There is no thing called "science" that finds answers. There are scientists who can form hypotheses about the universe they can see and perceive and check whether they are consistent with what they can see and perceive.
> There is no thing called "science" that finds answers.
That’s equivalent to suggesting people can’t do chess. Semantically it may be accurate, but it’s intentionally obtuse.
Language doesn’t actually work that way.
Anyway, science isn’t experiments and building hypothesis etc. That’s part of the process, but really quite small pieces of a greater whole. It’s the long processes of generations refining and testing earlier ideas that finds truth.
I am not sure I understand the statement about chess.
It is important to understand that scientists are individuals with individual incentives. While some have an inherent drive towards getting closer to truths via the application of the scientific method, others may find other things more important.
Abstracting "the science" from scientists is a convenient way of training other people in the acceptance of the proposition that there are inherently qualified arbiters of truth.
Chess is an abstract set of rules not the thought process behind making a move or the physical action of moving a piece. As such nobody actually does chess.
You can play chess, as in follow the rules, or be a scientist, as in contribute to the progress of science, but nobody is the physical embodiment of chess or science.
Edit: To be as clear as possible, the President isn’t Democracy, but Democracy still exists in that you can meaningfully destroy it.
Democracy is emergent behavior, you need free and fair elections and the general public to vote. Elected officials are a tiny part of that, just as an individual cell of your body is no more you than a single person is a country.
Science is similarly emergent behavior. You need the exchange of ideas, not just say a science fair where people go through the motions of experiments, but those experiments don’t get used by others to design new experiments etc.
Your statement "If it has an answer" only holds if you say that any truth science can't prove doesn't exist
But this isn't true. See Halting problem etc. There are things for which the answer can exist & yet be undeterminable
This is fine. I prefer to look at it this way: science is searching out a subset of knowable truths. The origin of the universe is interesting only insofar as we can dredge up relevant information, but coming up with an origin story or not isn't what proves the validity of science
Science isn't about getting all the answers, it's about getting the answers right & at it's best admitting when we got the answers wrong
When someone asks "If God doesn't exist what created the universe?" I say "I don't know, I don't care"
Life connects back to time zero because everything prior was an important boundary condition, e.g. heavy metals made through exploding stars supporting elemental composition of life, etc.
You don't have to understand everything to understand anything. Scientific theories are always abstractions that reduce the complex interconnected universe to a workable surface area we are trying to explore in order to produce a model that can be used to make predictions about the larger world that in turn can be tested, refined, or shit canned as appropriate.
You can say we can't possibly understand how the heart works because we do not understand the entire evolutionary tree leading up to the human race and how the circulatory system evolved over billions of years and ergo heart transplants are impossible. This is trivially false and its false for the same reason parent posters assertion is false. Everything is how it is because of initial conditions ergo everything connects back to time zero but we can still use the abstract understanding we do have to make models and predictions.
> Life connects back to time zero because everything prior was an important boundary condition, e.g. heavy metals made through exploding stars supporting elemental composition of life, etc.
The initial conditions were so uniform that it doesn't take the same level of detail to understand what happened, and we can look all the way back to the CMBR. A particle-by-particle reconstruction of interactions since the big bang won't make much of a difference in our understanding of what happened on Earth. Virtually all of the interactions arrived in our solar system in a very noisy fashion during star formation and it was up to the resulting sun to pump negentropy into the rocks and other matter.
He means to say that science does not have the tools to reproduce the beginning of the Universe. If it's not reproducible it's not Science. Confident assertions non-withstanding, the Human mind is a slave to nature, in that can never hope to uncover it's deepest secrets and thus, it's true.....nature?
By that definition science is entirely unreal because we can't reproduce an apple pie from scratch without first creating the universe. We explore geology including theories about the formation of the earth without making new planets.
What is supposed to be reproducible is the act of collecting and processing data to ensure that your conclusion isn't based on error, falsehood, or happenstance. What he is promoting is a basic misunderstanding of both science and logic.
People with preconceived anti science attitudes do this all the time. They face you down at high noon in their fancy duds, six guns ready at their hips sure of themselves and ready to kill and draw pearl handled.... water pistols.
