites that might enable him to educate himself somewhat. Apparently, however, he is content with merely dropping out of context quotes throughout posts that insult others. How sad.

You have said a lot, and I don't know how to divide it into parts so that I can reply to each part individually. So I will simply be brief and gloss over some points. Should you wish for more clarification, bring them up again. The statement "I am sitting at my desk" may be true at one moment in time. However, it will not necessarily be true in 5 minutes. However, if you said "At 6:06 AM on 11/11/2018 I was sitting at my desk" you have constructed a statement that will always be true regardless of time and place. This is the difference between a simple truth and an absolute truth. There are three basic philosophies of science: scientific realism, scientific antirealism, and scientific pragmatism. A scientific realist holds that science talks about electrons because electrons actually exist. A scientific antirealist holds that science talks about electrons even though they don't exist because they are useful as a metaphor for understanding atoms. Scientific pragmatists claim that it doesn't matter whether electrons exist as long as we can use this concept to invent working technology. Too often scientific apologists adopt scientific realism and insist that others do so too. I am not a scientific realist. Regarding the question of induction, it's not a matter of whether some inductions are valid. The point is whether we can distinguish between 'good' and 'bad' inductive conclusions. Imagine that we get on a plane and ask the first three people where they are flying to. All three are flying to Chicago. Most people would say that it's a good induction to think that the 4th person we ask will also be flying to Chicago. However, if we ask those same people their birth month and they are all born in March, most people would say that we cannot use this to conclude that the 4th person is also born in March. The question, then, is not whether some inductive conclusions can be true but rather whether we can distinguish between 'good' and 'bad' inductive conclusions. Your claim is that "a conclusion derived from a large and varied sample, taken under divergent circumstances in different times and places..." is a good one. I rebut that a person born in Peru may reason thus: My mother speaks Spanish as does my father. All the people at my school speak Spanish as well. Every time I go into a new shop, the proprietor speaks Spanish. Even when I encounter someone speaking a different language, it turns out that that person also speaks Spanish. In short, the only people I have found who do not speak Spanish are newborn babies, but they quickly pick up Spanish and are soon speaking it along with the rest of us. Accordingly, I can conclude that everyone 2+ years old speaks Spanish. Obviously, we know that this inductive conclusion is wrong. Yet, science feels free to make similar inductive statements and rarely if ever does it get called on them. At one point I was arguing with someone who assured me that the solar system (and by extension the Earth) was 4.5 billion years old (give or take a few million years here or there). When I challenged him on that point, he became irate, accused me of being a stealth Christian, and assured me that the half-life of uranium was well known because we had been studying it for 70+ years. My response to him was this: Imagine that we have a large room. In this room are vats. The vat closest to us is believed to contain 4.5 billion balls (give or take). We have taken 70 of those balls off the top -- not randomly throughout the vat, and we have discovered that all those balls are a specific shade of blue. In addition, we have taken 1 or 2 balls from some of the nearby vats, and said balls have also been blue. We have reason to believe that there are one sextillion vats in this room. What are the chances that ALL the balls in ALL the vats are blue, and how did you calculate the chance? I never got an answer. Finally, I will address the point you made when you said that a theist might say "The evidence for God's existence is admittedly scant, nonetheless, I know he exists." The unspoken assumption you are making is that evidence is required to believe/know something. A similar idea is expressed when someone says "That which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence." Yet, this statement is self-refuting because no evidence has been advanced to support it. If we assume that evidence is required to believe something, then we must ask ourselves: What evidence do we have that evidence is required to believe something?

Let's dispense with this nonsense for once and for all. Skepticism, obviously, doesn't pair with any of the other methods. One cannot say, "I'm skeptical that God exists, yet God is the source of all knowledge and through reading the Bible we can know His truth." Ditto for skepticism and empiricism. Can theism be reconciled with empiricism? Perhaps, but I'm somewhat skeptical. Yes, we can say that Einstein believed in God and Max Planck too. However, I have yet to hear of a situation in which someone was reading the Bible, came up with a new physics concept and tested it out in the lab. Can rationalism be reconciled with empiricism? No. Rationalists quickly point out all the logical flaws of science. Scientists don't like that very much. Perhaps theism and rationalism can be reconciled. I hadn't really given it much thought. Nothing is verifiable. Even if we choose something as simple as "Donald Trump is flying back to Washington tomorrow" we will find it extremely difficult if not impossible to verify this. One might say, "Well, I read it on MSNBC.com" — but that requires you to ask "How do you know it was MSNBC.com and not just someone who spoofed their website?" It also requires you to ask "How does MSNBC know that this is true?" Assuming we ignore the first question, we would have to contact MSNBC directly to find out. Assuming that they heard it from the White House Press Secretary, we must then ask how that person knew it? The more we try to verify the more we find that we have to verify and eventually we run into an infinite regress problem. The second objection I will make is this: Most Published Research Findings Are False. In short: If you believe in science, then you shouldn't believe in science.

