Witness Evidence

[bennyboy]

You do realize that you cannot repeat history right?

That's right. That's why it's so much more fun for some people to just make it up.

And even if you can repeat the outcome, that does not necessarily demonstrate the means.    Science isn't concerned with history (although it may be involved with it).  The focus of science doesn't care about what happens once, but cannot be repeated.

If you say all this, I think you don't know what science is. Science is the organized and methodical treatment of observable fact-- it does not necessarily require repeatable experimentation. You can't, for example, add a gram of calcium into a black hole in order to find out how it works.

   I once brought up alchemy in this regards, and that given good testimonial evidence would show that it did happen, even if there are unknown conditions where it cannot be repeated.   A friend who is also a chemist for an R&D firm, said they experienced this very thing. While trying to do something else, they accidently created a compound, that would be worth a lot of money to their company.   What they started with, what they did, and what the ended up with was all documented, and witnessed by a number of people.  Further, the spent a lot of money trying to replicate the results.   However the only physical evidence they ended up with is the final results.   However it not being repeatable is only evidence, that they do not know how they did it, not that it did not happen.

In your friend's case, if he had a hunch what caused the effect, and further experimentation didn't yield a positive result, he'd abandon his mistaken idea and work hard to replace it with a new theory. He wouldn't say, "In my heart of hearts, I feeeeel it has to be this way, so it must be true." That's not truth, it's wishy-thinking, and the point of establishing evidence isn't to add either the strength of feeling or the weight of numbers to wishy-thinking, but rather to remove these from the process of inquiry completely.

Here's your problem, as I see it: you are attempting to set up the hunch of human agency (aka testimonial) as a valid form of evidence, when it is the exact opposite of that.