What I find concerning about these discussions on what qualifies as science and what doesn't is the excessive arrogance displayed by some writers, as if they stand on the same esteemed ground as the countless individuals throughout history who have propelled scientific progress and shaped the technological world we live in today. Science is a remarkable collective effort of humanity, and it is crucial that we continue to allocate resources to this endeavor.
If anything, studying the history of science would open one's eyes to the fact that the methodologies and approaches that have resulted in a vast reservoir of knowledge have not followed a linear or consistent path throughout time.
There's a quote from his first blog post titled "A Clean-Sheet Introduction to the Scientific Method" that is unironically portraying science as a human endeavour somehow relieved of everything that made "religion" bad.
> Let me start with the easy part: By "religious beliefs" I do not mean to imply that science is a religion in the usual sense. It isn't. Religions generally involve things like the worship of deities, respect for the authority of revealed wisdom, and the carrying out of prayer and rituals. Science has none of that, not because science rejects these things a priori, but because when you pursue science you are invariably (but not inevitably!) led to the conclusion that there are no deities active in our universe, and therefore no good reason to accept the authority of revealed wisdom, and hence not much point spending valuable time on prayer and ritual
Science as an insistution has all those hallmarks: worship, authority and rituals. I'm not trying to make a case for religion here, but wanted to point out the shallowness of the whole write-up. I wish these science preaching guys would actually engage in more science worthy attitudes and be a bit more humble in their holistic assessment of what does and what doesn't constitute science.
Anything goes! would Paul Feyerabend say.
jskherman 59 minutes ago [-]
Indeed, anything goes! What matters is the result of experiments. Fundamentally science is about understanding more about the world. It does not matter if there are "magical" or "mythical" entities or not. In fact, I would even argue that my current position as to science and religion is similar to that of the position taken by Georges Lemaître.
There's a lot of peculiarity when you study science and even math. Some things just seem too elegant to be coincidental like Euler's equation and the phenomenon of emergence, but even if they are coincidental that realization of coincidence and the slim chance of it happening is also fascinating. On the other hand there are also mind-boggingly unelegant things about nature that require empirical methods because exact and analytical methods aren't cutting it to describe phenomena. It feels all like a mish-mash of different mechanics/rules put together. I do believe Lemaître understood it well that by researching the sciences we also, in its own way, are trying to learn and know about God and his creations (assuming you accept the axiom that God created the universe).
lisper 8 hours ago [-]
> excessive arrogance
Why excessive? The objective fact of the matter, as I point out in the first article in the series, is that the scientific method produces vastly more accurate predictions than anything else humans have ever tried. This is the whole reason science is even a thing. I think that justifies a little bit of cockiness until someone actually comes up with something better.
raskelll 8 hours ago [-]
The arrogance I mentioned is directed towards the people who think of themselves as appropriate to speak for the century-long success story of science itself while not really addressing (and understanding) how science emerged. Science as a human enterprise has flourished best without anyone putting boxes on what does and what doesn't consitute science.
lisper 8 hours ago [-]
Ah.
FYI, I have a whole series of unpublished chapters about the (very messy) history of science. I decided to take this different approach because I thought it would be a more effective way of reaching my target audience.
> Science as a human enterprise has flourished best without anyone putting boxes on what does and what doesn't consitute science.
That's not true. There is one box you cannot get out of without destroying the process: any hypothesis that is inconsistent with experiment must be rejected (and as a corollary to that, unfalsifiable hypotheses must be rejected). But yeah, beyond that pretty much anything goes.
raskelll 8 hours ago [-]
Let me revisit my statement once I've read those chapters then.
Regarding your second statement, out of curiosity, I wonder how you would characterize the 1989 series of experiments done by Fleischmann and Pons.
lisper 8 hours ago [-]
> Let me revisit my statement once I've read those chapters then.
Note that they are quite drafty. That was the result of a previous effort to tackle this project of writing about the scientific method for a general audience that I ultimately abandoned in favor of this current approach. The history part starts in chapter 5.
