We have at hand Bee's essay on phenomenology in physics. The essay
might be summarized by considering coherency as a sufficient argument
for a scientific theory. Going further and suggesting that
non-scientific theories are not worthy of personal or public support is
a separate proposal, and one I cannot support. Whether those are ought
to be supported by public monies is a separate issue.
However, the essay was about what might qualify as a 'good' theory in
the context of scientific enquiry. The substance is that gaining
coherence by incrementally reducing the accessibility of observables, if
not their number, was not a path to a better science theory, insofar as
science depended on the testability of axioms within a more-or-less
coherent theory. In other words, there's emphatically no science gain
in making fewer axioms more coherent at the expense of testability.
Coherence does not automatically imply scientific validity, for the
number of less-testable coherent theories is large. However, such
coherence might be interesting or valuable by other
less-phenomenological criteria.
Which brings us to the theism diagnosis problem. It seems to me that
one could devise various tests for coherence (e.g. smoothness of some
class of topological transformations), or, hey some behavior makes sense
in some evolutionary context. So, in this sense the coherence is
testable, and may even be said to posses a certain artistic, religious
or mathematical beauty, even if that doesn't move the science along.
I would class theism as one class of arguments about coherence and
identity that may fall on some non-scientific value spectrum (not very
high, I don't think). Most certainly *not* about testability in the
phenomenological sense that the essay addresses. The a-theist or
non-theist is not disbelieving, or buying into the sucker-punch question
'why don't you believe'; their attention is simply elsewhere.
C.
On 12/18/14, 9:14 PM, Marcus G. Daniels wrote:
On 12/18/2014 4:28 PM, glen wrote:
I've been passively looking out for any hint of an objective way to
diagnose whether someone's a[n] [a]theist.
The article referenced in the other thread sums it up. "But if you
think that you can’t test it, you shouldn’t put money into the theory
either."
The agnostic just lets untestable theory development carry on, whereas
the atheist would cut off the money, and direct it elsewhere.
Marcus
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