My response to that is that if there is something we cannot directly perceive, then we can find it through its reactions with things that we can perceive. And if it doesn’t react with things we can perceive, then there’s no point in looking for it, because something that can’t be sensed or affect sensible things might as well not exist.
I think you are correct from a practical standpoint. But if we are hoping science fully and accurately describes reality, we would still be lacking. That unidentifiable thing still exists; its existence is just immaterial to ours.
Well but we’re not sure about predictions. We can’t know with 100% certainty that tomorrow gravity will still be here, though we base our work as if it will, and our predictions are based on that assumption.
So my friend is right in saying science doesn’t give us knowledge about what our universe really is. Just to work with it, like the mans in the caves can work with their shadow in the Allegory of the cave, but never knowing what’s outside of it.
Just as you can describe how a computer works by taking 8 different buckets and saying an empty bucket is 0 and a full bucket is 1 does not mean that this is the way the computer is. It is merely a description of how the computer works.
Science also has the assumption that the world is real, and that there are laws that rule the universe which don’t change with place or time, that the rules of logic are valid, that mathematical language can be descriptive of the physical world. My question is, since science accepts these assumptions on faith, how can it say that it knows the real world?
I don’t know if we can say it can describe reality. The reality that we are aware of makes sense for science, but we can’t know if we’re just studying shadows, right? For instance, before it was discovered the earth was round, it made sense that it was flat. People would look far away, and that’s how it would seem. It’d probably hard for them to prove or notice otherwise. Same could be happening to us in other areas of science perhaps… We can’t behave as romans laughing because someone suddenly challenge our concepts of the solar system and says the sun is the one at the center.
But if it is completely immaterial, it is not part of our reality. For something to exist, it pretty much has to be tangible or affect things that are tangible.
I guess I am confused as to the definition of reality. If reality is that what we can perceive, then you are correct. My assumption was reality was objective and outside of our prejudices.
Cells existed before we knew about them. Atoms did too. My position is that we will continue on this path of discovery in the future, which means there are things we cannot perceive and describe as of now. And since we will continue to find new things that were not part of our reality, I believe there are things that we are unable to find because we are not so lucky to have every measurement device possible.
What is inside of a black hole? Perhaps the scientifically literate can help, but it is my understanding that we are unable to perceive anything past the event horizon. Does that mean nothing can exist there because even if something does, it does not affect anything tangible on the outside?
The Op’s friend and those with similar attitude need to read Asimov’s The Relativity of Wrong.
Of course not. This doesn’t mean that science cannot describe reality; it means that you cannot prove that science describes reality—which is a very different thing.
But, for the most part, people accept that science does describe reality, because it seems to work.
Where the controversy lies is whether science is the only way of describing reality, or whether there are aspects of reality that lie outside the reach of science. I don’t think we logically can insist that everything that is real or true can be scientifically described or proven, because that statement itself is outside the ability of science to prove. Or to put it another way, how could we know whether “science” and “reality” match up perfectly without having some way, other than science, of knowing what reality is?
Yes, but be wary. That line of argumentation is usually followed by “… so I can believe whatever ridiculous nonsense I want to and science can’t prove me wrong!”
The fact that we don’t know what the universe really IS, doesn’t mean we can’t know what it ISN’T. The Moon isn’t made of ice cream, and unicorns aren’t real, and homeopathic remedies are still just tap water.
Well, sure. But so what? Is it your position that religion can describe such things?
This is more a question of familiarity and scale. “Solid” or “impenetrable” objects or surfaces as we encounter them in daily life are only “impenetrable” because of electromagnetic forces. So, the only reason a cup won’t fall through a table is because the electromagnetic forces keep the two objects apart - the “particles” (atomic nuclei) in a substance are so small in relation to their distance to each other that they’re just not “touching” at all; even if you touch a wall, all you’re really feeling are the electromagnetic forces. Which is also mostly what keeps you (and most other objects) in one piece.
Well, I think it’s interesting. 
Good suggestion. Here it is. It’s a short read.
Hell no. I find little use for religion.
I think there’s a point here that people are missing. We’re using the wrong word.
Science models reality. It doesn’t describe it, it approximates it, to a finer and finer degree.
