An Essay about Atheism in Latin

[Belacqua]

Why not both? In metaphysics, you can intelligently speculate about potential explanations/accounts of such things as how this universe came to be based on the discoveries of physics, and some well-thought out metaphysical views might even help in guiding scientists to do the right research to answer certain questions about the way the world works.

Years ago on the old Amazon forums I was chatting with a guy about politics, and I realized he was using the word "capitalism" in an odd way. So I spent the next couple of days asking questions and teasing out what he meant by the word. 

In the end it turned out that he just used "capitalism" to mean everything that is good and honest, and "communism" to mean everything that is bad. It was no longer an economic term, where the means of production are owned by money-people, as opposed to feudalism. It was just a synonym for "everything I approve of." 

I think people sometimes use the word "science" in the same way. Any approach which they find reasonable and believable is science, while everything else goes into the "other" category. Metaphysics goes in with astrology and phrenology and anything else that's bad. 

This is related to the good article you linked to in the shout box just now. 

https://theconversation.com/why-atheists...ink-103563

Science is actually damaged if the term gets fuzzy. Science works extremely well because it is limited to repeatable testable methodological naturalism. But that leaves lots of other questions which can't be addressed that way, which are still valid questions. To pretend they're science instead of metaphysics actually does both fields a disservice. 

FlatAssembler has extremely strong metaphysical convictions, which he doesn't know are metaphysics. The belief, for example, that only science tells us what is true is a metaphysical issue, not resolvable through science. 

Sorry I'm addressing this to you, even though you're the one most likely to already understand all this. But I don't think Flat is willing to get it.