I didn't believe in aliens either, until, one day, I met Chuck: a gigantic, round, pink head, huge lips, over 6 ft and 350+ lbs, born somewhere around here but you can't ever tell what in the world he's talking about, various liquids coming out of his moth and ears, a big blue Gore 2000 button on his chest, etc etc. He gathers the shopping carts at the lot of the local Shoprite. Forget Mars, he could even be from another solar system...
Of course it is, verifiable is, imo, is certainly a chosen premise. Let me give a couple of examples. There's subjective truth (eg, I like pie), inter-subjective truth (eg, we all dream but none of us can prove it) and objective truth, a fictitious state where, presumably, all of us agree on something like the sun rising every morning. Trouble is, the last type is a limit, never to be really achieved because, for that, you'd need everyone on the planet to agree to something, including the Greeks and the Irish (impossible.) Therefore you're left with subjective truth and various levels of inter-subjective truth. I saw colleagues at the Physics lab looking at the same monitor and not being able to agree on what they were reading - the guy with the funny cigarettes in his pocket would never oblige. Trouble is, again, that we all know of situations where various "scientific" agreements were forged on the basis of necessity, ignorance or pressure. For example, many German scientists wrote essays how inferior the Jews are. Same with others who proved to us how inferior the Blacks are. Homosexuals are also frequent victims, etc. What I'm saying is various groups adjust and even impose their own "scientific" norms of verifiability, aka what it takes to prove something. Scientifically of course. Call it bad science? Perhaps, but we are full of it. I remember reading a few months ago that over half of the so called scientific data/papers out there are patently wrong. That's a lot. Half the people lie, that's all. And that list includes such notables as cold fusion, global warming, etc etc, perhaps even the very polular and almost universally respected General Theory of Relativity, given that the star in there, the graviton, has never been observed. Oh well.
There is nothing merely semantic about it. The fact is that "verifiable" is an agreed upon part of the scientific method. Agreement comes from Man. We are free to choose the scientific worldview for understanding the universe, or we can choose other worldviews. There is no compulsory way of viewing reality.
True. But there are ways of looking at the world where you don't have to get into a war just to convert other people to your beliefs. IMO in history religion is used too often as an excuse to wage war. Sure it provides a basis for creating communities by way of weekly worship. Leaders just take it too far. You can't do that with science. When was the last time a country went to war over a scientific dispute?
============= Free T; Thank you for the tough trend question. a] No; Note that punk does not obey his Father & Mother [both] punk-profligate c] Elders meeting D]drunkard[Hey friend , were not talking wine @ wedding fun; Moses wrote ''drunkard'' So you have a drunk/drunkard, a drunk punk gets his payday someday............... Note Israel did not have all the drunk camel/car deaths we have. So it looks like the Hebrew prophet wins again. Frankly I am gld my Dad used other old Testament punishment; severe spanking, King Solomon liked that. Strange name of a TX judge that made CBNnews, forbid spanking, even though the TX district attorney general DID NOT. TX anti-spanking judge named Lose Long ora. Spell checker is fine,LOL So what, TX Judge '' Lose Long ora ''doesnt like spanking''; King Solomon does.
They tested the bomb in Nagasaki and Hiroshima to see it it works, didn't they? Nobody went to war for a religious disagreement... They used religion to fanatize the troops, that's all. Emperors and Dukes only wanted one thing: power. Are we that different?
Science is also quite handy for rationalizing evil behavior. Scientific socialism/communism comes to mind. Eugenics. Social darwinism.
What are you talking about? No one was saying there is a compulsory way of viewing reality. Because the verifiable is coming from the scientific method and from Man as you put it , that makes things no less verifiable. Worldviews suggesting the need for something more than Man merely forces in ambiguity, as you are doing, where really there is no call for it. It is a fact the earth is not flat because it can be verified scientifically, not by faith. You don't need to muddy the water looking for something more than Man for the the verification.
What do you think he'd say? The science used to discover, to increase knowledge, is an entirely different thing altogether than any questions of ethics in the possible application of it.