Tim Dreyer . com

The argument for (and against) the scientific process.

What? I'm pretty sure that the assumption for/against a higher power is irrelevant to most (if not all) scientific theories. For example, the theory of the big bang neither proves or disproves god or the bible. As such, belief in god is irrelevant to the theory. The theory is based on observable evidence and those ideas that scientists have found that make sense in explaining the evidence.

Also, your claim that belief in no god causes faulty logic doesn't even make sense to me. Please expand.

The presupposition that God does not exist means that any conclusion is biased.

By that logic, I can state that "the presupposition that god exists means that any conclusion is biased." Do you agree?

Any time the base of your logic rules out a posibility beforehand, it is no longer valid. All possiblities must be considered and then the evidence followed to the most likely conclustion when there is not an absolute proof.

I completely agree with this quote, no holds barred. The only question that remains is what does the evidence support?

The assumption for/agains a higher power is the basis for most, if not all scientific theories today. What is a theory? A theory is someone's idea of how something works or how something happened. How did they form this idea? The idea is no physical, so it cannot be observed. The idea is not a chemical reaction because it cannot be reproduced in an experiment. The idea is something based solely on the philosophy of the theorist. After the idea is formed into a theory, then the scientific method is applied to find evidence for or agains the theory. Since the theory was based on philosophy, then the next logical step is to interpret evidence based on that philosophy until someone with a different philosophy comes along and disproves the logic that went into it.

Wow. I'm not sure I followed all of that. From what I got, you've got the scientific process wildly wrong. Evidence first, then explanations, then trying to disprove explanations. Science uses a process by which everyone tries to disprove theories. You can't prove anything using the scientific process. Just because there is only 1 theory for a certain problem doesn't make it the right solution. BUT if there is only 1 or 2 theories, they are what we work with until they are disproved. This is why respectable research must be peer reviewed. People that understand the subject matter much better than you or I try to pick everything apart and show how theories don't work.

As such, scientific theories may be debunked in the future. It's just that no one has been able to do it yet (assuming they are current theories). This follows with evolution, the big bang, genetics, biology, physics, chemistry, etc... Now, that being said, just because a scientific theory is current doesn't prove it's true, just that it hasn't been proven faulty yet.

If the scientific method can only disprove theories, then logic says nothing can be proven to be true, thus no absolute truth.

Yes, we can only disprove theories. But can we prove something correct? Let’s see how the scientific process works with this:

For any given topic, lets assume that there are a theoretical maximum number of possible theories to explain it, biased or otherwise. Lets call this amount T. I think we can safely assume that there is only 1 completely correct theory, though there may be multiple theories that are close or partially correct. I also think it is reasonable to assume that some small number of theories will never be though of. Lets call this N. That leaves the theories that are thought of A, which we can express by T-N=A. Of the theories, A, some are completely incorrect, some are partially incorrect and partially correct, and hopefully there is one that is absolutely correct (we’ll call the absolutely correct theory C).

We can arrange the theories, A, on a 1 dimensional graph with one end being incorrect, and the other correct. The theories that are completely incorrect will be grouped at the far end of the incorrect side. The remainder are at least partially correct. The ones that are mostly incorrect will of course be nearest the incorrect end. The rest will range from the incorrect end to the correct end with 1 hopefully at the far correct end.

Now, notice that it doesn’t matter what the theory is, it’s on the graph. The biased and unbiased theories. It doesn’t matter.

The way the scientific community works is specifically tailored to move the current understanding of the topic towards the correct end. Through peer review, all theories are tested for their validity. Bad theories are ousted and the number of theories in A is reduced. As the process continues, more and more theories are shown to be false (or partially false) and they are removed from the group A, until we are left with a very small number of theories or, ideally, the theory C.

Does this mean that this process will yield C every time? No.
Through this process, can we ever know that we have reached C? No, since there will always be the possibility that C is in the group N. What we can know is that this process gets rid of the incorrect answers and moves our understanding towards the correct side.

…thus no absolute truth.

No. Remember, the true idea C still exists. We just cannot guarantee that we will reach it. The possibility will always remain that C lies in the group N.

The scientific method does prove theories.

No. There is always the possibility that our current theory is incorrect, however reasonable it is. Science is always open to new and better possibilities. The best theory is accepted until it is either shown to be false or shown to be partially false and a new or updated theory is presented. As someone else put it, Science:

…holds that unbiased observation is not possible and a demarcation between natural and supernatural explanations is arbitrary; it instead proposes falsifiability as the landmark of empirical theories and falsification as the universal empirical method

The source of that quote is here and it describes the philosophy of many scientists and more importantly, me. A more in depth explanation can be found here and here.

The theories we cannot absolutely prove to be true are ones we cannot reproduce (ie. big bang). Since we cannot absolutely prove them, we have to follow the evidence to the most reasonable possibility.

