So wait, you're applying some kind of scientific criteria to my god theory and it fails to met it? Hmmm. Check back, being internally and externally consistent is one of the criteria I listed.

Also, scientific validity, i.e. how well the hypothesis corresponds accurately to the real world, is a much broader concept than internal and external consistency, we don't appear to be using the terminology in the same way.

Never said it did. It's just one of several criteria ALL of which are required to hold any level of confidence in a scientific hypothesis that wants to be considered a theory.

That's not Useful and therefore fails to meet that criteria (among others) and could never be considered to be a scientific theory. Are you sure it's me that's missing the nuances here?

You seem to be circling around some kind of hardliner verificationist / positivist view on the empirical process, but you claim that your entire posting has been about method and empirical theories, and the those positions has been mostly abandoned in modern science for a long time. Not that scientists really go around debating these issues much, few scientists are philosophers in my experience. You choose a method, you admit its limitations and proceed accordingly. It's about practicality, not epistemology most of the time.

It's also tiresome that all this started because you favor short mottos about what science must be, and then we go on long tangents that your initial arguments never merited. Why are we even debating nuance, when there wasn't originally any to be found? You've never moderated your claims, never once even admitted that there might be more to it than what you are stating. That's just not a healthy approach to method. If we're going to talk and about discuss method, this requires intellectual humility and acceptance of nuance

And at the end of the day the merit of scientific models is mostly that they work. We could have the same debates a car, what a car is, why it is a car, exactly that the parts of a car is. If we start deconstructing it epistemologically, we're going to find assumptions, inductive logic and abductive reasoning by the bucket-load. No amount of science or philosophy can resolve that. But at the end of the day you can get in it, drive to the shop and buy dinner - and that's a sweet deal.

You're making me sad that I don't have a car.

(Sorry for this "no-content" post )

Your understanding of "consistency" needs to be moderated a bit. Consistency is not understood as consistency across the entire spectrum of information, but consistent with regard to its domain of application.

Newtonian physics is consistent for macro objects moving at relatively slow speeds. If you go too fast, you start to dip into needing to use relativistic mechanics. If things are too small, you start to dip into needing quantum mechanics.

The failure of Newtonian mechanics to account for the very fast and the very small does not deny its status as a scientific theory. It just doesn't claim to be a universal theory. And its status as a theory is not damaged by this even though there are well-known and well-understood inconsistencies between Newtonian mechanics and the universe at large.

It's not useful for you to add in another concept ("scientific validity") at this time. But whatever you think it is, it's almost certainly true that you're not using it the same way as everyone else, which has also been the case this entire thread.

Fundamentally, the way you use "theory" in a "scientific" sense (or how "scientists" use the term) is not what you think it is. It has been this issue from the beginning. Science is not an arbitrary list of randomly capitalized words. And as long as you try to treat it that way, you will repeat your follies.

This is a useful analogy. It dovetails well with the cat analogy I used earlier:

Boiling down car-ness into individual features (tires, chassis, doors, whatever) and using those features to try to define car-ness is a fool's errand. Just as a list of capitalized words will fail to effectively describe science and scientific theories.

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The only push-back I would have is the question of whether science must "work" because it's not clear to me what *type* of work is necessary for it to qualify. This is kind of where things are at with string theory and things like a multiverse theory. A multiverse would create a structure in which certain aspects of the universe could be understood, but as far as I can tell there's no actual difference in physics whether there is or is not a multiverse. It's just a philosophical construct that allows us to conceptualize information in a certain way that is sometimes viewed to have a certain aesthetic appeal.

Is the aesthetic appeal enough for it to "work" in science? I don't know. And what of future proposals? Can we guarantee that it "works" in the same sense that we might think of it today? Maybe, maybe not.

So I push further with the concept that science is socially constructed and whatever it is that scientists agree on (or disagree on) is what makes something scientific or not (or what makes things debatable).

I'll also repeat my challenge for consideration: If the theory of evolution truly is a "scientific theory" under MB's definition, then at what point was it formally verified as a theory? What was the specific experiment or observation or whatever that brought it over the line?

The reality is that there is no clear line. Eventually, the evidence reached a level at which scientists started to generally accept it as being a meaningful explanation of enough data to be accepted as being a reasonable description of this aspect of biology. And that's all there is to it.

I don't think there is an issue with saying a scientific theory requires falsifiability and a proven track record.

But that's really completely unnecessary to say, because it's a term that applies to empirical method. So it's like saying a carburetor needs an engine to do anything.

It's statements like these I take issue with...

... where the entirety of science is painted with broad brush strokes.

