Re: Marriage is under fire!!
From: Jonathan Kirwan (jkirwan_at_easystreet.com)
Date: 08/15/04
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Date: Sun, 15 Aug 2004 18:50:30 GMT
On Sun, 15 Aug 2004 11:00:34 GMT, Rich Grise <null@example.net> wrote:
>But, apparently, the absolute scientific facts that you know now are
I know no absolute scientific facts. Just scientific facts.
Again, you are thinking like the religious, using concepts based on "absolute."
A concept about which no one of us has the perspective from which to speak
about.
>the last ever possible absolute scientific facts there could possibly
>be, right?
I've no idea what you are going on about here. I've never said anything of the
sort and more, if you had actually read what I wrote (particularly the longer
piece that you have NOT commented on), then you'd understand that parroting here
has nothing to do with anything I've said here.
Again, this is strawman arguing. I said none of this, don't subscribe to it, so
why are you pretending otherwise?
>Just like the flat-worlders were convinced.
Look, you are just going on, again. What people are convinced of is rather
irrelevant. I don't subscribe to conclusions of even our greatest minds,
because in science we take nothing on authority. Authority is irrelevant.
Theory and result is what counts. In fact, science processes work against our
natural tendencies to raise up authorities as "being right," by actually making
it a profitable for a young scientist to take down some great science authority
on their own turf. There is almost nothing a new scientist can achieve that
will bring them to the pinnacle of their profession, than showing that the
conclusions of some great science authority was wrong, someplace. This is
unlike any other human endeavor.
So, in science, we study the great authorities -- for HOW they think, not WHAT
they think; for HOW they arrive at conclusions, not for WHAT conclusions they
have arrived at.
Science fact simply remains always tentative. There are no absolutes here, as
you seem to be unable to escape the idea of. There are theories that are well
supported by experimental result, predict accurately in the situations for which
they are designed, etc. But this combination of theory and result doesn't raise
itself to some god-like status, it quite simply rests upon an extensive body of
existing deduction to specifics and experimental results confirming those
deductions. If someone else can find a better theory and is willing to support
it, defend it, and allow the normal processes of consensus to operate over their
natural times, then that theory will likely replace earlier theories.
And these new theories can be COMPLETELY DIFFERENT and very imaginative, as
well. The general theory of relativity has completely supplanted earlier
Newtonian laws, because it can be more broadly applied. And it is very
different, fundamentally. In the usual cases you and I experience, though,
Newton's laws remain a very much simpler way to view things and are equally
practical. So they are still taught.
Which of these is absolute fact? Neither. Both are science fact. One of them
has a smaller scope of application (Newton's laws) than the other. But neither
of them can be seen as absolute. Yet they are used every day to make accurate
predictions in real circumstances that bear out remarkably well. A new
scientist may imagine a new great theory that replaces general relativity AND
Newton's laws with yet another, broader context. And quite likely, it will
again be based on yet another, quite different, and entirely new fundamental set
of imaginative insights.
Frankly, I've no idea at all where you are coming from, Rich, with all this
absolutist thinking. It's like you are stuck in the superstitious days of a
millennia ago and cannot lift your feet out of the mud, mired forever in this
mode of Easter bunny thinking.
No problem to science, but it will pose difficulties for your understanding why
science thinking is so strong. The strength of science arrives largely through
its requirement that ideas unify. They are not disconnected. Each new concept
relies upon, and supports, other ideas. Like bricks placed in a giant, curved
arch, each brick an intrinsic part of supporting the load, upon which an entire
civilization can be carried. Not like disconnected ideas that lend nothing to
each other, such as necromancy, tea leaf reading, taro cards, and astrology,
which are more like low farm walls cobbled together also by stones, but where
the stones in one area lend almost no support if at all to any other part of the
wall.
>Or the guy
>at the patent office in 1899 who said everything possible had been
>invented.
Those are just people saying things. So? It's not science, you know.
The process of science is quite excellent. It manages to work in ways that
allows superstitious humans to do good science work and to lay down unifying
ideas. And that's a miracle worth remembering.
peace,
Jon
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