These were based on a series of lectures I gave a few years ago. I can dig up those links too if you're interested.
> I wonder how you would characterize the 1989 series of experiments done by Fleischmann and Pons.
I'm not sure what you expect me to say. The results have not been reproduced, so whatever happened in 1989 it was almost certainly not cold fusion.
maxnoe 4 hours ago [-]
This is easily solved by adding the well known quote (Sagan):
An older quote, addressing this case more directly would be (Eddington):
"The law that entropy always increases holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell's equations — then so much the worse for Maxwell's equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation — *well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes.* But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation."
lisper 51 minutes ago [-]
Well, Fleischmann and Pons claimed to have extraordinary evidence. They were just wrong.
Also, I cover the Sagan quote in the previous installment:
You don't get to claim yourself that the evidence you obtained is extraordinary
lisper 6 minutes ago [-]
They didn't, and that's obviously not what I meant.
vixen99 41 minutes ago [-]
No, we don't yet know what's happening in that area: as the DARPA 2022 report puts it in a press release entitled 'Solid State verification of nuclear particles in electrochemical cells'. "Work should continue - much interesting science to be done. Results do not yet rise to level publishable in peer-reviewed physics journals". Bottom line: some neutrons appear and they cannot explain the mechanism. If neutrons are detected and it's definitely 'cold' then what would you call it?
There are many other reports more or less with the same proviso. 'Not yet publishable'. Many will wonder about the 'yet' but that's usually the case with potentially new areas of science.
I would call it "anomalous room-temperature neutron production".
strogonoff 7 hours ago [-]
My pet theory is that success of predictions of modern science helped us achieve a local maximum which, while useful, also makes it difficult to evolve towards a higher (globally) maximum.
The axioms are:
1. Some models are useful, but all models are necessarily incorrect, incomplete, and/or unfalsifiable. (This can be restated in an unsettling, for a natural science enthusiast, manner as “there is always the unexplained”.)
2. We cannot know where the incorrectness/incompleteness lies.
However, the arrogance of modern natural science due to its success makes us disinclined and demotivated to look outside the box of its current models and tempts us into, e.g., treating the entities described by current models (wrong, per above) as ground truth, treating consciousness (you’d think, the only thing we have direct access to) as an illusion (red flag, explaining away), etc. Thus, we get entrenched in a local maximum.
lisper 54 minutes ago [-]
It's true that science is not complete, and cannot be. We know, for example, that we cannot solve the halting problem, we cannot predict chaotic systems, etc. But that's the wrong thing to focus on. There are a lot of things we can predict, and the scientific method produces better predictive theories than any other known method.
> disinclined and demotivated to look outside the box of its current models
OK, but that is not the scientific method's fault. If you want to look outside the box, nothing in the scientific method says you can't. An indeed the biggest breakthroughs have come when people have thought outside the box.
The problem is that it's often hard to distinguish between brilliance and crackpottery. But again, that's not a shortcoming of the scientific method, it's just the Way The World Is. Some problems are hard.
spywaregorilla 2 hours ago [-]
Seems to me we have very strongly evidenced beliefs about where incompleteness lies.
strogonoff 1 hours ago [-]
Consciousness is perhaps the most glaring one (as far as current models offered by natural sciences are concerned), if nothing else then because we deal with it every moment of existence or because it is what natural science itself stems from, is shaped by, is dependent on and exists because of.
Of course, whether it is the only unknown is unknown.
lisper 28 minutes ago [-]
Have you read Dennett's book?
wddkcs 4 hours ago [-]
That would depend upon what you count as a prediction. The Oracles of Delphi operated for hundreds of years, the Sibylline Oracles were relied upon for thousands of years, and both were universally regarded in their day as unnerving accurate. Dismissing their longevity as religious superstition I would argue is itself anti-science. It is the arrogance of dismissing such history that leads people to eventually declare themselves to be 'the science'.
lisper 39 minutes ago [-]
Actually, science can explain oracles. There is a whole field of study devoted to understanding how to deceive people. It's considered more art than science, but it actually is both. It's called "magic". And there is a whole sub-field of magic called mentalism that deals specifically with things like what the oracles did.