Your question is somewhat leading. It would be like someone saying, "I started reading the Bible when I was 8. Are you saying that I have gained no new knowledge since I was 8?" I'm sure that we can clearly see that simply because a gain of knowledge coincided with reading the Bible does not demonstrate that the Bible was the source of that knowledge. Next, we must also consider the question: When did 'we' start to use scientific methods? 1933? 1834? 1687? 1564? Personally, I have found that on a forum such as this one, there are generally one or more adherents to the Great Atheist Myth. The myth generally goes like this: Before 1564 humans were ignorant savages. Then Galileo, the first scientist, was born. Galileo proved that the Sun was the center of the solar system and singlehandedly invented science. Yet, the Catholic Church would brook no science in its realm. They tortured Galileo until he recanted and then imprisoned him. At his sentencing, Galileo uttered (in Italian) the words "nevertheless it does move," referring to the Earth, of course. Since Galileo, many scientists have been born, and all human knowledge gained from that point on is thanks to science. Personally, I laugh whenever someone expresses some version of this myth. Let's simply take the idea that before the so-called "Scientific Revolution" humans were ignorant savages. How does that explain the latest theories about the Great Pyramid at Giza — namely that it was a giant electrical power plant? When true believers become convinced that it was a power plant, they often simply remark "Well, there must have been scientists back then too." The assumption is that all knowledge comes from scientists. It is never examined nor is any challenge to it brooked. It is an article of faith.

Absolute truth is something that is true independent of time and place. For example, if we say "Mary is sitting at her computer" this may be true at the moment of speaking, but we cannot say that this is an absolute truth. Absolute truth exists. Anyone who claims that absolute truth does not exist must hold that the statement "Absolute truth does not exist" is absolutely true. This is a self-contradicting claim that cannot be true. But the question is: How do we come to know absolute truth (or any truth for that matter)? There are four main lines of thought on the matter. 1. Truth is largely unknowable. This is called skepticism. 2. God is the source of all truth. Truth can be arrived at by reading holy books and praying/meditating. This is called theism. 3. Our senses provide us with real information about the world around us. This is called empiricism. 4. We can know truth through deep meditative thought and logical thought processes. This is called rationalism. Since this is largely a science forum, the question we have at hand is this: Does scientific empiricism lead to knowledge? I maintain that it does not. As others have stated, knowledge is generally considered to be justified true belief. In other words, we must believe in something that is true and have good reasons for doing so. I maintain that science is unable to provide us knowledge because 1) science doesn't give us good reasons for believing in something and 2) we cannot know that the things science tells us to believe are actually true. Generally speaking, science operates by developing hypotheses and then testing these hypotheses. For example, let's suppose that someone theorizes that different items will fall at the same speed in a vacuum regardless of how heavy or light they seem to be. Then, someone will perform some sort of an experiment. They will create a (near) vacuum and drop items such as feathers and lead balls. When they get tired of this, they will emit a conclusion: The hypothesis has been extensively tested and has been upgraded to a law/theory. However, several practical problems insert themselves at this point. The first one is that we cannot know that what we have observed in the past will continue to be true in the future. The second is that most of us have never actually performed this experiment ourselves. We have simply heard it or read it somewhere and have taken it on faith. The third problem is that this experiment is at least theoretically possible for us to perform. However, finding a Higgs boson is something that the vast majority of the population will never be able to do. Most scientific 'knowledge' (dark matter, black holes, quarks, electrons, etc.) pertain to an area that we will never be able to experiment on. Problem 1: The problem of induction. What reason do we have to believe that the past is a good guide to the future? The naive defense of induction usually involves saying that we can see that the past is a good guide to the future by performing an experiment. "If the past is a good guide to the future, then the Sun will rise in the East again tomorrow." The following day, the person claims that induction has been verified. However, this justification is not satisfactory. The person assumes that since induction has worked in the past, it will work again in the future. This is circular reasoning. Another way of looking at the problem is this: If theory T is always true, we would expect observations O. When we observe O, we try to conclude that theory T is always true. However, this is a logical fallacy. There is no justification for this. Problem 2: In most cases, what we 'know' about the physical world comes not from our own experiences but rather from what we have read on scientific websites or in scientific textbooks. Rarely have we actually done the experiments ourselves. In this sense, the experience is far from what science preaches: That knowledge comes from sense experience. We are instead trusting in the writings or sayings of others. In a sense, this is fundamentally very similar to what theists do -- trust in a book that is believed to be true. Problem 3: Even if we accept the idea that we should do these experiments ourselves and try to do some, we will never be able to do most of these experiments. We will never be able to redo the carbon dating on rare fossil items. We will never be able to walk on the moon ourselves and determine what moon rocks are like. We will never be able to work at supercolliders and search for atomic particles. Even scientists cannot do experiments in any area except their own narrow specification. In short, the scientific endeavor will never be more than us trusting what is published in a scientific journal.