Christianity is heading for a full allegorization

[GrandizerII]

And I think that is as it should be. There *should* be skepticism of the new ideas as well as skepticism of the old. If the old ideas have worked well (and that is usually the case), there *should* be some inertia in transitioning to new ideas. At the very least, an evaluation of what can be salvaged from the old ideas and how the translation process to the new ideas works needs to be done.

And that is also how it should be. At the very least, the experiment has to be repeated under a variety of circumstances to see whether it is valid and how it holds up. There was an example with neutrino experiments recently where the observed speed of the neutrinos was faster than that of light. The scientists themselves didn't believe their results, which if true would have been revolutionary. It was found that a coil of wires slightly increased the distance that the light traveled, leading to a false speed for the light.

This sort of thing happens *all the time*. People, being human, make mistakes. Sometimes experiments are not done with sufficient care. Sometimes a hidden magnet can mess things up. The first thing that most scientists say when they get an anomalous result is ask where they made a mistake. And, if you actually read papers announcing discoveries, a good deal of the time is looking at various alternative explanations of the results.

Again, this is as it should be..

But there is more. The way a scientist can make their name is by proposing a new set of ideas that is testable *and passes the tests*. So while there may well be inertia on the part of the older scientists, there is most definitely not on the part of the younger ones. I would also claim that the older ones are as interested in figuring out what is actually going on and are, perhaps, more open to new ideas than you might suspect.

So, accepting the results years or decades later is *precisely* what should be expected from a subject that is self-critical at every stage. new ideas are considered. if there is not enough evidence, they are still discussed, even if not accepted, and once new evidence or a better formulation comes along, the shift is often quite fast. I can give multiple examples.

Regarding the aspects we do disagree on, we're going to have to agree to disagree. I tend to have a somewhat cynical view of scientists as an institution. And because science is very "human-operated", and humans are flawed and suffer from various biases, then necessarily science is going to be flawed in more ways than some of us may be thinking.

So if we go back to the Novella quote posted before by FM, and the other stuff FM posted later about how science is objective and such, the general point I'm making about science was in response to those.

Now that I think about it, the irony in Novella's quote was that it isn't really an adequate description of science. You could almost replace the word "science" there with something like "natural theology" and the description would be apt for that as well.

All that said, I still trust science as the best (and perhaps only) way to attain conclusive knowledge about various aspects of the world and how it works and such. But "best" is not "perfect", and I am always conscious of its limitations.

Oh, I agree that there is a *soft* problem of consciousness: determining the neural correlates of experiences. But, I don't see a 'hard' problem. Once we find those correlates between neural activity and reported experiences, I think we have solved the problem of consciousness.

I feel like you're misunderstanding what the hard problem is about.

The experiences being reported (as some phenomenological or, if you're an illusionist, "pseudo-phenomenological" thing/property) require an explanation for their appearance as phenomenological or "pseudo-phenomenological". But how do you get from neurons firing in the CNS to such a bizarre, seemingly "unscientific" appearance that is "out there in your face", so to speak?

When you report feeling toothache, for example, you're not just reporting, you're having what appears to be a feeling of being in pain, an intolerable sort of "ringing" that you wish would just end.

Going with another example, when you point your head towards the screen of your computer, you are vividly identifying words on the screen. Or at least you have what appears to be a vivid experience. You're not just "detecting in the dark". It all appears as flashy to you.

How do you explain the seemingness of vividness, the intensity of the feeling, and such?

Scientists have found that the philosophical issues tend to not give testable predictions. Instead, they tend to say how things 'must be' when actual evidence says otherwise. In general, it isn't blindness as much as the realization that the philosophy goes nowhere.

But again, something you glazed over here, is that science is rooted in philosophical assumptions. These philosophical assumptions (such as empiricism and the reality of the external world and uniformity) may be "common sense" reasonable, but they are not something you can scientifically justify. You have to assume certain epistemological and metaphysical positions (even if you do so subconsciously) before you can accept the validity and legitimacy of science.

But then the question is, what is special about those positions that underpin science? If we can't justify those via science, but we think they are very reasonable positions to hold, then what does this really say about our worldview?

A good example is QM, where the actual theory is probabilistic and not deterministic or causal (in the classical sense). Most of the interpretations come from attempting to reconcile classical metaphysics with modern physics. But that is a problem: we *know* that classical metaphysics is wrong *because* we have actual experiments showing that QM works. What we need is a new metaphysics that isn't based on classical realism or idealism. but instead takes into account the discoveries of physics over the last century,

Your first statement is true only if particular interpretations are true. You can't establish in a purely scientific way (in the sense you appear to speak of) that QM is indeterministic as opposed to deterministic. In fact, someone like Sean Carroll would argue that wavefunction collapse would require extra reasoning that isn't warranted, and that the MWI is a more elegant and qualitatively more parsimonious account of QM.

Yeah, I know, here we go with the philosophy BS, but scientists have to deal with that as well.