BTW, since you brought up oracles, you might enjoy this:
Arrogance is almost by definition against the values of scientific inquiry, and so if you see someone placing science on a quasi-religious pedestal, you’d best be skeptical of whatever that person is selling.
This tends to go with excessive praise of particular thinkers and the wholesale dismissal of entire fields and/or thinkers as “manifest nonsense” or some other ill-informed claptrap.
If you read actual philosophy of science books and papers by real philosophers, you’ll find that the attitude is more appropriate and not so laudatory. As it should be.
lisper 43 minutes ago [-]
> wholesale dismissal of entire fields and/or thinkers
Like what?
keiferski 22 minutes ago [-]
Like dismissing the work of Feyerabend or Wittgenstein without seemingly having read either:
I'm really not sure how seriously I'm supposed to take writings about the philosophy of science when the author thinks major thinkers in the field, like Feyerabend, are just writing gibberish. That's...not really a serious opinion, whether you agree with his ideas or not.
Actually, a search inside said book vindicated this sentiment.
Anyway, when I see "philosopher" and "20th century" together, my bullshit radar gets extremely attentive.
lisper 8 minutes ago [-]
I read Feyerabend a long time ago. It was recommended to me by someone I deeply respect so I was predisposed to like it, but it struck me as unalloyed nonsense. It was a long time ago and I don't really remember the details any more. My impression is that Feyerabend is mostly cited by crackpots who are bitter because they are not being taken seriously.
However, this question too can be settled empirically: can you point to any useful results that were produced by someone who credits them to Wittgenstein or Feyerabend? I'm not aware of any.
mistermann 1 hours ago [-]
What if your premises are less solid than they seem, and because of the "our thinking style is not only better on a relative scale, on average, it is near flawless in an absolute sense" mindset that often comes along with the culture of "science" you're unable to even consider such possibilities?
lisper 37 minutes ago [-]
What premises? The scientific method has no premises, it's just a method. If you are "unable to consider" some possibility that is not the fault of the scientific method, that is a shortcoming in your mental abilities. The scientific method doesn't stop you from considering anything. All it forces you to do is reject ideas that are at odds with experiment.
nairboon 6 hours ago [-]
> The objective fact of the matter, as I point out in the first article in the series, is that the scientific method produces vastly more accurate predictions than anything else humans have ever tried.
Which scientific method? As far as i know, there is no such thing as "the scientific method". Though, there are many methods.
lisper 1 hours ago [-]
No, there is only one scientific method, which is to say, one method that works better than any other to produce theories with predictive power. I describe it in the inaugural post of the series:
Ah, Feyerabend. So often shunned and belittled as an enemy of science—so often feared. His conversations with Imre Lakatos still hold up well to this day.
This comment beautifully assembles everything I hate about institutionalised "science".
> as if they stand on the same esteemed ground as the countless individuals throughout history who have propelled scientific progress
There could absolutely not exist a more anti-scientific sentiment than this. This sentiment is what erodes the core of development. Esteemed my b*t.
As a tenured professor you ar entitled to absolutely nothing. The fact that you decides masochism on yourself does not allow you to have any masochistic behaviour towards students and staff.
Science is about accepting and realising the ideas that best possible describe the real world. If you can get direction out of history to do this well, be my guest. But do not set history og science up as a dogma to access an exclusive group.
What this comment is describing the the "religion of scientific institutions" and has nothing to do with science.
mistermann 2 hours ago [-]
> Science is about accepting and realising the ideas that best possible describe the real world.
> What this comment is describing the "religion of scientific institutions" and has nothing to do with science.
Do you consider the real world actions of scientists to be a part of science? I think anyone who attributes scientific accomplishments to "science" must (at least when it serves their purposes, more on this below). This then (can) lead to the distinction between scientific scripture/intent/aspiration (the scientific method, etc) and things as they actually are. How is it possible to possess knowledge of what all scientists do, and not do, in fact (without resorting to the supernatural, or evasive rhetoric as one commonly witnesses politicians engage in as they dodge a question pointed at a legitimate weakness in a narrative)?
