Re: Marriage is under fire!!

From: Jonathan Kirwan (jkirwan_at_easystreet.com)
Date: 08/16/04 

Date: Mon, 16 Aug 2004 20:32:46 GMT

Just to elaborate:

Merely descriptive ideas alone aren't science theory. Science theory involves
fundamental, imaginative insights that are then either selected or rejected.

If you "work backwards" from observation to arrive at what amounts to a trivial
generalizations, there is nothing new created. Such inductions will only tell
you what you already know and have seen. But if you use your imagination to
create something entirely independent and new and if it then, through deduction
and test, turns out to be confirmed by experimental result, then you probably
have something really interesting.

Imagining that any two point masses are attracted to each other, regardless of
distance, and that the force between them is inversely related to the square of
their distance and proportional to each point mass and some proportionality
constant, then you have something truly novel and independent as ideas go. From
that and some calculus, you can show then that a sphere of mass can be treated
as a single point of mass and this then is a derivation that makes analysis as
well as experimental testing tractable. In the end, the idea either stands or
falls.

If it had been simply inductive, then the results would, of course, appear to
match the inductive claim. But of course it would, since the induction itself
was based on mere "pattern matching" based on our abilities to do so from actual
observation. Nothing new can be tested, since the claim only predicts just what
it was designed to generalize.

Using independent theory as one key element allows the science process to
operate, in many ways, just like evolution itself does in nature. (Where
"random mutation modifying genetics" is replaced by "imaginative insights
leading to deductive theory" and "natural selection and rejection based on
relative success at passing on specific genetics" is replaced by "theory
selection and rejection based on experimental result."

Jon