Though quoting Lib, this is in response to this oft-raised point, brought to the table this time by PRR.
Let me offer to the collective wisdom of Doperdom the proposition that issues in a discipline are properly dealt with using the methodology of that discipline.
I would no more require of PRR or Fretful Porpentine that they “prove to me by the scientific method that Henry James is a better writer than Alan Dean Foster.” The proper tools for this are in literary criticism. I’m not sure how anyone would go about devising a “scientific” proof for the question, and if anyone should come up with an answer, I’m sure others would gleefully shred the proferred methodology.
Likewise in the social sciences, experiments cannot be structured with the same sense that “in a properly designed experiment, a given object will always react in the same predictable way.” The social sciences study the behavior of human beings, whose motivations and consequent actions are multifarious and not fully predictable. You cannot treat the subjects of a psychological or sociological study as physical objects or biological specimens; you need to allow for individual vagaries of behavior in structuring your experiment.
And the proper methodology for demonstrating the existence and characteristics of the Ultimate Ground of All Being, a Personal Entity who supersedes the Universe? You cannot dip God in acid to see what chemical reactions he goes through, or hit him with chisel and mallet to see what shape he fractures in. You cannot run God through a maze (WTF would you use as a reward, anyway?)
Suffice it to say that it is my considered and honest opinion that the interventions of God in my life have changed me in ways that I would have rejected before them as too risky and vulnerable, but which, having been through those changes, I can say fully that they were changes that I am a much happier man for having been through them. I find it possible – barely possible – to posit a subconscious subtle enough to realize I needed to go through them and delude me into thinking there was a God doing that to me. I find it completely beyond the realm of possibility that I have a subconscious with the psychic powers to recognize that I will soon meet a young man and take him for a son who was instrumental – well nigh necessary – in bringing me through those changes, whose existence I was at the time of that experience absolutely unaware of and whom I had seen exactly once before in my life, and that in a casual pass-each-other-on-the-street event. Rather than posit a precognitive genius subconscious devising a methodology for changing my emotional structure and self-image based on a highly improbable series of events involving people it did not yet know well enough to analyze their role, some sort of supernatural intervention seems to me to be the more reasonable hypothesis.
By the way, William of Ockham’s shaving implement seems to be cropping up over and over again here. I wonder if anyone besides me realizes what kind of logical principle it is? It’s not the tools Lib can discourse at length about for deductive logic. It’s not a part of the scentific method or other techniques of inductive logic. Rather, it’s one of the tools of abductive logic – the heuristic methodology that makes human problem solving better than computer for the moment.
Abductive logic is the method by which we eliminate the improbable, the absurd, the inane, and the wildly outrageous. It’s a technique for quickly establishing probability of having been the cause.
Turn on the TV, and observe: the current episode of “Lawn Odor: CSI Poughkeepsie with Criminal Intent” is on. And lo and behold, there is a body lying there with his head bashed in, and a bloody hammer lying next to it. Now, at first cut, the following are possible hypotheses:
[ol][li]The Flying Spaghetti Monster appeared to him and drove him insane, so that he suicided by bashing his own brains in with the hammer.[/li][li]Mr Mxyzjplxk appeared from the Fifth Dimension and did it to him.[/li][li]Aliens from the fifth planet of Mu Monoceratis whisked in by a matter transporter and did it.[/li][li]The Illuminati needed to eliminate him, to carry on their plot.[/li][li]It was Elvis, who has not* been in Kalamazoo since he faked his death, but carrying on an illicit gay romance with Bigfoot in the Oregon mountains, and the deceased had uncovered evidence of it and needed to be disposed of.[/li][li]The CIA discovered he was immune to their mind control rays.[/li][li]The Dalai Lama snapped, went homicidally insane, travelled to this place and killed him, then as quickly snapped out of it and went back home.[/li][li]He was killed when he surprised a random burglar trying to rob his home.[/li][li]His estranged ex-wife did it in a fit of rage over his having hired private detectives to monitor her current romance.[/li][li]His gay son, who had just come out to him and whom he had told he was forcing into “reparative therapy,” killed him as what he saw as the only way out.[/li][li]The gofer at work whom he regularly belittles, whom he doesn’t know is actually his son by an affair 22 years before…[/li][li]Batman was prepared.[/ol][/li]
Obviously any sane individual (except Reality Chuck, who has saved this post as possible story material ;)) is going to eliminate about 2/3 of the potential explanations above. But why? What makes specific explanations more likely than others? (And in Chuck’s story, it really was Elvis! :))
The answer is that one uses a “filter” to eliminate the abstruse and bizarre unlikely solutions, allowing one to focus in on the most probable few.
They have not been disproven, by deductive reasoning. They have not been excluded as “not saving the phenomena” by induction. Rather, they have been tagged as “wildly unlikely” by abductive reasoning.
Ockham’s Razor is just such a principle. It says, in essence, “That explanation is most probable which requires one to assume the least number of hypothetical entities to entertain it.” Not proven; most probable. That’s an important distinction. When you’ve eliminated all the probable explanations, it’s time to check out what the Dalai Lama and Batman were doing. But only after you’ve eliminated the other, more probable ones.
What I said (each time) is that the most compelling evidence I have is my experience, not that it is my only evidence.