SCIENCE: -- "observational science" vs "historical science" vs ... science.

Because I'm familiar with the scientific method. I'm sure you've been posting on this forum for long enough to have noticed that very often the things that seem "obvious" to you seem ridiculous and nonsensical to people who actually know stuff. What you have said is that you yourself can't think of a principle which makes the distinction that you want to make.Good luck with that. Insofar as this means anything, it is obviously false.Again, how do you imagine this going down? How do you create a consensus in the first place? Archaelogist 1 : I've just made up this thing called the Mesozoic era, and I want you to believe in it. All the other archaelogists : Why should we believe in it? Archaelogist 1 : Because ... uh ... there's a scientific consensus that there was a Mesozoic era. All the other archaelogists : No. No there isn't. That's why none of us believe it, or have heard of it 'til you mentioned it just now ...If conclusions were "determined by consensus", which is the seventeenth dumbest thing you've said all week, then in that case it would be impossible to create a new conclusion. Well, again I would like to invite you to distinguish between this and the case where we infer living stegosauruses from their fossils. Every conceivable difference is to the advantage of radiometric dating ... And if the fossil stegosauruses were sneezed out of its beak by a giant purple chicken made of custard, then all this stuff about living stegosauruses would turn out to be pretty silly. "You really have no way of knowing."What you need, let me remind you again, is a method for denying the facts that you want to deny that wouldn't also allow anyone else to deny pretty much anything at all. You have admitted your inability to think of one. Until you can, I suggest that you either adopt the scientific method or shut up about epistemology.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

It's a "distinction" which, when pressed, you cannot actually make, and the importance of which you are unable to explain. Which makes it hard to ascribe any particular importance to it.If a new prophet appears among us crying "Woe unto the pruntipators, let all who pruntipate be cast into the sacred fire", then it is reasonable to ask him what pruntipation is and what's so wrong with it. If he replies that he hasn't figured that out yet, but he's working on it, then it is hard to take him seriously. If, moreover, we find that the people he denounces as "pruntipators" are all black or Jewish, we would begin to suspect that the real basis of his animus against these supposed pruntipators is not actually that they engage in an activity which he is confessedly unable to define or recognize.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

And yet you admitted that we could verify the existence of former living stegosauruses from their bones, although that is a proposition about the prehistoric past for which there is no witnesses.So, would you like to take another run at it? You would do well to (a) accept the scientific method (b) find a distinction that does what you actually want it to do or (c) shut up until you can bring yourself to do either (a) or (b). As it stands what you are doing, in effect, is denouncing yourself for having a "real mental problem" for believing in stegosauruses, when that is in fact pretty much your one concession to reality. You still haven't explained how this brainwashing took place, despite my repeated inquiries. You seem to be requiring that we believe in a sequence of past events that you yourself can't even imagine, let alone produce evidence for. Yeah, for example people say that that unwitnessed past contained stegosauruses, and you believe them. You say that that's fine. You yourself are not following your argument. You don't apply it to facts that your religion permits you to acknowledge, such as former living stegosauruses. Now, if you think your argument is bullshit, you can hardly complain when we concur.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

I think it's a rather narrow-minded categorization of her opponents. What if I'm actually a Barbarian Conformist? You know, raping and pillaging 'cos of peer-group pressure?

Who would have thought that the quality of Faith's arguments could decline?

Besides the specific gaping flaws in this particular line of argument, it demonstrates a more general problem, a hollowness when you poke your finger into their arguments. No creationist has ever actually tried to construct an epistemology ... but they know what it would be like if they did, just as they know what flood geology would be like if only they could invent it: it would account for the fossil record, water would be involved. Well, it's the same thing here. They feel sure that there should be some way to rewrite the rules of scientific inquiry so as to rule out the bits of science that upset them but not the rest of it. But they can't actually think of one. Amongst themselves they can talk as though someone has, but when someone with any critical thinking skills --- even someone with any curiousity --- hears this sort of talk and starts asking questions, there's nothing there.

She always complains about being misrepresented when you talk about what she said instead of what she wishes she said.In this case what she wishes she could say cannot be said; she wants to describe an epistemology that does just what creationists want it to do and which is based on propositions less arbitrary than "because we say so". It can't be done, but it's what she wishes she'd said. Pointing out what she actually said is so unfair.

In hindsight, we should have written them down for her.

And I think it's very revealing.Imagine two men under suspicion of the same crime. One says to the police: "Sure, take my fingerprints, take my DNA. You want to look at my clothing? Sure. The GPS in my car? Take it. My online history? You're welcome. Look at all the evidence you want, I'm fine with you running the full battery of forensic tests, in fact I insist upon it."The other says: "Nonononono, mere data is subject to all sorts of interpretations and can never prove anything about a crime to which, as you admit, there are no witnesses. My DNA, my fingerprints, can never truly prove anything, and any conclusions you might draw from them will be fallacious."Which man has something to hide? You wouldn't invent an epistemology like that unless you knew that a study of the evidence would reveal facts that you are desperate to conceal.

Well, not necessarily. I might, for example, regard a single datum about, say, the average temperature of aardvarks as less reliable than the theory of evolution; or data about the position and velocity of a single asteroid as less reliable than the theory of gravity; or the claim that "such-and-such an infectious agent is the sole cause of the following symptoms" as less credible than the germ theory of disease.I don't necessarily say that I would, or that I'd be right, these are just examples off the top of my head, but we might, and might justifiably, be more confident of a theory than of a particular item of the data it's meant to subsume.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

To take a real-world example, Dawkins described it, IIRC, as a "scandal" in the theory of evolution that bdeloid rotifers reproduce asexually. We didn't on that basis throw over the theory of evolution, and it turned out that although technically they're asexual, they engage in lateral gene transfer. The theory was correct, the facts that called it into doubt were wrong.

Do you mean Humpty Dumpty?

The fact that the Sun exists is only observational.What's the word "only" doing in there?