How reliable is science? (The limitations of science)

by xeno6696 , Sonoran Desert, Saturday, April 14, 2012, 15:16 (4604 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained

MATT: Tony has at least one thing backwards however. If you read Darwin, he started from the evidence, and worked forward from there. He had no intention of eliminating God at all, and all evolutionary theory is ultimately expanded upon Darwin's base. It *IS* looking at the evidence, only from an extremely conservative empirical perspective. I've met Jewish and Muslim doctors and scientists that have no problem with evolution as it is taught today. And it isn't because they feel bullied. 
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> > Where Dawkins goes wrong, isn't in terms of science, its in terms of his normative stance that the scientific perspective alone takes precedence. That's something for an individual to decide, not Dawkins.
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> I wasn't referring to Darwin so much. Despite how it may seem, I have every reason to believe the Charles Darwin studied the evidence and formed a hypothesis that could be tested in good faith and in the standards of good science. But then, Darwin, like many scientist of his generation, was independently well-to-do, so he was not under the publish-or-parish system that lends itself so well to bad science. 
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> That being said, consider that since there came to be a general acceptance of Darwin's Hypothesis, and it gained the status of Theory, that any dissenter from the ideology is figuratively burned at the stake as a heretic in the scientific community. With the current status of scientific -The problem is that the only dissenters are proponents of ID, which is a philosophical challenge only. There isn't a single testable claim made by ID, so in that light it is rightly castigated. Saying "life is too complex to have arrived by chance" isn't a scientifically testable statement. -The vitriol of the biological community is due to ID proponents attempting to launch their philosophical views into technical journals. I promise you, if they were submitting the papers into the philosophical journals where they belong, the fight wouldn't be so fierce. ID is not science. -> So tell me, Matt, how can we trust the science under these conditions? Do we turn a blind eye to all the backbiting and backroom politics? Do we trust that scientist are less human than we are and all work on altruistic principals which holds monetary concerns as of no import? How can we trust the institution when they have repeatedly buried the work of scientists who do not conform to the orthodoxy? Some time back I linked an article regarding a female archaeologist who ran into this problem because her discovery called into question common historical orthodoxy. No one will publish her works despite the fact that all of her findings were independently verified. And soon after the incident, no one would fund her work further either. Is this the ideal of science that you hold so dear?-Who's getting buried where? Relativity was accepted. Quantum entanglement was accepted. Ulcers as a bacterial infection was accepted. All of these faced vitriolic opposition, but as the results were compared with "the real world" and it was proven that these ideas *did* explain phenomena better, they were made "normal." That's what the process of replication is for. -Have you read "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions?" It focuses on Einstein as a case study. If there is a duplicity in science, it'll come out. The process hasn't failed us yet. It just doesn't work as quickly as you or David would like, because there's some idea that both of you like, that you think should be the paradigm, and it isn't. -Sit back, take a holistic view, and let the process do its job. -For your question marked in yellow: It's how I expect humans to operate. If her ideas stand on their own merits however, there is no choice but to accept those ideas. Like Mendel, it might not be until after she's dead, but *someone* will either come up with a similar idea or find hers and then cause a revolution. -You need to respect that in my mind you're asking humans to be "all rational, all the time." -Look at how plate tectonics was ridiculed. Hell, as a small child, I noticed that South America looks like it could nest into west africa, and that Greenland looks like it could have fit into hudson bay. (I was a kid.. I was only half right on that count!) But because the guy who proposed it was an astronomer, geologists everywhere dogpiled on him. -Guess what happened? -The bottom line is this: Even if it takes 100 years, science corrects its own mistakes. THAT is exactly what I would expect.

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\"Why is it, Master, that ascetics fight with ascetics?\"

\"It is, brahmin, because of attachment to views, adherence to views, fixation on views, addiction to views, obsession with views, holding firmly to views that ascetics fight with ascetics.\"