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So if something cannot be experimentally tested, is it an invalid hypothesis? What is science supposed to do for "one-offs"?
Well ~everyone agrees that "gravity" is real in the sense that if you jump off of a tall building it will be extremely painful. But the theory of gravity and actual observations of the universe are at odds. That's the reason dark matter exists (in the mind of scientists, anyway), because the theory of gravity was insufficient to explain why the observed mass of the universe behaved the way that it did.
This wasn't necessarily true historically, I don't think, but as society specialized priests deferred more and more to scientists on the mechanisms.
I'm told that's what the principle of falsefiability is, but again, I'm a layman. All hypotheses I create in daily life could be tested by attempting to write code and seeing if it works.
Shrug, say "that's very cool but can we make use of it again?" and continue on? At least we spare the energy and time of praying that way.
As for the rest, I'm not sure we even are at a disagreement, I've lost track of the argument.
Theories prove themselves insufficient and new theories are created to fill the gap. "God did it" proves itself insufficient compared to scientific (or rather, materialist) theories, and retreats to ever-shrinking gaps.
Hmm. I think this is a very inhuman response. Humans are curious, we want to discover things. Want to discover the truth. I think we're interested in more than just utility.
I tend to think this is a simplistic view of history (and, perhaps ironically – a sort of reverse-polarity fundamentalist-Christian view of the world) but I understand where you are coming from.
So am I, yet religions are notoriously opaque to truth-discovery. "The ways of God are inscrutable" and all that. If you are saying they are inscrutable, why would I bother searching for the truth the way you told me, rather than my way (which tells me you are likely to just be a meme carrier)? It appears to me that for most people religion's function is to stop curiosity at certain points where it can't actually explain things further, not foster it. Meanwhile the "religious scientists", the way I see it, just do science the regular materialist way and resort to God when outside of their sphere of knowledge.
I mean, a lot of searching for truth had been prompted by one-off events. But searching for truth doesn't mean one must accept the religious premise ("it was a divine miracle") on face when one begins.
My understanding is that historically religions were actually great drivers of truth-discovery, particularly in pragmatic matters such as due process – but this also had spillover upstream of science itself, for [at least in the Western tradition of Christianity] the attitude towards God was that "it is the glory of God to conceal a thing: but the honor of kings is to search out a matter" and of course "God is a God of order" which gave Western scientists the theological justification for inquiry.
To use just one example (contrary to popular wisdom – although it's been a bit since I read up on it, so I might be a bit off on the specifics myself, apologies) Galileo was given the opportunity to prove his theory of heliocentrism in his trials, and his theory was rejected because it was shown to be more likely to be untrue – the science of the day just wasn't up to snuff, and so when actually tested the science leaned against Galileo, (whose research had I think been actually encouraged by part of the Church until he seemed to go out of his way to ridicule the Pope, not exactly a winning move in Italy in the 1600s).
Now, I am not saying I agree with everything that happened to Galileo. But I am saying that if Catholic Christianity had been closed-minded to the truth in the 1600s, Galileo wouldn't have been allowed to make a scientific defense of his theories, or permitted to pursue his research in the first place. Instead, the religious authorities at the time, however imperfectly, showed that they were interested in truth, and pursued it through science, due process, and adversarial justice. Those are not the values of a society that is opaque to truth-discovery, but rather a society that values truth discovery.
And that value was so good and effective that as society secularized it was retained, and in some sense its origins have been forgotten.
(Of course this is necessarily simplistic, as any grand sweeping narrative of history is, but I think it's closer to the mark than "religion stifles truth" – the truth is more complicated than that).
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