Theories that describe things that we cannot reproduce have to be dealt with in a different way. Like you pointed out, we cannot prove the big bang by either direct observation or by making one ourselves. So how do scientists disprove various theories about the beginning of the universe? They make predictions about things we can observe. They figure out that “if the beginning of the universe happened in such-and-such a way, we will see effect E in the astronomical object O”. Since they can look at the astronomical object, this gives them a way to disprove various theories about the beginning of the universe. If they look at astronomical object O, but they do not see effect E, they then know that their theory was incorrect.

Unfortunately this does not work with every theory. Some theories are not easily falsifiable because we do not yet know of any way to make predictions from them and test to see if our predictions were incorrect. One prominent theory that has so far been very difficult for scientists is string theory. You can read about string theory here if you are interested. Like with string theory, when scientists have a theory that is not falsifiable, they work feverishly to figure out ways to make it falsifiable, or to get predictions from it that are falsifiable. This is exactly what is happening with String Theory.

…we have to follow the evidence to the most reasonable possibility.

Yes, and the scientific process is the best way to accomplish this in the most efficient manner. As I explained above, it invariably moves us closer to the truth.

I still stand by the statement that theories are based off the theorist's philosophy.

Ok, that’s fine by me. I agree that there will always be scientists that will have philosophies that affect their ideas and theories. The cool thing is that the scientific process makes these biases irrelevant. The only valid scientific theories are those that are falsifiable (or, like those that deal with the beginning of the universe, give us ways to make predictions that are then falsifiable). Since they are falsifiable, others can then show them to be false.

Then anyone who holds the same philosophical beliefs will review the evidence and come to the same conclusions.

Here I will have to disagree with you. You cannot think to speak for every scientist. You also cannot assume that all scientists have the same philosophical beliefs. For that matter, some scientists believe in god (like I used to)! As such, you cannot say that scientists will blindly follow each other just because they might share similar philosophies.

I have a feeling that you will need an example of this process. There are examples a times in which someone came up with a theory that was vastly different than the popular theories of the time, but the scientific community still changed its stance due to the fact that the new theory was better. A perfect example of this is Einstein’s theory of relativity. You know as well as I do that his theory was incredibly insightful as most at the time believed in aether, I believe. I can provide more examples, if required, of other times where science followed theories that went against the popular beliefs because the popular beliefs were shown to be false. As such, you cannot just state that “When someone with a different philosophical belief comes along and points out all the flaws, only the people with the same philosophical aversion or the people truly seeking to follow the evidence will agree with the disputes and any insuing theory. ” This has been shown to be false many, many times.

You believe scientific theory is based off evicence, but you are following the logical falacy that everyone in the scientific community is after the truth. Not all of them are seeking truth, and more times that they will admit, the conclusions are more an issue of the will than the evidence.

I believe that I have sufficiently shown that there is no logical fallacy in the scientific process and that though some (or all, it doesn’t actually matter) theories are affected by personal biases, the scientific process will weed out the false theories in time.

I can see your point about the possible theories and their percentage of truth, but with that premise, the inference is we cannot know absolute truth. As I have said before, that statement is false because it is stated as an absolute truth. Meaning that whoever makes that statement implies that they know the absolute truth which by the statement cannot be known.

It seems you're getting tripped up by the premises of my argument. I state that the scientific process cannot be used to find the truth 100% or even say whether or not what we are working with is the truth. But it works on the assumption that there is truth. It does not negate the premise that there is absolute truth.

Remember that for a logical argument, we must have certain assumptions that we agree to before moving on. The assumption that absolute truth exists is one of these assumptions that we make before working with the scientific process. Without this assumption, the scientific process doesn't work.

Also, we are not deriving the assumption that there is absolute truth from the scientific process. This is something that comes from our philosophy, not the scientific process. Therefore, the inherent uncertainty assumed by anything derived from the scientific process is not present.

There is an absolute truth, that can be known.

Why are we even talking about this? We both agree that there is absolute truth. I was pointing out that we cannot ever be 100% certain that our current understanding gained through the scientific process is actually the whole or actual truth.

Something you can use the scientific method to prove as true is gravity.

Here you're getting tripped up over the difference between observations and the theories that we make about observations. Gravity is a term for the effect of forces that we don't absolutely understand yet. This means that gravity is the observation and therefore the assumption (and we must assume that our observations are true). How it works falls under the area of "ideas" (or part of the group "A" that we talked about earlier). The theory of relativity describes how the observation, gravity, works. There are conflicting quantum theories of gravity that describe different ways that could explain our observations on a quantum scale. These are the theories derived from the scientific process and therefore these are what we are uncertain about, not the observation "gravity."

So to sum up, Gravity is the observation or assumption. General relativity is our current theory for how gravity works over large scales. The scientific process has given us our current theory, but we are not 100% sure that it is absolutely correct. We still need to figure out a way to incorporate the quantum effects of gravity. So "gravity" is true, yes, but only because it is the observation (and as an observation, not derived from the scientific process) and we must assume our observations are true (otherwise what's the point?).