Thread: What is this?
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      11-25-2014, 08:45 PM   #86
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Quote:
Originally Posted by chiplee View Post
It's informative you want? It's informative you shall receive. Ladies are always right.

It continues to be made apparent that too many people misunderstand what is meant by the term "theory" in science. So I thought I'd clarify. Nothing awarded the title theory in science, is just a theory in the everyday sense. Science establishes theories from hypotheses after rigorous analysis. To be clear, science is not able to establish, or even interested in establishing "facts", but theories come as close as science will ever get to being factual.

The proofs that do exist in science come from logically deduced arguments, not empirical ones. In other words, to be a "proof" in science, data sets must demonstrate that their supported proposition is true in all cases to which they apply, vice just all observed (empirical) cases, and there cannot be a single exception. In science we recognize that we have not observed, and could never observe, every instance of anything, so we don't use the word "fact". At least not in any formal or disciplined sense.

In the empirical world, pure truth simply cannot ever be reached. So in science, unproven propositions believed or strongly suspected to be true are called conjectures. And, as dear Dr. Gould said, outside of mathematics and logic, everything is conjecture.

Stephen Jay Gould also wrote, "The final proofs of logic and mathematics flow deductively from stated premises, and achieve certainty only because they are not about the empirical world." He recognized (and it is an axiom of science) that there can be no such proofs (no "FACTS") in the empirical world. This is not because nothing is true, but because there is no intellectually defensible mechanism for establishing any proposition as true "without even a single exception." To empirically establish such a quality, we would have to actually observe every single instance of the event in question. How wonderful it would be if we were actually able to do such a thing, but, sadly, we cannot.

Therefore, in the empirical world, where proof is forever foreclosed to us, we must depend on other tools for establishing confidence in our various conjectures. Those tools are evidence and reason. These tools allow us to reach conclusions with great confidence, but that confidence must always remain tentative and provisional.

Consider the example conjecture, "The sun rises in the east."

We have great confidence in the statement as a provisional truth. We have observed innumerable such events, and the sun has never disappointed us... so far. Each one of these observations is additional evidence that the sun rises in the east, and reason allows us to inductively gain great confidence that tomorrow it will do the same thing.

But, the sun doesn’t actually rise in the east at all. In fact, the sun's own motion has nothing to do with our experience of the sunrise. As we all know, it is the earth's rotation toward the east that creates the illusion of a rising sun. We now have better evidence and better reasoning that allows us to understand that the conjecture "the sun rises in the east" (considered "proved" by many for most of human history) is not actually true at all. And no matter how many times you wake me up, turn me to the east and point out that "the sun is rising in the east," you are still offering no proof. You are merely providing an additional piece of evidence for a conjecture that ultimately is false.

History is filled with similar examples of things that were considered true (and mistakenly considered "proven") that ultimately turned out to be false, so we’ve learned our lesson.

And it doesn't stop there.

Our current conjecture that the earth’s rotation toward the east creates the illusion of a rising sun is much better supported by both evidence and reason than the older conjecture that the sun rises in the east. We have great confidence that science is progressively and incrementally approaching truth... (just as it aims to do in all of its endeavors) And certainly in this example the step was a great one in that direction. But does that make our current understanding any more a "proof" than the older one? Absolutely not.

The earth rotates towards the east today, but this was not always so, and it will not always be so in the future. Let's just use the old colloquial "the sun rises in the east" for ease of understanding, but only as an idiom for the rest of this discussion.

We expect the sun to "rise in the east" tomorrow, just as it always has since we started watching it. But there will be a day when that is no longer the behavior the sun exhibits. It is almost certainly absurd to imagine the transition will happen in a single night, and the probability of that is vanishingly small. But it's not zero.

Thanks to our two tools, evidence and reason, we can have great confidence that many of our conjectures are probably 100% true. That confidence is necessarily so great that we lead our lives functionally behaving as though and understanding that they are. It would be futile to live our lives otherwise. And there is no need for anyone to embrace the absurdity that we do not know a lot of things that actually are true, just because we cannot prove them.

But that does not change the fundamental reality that everything we believe, no matter how well supported by evidence and reason, is still conjecture and never proved.

That's a long discussion leaving one major issue unanswered. Why does it matter?

It matters because debaters (usually creationists) use the false and impossible demand for nonexistent "proof" as permission to literally be stupid. If the only tools we really have are evidence and reason, and if the only way we can distinguish what is probably true from what is probably false is by the quantity and quality of those two tools, then the "fact" of the matter is that any honest ranking of our various "god conjectures" would place them all at the bottom of a broad spectrum that had the "theory" of evolution, and the "theory" of gravity, and the germ "theory" of disease, etc. near its top. And yet creationists use these words to argue for equal time for "creation science" in schools and text books. Words mean things, but sometimes they mean more than one thing. And to regard the theory of evolution as "just" a theory requires a gross misunderstanding of the nature of knowledge and of the science from which we have all benefitted.
You been booklearnin lots. We don't hold kindly to such roun' these here parts....
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