Religious claims are scientific claims

[mythbuster1]

My point is that a multitude of experiments still do not prove anything beyond the level of precision of the experiments. Rarely are longstanding theories refuted outright, but rather they tend to be relegated to first-order approximations of more exact theories. Newtonian equations work to three significant figures up to one tenth of the speed of light, but as you approach the speed of light, they don’t even come close to accurately modeling the behavior of particles. Likewise with quantum mechanics: Newtonian mechanics fails to predict the behavior of particles on scales comparable to their de Broglie wavelength, at which point their wavelike properties become significant. Quantum equations quickly converge to Newtonian equations at scales much larger than the de Broglie wavelength of the particles, but Newtonian mechanics fails to predict many properties of very small or very cold particles.

 

[Damian]

Your whole construct just fell apart.

Assertions without explanation are dismissed without explanation. AKA: catholic troll here.

 

[goout]

goout:

Your whole construct just fell apart.

Assertions without explanation are dismissed without explanation. AKA: catholic troll here.

This is getting silly.
You bound words to rigid math/like meanings, then when given an obvious extension of that construct, you vacillated. And so I noted that your construct is made of tissue paper.

 

[Kaninchen]

My point is that a multitude of experiments still do not prove anything beyond the level of precision of the experiments.

I was brought up in a strict Popperian home, I sort of know the story

The explanation of ‘How is it that . . .’ speaks of motivation, it’s what we do.

 

[Damian]

This is confusing, aren’t many Religious claims based outside reality?

Claims about reality that are outside of reality, are by definition, not part of reality but part of fantasy. AKA: fairies, magic, etc.
You can be outside of the universe, like what was before the Big Bang. But that is still part of reality.

how can something not associated with reality be a scientific claim in the first place?

It can not be. AKA claims of fairies, magic, etc. are all claims about a noun that is not associated within reality.
Ex: All fairies can fly. Well as long as everyone agrees that fairies have wings and operated like a butterfly would, then yes that is a logical statement to make. However, fairies are not demonstrated to be part of reality at all, so it’s a logical statement but not a statement about reality. That is the difference between comic book characters and non-fiction books.

Just because we can’t detect something doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist

I agree, but you’re not justified in believing it is actually part of reality until you actually detect it in reality. Otherwise reality is what ever you want to define into existence regardless of what reality actually demonstrates it to be.

they did exist in reality you just didn’t know it.

If you can’t know something is part of reality, are you justified in holding that idea as a justified true belief about reality? That your internal model (justified true belief about reality) of reality is actually representing reality as accurately as possible? No no you are not justified to hold that belief. You can be justified to look for it, but not to believe that is actually true for reality.

 

[Damian]

Disagree. Marriage is a process, not a physical object. However, it is a process within reality because the physical objects performing the process are within reality. AKA “rolling”, the rock rolls down the hill. AKA two actual physical people engaging in a process labeled “Marriage”.
However, if I said I was doing the process of levitating above the ground, could your religious philosophy help you tell the difference between Process A and Process B to tell which is actually a claim within reality or not? “Marriage” vs “levitation”?
I don’t believe you’re this thick to not get what is being discussed here.

You bound words to rigid math/like meanings,

Yes, it’s called being precise for communicating exactly what I am talking about. Sorry I can’t be nebulous like religious language that allows for any amount of moving the goal post you like, but that’s not my problem here.

 

[Wesrock]

Wesrock:

What if we haven’t directly observed the meteor but see effects which can only be explained by such a meteor passing having a specific motion?

Such as “dark matter” then. We can see the affects on our universe and we call the cause of that “dark matter” because we understand how matter affects our observed universe and based on our model of the universe, for our mathematics to work in the model, we would need more matter than we have observed. So we call that unobservable matter that keeps our mathematical models work, “Dark Matter”. However, we have observed matter and how it affects our universe. We have never observed anything that we can attribute to the supernatural because the supernatural has yet to be demonstrated to be part of reality at all. Matter has. That is how I see the difference.

The natural world is that evidence we’ve observed. And I reject the “voodoo magic” connotation that you’re applying to the word supernatural here.

 

[Wesrock]

And we’ve been over this a half dozen times. Likening this to claims about an invisible unicorn is just a complete categorical error.

 

[Damian]

Okay, so how is the claim of “supernatural” at all any different than the bucket of “unknown natural”? Unknown Natural does not have any more baggage associated with it at all like the bucket of “Supernatural” as the explanation for an event with an unknown explanation.

At this point it seems like you appear to be hinting that they are the same thing.

The difference between “magic” and “unknown natural” is that the natural has actually been demonstrated to be part of reality, magic and the supernatural have not. I believe this is why you see me pointing out that they appear to be no different because we can’t actually demonstrate how they are actually different, the claim of “voodoo magic” as an explanation and the claim of “supernatural” as the explanation. Neither are demonstrated to be part of reality, right?

 

[Beyond_Reason]

I believe this is how the planet Neptune was found.

 

[Wesrock]

Okay, so how is the claim of “supernatural” at all any different than the bucket of “unknown natural”? Unknown Natural does not have any more baggage associated with it at all like the bucket of “Supernatural” as the explanation for an event with an unknown explanation.

In this case, what is supernatural transcends and is the cause of the natural order. Imperfect analogy time, but one could consider the way a computer transcends and is the cause of a simulated reality it’s running, only in the case of God we’re not just talking about one step above (like how in the movie Inception there are dreams within dreams in various levels), but the Ultimate Reality, the absolute top level, nothing above it or parallel to it, the origin of it all.

