Debunking of Modern Evolutionary and Cosmological Theories

[Mudhammam]

They're non-empirical because, per the standard definition, the "empirical" is "based on, concerned with, or verifiable by observation or experience rather than theory or pure logic." Rationalism relies on the pure abstractions of the intellect to formulate conceptions of truth while strict empiricism looks exclusively to the objects of experience in its determinations. The former begins with the whole and works its way down to the parts; the latter starts with the parts and works towards the whole. Obviously, the two approaches or aspects of reality are relevant to all of our inquiries and neither is fruitful in the extreme if it is to the exclusion of the other. Mathematics is concerned with numbers, which are objects of thought and never verifiable by direct experience, except to the extent which bodily magnitudes are subjected to the rules of addition and division, and the debate as to whether numbers are properties of the objects themselves, an invention of the human mind, or of an abstract (some might say divine, or metaphysical) realm only accessible in thought, rages on since the early days of the Greeks' "golden age," and most notably in the writings of Aristotle and his teacher, Plato.

Mybold

I think I see the point.  But, being a rigid materialist, I don't see there being anything there which is in principle not subject to an empirical methodology.  Just that one has not yet been implemented to successfully explain thought.  Suppose that one can be found in which thought is reproducibly explained as patterns of ion density in bi-lipid membranes (with some support structure and energy flow guiding bits), all of which is material and all of which is subject to empirical investigation.  At that point, does what was previously transcendent, mathematics, logic or rationality itself, become base?  Do rationalism and empiricism then meet in the middle?

I'm horribly ignorant of math beyond simple algebra and I haven't done any in-depth studies of the different ontological positions regarding numbers and the arguments for or against their existence in the sense of real or simply imaginary objects; that being said, even if all thoughts can be demonstrated to correlate to electrochemical signals of the brain, I don't see how that would explain why numbers have the properties they do or why they* seem to exist only as mental representations of a certain class of objects and yet describe the world with such uniform and regular precision, a characteristic they match to a tee. And besides, if we were to reduce the (world of our) mind to this stuff we call matter, wouldn't our experiments inevitably depend on the sort of rigid and changeless precepts of our mathematical and logical languages anyway? So, would that actually "prove" without a doubt that matter is all that exists? Or would it only establish certain facts about our reference point, one particular mode of existence, and which requires an observer who interacts with such-and-such an object, such as his or her own brain? The nature of what it even really means for something to "exist" is still a battle far from won by either side, or so I have been told. To paraphrase what my philosopher professor said, "Thinking about abstract objects is difficult. Because they're abstract."

Julia, you might find this quite fascinating: 

Quantum logic has some properties that clearly distinguish it from classical logic, most notably, the failure of the distributive law of propositional logic:[6]

p and (q or r) = (p and q) or (p and r),
where the symbols p, q and r are propositional variables. To illustrate why the distributive law fails, consider a particle moving on a line and let
p = "the particle has momentum in the interval [0, +1/6]"q = "the particle is in the interval [−1, 1]"r = "the particle is in the interval [1, 3]"
(using some system of units where the reduced Planck's constant is 1) then we might observe that:
p and (q or r) = true
in other words, that the particle's momentum is between 0 and +1/6, and its position is between −1 and +3. On the other hand, the propositions "p and q" and "p and r" are both false, since they assert tighter restrictions on simultaneous values of position and momentum than is allowed by the uncertainty principle (they each have uncertainty 1/3, which is less than the allowed minimum of 1/2). So,
(p and q) or (p and r) = false
Thus the distributive law fails.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_logic

Maybe the end of science will be the discovery that the entire project was built on illusion.


*Or, as you mentioned logic and rationality, the "categories," those necessary principals of thought that Kant called a priori knowledge, rather than that which is first derived from experience and put into language, such as the "wetness" of water, or even water's more abstract qualities when we get down to its fundamental constituents.