Science, Knowledge, Bias

Response to http://metacrock.blogspot.com/2011/08/science-is-not-only-form-of-knowledge.html

Did it ever occur to you that perhaps people are just being "pedantic" when they object to your strawmen? You also never defined what you mean by "Knowledge". But in general terms, knowledge is an extremely fuzzy concept that has really never been nailed down by philosophy. It's a placeholder concept, we don't know what it is but we know it when we see it.

Even justified knowledge can (and has been) proven false. For example: CLEARLY the sun goes around the earth, I can see it moving, I don't feel like I'm moving. I can form this into a series of hypotheses that I test and all are born out by the facts. Therefore, I can form a justified belief that the sun goes around the Earth. What's wrong here is that I don't have ALL the facts. I didn't do a very good job and I missed some obvious difficulties. If you want to see an example of this at work in reality check out my post on it: http://iconoclasm2000.blogspot.com/2011/06/response-galileo-rout-galileo-rout.html Where I give a long list of observables that must ALL be satisfied by our theory and the geocentric theory absolutely fails a number of tests. Tests I may not have been aware of initially.

This is the hurdle you must overcome with any epistemic theory and this is the REASON the scientific methodology exists as it does today.

To put it more succinctly, Science is our best methodology for removing sources of error and bias from our conclusions.



So science is not the only route to knowledge - you can just make shit up based on a dice roll and it MIGHT be true - you can form theories from abstract ideas and hope they are true - or you can measure the universe and gather facts and jump to conclusions - or you can take those same facts and subject them to best possible testing that humans have devised. The first three ensure that you suffer from all the types of errors and bias that we KNOW exist.

You can use ANY process you want to come up with hypotheses (including dice rolling, with computers this is a reality) - the question is, how do we decide which ones are actually true.


The "empiricists dilemma" is irrelevant because it cannot be demonstrated. I could postulate that we exist only in the fart of a magical unicorn, I have no BASIS for such claims so they are absurd. You also cannot prove that we weren't created in JUST this very instant. Again, we have no basis for making such a claim other than to wonder "what if". "what if" is fine, come back when you can prove we aren't just swirls in the fart of a magical unicorn. I can postulate an infinite number of absurdities (thanks to recursion). So you now have an infinite number of absurd things that are exactly equal to your "dilemma" in weight. Surely that sheds a different light on it?

Science's only burden is to demonstrate utility - it has done. It has proven itself time and time again to falsify even our a priori assumptions and bring us closer to "Knowledge".

To propose there is some OTHER process for doing the same thing (better)?) is to claim that LEAVING IN errors and bias produces better results, which is absurd.

In short, I reject your strawman of science and I show that the negation of science leads to an absurdity.


"Science is a social construct" - so is philosophy. You can use philosophy to come up with hypotheses but if you want them to be accepted as valid descriptions of reality then you'll have to submit them to testing and validation. Are you SERIOUSLY suggesting that we must accept as true random SHIT that people make up no matter how strongly it disagrees with physical reality?

"The atheist fortress of fact is a philosophical position" - this isn't even a distinct idea that I can comment on.

"They will only accept as scinece [sic] the things that rule out God belief" - blatantly false and more than a few scientists have believed to invented clever arguments and evidences for God. You are confusing your own Confirmation Bias and other cognative disabilities with our refusal to accept false evidence.

Look at the case of Lourdes. There used to be THOUSANDS of miracles claimed at Lourdes. Then a commission was setup to try to validate them and instantly the 'miracle' claim rate dropped to a mere trickle. Now this was still in the early 1900's. As medical science has advanced the miracle rate at Lourdes dropped further, and further, and now it's pretty much at zero. Are there ANY even claimed since about 1987? Where did all the miracles go? What you had was millions of visitors who were primed to believe in a miracle and you had massive levels of fraud and simple confirmation bias. And even then the 'confirmed' miracles in the earlier part of the century were of the "disease went into remission" variety. Well, whoop-de-do. Some of those diseases had no known cases of remission so they were counted as miracles but work since has shown that natural remissions to occur in those diseases as well. But guess what, they refuse to retract their 'miracle' claims.

Confirmation Bias. So now we have MILLIONS of people failing to get any miracle cure at all and one random person goes into remission and that is a miracle. Has anyone regrown a lost limb after visiting Lourdes? Nope, not a one. It's unable to produce any miracle that doesn't otherwise also have Natural causes. The fact that people still believe in these types of Miracles is the true Miracle.

So, please produce someone who can pray for someone and regrow a limb and do that under strict scientific scrutiny and that would the type of evidence that I would find acceptable.

I will not find pathetic cover-ups for Natural processes as evidence.

"There's more to the universe than the surface level of how the physical aspect function" - I'm sure that this statements actually means much of anything but can you demonstrate some fact that shows this is necessarily true?


P.S. It's the HIGGS (two G's) not Higs and that is a SIMULATED trace, not an actual trace. http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2009/mar/13/particlephysics-cern

See how little sources of error creep in? :)