 

[Damian]

Sure, you can make this logical argument if everyone agrees with the definition of the terms. But again, all it sounds like you are doing is using the label of “supernatural” as the label for the cause of our universe, not reality itself. Its just a label for that event that kicked off the big bang. So we’re all following the logic to go search for what happened before the big bang and how universes are created, but no one is justified in holding a justified true belief of what that is until we are able to investigate it. This is no different than what Einstein did with the Gravity wave example I gave earlier. Or do you see it differently?

 

[Beyond_Reason]

Is this sort of scientific method capable of discerning the ultimate nature of the universe? We can discern new physical causes, and better, more accurate physics, but I’m doubtful that such a method could find out the cause behind the physics.

And even ignoring the logical possibility of finding out an ultimate answer, we’re getting down to some really bizarre physics at the most fundamental observable level. It’s beyond amazing what physicists have been able to figure out, but I don’t see any reason to think we’re getting to a sort of end solution or that our powers of observation can get there. In other words, do we have a limit on how powerful our microscopes can be? The eye exists at one level of physical reality, and there are apparently some seriously, seriously deep levels.

 

[Wesrock]

Sure, you can make this logical argument if everyone agrees with the definition of the terms. But again, all it sounds like you are doing is using the label of “supernatural” as the label for the cause of our universe, not reality itself. Its just a label for that event that kicked off the big bang. So we’re all following the logic to go search for what happened before the big bang and how universes are created, but no one is justified in holding a justified true belief of what that is until we are able to investigate it. This is no different than what Einstein did with the Gravity wave example I gave earlier. Or do you see it differently?

The imperfect computer analogy can still fit here. The computer didn’t just start the simulation and stop, it’s necessary for every moment it’s running, not just in a chain of events going backwards, but about conserving the existence of items in the simulation there and then, as they have no intrinsic ability to give themselves or retain existence from moment to moment, but are constantly and immediately dependent upon an external and transcendant cause for that. God as a conserving cause is Catholic dogma, and is also the angle most cosmological arguments take (exception: the Kalam argument).

It’s not about the kickoff event or a before.

 

[Damian]

Its able to discern the accuracy of the model of reality that we have the ability to interact with. For example, if all of actual reality we can interact with is just 1%, then that 1% is the ultimate reality to us because we don’t have the actual mental and physical ability to investigate and understand reality beyond that. We can conceive of ideas beyond what we actually can interact with and investigate, but we either can not or do not have the tools to determine the difference between our imagination and reality, so it stays in the null-hypothesis position, the concept is imaginary until demonstrated otherwise.

 

[Damian]

Okay, logically correct, but reality has to demonstrate that our logical conclusion is actually possible though. So you can keep looking for that, but until reality demonstrates that concept is there, that is when we can update our model of justified true belief of reality though. I’m fine with people looking for their ideas about reality, but not when they live their lives as if that idea is actually there when reality has yet to demonstrate that it is there. Again, its the Einstein gravity wave example here it seems.

 

[Dovekin]

If you can’t know something is part of reality, are you justified in holding that idea as a justified true belief about reality? That your internal model (justified true belief about reality) of reality is actually representing reality as accurately as possible? No no you are not justified to hold that belief. You can be justified to look for it, but not to believe that is actually true for reality.

This makes no sense.

If you only count what you can prove, are you justified in holding that your internal model of reality is actually representing reality as accurately as possible? No, you are not justified in believing that reality consists only of what you can prove is part of reality. It may be that your model consists only of things that are real, but that model does not necessarily represent reality as accurately as possible. (Isn’t this Gödel’s theorem, or an analogue of it?) Believing only in what can be proven is no better than believing in unproven things by this standard.

If you have proof of when and where every passenger train will cross your path, you can still be squashed by a freight train.

Your ideas about dark matter are similarly shaky. It may be unquestioned that matter curves the universe, but that is not the same as “only matter curves the universe.” That is an unproven idea that is needed to prove dark matter exists.

 

[Damian]

No, you are not justified in believing that reality consists only of what you can prove is part of reality.

I’m not saying that your internal model of reality has to represent all of what reality actually is because we obviously don’t know everything about reality; only what we have experienced so far. (Seriously do I have to point this out?) I am talking about our model of reality that we have detected so far. The parts of reality that we haven’t detected yet are our logical conclusions that reality has yet to demonstrate is there. Our logical conclusions about reality informs us of where to investigate next about reality so that we reveal more about reality that we understood before. So your logical conclusions about reality are informing us where to go look within reality to see if your logical conclusion actually is the case for reality or not. Your logical conclusion could actually be broken because of our ignorance of reality so far. That’s why logical claims that are in reference to reality are only justified to hold as a true belief about reality once reality actually demonstrates that to be the case.
I don’t know how to make this more clear than this. You seriously believe that I am talking about a model of reality where everything is known about it?

 

[Beyond_Reason]

I could see this making some sense if religion was nothing more than a stop gap for current scientific ignorance, but I think there’s more to it than that.

 

[Wesrock]

Okay, logically correct, but reality has to demonstrate that our logical conclusion is actually possible though. So you can keep looking for that, but until reality demonstrates that concept is there, that is when we can update our model of justified true belief of reality though. I’m fine with people looking for their ideas about reality, but not when they live their lives as if that idea is actually there when reality has yet to demonstrate that it is there. Again, its the Einstein gravity wave example here it seems.

The catch-22 for you is that cosmological arguments are demonstrated from principles that must be true if empiricism and the scientific method are to be true. To demonstrate that the arguments are false, you’d have to demonstrate that the empirical, scientific epistemology is false, which is not possible scientifically. You’d have to use science to prove that science is bunk, which is self-refuting. What you’re asking for on the flip side is that we scientifically demonstrate that the principles that science requires are true, which isn’t testable or falsifiable and would be rather circular. We’re talking about a level more fundamental than quantifiable measurements, about our reasoned belief that quantifiable measurements demonstrate anything to begin with.