Lew wrote:Joe Baker wrote:
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Joe Baker, who thinks it more appropriate to speak of that which is DISPROVEN as myth, than that which is merely NOT PROVEN.
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I agree with the basic premise of this statement, but in true scientific reasoning, nothing can be "proven." There are theories that merely have not yet been disproven, and are therefore the best explanation for a particular phenomena, but we can never really "prove" a theory to be true. The best criteria I have seen for a theory to be scientific is:
1. It must be able to be proven false (falsifiable).
2. It must have survived attempts to falisify it.
3. It must be logically consistent.
4. It must provide better explanatory value than alternate theories.
We think of "laws" of science as being true in some absolute sense. In reality, they are merely the best explanations that we have developed yet, and have been accepted in practice and theory by so many so as to be universally agreed upon.
Of course this also means that explanations that include some "supernatural" component cannot be scientific because they don't satisfy condition 1. There is no way to try to prove them false.
While I'm sure you and I disagree about much, we don't disagree about anything you've stated here. I didn't speak of anything being provable, only disprovable; but even there I was using "disprove" in the more general sense, not in the scientific sense.
My faith does not rely on "provability"; if it did, it (a) wouldn't be faith, and (b) wouldn't be held by me. Faith is "evidence of things not seen" -- it relies on the heart (again, as used in the general rather than scientific sense
), and defies scientific proof. Only a fool would claim otherwise. Lack of proof doesn't mean lack of evidence, nor lack of accuracy.
As a more universally understandable example, I can't "prove" that I love my children -- after all, my kindness to them COULD be only to garner approval from the neighbors, or to win romantic favor with their mother (indeed, plenty of behavioral scientists would make exactly this claim
). But the fact that I can't prove my love for them doesn't make my love a myth! Nor does the fact that I can show evidence of that love (my behavior toward them) make the behavioral scientists' theories a myth. It is factual that I love them (my claim), and I have
evidence, but I lack
proof.
Many things are "true" (factual, to you scientific types) but not provable. We should be slow to call that which we do not believe in a "myth". That's the point I was trying to make.
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Joe Baker, who has learned not to try to talk about "truth" or "proof" to scientists.
ophobes, but knows when something does or does not point towards 'light' or 'darkness' "...