“Blue” is electromagnetic radiation of a wavelength between 492nm and 455nm. If you are looking for some kind of metaphysical reason for the color blue, you need to go down the hall to Dr. Confonda’s Philosophy 207 class. Things are the way they are because physical laws dictate such. What dictates physical laws may be in question (and may be beyond the purview of science, M-Theory notwithstanding) but there is no supernatural reason “why” the sky is blue. That is strictly a semantic and/or ontological question, and debates like that end up in a tautological loop.
Ooft. Despite the fact that we do, in fact, have a somewhat distorted view of our own value and significance, it’s pretty clear that human beings have the greatest capacity for conceptualization, and that is the quality that has allowed us to escape our physical limitations. Certainly, other creatures have capacities that we can’t match, and may have mental facilities beyond our expectations (I think rather highly of the octopus in this regard) but none have demonstrated the capability to record and transmit information in a permenant sense in the way that humans do. Intelligence (in the terms of conceptualization) may not be the end-all, be-all of existance (and certainly isn’t an end goal of natural selection) but by that measure, and nearly that one alone, we are superior over any other species. We can’t run as fast, jump as high, or see as well as many, but we can count higher than “hrair”, a feat of which nearly any other creature (save, again, for the higher cephalopods) are certainly not capable.
Again, you are convoluting the concept of assumption with faith. I may assume that I’ll still be living and breathing come next Wednesday (I hope so, anyway) but I have no expectation that this is a given. I make plans based on that assumption, but I know that something could happen between now and then to interrupt those plans.
“Supernatural” is defined as “1. Of or relating to existence outside the natural world.” I dare say that no scientist believes that just because they can’t currently explain a phenomenon that the cause of it is beyond the rules of the natural world. However, religious leaders frequently invoke a supernatural intervention as the cause of an event. That people 500 years ago might have deemed life to be a supernatural event is of no consequence; today, we have the knowledge to recognize that actions that happen in the experiential world are the result of physical laws.
From a theory of mind standpoint, intuition is a pre-cognitive conception of experience; instead of being able to reason or calculate out the cause of a result, we use intuition (more specifically, inductive logic based upon past experience) to give us a result from incomplete data. Intuition works pretty well in the experience of day to day life, but serves poorly when we look into the nooks and cranies of the world that are beyond our normal experience, like quantum mechanics, relativistic physics, or geologic-timescale events like evolution; which is why we often find science contradicting our normal expectations.
You are right in saying that because “something HASN’T been tested doesn’t mean that it CANNOT be tested”, and indeed, the very premise of the scientific method is grounded in falsifiablity. A theory must be able to be tested in such a way that a failure of the theory renders it invalid (or at least in need of massive refinement). A large number of failures would indicate a bad theory, whereas a continued failure to fail when tested validates a theory as being accepted. “Truth” as applied to theories is a nonsensical proposition (though we often use the term in casual speech), but “validated” and “accepted” indicate that a given theory or model is an accurate predictor of events relating to the theory.
You’re throwing out a strawman here, in assuming that people who accept science regard themselves as being smarter than religious people. In fact, I’ve known several very smart people who were strongly religious, and indeed, the Jesuits are known as great logical thinkers. I think that the premises they reason from are deeply flawed, but that doesn’t make them unintelligent.
Do you understand that you just blew your own argument out of the water here? The reason that Newton’s theories are so widely (practically universally) accepted aren’t because of his reputation; in fact, as you point out, he was a crackpot about alchemy, in addition to his legitimate work with physics and mathematics. His theories have endured because (until the 20th Century) no one was able to poke a hole in them, and continue to be used even today because they provide an accurate model of the macro, non-relativistic world that we normally experience. His reputation is bolsh; were someone to create a serious, validated argument aginst Newtonian physics (and that very thing happened when Einstein published his treatise on Special Relativity) the theory would be reviewed and revised in short order.
You are attempting to brand as “snobs” people who ask for objective evidence instead of blind faith. This is, well, not a valid tactic (I believe philosophers would refer to this as an argumentum ad hominem). You seem to be demanding that religion and/or intuition (which you are effectively equating) be given a place next to science on the mantle of human reasoning. The methods by which they offer up solutions are very different, though. Religion/intuition works by authority and “feeing”, without providing any substance with which to debate. Pat Robertson might be just as right about “what God wants his people to do” as Muhammad or Buddha or any other religous figure. Science, on the other hand, is predicated on the scientific method, which is (at least in principle) independent of the mouthpiece for a particular theory. Natural selection is valid (or not), regardless of whether it is espoused by Stephen J. Gould or Richard Dawkins, and their disagreements over specific mechanisms are resolved not by which one has more prestige or a more forceful personality but rather by which theory holds up better in light of observation or experimentation. Religious explainations are often the classic case of immediate gratification; event X happened because it’s God’s will, whereas science can only offer up tedious and methodical testing of hypotheses and a body of knowledge that is incomplete by its nature rather than known by some large, shadowy figure behind a veil of mist. The are not equivilent; rather, they are orthogonal, and often competing methods of explaining the natural world. You can choose religion or mysticism if you like, but the answers it offers seem to often dead-end in some kind of “it’s God’s plan” explaination, whereas science more honestly says, “We just don’t know yet. But we’re trying to figure it out.”
I don’t intend for the previous to come off as degrading or insulting, but in trying to effectively co-opt science as a component to religious belief or intuition, you are suborning the entire princple (and difference) of science, which is to explore and explain without artiface. Certainly, one begins with assumptions, but the rule of science is never to allow those assumptions to overrule evidence to the contrary. Religion, on the other hand, begins by assuming that certain ideas are true, regardless of evidence, and then seeks to fit by whatever method necessary, the details of the natural world into the box created by those ideas. They are not one in the same, or complementary components, which is why they divereged during Enlightenment. Mysticism is a shroud for ignorance; a good scientist, on the other hand, will admit what he doesn’t know rather than to hide it behind a blanket of fabrications.
Stranger