A linguistic analysis of an historic work does not apply "methodological naturalism" and it certainly is not falsifiable. A simulation of DNA can be used by researchers in scientific work, but it is not empirical. A case study can be used in medicine, but it is not falsifiable. A researcher can use qualitative method and study to build his quantitative variables, but it is not an experiment and offers no predictive power. A literary study to check the scope of a field is often used in science, but it it is not based on assuming natural laws.

And it's not like these things lack rigor. That's what is really irksome about these broad strokes. The implicit accusation towards these completely legitimate ways to do science. Indeed, you'll often find that scientists that work with these approaches are far more invested in rigor than ones using empirical method, because they are very keen on being completely clear about what they can't say.

Furthermore, even empirical theories can (and will) make unfalsifiable claims. Wording that make it sound like they do not is simply deceiving. We have theories making claims as to what happens in black holes, but it's not like we can test that. We have theories making claims as to how past events led to the present, but we can't test those either.

And sure, you can trim it down and only keep what has been supported empirically and claim that only this bit is the actual theory. But that's not really how science works. We're often beyond the bit where a couple of dudes can have a clever idea and test in their lab. Instead we might be working with immense frameworks where where tens of thousands of people are working within the framework over many decades, often disagreeing and most of them will only know about a few of the others. Earlier in this thread I asked if the standard model of physics was a theory before the discovery of the Higgs-Boson, and the answer is simple. Yes it was. It was seen as solid enough to be considered a model even if it contained free parameters yet to be experimentally proven.

Also the entire thing points to some sort idealized version of science, where you must strive towards the theory at all costs. That's not really how it works either. Consider language. A functioning and believable linguistic model of how language developed could be an invaluable asset, but it can't actually ever become a theory. Should we stop researching language development?

Science is a lot more plyable than most people think. And we don't need to strive towards it not being so, because you'll lose a lot more than you gain. Heck, it was empiricists that delivered the killing blows to positivism as an important scientific movement, and for good reason.

And the irony of it all is that I am an empiricist, I did research with empirical method. It's not like I have some big hatred towards the empirical process. I think it's the most solid scientific approach there is. But some "empiricism or bust!" approach to science holds little water and very little gain.

I think the "science is socially constructed" is a reasonable point. It also makes it easier to explain some traits of scientific disputes, how disputed science can become reputable, how reputable science can become disputed and so forth. If we overlook the social aspects we should expect most such debates to be over very quickly, which is rarely the case. I often describe science humorously as "professional qualified quarreling", an observation I stand behind completely.

Also I think a lot of valid criticism could get pushed under the rug if we ignored the social aspect, because it would be very easy to just hide behind the loopholes of some simple "scientific qualifiers".

But science remarkable achievements is mostly defined by it working, meaning its results. By that I mean that science produces models that are applicable in some way. Its ideal of rigor can never be overlooked completely either. I don't foresee a future where science foregoes that.

But I'm not saying that all of science "works". But for example, psychology has some valuable theories about learning and behavior - so we know it works. I can predict your responses pretty damn well under stressful conditions, and that has value. That doesn't mean all of psychology works or is applied research, but we know it can work so it gets a pass. Physics have given us an incredibly amount of applications, so it gets a solid pass... etc.

I do believe that conjecture and exploratory research is very valuable in science, as long as it is taken for what it is. I think we wouldn't have a lot of our most valuable theories if we didn't have people who were good at thinking outside the box.

Maybe a rude way of putting it is that science without its results would just be a bad attempt at philosophy.

And yet as soon as I posit that ID is a scientific theory you immediately start applying criteria to show that it isn't....... I don't think we differ that much in our view, only in how stringent those criteria should be and what they actually are. You can think of my view as 'hardline' if you want, I prefer to think of it as a means of producing more reliable conclusions. If I had to choose one of the criteria as the 'most important', I'd choose Falsifiability because a conclusion that can't be proven to be wrong simply isn't that useful.

I have little interest in continuing the ID discussion, it was silly then and it is silly now.

I would hold that the most important aspect of any scientific endeavor is rigor, which roughly translates to the ideals of consistency, honesty and fairness. Falsifiability is only needed in a portion of scientific work, but rigor is always needed.

I don't think falsifiability yields reliability on its own, because falsifiability in no way guarantees good design. It can certainly shine a light on reliability as important, however. Then again, you also have the cases where studies are retro-fitted to make the model seem more reliable, by cutting out the hypotheses, analyses, data and discussions that shines lights on weaknesses - this happens much too often. People want to publish a reliable model instead of being honest and publishing on the model being weak.

In social sciences the phenomena I describe here has given birth to what I call the model craze. Instead of exploring known models and perfecting them, almost everybody pushes a new model. When you know the field, you quickly learn to tell a model designed to fit the paper from a model designed to fit the study object, but it makes many disciplines a minefield for laymen seeking knowledge. I think it happens more in the social sciences (more leeway when designing variables), but I suspect it happens in the hard sciences as well.

