Scientific method proves order cannot exist w/o intelligence

[Purple Rabbit]

My view is that there is such a thing as truth, otherwise the operation of the universe would be impossible. Something, at some time, has to "be", has to "happen". My contention is that we are unable to know these truths, only make educated deductions in hopes of finding a possible explanation that fits.

I agree. Truth exists since something clearly IS, i.e. reality IS. But to have access to truth is another thing. Scientific truths are tentative ones, there is no real hard test to find out whether we have arrived at these.

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And yet, at the same time, operating under the idea that we live in a Matrix is fundamentally useless in our day to day lives, so we must do our best with what we have. Therefore if all these other people and other evidence points to a cat in the room, we are justified in believing it to be so until evidence proves otherwise.

Shit, I have to agree again. The criterion science implicitly uses is simply "what works best", meaning something like: wich model of reality gives the best result in describing and predicting the phenomena in it. Even if we are minds in a jar on which some movie of reality is projected, we can only hope to understand the movie, maybe even get a glimpse of something behind the movie if there is inconsistency in the movie, but it is pretty useless to start with supposing a reality behind the reality we can observe. Yet this is what religions do for a living.