Another angle is whether negative consequences of the actions of scientists should be attributed to science or not. In my experience, negative consequences somehow do not count, and there are few disciplines other than science that get this sort of a free ride in our culture... The only one that comes to my mind is (so-called) "democracy".
keiferski 5 hours ago [-]
The common thread among scientisim-followers is that few have actually bothered to read a book or paper on the philosophy of science by actual philosophers, and instead have adopted science as an identity label.
One consequence of this is how religion is now juxtaposed directly with science, because if the atheists are scientism-followers, then religious people must be anti-science. This is directly contrary to how most scientific innovators thought about the relationship of science to religion (Newton as a prime example.)
raverbashing 5 hours ago [-]
Agree
Popperians wish science behaved the way they wanted it to behave
I'm still waiting to figure out how Popperians get their ideas for theories because "officially" they can't get them from anywhere (since anything not proven by experiments is "wrong" in their head).
NayamAmarshe 6 hours ago [-]
I wish people could just read Sāṁkhya and Nyāya philosophy once just to get a better understanding about consciousness and reasoning.
No science course requires you to learn epistemology beforehand, which is why things like these happen. People keep on bringing mental speculation and debating philosophy which has pretty much been discussed to death thousands of years ago.
PS: Not trying to dismiss the blog post, it tries to get close. It's a good read.
lisper 8 hours ago [-]
Author here. Please note that this is the fifth installment of what is planned to be a very long series of articles about the scientific method targeted at a general audience. Comments and constructive criticism are welcome, but please keep the context in mind.
n4r9 5 hours ago [-]
Hi Ron. I've definitely gotten into arguments with you about quantum theory on HN before, so it's nice to see something about which I broadly agree with you.
I skimmed back over your "Scientific Method Part 4" post and noticed the following paragraph:
> The reason science is naturalistic and atheistic is not because these are prejudices built into the method by fiat, it is because it turns out that the best explanations -- the most parsimonious ones that account for all the known data and have the most predictive power -- are naturalistic. The supernatural is simply not needed to explain any known phenomena.
I wonder if there's some nuance missed here. The natural follow-up question in my head is: can the scientific method ever support a supernatural explanation? What could such an explanation look like? How could it have predictive power whilst maintaining its supernaturalness?
I wonder if, actually, the scientific method is inherently at odds with supernatural explanations because as soon as an explanation has genuine predictive power (edit: and is parsimonious), it becomes natural.
lisper 44 minutes ago [-]
> can the scientific method ever support a supernatural explanation?
Of course it can, which is to say, it can support an explanation that would be considered "supernatural" by today's standards. If there were evidence of supernatural (by today's standards) phenomena, science could easily incorporate supernatural (by today's standards) explanations for those phenomena. But the word "supernatural" means what it means (today) for a reason. A lot of people have looked for evidence of phenomena beyond the Standard Model and failed to find it. This is not to say that there might not be a breakthrough tomorrow, but I'll give you very, very long odds against.
> as soon as an explanation has genuine predictive power (edit: and is parsimonious), it becomes natural.
Yes, but that's kind of like how any AI technology that actually works is no longer AI. Science can easily incorporate deities, demons, psychic phenomena, Bigfoot (heck, that's just a new species, happens all the time). In fact, all of these things started out as bona fide scientific hypotheses back in their day. The thing that makes them "supernatural" is simply that they are at odds with the current set of data. That could change any time. But the predictive power of current theories means the odds are not with you.
marmight 3 hours ago [-]
> I wonder if there's some nuance missed here. The natural follow-up question in my head is: can the scientific method ever support a supernatural explanation? What could such an explanation look like? How could it have predictive power whilst maintaining its supernaturalness?