They went looking for the correct answer to satisfy their religion not a commitment to truth and found cheaply manufactured baubles they are sure are deadly weapons because the very skills that would enable them to see it clearly would prevent them from looking for such easy answers in the first place.
let me rephrase; science has limited itself to understanding the laws of Nature. It can never tell us how the world -and thus life- came to be. I admit your argument was a good one. But not the anti religious points. Essentially atheists has declared Nature as the true god. In the rules he has imposed, he has left us with no choice. Science has hardly managed to do away with god, it has merely managed to exchange him as it were.
I will also argue that atheism is a religion. There is nothing more exciting than being able to throw off the rules of one god by replacing him with another who asks for nothing.
Only theists conceive of God as an essential element and thereby perceive a god shaped hole in atheists world view? What religion does your cat practice for example?
Nature is like gravity it is a label we attach to things in order to communicate about some aspect of our mental models of the universe we share or imagine we share sufficiently to communicate theories about the underlying thing those models point to. It isn't in most cases not imagined to be a sentience modeled after ourselves but rather an abstraction around some aspects of everything in the overarching model.
Religion, Philosophy, Science are all systems of models of the world but they belong in different category based on characteristics in the same way that a trout, a dog, and an duck are all animals but they aren't all fish just because they all swim.
Religion especially western religion has classically been a pre scientific exploration of different theories about how the world came to be lacking virtually all actual understanding and focused on the idea that something much like man writ large was responsible for the universe and that the man who acted as conduit to the wishes off that man would derive some measure of that beings power mirroring primitive social structures and extending them skyward to the fanciful creations of our own mind. As if an ant had imagined the entire world was a giant burrow made by giant ants who could make their wishes known to lesser ants by way of the arrangements of your dogs droppings in your yard.
Science is merely a system for harnessing the same imagination but directed towards testing our fanciful explanations and building an increasingly powerful set of facts and models that are extremely likely to be somewhat true. We by the nature of our brains are builders of models and we must have them to exist and to progress but we don't need to build a system that glorifies the very flaws to which our minds are most heir to and exploits them. That is to say we haven't replaced God with nature we have simply built mental models of the universe that don't contain a first cause because we don't believe there is a conscious act at the center of it all.
Those of us who have wings know that a wing isn't a different kind of fin and a rocket engine isn't a different sort of wing and naked is not a style of pants.
There is no reason that we can't at the end of a long road have a pretty good idea how how life on earth came to be in the same way as we have a pretty good idea of how to continents came to be as they are. It wont be perfect but it will keep getting better every year as we learn more.
Your god was invented thousands of years ago so someone could claim to speak for him and attain status within his or her tribe without hunting more animals a trick that amazingly still works NOW. Throwing off the yoke of his adherents doesn't free one from the obligation of life, meaning, your family, or your fellow man. It is a harder obligation not an easier one. You incorrectly frame casting out comforting lies and facing down a terrifying truth as an easy way out but nothing could be further from the truth.
If a lie it is and I for myself call it a lie then adhering to it would be an unacceptable act of cowardice. If you truly believe it then to you it is courage to adhere to it but neither of our experiences is a lie and you definitely do not understand mine or any other alike.
> Your god was invented thousands of years ago so someone could claim to speak for him and attain status within his or her tribe without hunting more animals a trick that amazingly still works NOW.
Another fallacy and incorrect assumption that's clouding the discussion. Don't group all religions together then toss them all out as equally invalid.
I'm talking about subjective understanding of objective truth. I of course think the objective truth is there is no God. The majority in America differ.
In what way do may statements and reality diverge? Be specific with quotes.
For example
> science does not have the tools to reproduce the beginning of the Universe. If it's not reproducible it's not Science.
What followed in this thread wasn't a discussion of religion. The post you are directly replying to directly dealt with the charge that it is impossible to scientifically examine the beginning on life on earth because it wasn't reproducible and ergo not science based on your misunderstanding what reproducible means.
If you look again up thread you will see that religion was discussed in a different part of the thread. Did you mean entirely different statements were strawmen? If so what and again please be specific.
I have myself been very specific in the arguments I refuted so you can do the same.
There is no thing called "science" that finds answers. There are scientists who can form hypotheses about the universe they can see and perceive and check whether they are consistent with what they can see and perceive.
We are mostly ants on a balloon:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/does-the-fact-tha...
We do not know where the balloon came from.