Religion

I just wanted to note that, for the record, there are some ideas being used here to promote science that are a bit outdated and, in many contexts obsolete.

Occam's Razor only holds in some cases, and now appeals to people who want to belief a simplistic view when our current science involves a growing complexity that transcends that kind of thinking all together, yet it remains a part of the cannon of scientism and I would hope that proponents of science would get with that rather than using it as a leverage or tool in arguments.

The same applies to using falsifiable as a dogmatic truth. It has, for good reasons, been pretty much abandoned, but is still flickering in some people's minds as truth and, again, a useful attempt to prove what is uncertain and maintain a superior position, which is fine with me, but how that reflects and actually supports science is just baffling if people are actually up-to-date with the very science they have faith in. However, that might delineate the difference between mere believers in science, philosophers of science and scientists, which, in the end, all rests on a method and that methodology is what science is in my understanding. It is a tool we use from a certain perspective, which is not necessarily and antagonist to other views, (religion, philosophy, etc.) Arguments on those matters are helpful and can be productive, but those arguments and discussions are about the implications and relative meaning of scientific discovery, et al.

This brief tale suggests that scientists will stop tinkering and agree to relegate a theory only when a demonstrably better one is available to replace it. We could conclude from this that theories are never falsified, as such. We know that Newton’s laws of motion are inferior to quantum mechanics in the microscopic realm of molecules, atoms and sub-atomic particles, and they break down when stuff of any size moves at or close to the speed of light. We know that Newton’s law of gravitation is inferior to Einstein’s general theory of relativity. And yet Newton’s laws remain perfectly satisfactory when applied to ‘everyday’ objects and situations, and physicists and engineers will happily make use of them. Curiously, although we know they’re ‘not true’, under certain practical circumstances they’re not false either. They’re ‘good enough’.

Such problems were judged by philosophers of science to be insurmountable, and Popper’s falsifiability criterion was abandoned (though, curiously, it still lives on in the minds of many practicing scientists). But rather than seek an alternative, in 1983 the philosopher Larry Laudan declared that the demarcation problem is actually intractable, and must therefore be a pseudo-problem. He argued that the real distinction is between knowledge that is reliable or unreliable, irrespective of its provenance, and claimed that terms such as ‘pseudoscience’ and ‘unscientific’ have no real meaning.