In principle religious prophecy could fit the bill. You could imagine a surprising and unambiguous religious prophecy about a future event, such as that the Yellowstone Caldera will erupt in February of 2025. If a series of such prophecies were successfully made about various events spanning a variety of disciplines or topics, each attributing the knowledge to the same deity, it would be difficult for me to not attribute the predictions to the supernatural.
In practice though, religious prophecy tends to either fail in being surprising or in being unambiguous. And when it is not unambiguous, it is not falsifiable.
edit: I would also add that it is important that the prophecy be about something that is independently verifiable as well.
47 minutes ago [-]
hcks 9 hours ago [-]
I find it funny that a blogpost claiming to be about the “scientific method” spends 4000 words to try to convince its readers of a wordplay, using analogies and metaphors.
(Yes “consciousness is an illusion” is a wordplay. If you claim it’s a scientific theory, then what does it predict?)
mistermann 1 hours ago [-]
One interesting phenomenon Maya (~consciousness is an illusion) could explain is the perceived (by themselves and others, the internet is absolutely full of artifacts of it) omniscience of scientists, despite the letter of science providing all that is needed to logically protect one from such illusory beliefs.
raskelll 9 hours ago [-]
Read the whole of his "science" series. You're going to be delighted to find out that he's really fond of analogies, golfing being a particularly fitting one.
lincpa 3 hours ago [-]
[dead]
Rendered at 15:10:10 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
If anything, studying the history of science would open one's eyes to the fact that the methodologies and approaches that have resulted in a vast reservoir of knowledge have not followed a linear or consistent path throughout time.
There's a quote from his first blog post titled "A Clean-Sheet Introduction to the Scientific Method" that is unironically portraying science as a human endeavour somehow relieved of everything that made "religion" bad.
> Let me start with the easy part: By "religious beliefs" I do not mean to imply that science is a religion in the usual sense. It isn't. Religions generally involve things like the worship of deities, respect for the authority of revealed wisdom, and the carrying out of prayer and rituals. Science has none of that, not because science rejects these things a priori, but because when you pursue science you are invariably (but not inevitably!) led to the conclusion that there are no deities active in our universe, and therefore no good reason to accept the authority of revealed wisdom, and hence not much point spending valuable time on prayer and ritual
Science as an insistution has all those hallmarks: worship, authority and rituals. I'm not trying to make a case for religion here, but wanted to point out the shallowness of the whole write-up. I wish these science preaching guys would actually engage in more science worthy attitudes and be a bit more humble in their holistic assessment of what does and what doesn't constitute science.
Anything goes! would Paul Feyerabend say.
There's a lot of peculiarity when you study science and even math. Some things just seem too elegant to be coincidental like Euler's equation and the phenomenon of emergence, but even if they are coincidental that realization of coincidence and the slim chance of it happening is also fascinating. On the other hand there are also mind-boggingly unelegant things about nature that require empirical methods because exact and analytical methods aren't cutting it to describe phenomena. It feels all like a mish-mash of different mechanics/rules put together. I do believe Lemaître understood it well that by researching the sciences we also, in its own way, are trying to learn and know about God and his creations (assuming you accept the axiom that God created the universe).
Why excessive? The objective fact of the matter, as I point out in the first article in the series, is that the scientific method produces vastly more accurate predictions than anything else humans have ever tried. This is the whole reason science is even a thing. I think that justifies a little bit of cockiness until someone actually comes up with something better.
FYI, I have a whole series of unpublished chapters about the (very messy) history of science. I decided to take this different approach because I thought it would be a more effective way of reaching my target audience.
> Science as a human enterprise has flourished best without anyone putting boxes on what does and what doesn't consitute science.
That's not true. There is one box you cannot get out of without destroying the process: any hypothesis that is inconsistent with experiment must be rejected (and as a corollary to that, unfalsifiable hypotheses must be rejected). But yeah, beyond that pretty much anything goes.
Regarding your second statement, out of curiosity, I wonder how you would characterize the 1989 series of experiments done by Fleischmann and Pons.
