RE: Question about "faith"
September 28, 2020 at 10:22 am
(This post was last modified: September 28, 2020 at 11:20 am by Mister Agenda.)
(September 25, 2020 at 10:23 am)John 6IX Breezy Wrote:(September 25, 2020 at 9:09 am)Mister Agenda Wrote: A hypothesis is not mere conjecture, it is a proposed explanation for available evidence, and that explanation has to be falsifiable. Guess what ghosts aren't.
No, that is what theories are, they explain the available evidence. Hypothesis are predictions about the outcome of an experiment. Conjecture aligns more with the nature of theories.
Sigh.
hy·poth·e·sis
/hīˈpäTHəsəs/
noun
noun: hypothesis; plural noun: hypotheses
a supposition or proposed explanation made on the basis of limited evidence as a starting point for further investigation.
A proposed explanation IS a prediction, if it's potentially falsifiable by experiment. A scientific theory is based on evidence supported by hypotheses that survive attempts to falsify them. Neither a hypothesis nor a theory is a mere conjecture.
Though even scientists aren't strict about their wording, theoretical physics ought to be more properly called hypothetical physics since it's got so many hypotheses that we don't have the means to test yet, IMHO.
(September 25, 2020 at 12:44 pm)John 6IX Breezy Wrote:(September 25, 2020 at 11:56 am)HappySkeptic Wrote: A scientist doesn't come up with ghosts, demons, fairies, leprechauns, or other anthropomorphic imaginings to explain nature. Because its never worked, ever, and is usually defined in a way that can't be falsified. It is a bad probability bet.
I think it's important to remember that, although ghosts aren't theorized by scientists, there are plenty ghost-like conjectures in science. For example, in the early days of neuron research, Cajal argued for the existence of dendritic spines, even though it was almost universally rejected as an artefact of staining techniques. He stood by his argument, and only with future developments in staining could the opposing artefact conjecture be falsified in support of the dendritic spines.
So his evidence for the existence of dendritic spines was the Golgi staining method which showed them (reproducibly), and there was an alternative explanation that also explained the images but eventually the method was proven reliable for this purpose. This is like ghosts how?
Proposing an explanation that might turn out to be wrong but is based on reproducible evidence is not like proposing ghosts at all, IMHO. When science has been applied to the existence of ghosts, it has only ever found evidence for alternative explanations for the claimed phenomena, never for anything that could reasonably described as 'ghostly', just nature, usually human nature or normal artifacts of photography. I think you're reaching, for some reason.
I'm not anti-Christian. I'm anti-stupid.