How reliable is science? (Assumption 7/7) (The limitations of science)

by dhw, Tuesday, April 24, 2012, 19:29 (4594 days ago) @ xeno6696

MATT: Ultimately where I wanted to move in the original epistemology thread, was into a direction of "common sense", just not quite the level you were looking for. [...] I sense you've hit upon Nietzsche's idea of "nihilism" and don't like the abyss you see.-Nietzsche's idea of nihilism was not, as far as I'm aware, an abyss. I always had the impression that his form of scepticism allowed for humanistic values but was directed against the barrenness of existing codes and especially those of religion. His appreciation of the arts was certainly not evidence of what most people understand by nihilism, i.e. a total negation of all values. However, you are the Nietzsche expert, and far more relevant to our epistemological discussion is the comment I have made repeatedly: on a purely philosophical level, there is no such thing as 'reality', and we can only have any sort of exchange if we accept a commonsense level. My understanding of that is a level at which we agree to accept the realities of the world as we know it: e.g. that you and I and the universe exist, that there is such a thing as a sequence of past/present/future, cause and effect, that people can love one another. What level are you referring to if it's not the same as mine?-MATT: It's a given: we don't know, what we don't know. But science itself gives us a way out of that trap. [...] When it comes to discussions like origins, science doesn't lie: It says we don't know. [...] Science gives us the BEST explanation that we can find reliable.-Sorry to cherry-pick these quotes, but by putting them together, I'm trying to emphasize the distinction that I feel you are still not making. It's discussions "like origins" that I'm focusing on ... and they include the nature of consciousness, of love, of aesthetics, and of all those phenomena that seem to defy material explanations. This is the "trap" and science does NOT give us a way out, and it does not give us an explanation, let alone the BEST explanation. But what some scientists do (nicely illustrated by Tony's attack on Dawkins in his post of 24 April at 01.39) is pretend that science CAN give us explanations. Once again, they do so by imposing their materialist philosophy onto science, which is only equipped to deal with the material world ... hence anything non-materialistic is non-scientific and so cannot be true! It's a blatant distortion of language, philosophy and science, but all too often they get away with it.-I drew attention to the gap between science's (suspect) findings and the conclusions some scientists draw from them. You say you learned about this gap at high school, mainly by reading philosophy. Yours must have been a pretty enlightened school, or you were a pretty advanced student ... which I can well believe! "We can blame this problem you see not on science, but on the lack of basic philosophical training..." I blame the problem on some scientists, not on science, but the complaint some of us are making is that even highly intelligent people seem to have been persuaded that science offers us the BEST explanation of mysteries which science is no more qualified to solve than theology or philosophy. Yes, science offers us the BEST chance of explaining discoverable material realities. That's all.-MATT: I might poke you and say that "Natural Selection explains the whole of life, as far as we can tell."-And I will poke you back. I quoted it as an instance of a famous scientist trying to hoodwink the public, and I thought you had seen the light! Oh misery! Natural Selection explains why some things survive and others don't. It does not explain how those things got here in the first place.