That came from a post where I agreed that something that isn't 'observable, repeatable and testable' isn't reliable and you didn't correct me or point out that you didn't mean that. You have now.

I would agree that if you're working with a hypothesis that isn't 'observable, repeatable and testable', among other things, it could never be classed as a scientific theory.

+1

Sorry, but I don't know if I can respond to the rest of your earlier post soon or not. I have other stuff to do today plus I have a bit of a cold right now, so that might slow me down a bit.

Have a blessed day.

Lagtight, do you believe the earth has four corners?

No. Do you?

Hi, tame_deuces. Thank you for your response.

You made a lot of excellent points. I won't pursue this argument any further.

Have a blessed day.

Thanks for the links. When I have the time and mental acuity I will check them out.

Hi, DeuceKicker.

Thank you for your interesting questions. I'm not thinking straight right now, but when I'm up to the task I will attempt to answer your questions.

Have a blessed day.

edit: Just posted this to let you know that I'm not ignoring your post.

Really? Because he made excellent points? Are you unable to counter them?

If Jesus was God incarnate on earth this is not true.

Interesting point, batair. Seems to me, though, that belief in Jesus' life, death, and resurrection are based on the testimony of eyewitnesses more so than "science." If "repeatability" is a prerequisite for a theory to be properly called "scientific", then the Incarnation wouldn't seem to be a scientific hypothesis.

I will mull this over further; just now saw your post and am "shooting from the hip", as they say.

Have a blessed day!

Can you explain this?

I just mean i could draw blood from God and test it if i had a time machine and watch the tapes of his miracles to study them. People have studied the shroud and tested it for blood and stuff. Which means if Jesus was God we have studied him.

If God was flesh and blood we could study his flesh and blood and him. Even if he is fully human and thats all it showed. Science still studied God.


I guess you mean prove that he exists. If all the miracles are true and the reincarnation was and we taped and use our fancy study stuff it might show that.

Then there is his return for Armageddon. That would be able to be studied too and it seems like that could also prove God. Unless he is an alien tricking us....

This is speculative and not particularly scientific. Some events happen and we don't have the data for it. Positing a time machine in which one could possibly go back in time to attempt to measure something doesn't really move things anywhere.

It really seems you're stretching to try to make a point here. And I don't even know what the underlying point you're trying to make is.

Historical events are not falsifiable, so no historical subject is ever empirical, falsifiable or testable in the sense that scientific endeavors usually use the terms.

Not even relying on prime sources is empirical, as those sources are rarely (if ever) written with the empirical method in mind. But even beyond that pretty much any history-subject relies on conjecture to make its case, not merely listing or quoting sources.

That doesn't mean that history is unscientific. It's an organized academic inquiry that seeks to find facts, not beliefs. But the scientific tools are not empirical, but qualitative and phenomenological in nature. Literary analysis, linguistic analysis. Rigor is enforced through method, principles for classification of sources and so forth.

As usual with many things relying on precision of language these ideals arose in Germany and its ideas of "wissenchaft", it translates to "science" in English, but the direct meaning of the word would be "knowledge crafting", and the Germans would apply the term wissenschaft to what English-speaking academia would dub "the arts". History even got its own title "Geschichtswissenschaft", which in German-English dictionary would simply say "history" but really reads "story knowledge crafting". A pretty interesting example of nuances lost in translation.

The most typical example of this way of thought is the German paradigm of "historismus", which can be very broadly translated to the common adage "history repeats itself" - meaning one claims there are rules to historical developments and that you can therefore make scientific predictions based on historical analysis.

Why do I harp on that? Well, because most positivists and many empiricists attacked that line of thought and many disputed if history could even be scientific, a divide that has a very interesting consequence to this day. Some countries teach history in the arts, but others (like mine) typically teaches it in the social sciences.

Sorry for the nerdy ramble, but this is a subject that has always interested me.

And when evidence has come to light that has falsified historical accounts...? Perhaps I'm not understanding what you mean by 'historical events', or maybe 'accounts [of events]' and 'events' are not the same thing?

Falsifiability in empirical science means that you by deduction will try to prove your claim wrong with observation or experiment. That is not possible to do regarding claims that some historical event took place in our past, as you can't observe it.

We can factually state that the Notre-Dame de Paris cathedral was built, but that is an either an abductive conclusion ("there is a cathedral, so it was likely built") or an inductive conclusion ("all buildings we have observed in our lifetime has been built, so all buildings must be built"), not a deductive one.