You can find them here:
https://flownet.com/ron/TIKN/
Note that they are quite drafty. That was the result of a previous effort to tackle this project of writing about the scientific method for a general audience that I ultimately abandoned in favor of this current approach. The history part starts in chapter 5.
These were based on a series of lectures I gave a few years ago. I can dig up those links too if you're interested.
> I wonder how you would characterize the 1989 series of experiments done by Fleischmann and Pons.
I'm not sure what you expect me to say. The results have not been reproduced, so whatever happened in 1989 it was almost certainly not cold fusion.
"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."
An older quote, addressing this case more directly would be (Eddington):
"The law that entropy always increases holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell's equations — then so much the worse for Maxwell's equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation — *well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes.* But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation."
Also, I cover the Sagan quote in the previous installment:
https://blog.rongarret.info/2024/04/the-scientific-method-pa...
There are many other reports more or less with the same proviso. 'Not yet publishable'. Many will wonder about the 'yet' but that's usually the case with potentially new areas of science.
https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0153487 Li–Pd–Rh-D2O electrochemistry experiments at elevated voltage
The axioms are:
1. Some models are useful, but all models are necessarily incorrect, incomplete, and/or unfalsifiable. (This can be restated in an unsettling, for a natural science enthusiast, manner as “there is always the unexplained”.)
2. We cannot know where the incorrectness/incompleteness lies.
However, the arrogance of modern natural science due to its success makes us disinclined and demotivated to look outside the box of its current models and tempts us into, e.g., treating the entities described by current models (wrong, per above) as ground truth, treating consciousness (you’d think, the only thing we have direct access to) as an illusion (red flag, explaining away), etc. Thus, we get entrenched in a local maximum.
> disinclined and demotivated to look outside the box of its current models
OK, but that is not the scientific method's fault. If you want to look outside the box, nothing in the scientific method says you can't. An indeed the biggest breakthroughs have come when people have thought outside the box.
The problem is that it's often hard to distinguish between brilliance and crackpottery. But again, that's not a shortcoming of the scientific method, it's just the Way The World Is. Some problems are hard.
Of course, whether it is the only unknown is unknown.
BTW, since you brought up oracles, you might enjoy this:
https://blog.rongarret.info/2018/01/a-multilogue-on-free-wil...
This tends to go with excessive praise of particular thinkers and the wholesale dismissal of entire fields and/or thinkers as “manifest nonsense” or some other ill-informed claptrap.
If you read actual philosophy of science books and papers by real philosophers, you’ll find that the attitude is more appropriate and not so laudatory. As it should be.
Like what?
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastMonth&page=0&prefix=tr...
I'm really not sure how seriously I'm supposed to take writings about the philosophy of science when the author thinks major thinkers in the field, like Feyerabend, are just writing gibberish. That's...not really a serious opinion, whether you agree with his ideas or not.
Actually, a search inside said book vindicated this sentiment.
Anyway, when I see "philosopher" and "20th century" together, my bullshit radar gets extremely attentive.
However, this question too can be settled empirically: can you point to any useful results that were produced by someone who credits them to Wittgenstein or Feyerabend? I'm not aware of any.
Which scientific method? As far as i know, there is no such thing as "the scientific method". Though, there are many methods.
https://blog.rongarret.info/2024/03/a-clean-sheet-introducti...
If you know of a process that works better than the one described that would be Big News.
https://blog.rongarret.info/2024/04/the-scientific-method-pa...
For an unbiased analysis of Feyerabend's impact, I recommend this book review:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3186788/
> as if they stand on the same esteemed ground as the countless individuals throughout history who have propelled scientific progress
There could absolutely not exist a more anti-scientific sentiment than this. This sentiment is what erodes the core of development. Esteemed my b*t.
As a tenured professor you ar entitled to absolutely nothing. The fact that you decides masochism on yourself does not allow you to have any masochistic behaviour towards students and staff.
Science is about accepting and realising the ideas that best possible describe the real world. If you can get direction out of history to do this well, be my guest. But do not set history og science up as a dogma to access an exclusive group.