I myself have been advised by a sitting professor to cut hypotheses that he felt under-cut the research question, which is inane - as the only way to under-cut a research question is to be dishonest in reporting your findings or dishonest in discussing them. Well, or not answering it, but we ignore that as a special case. But of course, had I heeded his words, the model I was exploring would have seemed very reliable.

Actually it served it's purpose of illustrating that when deciding if something is worthy of being described as a scientific 'theory' or not, you immediately started to apply criteria to it, and that after mocking me for repeating criteria 'ad nauseum'. It doesn't matter to you that scientists might be working on it using scientific methodologies, it only mattered that clearly isn't a scientific theory because of those criteria that you think matter. I think that your list of criteria is incomplete. By ruling out Falsifiability, you're willing to entertain conclusions that you have no way to demonstrate could be wrong.

Tbh, the second you did that the conversation about a theory needing to meet certain criteria was over for me. Everything since then has been an attempt to make you see the contradiction in your position.

Actually, those were my criteria for something being scientific. I have not debated the specific merits or criteria for scientific theories in this thread.

Let me remind you that started this entire debate with claiming this:

Not a claim about scientific theories, but about science.

Now in this part of the the thread you're referencing Popper, who rejected methodological naturalism. There is no consistency to neither your arguments, nor what you are actually debating.

A scientific theory is obviously empirical and uses empirical method, it is a term defined by 20th century empiricists. This is not an issue that require any kind of debate.

The actual conversation was dead on arrival. There simply is no standardized list of criteria that must be met for a theory to be considered a "scientific theory." No volume of Repeated and Repeatedly Capitalized Words in this thread will change that.

And you are still failing to see the distinction I'm drawing between the scientific process and a scientific theory.

You too won't consider a hypothesis to be worthy of being described as a theory unless it meets criteria you have. The only difference between our positions is that of what those criteria are.

The problem is that you're holding that you never talked about anything else than a scientific theory, which isn't true. You were demonstrably talking broadly of science earlier in the thread, not scientific theories.

I can't accept that the things you actually wrote doesn't mean what they said, and that my arguments were therefore irrelevant.

I understand that you find it frustrating, but you're the one holding the debate hostage - not me.

Echoes of the past...

You're basically back to accusing me of dishonesty. So if anyone is 'holding the debate hostage' it's you. I have talked about both science and scientific theories, but I've been totally consistent in how I've talked about both.

Do you yet understand the difference I see between them?

Please remove question marks when posting accusations.

I understand that you have stated that if it is not falsifiable it is not science, and I understand that you have stated that science always applies methodological naturalism. I also understand that you're continuously shifting between claiming to never had said such things, defending that you said them or repeating them in different wording.

And I understand that this debate isn't going anywhere because your interest in this subject isn't (and likely never was) about what science is or what a scientific theory is.

Your goal is to weaponize these terms to support your views on religion and irreligion, and you are obviously not going to let irrelevant things such as how science is actually done to stand in your way.

The only reason I was invested in the debate is because your views, contrary to what you think, justify the views you think they oppose. The minute you accept broad meta-physical assumptions as justifications for knowledge instead of merely saying "I don't know", the door is wide open for theology to do the same. And then boom, everyone is standing on different hill-tops screaming "this is the the way it is!" with no joint standard for facts or truths.

Belief is mostly irrational. Knowing that there is God is totally rational.

PhD. Philosophers are welcomed to replay to my post.

applying this false dichotomy between religion and science is a post-modernist, populist trick.

Educated people who know basics of logic, philosophy and some history to back it up, will never put science and religion in a binary opposition.

Don't even know what this is supposed to mean.

Nope. I've said, ad nauseum, that if it's not falsifiable, it's not a scientific theory, although there have been a couple of instances where I didn't think I needed to add the word 'theory' since that was the context of the conversation and it should have been obvious to you what I was referring to. Apparently though that was enough to confuse you for the entire duration of the conversation despite multiple attempts by me to rectify that simple misunderstanding.

I think we're done. We're just going in circles.

Can you define 'rational', 'irrational' and 'belief'. Just so I can understand what you're saying here.

I don't think your claim to think modern language to be stupid, or whatever it was you said, can excuse basic spelling mistakes like this, unless you're dyslexic or something?

Why's that?

"Burning bushes do not speak".

There, I put science and religion in contrary positions.

I'm no Phd. philosopher though, so feel free to ignore my post (please).

No you did not. An akasha plant is the most potent dmt plant on earth.

Yes, this is surely the type of arguments that only doctors of philosophy can unravel.

+1