RE: Supernatural and Atheism
December 10, 2022 at 12:44 am
(This post was last modified: December 10, 2022 at 12:47 am by Thumpalumpacus.)
(December 7, 2022 at 10:44 am)Jehanne Wrote:(December 7, 2022 at 5:26 am)BrianSoddingBoru4 Wrote: But science is not just a collection of facts - it is primarily a method for arriving at a close approximation of those facts. It is not inconceivable that a different methodology will someday establish an age for the world of, say, 4.61 billion years or 4.48 billion years. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me to learn that somewhere there is at least one credible geologist or cosmologist working on refining this data.
ALL scientific knowledge is provisional. As it should be.
Boru
We'll have to agree to disagree. On an existential level, I think that you are absolutely correct; we may all be, in fact, brains in vats. On a practical level, the age of the Earth will, a billion years from now, be calculated as being 5.543 billion years +/- a few million years.
This is not about solipsism, so we'll dispense with the brains-in-vats stuff for now.
But what if our instruments are not entirely accurate? What if there's another variable in the equation we have yet to account for? Of course there's that whole +/- a few million years thing, which actually points to uncertainty.
Scientific knowledge is in one sense asymptotic. We can approach facts, but probably cannot fully understand them, perhaps because we're inside the system and thus can't analyze it objectively. Godel's Theorem implies at that as well.
Everything we think we know should always be subject to revision. Certainty is the greatest obstruction to learning.