As we experiment, we learn that reality acts in such and such a way, we make notes, and we enhance our models that way. What the Op’s friend is doing, is insisting we work from the bottom up, not the top down.
If creationists, anthropomorphic global warming deniers and many other anti-science folks had read and understood that, we could had saved hundreds of years worth of explanations. 
Well, that’s not far from where I was going with the modifiers our culture and right now. Contrary to whatever Der Trihs is babbling on about, reality exists within a context. The reality of a frog is not the reality of a tiger. Our context is society and culture. Among our goals as a society and culture now are exploration, communications, convenience technology, transportation, etc; science works very well in this context and thus does a good job of describing our reality. The distance from Betelgeuse to Arcturus, or the speed of an electronic impulse across a serial bus means precisely nothing to an island tribesman, and thus would not do a very good job of describing his reality. Hunter-gatherer legends and traditional rites of adulthood and marriage, however, suit him very well. A description of objective reality, apart from being virtually useless and probably impossible to achieve, is limited by the nearsighted phenomenon of everybody thinking their version of reality is objective. Even taking Asimov’s Relativity of Wrong into account (great essay, by the way), if you don’t think our version of “reality” is in for radical revisions and new discoveries, you’re not paying attention to the past, or asking the right questions about the present and future.
No. Firstly, assumptions are not proven. If they were, they wouldn’t be assumptions. Second, anything can describe reality. What your subject stresses is whether it can accurately describe reality. But this supposes (uh-oh, assumptions!) that there is some standard by which we can say a description is, is not, or has some degree of accuracy.
What does science mean by accuracy? Usually: the degree of conformity of predictions to experience.
What are your friend’s criteria? If he states them, then the question will practically answer itself.
Please explain how the Judeo-Christian religions have described reality, in a useful fashion, in any point in history, in a way superior to competing alternatives. Please also give at least one example.
Not Cisco but I will give it a go. The salient features of reality to various henotheistic tribes that became “the Hebrews” were mostly agricultural, social, and political ones. The alternatives were a variety of extant local belief systems that loosely worked together, some with a variety of different rules and sacrificial systems. Judaism united these tribes with a shared mythology and a common set of laws; the myths provided the basis for a common identity and purpose, and provided the basis for a set of laws that made social and political life more predictable - “if I do A, B will happen reproducibly”, that there is a “degree of conformity of predictions to experience”, has been established as the least poor test of useful concurrence of a belief with reality and that belief system passed that standard for those salient features of reality. It provided agricultural guidelines and a means for providing for each other as part of social obligations; also better than many other alternatives available at that time. And the stories, oh the stories … they gave great fodder for understanding human nature, the human condition, the complexity of real people who are neither all hero or all villain, and much much more. Much more so, IMHO, than most competing alternatives available to those peoples at the time.
Was it a method for discovering germ theory? No. But it did provide rules for isolation of those with what observations had told them close contact would lead to contagion. Did it uncover that the earth is not flat and that it revolves about the sun? No. But it did observe enough to come up with a good enough calender to guide planting and harvesting.
Reality is infinite (we believe) - our understanding becomes focused on the parts most salient to our needs of the time and what we have the tools to perceive. For that time’s needs it did a decent job.
Nonsense. Reality doesn’t exist “within a context”; reality IS the context. Reality is the same for everything. Subjective perception is not reality.
And yet both negotiate reality in the same way. Their sensory perceptions are used to construct neurological models that are capable of predicting how reality will unfold in the future. For the frog its model may be optimized to predict the trajectories of flies, and for the tiger its model may be optimized to predict the bounding of gazelles, but from an epistemological perspective, both are proceeding in the same manner.
Science is merely the systematization of this natural epistemic process: Make observations, construct models, and then make further observations to confirm the predictive value of the model.
We humans live in a model of reality that is optimized to serve the survival needs of a small pack of hunter-gatherers on the African plain. However, by being very systematic about our observations and inductions we can extend our model to encompass a much wider variety of ways that the universe can unfold.
This is why its unlikely that science will ever be replaced by “something better”. Observation and induction are so inexorably intertwined with what it means to “know something” that its hard to imagine how “knowing” can exist independent of them.