We can make a deductive claim "all buildings must be built, the Notre Dame was built", but we have no way of observing that our conclusion might be wrong, so we can't falsify it.

Of course, this is a rather silly and absurd example, but that's why I use it. It becomes even more clear if you consider that history is much broader than just musing about buildings and things we have clear present material evidence of. In addition, history also uses a lot of conjecture by extrapolating from historical accounts.

No it doesn't, you simply need a possible means of falsification, that could even be an argument. This has been covered already ITT.

Of course it is. There a great many accounts of historical events that were revised after evidence was found that disproved them. This is so trivially obvious that I'm sure that we're not talking about the same thing here at all.

It's not my intent to be rude here, but you don't know what empirical method is.

It literally is, in its most basic form, to test by observation. Observation happens in the present. Historical events happened in the past. You can try to tie that string together all you want, but it's not going to connect.

And I'm even being extremely generous and ignoring reproducibility and scientific objectivity.

I understand it better than you imagine, I understand it well enough to know that whilst practically useful, the empirical ideal is actually impossible to achieve. It's still handy for a great many endeavours though, including the application of the scientific method. In my view, something empirical could not be scientific, but something scientific could not be non-empirical.

You're not being rude, in fact I greatly appreciate your civil tone

In other words, no "Scientific Theories" actually exist because it's impossible to attain the standard that has been defined.

You have once again gone above and beyond to demonstrate willful ignorance. You have also added intellectual arrogance into the mix. It's probably an overused accusation, but Dunning-Kruger?

Proving history certainly presents different challenges than scientific experimentation, but I would not go so far as saying it is not empirical. "Is their a document demonstrating that so-and-so said X" is an empirical question. I would say that "did the United States bomb Hanoi at Christmas?" is an empirical question, even though one particular scientific test -- reproducible results -- is impossible.

The way you frame the issue would descientize an awful lot of things we take for granted. We can't reproduce the creation of the moon from an earth-meteor impact, but empirical methods still strongly suggest that happened.

Certainly some historical questions resist empirical answers, especially when quotes or acts do not necessarily reflect actual beliefs. For example, "Does Trump really hate blacks or is he just attracting racist votes?" The brain remains a black box, but we can build chains of evidence that make a conclusion about a mental state likely enough to depend on.

But guess what, educated guessing is often done in hard science also.

Quantum mechanics claims that certain things can never be known, only guessed. We claim an electron can be a particle or a wave, it does all sorts of weird-assed stuff that we explain with valence shells, magnetic fields, spin, and quark colors, but these are primitive mental pictures created by talking monkeys about things we will never, ever prove as tangible truth. At least not in the sense that we prove that gravity pulls on all objects equally, because we can keep reproducing Galileo's cannonball test.

So yes, the post modernists are correct, making empirical claims about history presents endless messy problems, but it's all we got and we get as accurate as we can. You still reading, lagtight? How do you know the Devil didn't write the Bible?

If the claim can't be observed or falsified, it can't be subjected to empirical method and is not empirical science. And you can't observe an historical event.

This isn't very controversial, most history textbooks at uni level with a mention of method would mention it.

You can support history with empirical science, but that is induction - not deduction.

Did you see the story about the finding of the oldest **** sapien fossil found outside of Africa? It means that the 'event' of **** sapien leaving Africa happened much earlier than previously claimed. There would be an example of evidence changing the historical record. So, it is falsifiable, and in this case, and many others, has been falsified. Or is this not what you're talking about?

Oldest known human fossil outside Africa discovered in Israel

Strictly speaking, the only thing you can empirically say is that you've found new fossils and you can use other existing empirical theories to say how old they are. But once you start speaking about actual events, then you can't go back and see them actually happening, so you can't observe it and you can't falsify it.

You can say "this most LIKELY happened", but that's abduction not deduction. You can support your claim of what happened with known empirical theories "We know that this works like that in all known cases, so it's what happened here" - but that's induction, not deduction.

Empirical method relies on deduction.

I think some of you have this notion that this somehow equates to me saying these fields are "less scientific" than some hard science field which can do direct observation. They are not, they are just as scientific. They simply have to rely on alternative method and other forms of reasoning and they need to add conjecture. That is completely unproblematic as long as one admits methodological weaknesses.

This only becomes a problem if one holds that only pure empirical method is "properly scientific". Which I don't.

So you think that a process that doesn't restrict itself to a naturalistic (and therefore empirical) outlook can still be considered to be scientific?