Non-existence

[Kyuuketsuki]

As far as I can tell "empirical equivalence" is a term bandied about in purely philosophical circles ...

Empirical equivalence is certainly a valid relation between two different theories in science.

Is it now? Would you care to point to a genuine scientific paper (even a an article in a reasonably reputable popular science magazine) to support that claim? As I believe I said ... "empirical equivalence" is a term that seems to be intimately associated with philosophy and metaphysics ... it has nothing, as far as I can tell, to do with science (nor with any comparison between the ideas of 2 scientists).

What is wrong with non-empirical? Nothing. Non-empirical in this context simply means the theory which you apply to the empirii, independently of the other theories that could be equally so applied.

Nothing is wrong with a lack of empiricism but a lack of measurable and verifiable data CANNOT be used as evidence for anything ... that is the problem. Empirical data can be verified, empirical data can be measured, empirical data is the core of science and science/math are the only things that have ever been shown to work.

Notice that I, as a Thomist, am a realist; so I believe the universe and our world is, indeed, real. So I am in no way arguing against you, I am just clarifying what I see as a misconception about what "empirical equivalence" would signify.

What I noticed was that your Thomist views appear to be full of shit! Now I know you will take my language, my dismissal as indicative of my lack of knowledge, as being brutish but the actuality is that I despise philosophical (and particularly metaphysical) psychobabble so much that I wouldn't even consider arguing against it because I consider such mental masturbation beneath me. I am not as uninformed of such subjects as you'd like to believe I am but I've made a choice for reason that make a great deal of sense.

Indeed it seems you are using the word "metaphysical" or "philosophic" as a straw man to debunk any point your opponent in a discussion raises, just so you don't have to address the actual substance in his argument and point being made.

A strawman eh? You realise of course that a strawman is where one sets up an analogous situation to the one under discussion, destroys it as a logical proposition and then declares the discussed claim invalid by the same logic when it isn't necessarily established to be so? I freely admit I may be committing some kind of logical fallacy but I don't believe I have committed a strawman even once ... and if that is what you think I am doing then I would ask that you either point out exactly where I have done so or withdraw the assertion because as far as I am concerned I have very simply, and very straightforwardly, dismissed metaphysics as rubbish. If you'd like to know why it is this ... science is a methodology that explains how & why things work, how they came to be and predicts other things previously unknown. Philosophy and metaphysics alone do not. If you think I err then I ask but one thing of you ... point out one thing (any thing) which has been fairly conclusively established on the basis of metaphysical or philosophical reasoning alone, something that is held to be true by (let's say) the vast majority of the scientific, academic and learned theological communities. Is that so much to ask?

The real problem here is that science cannot settle it, due to the empirical equivalence. The question of whether reality exists or not lies outside the boundary of determinability by the scientific method. And it lies outside the boundary of what the empirical methods of science can observationally discover. Yet it is important for science, just like the scientific method is important for science. How you interpret science is important for the science you are doing.

Actually the real problem is that science and math are the only two philosophies that actually explain anything in a fashion that can be validated by others ... no other methods have yet to be shown to work in that fashion.

The rest of your post is metaphysical garbage.

Kyu