What this comment is describing the the "religion of scientific institutions" and has nothing to do with science.
> What this comment is describing the "religion of scientific institutions" and has nothing to do with science.
Do you consider the real world actions of scientists to be a part of science? I think anyone who attributes scientific accomplishments to "science" must (at least when it serves their purposes, more on this below). This then (can) lead to the distinction between scientific scripture/intent/aspiration (the scientific method, etc) and things as they actually are. How is it possible to possess knowledge of what all scientists do, and not do, in fact (without resorting to the supernatural, or evasive rhetoric as one commonly witnesses politicians engage in as they dodge a question pointed at a legitimate weakness in a narrative)?
Another angle is whether negative consequences of the actions of scientists should be attributed to science or not. In my experience, negative consequences somehow do not count, and there are few disciplines other than science that get this sort of a free ride in our culture... The only one that comes to my mind is (so-called) "democracy".
One consequence of this is how religion is now juxtaposed directly with science, because if the atheists are scientism-followers, then religious people must be anti-science. This is directly contrary to how most scientific innovators thought about the relationship of science to religion (Newton as a prime example.)
Popperians wish science behaved the way they wanted it to behave
I'm still waiting to figure out how Popperians get their ideas for theories because "officially" they can't get them from anywhere (since anything not proven by experiments is "wrong" in their head).
No science course requires you to learn epistemology beforehand, which is why things like these happen. People keep on bringing mental speculation and debating philosophy which has pretty much been discussed to death thousands of years ago.
A good lecture on this topic: https://youtube.com/watch?v=4FQBs4K8EDo
PS: Not trying to dismiss the blog post, it tries to get close. It's a good read.
I skimmed back over your "Scientific Method Part 4" post and noticed the following paragraph:
> The reason science is naturalistic and atheistic is not because these are prejudices built into the method by fiat, it is because it turns out that the best explanations -- the most parsimonious ones that account for all the known data and have the most predictive power -- are naturalistic. The supernatural is simply not needed to explain any known phenomena.
I wonder if there's some nuance missed here. The natural follow-up question in my head is: can the scientific method ever support a supernatural explanation? What could such an explanation look like? How could it have predictive power whilst maintaining its supernaturalness?
I wonder if, actually, the scientific method is inherently at odds with supernatural explanations because as soon as an explanation has genuine predictive power (edit: and is parsimonious), it becomes natural.
Of course it can, which is to say, it can support an explanation that would be considered "supernatural" by today's standards. If there were evidence of supernatural (by today's standards) phenomena, science could easily incorporate supernatural (by today's standards) explanations for those phenomena. But the word "supernatural" means what it means (today) for a reason. A lot of people have looked for evidence of phenomena beyond the Standard Model and failed to find it. This is not to say that there might not be a breakthrough tomorrow, but I'll give you very, very long odds against.
> as soon as an explanation has genuine predictive power (edit: and is parsimonious), it becomes natural.
Yes, but that's kind of like how any AI technology that actually works is no longer AI. Science can easily incorporate deities, demons, psychic phenomena, Bigfoot (heck, that's just a new species, happens all the time). In fact, all of these things started out as bona fide scientific hypotheses back in their day. The thing that makes them "supernatural" is simply that they are at odds with the current set of data. That could change any time. But the predictive power of current theories means the odds are not with you.
In principle religious prophecy could fit the bill. You could imagine a surprising and unambiguous religious prophecy about a future event, such as that the Yellowstone Caldera will erupt in February of 2025. If a series of such prophecies were successfully made about various events spanning a variety of disciplines or topics, each attributing the knowledge to the same deity, it would be difficult for me to not attribute the predictions to the supernatural.
In practice though, religious prophecy tends to either fail in being surprising or in being unambiguous. And when it is not unambiguous, it is not falsifiable.
edit: I would also add that it is important that the prophecy be about something that is independently verifiable as well.
(Yes “consciousness is an illusion” is a wordplay. If you claim it’s a scientific theory, then what does it predict?)