Barbarian observes:
Yep. It’s a basic limitation on the methodology in science.
That’s not even the issue. Science itself is not limited to methodology,
It surely is. The method is self-limiting.
no more than human reason is limited to the methods of modern logic.
Human reason is not limited to scientific thinking. And that’s not bad.
There is also a metaphysical underpinning,speculation,interpretation of the evidence,and development of theories.
Scientific method. The underpinning is the assumption that the physical universe is knowable and predicable. So far, so good.
Barbarian suggests:
It’s true. Show me a test science can do to analyze the supernatural.
First show me where I claimed there could even be such a test.
That’s what science does in the physical universe. It’s all it can do. What
do you want it to do to support your faith?
Barbarian observes:
Nope. Hypotheses (speculation) have to be testable. Interpretation requires data on physical entities. And theories are tested ideas with evidence to show they are true.
Evidently,scientists are not abiding by those supposed rules.
Cold fusion comes to mind. Scientists are not perfect beings. They mess up from time to time.
If they were,then abiogenesis should have been abandoned by now.
So far, the evidence has indictated that is how life began. If science could venture into the supernatural, we could use Genesis, which confirms the same thing.
Barbarian observes:
You’re right. The reason that people of all beliefs or none at all can do science is that it does not interact with the supernatural.
Whenever science interacts with life forms,it interacts with the supernatural,because life is not intrinsic to the natural.
Problem is, lack of evidence, or even scriptural support for your assertion.
Barbarian observes:
Pythagoras, yes, by our standards. His weird fear of irrational numbers prevented him from making further progress, and his attempt to hide them was most unjustified, for example.
It’s a good thing that he made no progress into irrational theories,like chaos theorists do.
Um, in mathematics, “irrational” means “cannot be expressed as the ratio of two integers.” And, BTW, chaotic systems can now analyzed and understood, albeit not quite the way Poincare envisioned.
links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0027-8424%2819911215%2988%3A24%3C11129%3APCFIDD%3E2.0.CO%3B2-I&size=LARGE&origin=JSTOR-enlargePage
The problems associated with the onset of turbulence in laminar flow system are numerous and the use of Fiegenbaum’s discoveries has made the analysis easier.
Barbarian observes:
Copernicus didn’t include God in any of his work.
I didn’t say he did. I said that belief in a Creator need not get in the way of scientistsmethod.
That’s true, now. So what’s the problem for you?
Barbarian observes:
It was entirely naturalistic.
It was natural science with a metaphysical foundation – the Platonic belief that the natural world is rationally structured,is imbued with rationality,and so can be profitably studied and understood by science.
Uniformitarianism of the gaps. Interesting. But of course, none of that was actually in his work.
Now if there is rationality in Nature,it could only come from a rational mind.
A philosophical assumption, but not science.
Barbarian observes:
Likewise with Galileo. Kepler was impaired by his religious ideas, but did eventually get the right answer.
None of that in Newton’s theory of gravity or laws of motion. There was some in his alchemy, but he was unsuccessful there, too.
Copernicus,Kepler,Galileo,and Newton were all Platonists.
Interesting story about that. Kepler was indeed a strict Platonist when he started his investigations. He had this complicated hypothesis about the orbits of the planets, based on the Platonic solids. Later, he continued to hold Platonic ideas, such as the planets being perfect, and rational, and therefore having orbits in perfect circles. He later berates himself for this blunder, which greatly delayed his discovery of Kepler’s laws:
**He had an ardent mystical neoplatonic faith. He wanted to work with the best observational data available because he felt that even the most elegant, mathematically-harmonious theories must match reality. Kepler was motivated by his faith in God to try to discover God’s plan in the universe—to
read the mind of God.'' Kepler shared the Greek view that mathematics was the language of God. He knew that all previous models were inaccurate, so he believed that other scientists had not yet read the mind of God.’’
Since an infinite number of models are possible (see Plato’s Instrumentalism above), he had to choose one as a starting point. Although he was hired by Tycho to work on Tycho’s geocentric model, Kepler did not believe in either Tycho’s model or Ptolemy’s model (he thought Ptolemy’s model was mathematically ugly). His neoplatonic faith led him to choose Copernicus’ heliocentric model over his employer’s model
Kepler tried to refine Copernicus’ model. After years of failure, he was finally convinced with great reluctance of an revolutionary idea: God uses a different mathematical shape than the circle. This idea went against the 2,000 year-old Pythagorean paradigm of the perfect shape being a circle! Kepler had a hard time convincing himself that planet orbits are not circles and his contemporaries, including the great scientist Galileo, disagreed with Kepler’s conclusion. He discovered that planetary orbits are ellipses with the Sun at one focus. This is now known as Kepler’s 1st law.**