Do you wish there's a god?

[Mister Agenda]

We directly perceived that round things roll and flammable things burn. We also directly perceived that the sky is a dome, the moon probably not that much higher than the mountaintops, and the earth a disk that you could see once on a mountaintop. The method we used to make wheels and fire was observation tested by trial and error. After all, not all round things make good wheels, and not all flammable things are easy to set on fire. That's not even getting into the best tools for making them. We used a method to figure out how to make those things, different primarily in complexity from how we figured out that our world is roughly an oblate spheroid, the moon is hundreds of thousands of miles higher than the highest mountains, and how to make computers. The knowledge didn't spring from our brows fully formed like Athena from the brow of Zeus.

You're moving the goal post. You earlier claimed that the scientific method is some sort of cure for the limitations imposed on us by our biases. This is what I'm arguing against. Not the variety of benefits, inventions, discoveries that were a product of it.

Let view strong biases as a disease, and imagine the scientific method as a cure to that disease. We'll use a creationist with his strong biases as an example, explain to me how I can cure his disease, his biases, with the scientific method?

Will his biases prevent him from applying the scientific method properly? Does he have to set his biases aside first, before applying it?

The variety of benefits, inventions, and discoveries produced by the scientific method are evidence that it works, despite our biases and flawed perceptions. Essentially all science is, is finding out what actually works no matter what our initial guesses were and building on that knowledge. It's our most dependable way to find out what disputed claims about the natural world are factual, or at least most probable.

Whether your proposed creationist's biases prevent him from applying the scientific method will depend on what biases he holds and how strongly he holds them. His biases matter less if his work is peer-reviewed, because one of the purposes of peer review is to expose biases that have affected an experiment or discovery. There are a minority of scientists who aren't creationists who still can't accept being proven wrong, or evidence that their work is fatally flawed (the discover of supposed cold fusion comes to mind). The contributions they make to science that tend to be longest remembered are their examples of how not to do it. Science can't persuade someone who rejects findings that don't align with their preconceptions, but neither will anything else, generally speaking.

Were you under the impression that I was claiming that science can cure specific individuals of their biases? It doesn't do that at all. It enables us to discover facts about the natural world despite our biases because it's a way of screening our biases and misperceptions out. The scientist who runs the experiment can be as bone-headed at the end as she was in the beginning, if the method is followed honestly all the way through to peer review, the results will be less biased than the scientist who conducts the experiment. They can keep thinking they've discovered cold fusion or irreducible complexity all day long, but the scientific community (sooner or later) will figure out what is actually the case based on the data.

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And what the utter fuck is a lackist?

A term for people who say they simply lack belief in god .

But apparently a PURE lackist doesn't have any beliefs at all about anything....